Chapter 40: Book 1, Attempted Murder

I did consider it a good thing to be suspended. It meant I had more time to spend working and doing my university studies.

In three days, I have one of our Scott Centurion bikes modified for Alva. I put frictionless bearings in the crankset and wheel hubs, gave it some aerodynamic handlebars and wheels. The modifications added a touch more weight, but it was negligible compared to the benefits. At the end of the third day, Alva takes the modified bike for a spin. When she gets back, she is excited, saying, “I love it. I have never heard of a bike this fast before. My only complaint is the lack of shifters and brake levers in the aerodynamic position. I lose a bit of speed when I need to shift.”

“That is negligible. Even after you slowed down, you are still faster than you were on your old bike, and when you are in the aerodynamic position, you should already be in high gear and only need to shift when you are slowing down.”

“Or approaching a hill.”

“The bike is yours to train with. The battery for the bearings will only last about 300 km, so you need to charge it after every ride.”

“It’s mine, really?”

“Technically, it is mine, but like all the other bikes, it is permanently on loan until we get you a better bike or you leave us.”

“Hell no. There is no way I could ever afford a bike like this. I’m staying until I can’t ride anymore. And what do you mean, ‘get me a better bike.”

“We haven’t made the aerodynamic carbon fibre frame yet. The mods on the Centurion make your bike almost a lb heavier. The carbon fibre will reduce that.”

Saturday, we all meet at my place for the weekly ride. It is the first time we change our route. We now have various levels of riders. Not everybody can do the full 60 km. Every 10 km, we pass by my house and leave some people behind so they can shower up and get ready for work.

We are travelling on Latoria Rd, passing where Veterans Memorial Pkwy tees into it. We are going reasonably fast when I see a car parked on the side of the road, about 30 yards from the intersection on the Pkwy. The car starts moving forward, but I do not pay much attention. They have a stop sign, and we don’t.

The car doesn’t stop. In fact, it accelerates through the intersection coming straight for me. Being so, I appear to be the target. Thankfully I am the trailing rider, so the only other person to get hit is Carol.

They only clip Carol’s rear tire, but it is enough to throw her from the bike. Instead of relaxing and absorbing the blow, as one should in an accident, she makes the mistake of trying to brace herself from impacting the ground. It shatters her right arm. Thankfully, her helmet and shattered arm protect her face from scraping along the pavement. Her hip lands fairly hard, but I am having my own problem, so I do not notice how bad it is.

At the same time, they hit me head-on. Ironically, the good news is, I was severally abused for nine years. Every time a bone breaks, it heals stronger. Your bone is not solid. For lack of a better explanation, if you cut a bone and look at a cross-section, you will see it is honeycombed. With each break, the holes start to fill in, and your bones become heavier. Each time you are hit, your bones suffer micro-fractures. I am almost 20 lb heavier than I should be, because my bones have mostly filled in those holes. It means my bones are less flexible but much stronger.

When I was 26, I was driving up to Fort Grand from Victoria to visit my parents in Fort Grand. I was in the navy and just got back from 9 months at sea. We didn’t take any significant breaks since we left Victoria that morning and had just driven through the Pine Pass in the northern Rockies. I had done all the driving so far and needed a nap. I knew the rest of the way to Chetwynd wasn’t dangerous, and my friend with me had slept most of the way from Yale, which is most of the trip. I figured I would let him drive until Chetwynd. That way, I could get a ten-minute catnap and be refreshed for the next dangerous section of the road. We were going to take the shortcut, travelling the Hudson’s Hope Rd.

The Hudson’s Hope Rd falls off the mountain all the time. In fact, every day, the highways department sends somebody down the road from the Fort Grand to see if the road fell off the mountain again.

I get to sleep, and my buddy decides he is going to speed. We are doing 120-130kph in an 80 zone, and he falls asleep. We hit a concrete barrier and roll on top of it. When the car lands on its roof, the roof caves in. As it does, it hits me in the head, hard enough it destroyed my seat. By then, my bones were so dense they didn’t break. Since my back was adequately aligned, the force travelled down my spine, and I ended up with a bruise on my ass.

I remember when the car was rolling, just before it landed on the roof, I looked at my friend, thinking, ‘I’ll survive, but I’m pretty sure you’re fucked.’

