Run Over by a Bus

CHAPTER 2

16:18 MDT
8 May, 1997
Las Cruces, NM

"No, NO! Stop! What are you doing? Please stop!" I heard these words explode out of my mouth but it hardly seemed possible that I was speaking them. It was like a surreal dream. You know the kind; you are running from some danger but can't find your footing or you are falling free fall through thin air with no way of controlling your descent. That is what it felt like was happening. I kept hoping I would wake up at any minute and it would all be over; nothing but a distant, hazy memory of the previous night's sleep. It was no dream.

I was pinned between the front bumper of a 1981 Blue Bird School bus and the side of my friend Bob's Dodge Van. In spite of my pleas, the bus kept up its relentless pressure. With each second, my voice was weaker as my chest was compressed and ribs began to crack. The pain was like nothing I could ever have imagined. What was happening? How could this be happening to me?

Desparately clawing at the hood of the bus, I tried frantically to extracate myself from between the two vehicles. My feet were swinging wildly beneath the bumper as I tried to get a solid foothold that would enable me to somehow climb up and over the bus's grill to safety. No luck. There was not enough room to maneuver. The bus kept going; kept crushing me. I could hear the metal panel of the van's door beginning to creak under the pressure as my body was pressed into it's door like clay being forced into a mold.

Finally the van could take no more and it's rear wheels broke free, allowing it to be pushed aside. The bus lurched up and over the concrete curb separating the paved parking area from the gravelled area beyond. As I lost the last remnant of support from behind, and with no footing on the ground I fell backwards onto the gravel and thorns and watched in horror as the bus began to run over me. Thankfully, one of our potential buyers was standing next to me. Though he was slightly injured himself, he was able to move my splaying legs to the side and out of the path of the bus's tires. The front bumper and suspension of the yellow behemoth, caught my legs in mid air and folded them back over my chest.

Freakishly, the bus continued its forward momentum. My pleas continued unheard. Gradually I was vacuumed under the engine, the drive train, the muffler as the bus durg me for forty feet. Each foot of that journey was painstakingly real; grindingly slow; inconceivably painful. My back was absorbing the rough, gravelly surface of the ground beneath, ripping away not only my clothing but flesh as well.

In what seemed like a timeless hell but was in reality only a few seconds, the bus finally careened up over a 6" ledge and onto the church's basketball court. As it jostled up and over this last obstacle, the back of my neck was caught against it with sufficient force to flip me over without crushing the vertabra completely.

Finally. It was over. The only sound I could hear at first was the ticking of my Casio watch. My right arm and wrist were contorted and now rested under my head which was turned to the left. I thought I should probably get up and see what had happened. As hard as my mind willed my limbs to move, there was not the slightest ability to move. What was to happen next? I should have been terrified. I wasn't. In what should have been a moment of extreme fear and panic, became a peaceful place of God's presence while I lay there waiting.