Blind Panic Read Free

which added to the pandemonium, and others beating on their windshields with their fists. Several managed to open their side windows and climb out, but Jasmine saw one overweight driver who had managed to squeeze himself out of the rear window of his Shogun SUV, only to tumble down the narrow gap between his vehicle and the FedEx panel van behind him and become inextricably wedged. He was beating onthe panel van’s radiator with his fists, red-faced and sobbing like a baby, while the FedEx driver could do nothing but stare back at him.
    Jasmine was still more than a hundred yards from the interstate, climbing over one vehicle after another, when the smoke from the burning Explorer suddenly began to blow more thickly. She turned around just as the Explorer blew up, and a huge orange fireball rolled up into the air. The explosion was deep and deafening, but even worse were the muffled screams of the hundreds of people caught in their cars.
    Within seconds a station wagon next to the Explorer was blazing, and then a van directly in front of it. Dense brown smoke poured across the pileup, making it look even more like a battlefield. Jasmine clambered over the sloping silver hood of a Cadillac STS and managed to reach the retaining wall on the opposite side of the off-ramp. Now she was able to balance her way along the top of the wall, occasionally grabbing onto the vehicles next to her to stop herself from falling.
    Over the flack-flack-flack of the helicopters, she heard a sharp series of pops and crackles, and then the BP truck exploded. Even though she was making her way up the opposite side of the ramp, shielded from the full force of the blast by a Jeep, she felt a wave of superheated air on the back of her neck, and she was blown so violently to the right that she almost lost her footing.
    Another car’s gas tank blew up, and then another, and another. The screaming began to rise in a crescendo, an opera from hell. Within less than a minute, more than fifty vehicles were blazing, and the smoke was so thick that it blotted out the sun.
    Jasmine saw six or seven people staggering and stumbling across the wreckage, some of them smoking and blackened, some of them still ablaze. Only two vehicles away from her, she saw a father and a mother and four young children, all of them frantically knocking on the windows of their burningVoyager. They were all sandy-haired. She didn’t know why that made such an impression on her, but it was like seeing a whole family album thrown into a fire.
    She had almost reached the top of the off-ramp when she heard a woman screaming, “Save my baby! For God’s sake! Save my baby!”
    Jasmine lifted her hand to shield her face from the heat. The smoke was so thick now that she could hardly breathe. Right in the center of the pileup, a young blonde-haired woman had managed to open the passenger-side window of her SUV and was holding up a baby boy in both hands. Next to her, in the driver’s seat, a man in a white T-shirt was slumped over the steering wheel, his hair matted with blood.
    The baby was red-faced and kicking its legs and crying, but the woman managed to keep him aloft and continue to scream out, “Save my baby! Somebody save my baby!”
    Jasmine climbed onto the hood of a taxi that had been crushed between the retaining wall and the side of a trailer. The taxi driver was slumped sideways in his seat, unconscious or dead, but the woman passenger in the back was shouting hysterically and trying to break the window with a gold high-heeled sandal.
    Jasmine crawled across the hood on her hands and knees, and then walked across the trailer. Less than a hundred yards away five or six more vehicles exploded, and one old Chevy pickup was flung right into the air, landing on its roof with a thunderous crash.
    Once she had crossed the trailer, Jasmine was able to climb onto the roof of the dark blue newspaper-delivery van that was crushed up alongside the woman’s SUV. The woman held up her