The woman was not dead; far from it she was barely injured at all. Her nose had been bloodied by the deployment of the air bag, her neck had suffered bruised ligaments, tendons and muscles, more commonly known as whiplash and she had been stunned briefly into unconsciousness.
When she came around Dora was groggy and scared, her nose had bled an awful lot and her neck hurt horribly. Looking out of her broken side window she saw the bag lady's body in the middle of the street. The woman mistakenly thought she had only been out a few seconds, she also thought she may have run the bag lady over before hitting the tree.
Guilt overwhelmed her and she reached for her door handled to go and see if the other woman was okay. The door was stuck and would not open. She looked around for her cell phone and, finding it on the floor of the passenger side, barely within reach, she put a call into the police. It rang twelve times before a dispatcher answered. She told him she had an accident and she thought maybe she had run over a bag lady. The dispatcher told her to go home, get indoors and not to go out again.
Dora was confused, "You don't understand, I ran someone over, I can't get out of my car and they are just lying in the street, you have to send someone to help, there is blood all over my car!"
"Are you injured?"
"I think so, I can move, I just can't get my door open. The window is broken out."
"Can you start your car?"
"What? Ugh, let me try." The engine would not turn over, "No it won't start."
"You need to get to a safe place, your home if you can reach it, can you make it home?"
"I don't understand! I had an accident. I might have killed a lady! And you are telling me to go home? Don't I have to wait for the police?"
"Lady," a voice sighed on the other end of the line, "Look lady, you heard about the curfew right? You are not supposed to be out; you were supposed to stay in your house. I am telling you, no ordering you, to go home and barricade the doors. Leave the bag lady in the street or sidewalk, do not approach her. Do not wait for the police to arrive, do not stop until you get home and above all do not talk to anyone who looks odd on your way back home."
The woman realized something more was wrong here than she had thought, "Curfew? No…I…" her voice lowered to a mere whisper, "Is it…is it the terrorists? Are they here in Kansas City too? Like Denver?"
The exasperated man on the other end of the line said, "Yeah, yeah, it is lady, they are running around Kansas City now, okay? They have a drug that make people all crazy, like maniacs you've got to stay away from other people, get home and don't answer the door! Can you do that? Tell me who you are and where you live, if we can send an officer around to check on you later we will. Okay?"
Dora gave her name and address to the dispatcher, who seemed please to get off the line with her. After hanging up she looked out the smashed window of her side door. It was covered in small pieces of broken glass. More blood dripped from her nose as she tried to force her door open. Her head felt like hell, she was getting frantic trying to force the door and no one was coming to help her!
She looked across the width of the car to the other door, it seemed like it was an insurmountable distance away. Dora leaned over and tried to reach the inside door handle. A dull pain shot through her neck. She took her hand off of her face and used it to support her neck and continued to try and open her passenger side door. Eventually she just lay down over the seat, then looked up and pitifully clawed at the door with one hand. It opened.
Dora was slowly able to move over the seat and out the door onto the lawn of someone's house. Getting up on her hands and knees she reached back into the car and got her keys out of the ignition, then groped around grabbing her purse and cell phone before using her hands to climb up the outside of the vehicle and get to her feet.
The bag lady had not moved, and the woman didn't think she was going to either, she was sure the woman was dead.
'There is something about killing a person that changes you.' she thought, feeling a strange sense of remorse and loss, even though she did not know the person she had run down and killed. Turning her head to the car she followed that up with 'Roger is going to kill me!'
The car had impacted on the front bumper almost directly in front of the driver, the tire rim, which had been thrown free when she hit the tree, was nowhere in sight. This was the second car she had totaled in less than a year. Roger might follow through with his threat and buy her a 'previously owned' vehicle as he had said he would after the first accident. That would gall her to no end, cars were status and no one of status bought used goods. Unless they were antiques, there was an exception to every rule.
Pushing herself away from the car she experienced another tingling pain in her neck, she immediately used one of her hands to steady her head and looked back the way she had come. No cars. She thought her house might be three miles away, a long walk, maybe she could call someone and ask them to pick her up. She opened her phone and called Marge.
Marge lived in the same gated community as Dora, but their houses were about as far apart from each other as they could be and still be in the same subdivision. The two of them shared many of the same past times; gossip, early morning bloody Mary's, club lunches and afternoon gin and tonics. They would also work out together and told each other all of their secrets, especially those that painted their husbands in an embarrassing light. Giggling like school children they would often be interrupted by Roger or Marge's husband, Jerry, in the middle of an off color story involving one or the other of them.
The woman had almost slept with Jerry once and Marge had almost been 'swapped' to Roger the same night. That had been one memorable ski trip in Crested Butte in Colorado. The swap had never managed to happen, but boy had Roger pounded her hard that night. She knew he had a thing for Marge since then and both women had tried to engineer a second trip, but their husband's schedules just never seemed to allow it. Not that the woman was all that impressed by Jerry, he was a spectacled man about six feet tall with a pronounced beer belly, nothing she didn't get with Roger, to be sure, but he was also completely bald. Not 'receding hairline' bald, but billiard head bald. He had lost all his hair in his twenties and something about his baldness disturbed Dora. Oh she would have slept with him, with Roger's knowledge, and she probably would have had an orgasm too, anything for a change of pace and something new. She just didn't think she would enjoy the baldness part of it.
The phone was ringing.
"Hello?" it was Sylvia, who Marge had over some days to help out with the cleaning and other odds and ends around the house.
"Oh, Sylvia, this is Dora. Is Marge there?"
"Yes, Dora. She is sleeping right now, want me to have her call you when she gets up? It is still a little early for her, she had a late night last night."
"Her too? I hate to ask this, but Sylvia, could you wake her? I have had a bit of an accident."
"An accident? You are hurt? I will get her right away!"
Nodding to herself and wincing in pain at the same time Dora waited for her friend to pick up the phone. Over the line she heard Sylvia knock on a door and then heard some muffled conversation, including a man's voice say, something like "I thought you told her not to bother us?" before Marge shushed him and yelled at Sylvia to go away. Sylvia tried explaining through the door that it was Dora on the line and she had been in an accident.
Grinning Dora knew the man was not Jerry. 'Ooh that tricky bitch! Getting some on the side and not even telling me! I am going to let her have it.' Then her brain caught up with her and she found herself pulling the phone away from her ear and staring at it in her hand while Marge said "Dora? Dora, darling? Are you there?"
Dora clicked the end button on her phone, breaking the connection. Her brain had caught up with her in time to tell her the man's voice on the other end of the line had been Rogers.