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She didn’t answer, but glanced out at the dark forest as it blurred by their car. She didn’t seem to see the trees either, but focused her eyes somewhere beyond them.
"Jennifer, what’s wrong?"
She spun her head around, startled. She hadn’t heard her husband’s question. "What?"
"I asked you what was wrong."
She still had a far away look in her eyes, as if she were looking at something inside her own skull.
A blur passed by the window and it caught Jennifer’s eye. "What did that sign say?
"I think it was a junction sign for a farm road. Why?"
"What road number?" Jennifer was panicky, reaching for the seat belt that she never wore and clicking it into place by the seat.
"I don’t know. 2118? 1821? It was something like that. Why, Jenn? What’s wrong?"
"STOP THE CAR! NOW! Stop it, Ben!" The intersection loomed ahead in the illumination of the vehicle’s headlamps.
There was such fright and power behind her voice that Ben slammed on the brakes. They stopped in a haze of smoke and the smell of burning rubber. They had come to a halt twenty or thirty feet shy of the intersection just as a pickup truck came roaring around a blind curve to the right of the crossroads. The truck ran the stop sign and continued on out of sight to their left. If Ben hadn’t listened to his wife and hadn’t of stopped, the speeding truck would have slammed into their little car and more than likely would have killed the two of them.
"What just happened, Jennifer?" He reached forward and stopped the engine after pulling to the side of the road. He switched on the hazard lights and turned to his wife, waiting patiently for an answer to his question.
"I saw it, Ben. I was looking out at the trees, then suddenly I was somewhere else. I was looking down on a dark roadway and at our car. I watched us pass through this intersection and the truck slam into us." She was crying now as tears rolled down her cheeks, streaking her makeup. "I watched us die, Ben. Then an image of the sign flashed before me. It all happened in an instant, and then I was back here, and the same sign was passing by the window. I watched us die…I watched us die…"
Ben held her for several minutes till the worst of her sobbing was through. When they separated from each other’s embrace, she whispered something under her breath that he didn’t hear.
"What was that?" he asked.
"The Beyond. I was in the Beyond, in another plane of existence. It was as if I had entered another reality that paralleled ours, but was just a short amount of time ahead of our own time. That’s how I was able to stop you before we went through the intersection. You want to know the scary part?"
"What’s that, honey?"
"I can still see into The Beyond. Even now."
"What?"
"I’m still catching little snatches of The Beyond. I can prove it to you, too."
"You can? How can you do that?"
She sighed as her eyes went out of focus again and she entered The Beyond. Her initial fears were subsiding and she knew it was too soon to feel it, but she was surprisingly comfortable switching from her own reality to that of The Beyond. She shouldn’t be feeling this at ease with what she was seeing, but something was comforting her. This was a gift, she thought. And as long as she had it, she would use it.
"Turn left up there," she said, pointing at the intersection ahead. "Follow that truck."
"What? Why?"
"I told you, Ben. I can prove that I can see what happens in the near future. It’s not just with the two of us either. You know that man in the truck that just passed? He’s wrecked into a tree about a mile down. There’s no one to help him and he’ll die if we don’t. Please, Ben. Go!"
Ben started the car and stepped on the gas as Jennifer pulled out her cellular phone and called 9-1-1. She gave the exact directions as he turned onto the other road and reaching forward, he reset the odometer. He didn’t do it to try to prove that his wife couldn’t see into the future, or anything like that, but he did it to satisfy his own curiosity. He knew his wife well. With over ten years of marriage behind them, he trusted Jennifer with his life.
1.2 miles. That’s what Jennifer had told the dispatcher.
Ben rounded a sharp bend in the road and sure enough, there was the truck, mangled and arched around a large pine tree. Jennifer leaped from the car before it had stopped and as he looked down at the odometer, Ben realized that his wife was now something every kid in America always dreamed of being…a superhero.
Ben got out of the car and went to help his wife, the little white numbers of the odometer were burned into his brain.
The odometer read exactly 1.2 miles…
And like Jennifer had told him, there was no one else to help the injured man. Because of her, a stranger got to keep his life.
…No, Ben thought, not just a stranger, but me as well…and her too. He wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t of trusted in his wife and stopped the car when he did. Things would have surely been different…
Copyright July 2001 by Christopher J. Thomasson