That wasn’t the scary part. When the car came to a stop, the front windshield is missing, but we couldn’t exit the car that way because it had collapsed. My side of the vehicle was less than 3 1/2 ft tall. The side windows had shattered and were missing. My door was bent so I could have crawled out my window, but we were in the ditch, and the ground was where my window should have been. I knew we needed to get out of the car so we could asses our injuries. Part of the car was sticking out of the ditch, onto the road, and we were in the middle of a blind turn. This put us at a high risk of another car running into us. I looked at buddy and said, “We need to get out of here, I’m pretty sure our doors are jammed shut. We will have to crawl out a window.”

“You go first. Crawl out your window, then help me out.”

Buddy sees the ground where my window should be. His suggestion is my first indication that there is something severely wrong with him.

I was able to talk him through crawling out his window. By the time he was out, he was wheezing loudly, and his chest was expanding.

After I crawled out, I let him know, “There is no cell service out here. We have no way of knowing how long it will take to get help. You need to lay down now with your right side elevated, or you will die.”

I knew his ribs had punctured his lung on the left side, filling his lung with blood, and his chest cavity with air. I should have guided him a little better, but was in a bit of shock myself and didn’t realize how bad his delirium was. He laid down in the middle of the road. I had to drag him behind the car. It was more than a half-hour before the first vehicle happened by.

Unfortunately, it was a truckload of Americans. The US didn’t have good Samaritan laws. In the US, if you stopped to help somebody and they died in your vehicle on the way to the hospital, the family of the deceased could sue you. By Canadian law, you are required to help and can be charged with murder if somebody dies when you could have saved their life. These assholes stopped to see if we needed any help. As soon as they saw how badly my buddy was hurt, they got in their truck and left, spouting how they didn’t want to get sued. When they got to the next town, the fuckers didn’t even phone for an ambulance.

Ten minutes later, the next car came by, and a minute later, another showed up. The first vehicle was a kid moving up north to work the oilfields. His car was full, and he had no room. He was kind enough to dig out a new sleeping bag to put over buddy to keep him warm.

The second car raced off to get an ambulance. An hour later and still no ambulance. Eventually, we heard police sirens, and a cop car came racing around the corner of the highway. The cop car pulled off to the side of the road but sticking out enough to block another vehicle from hitting my car, pushing it on top of buddy. They, leaving their lights flashing, and a CST and Cpl get out of their vehicle. The first thing they do is separate me from my dying buddy. I understood, so I didn’t argue and did as I was told. Sometimes, in stressful situations, people do unpredictable things. Separating people in situations such as this, helps the police keep the scene under control.

Seeing that his partner doesn’t need help with buddy, the Cpl joins me at the side of my car, asking, “What happened?”

“He has a punctured lung, and his chest cavity has filled up with air. It is why his head is swelled to twice its normal size. We need to get him to the hospital now, or he is going to die.” I was hoping the air was confined to the outside of the skull.

“Don’t worry about that. We were delayed on the other side of Chetwynd since there was a two-car wreck on the highway to Deer Lake. The ambulance has dropped off its patient and is on its way. My partner is taking care of your friend. Now, what happened?”

“We were going at least 120 when we hit the concrete barrier and rolled.”

The barrier was more than 100 ft from where we stopped.

“You fell asleep?”

“I had been sleeping for a while.”

I never thought to mention that it wasn’t me driving. The driver’s seat is the safest place in a vehicle. If there is only one survivor, it is usually the driver. The cop assumed I was driving, and when I admit I had been sleeping for a while, he looked at me funny. I don’t clue in. Before he was finished questioning me, the ambulance arrived, interrupting the interrogation. The paramedic needed to know what I had done for first aid, and that took priority.

The police stayed behind to investigate the accident as the ambulance took us to the hospital. You would think that would be the end of the story, but often, things in the north play out a little different than they do everywhere else. Chetwynd was a small town. The hospital had two surgical rooms but not enough medical staff to operate them both at the same time. The ambulance took off to collect those with non-life-threatening injuries from the other accident. There was one doctor and a nurse that took buddy in for surgery. The doctor came out, looking frustrated. She asks, “How are you with blood? Do you get squeamish?”

“Not at all. I have had enough injuries that few things bother me.”

“Good, your buddy needs help, now. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people to operate. Everybody is in surgery with the guy from the other accident. Would you mind giving me a hand?”

“I have no clue what I’m doing.”

“I only need another pair of hands. I can talk you through it.”

“Lead the way.”

She quickly took me to get scrubbed, and in no time, we were in the surgical room. She bled out the air, and his head quickly returned to its proper size and shape, followed by his chest. She did let me install the valve in his chest, but only after doing the prep work and making sure I couldn’t screw up. It was a unique experience that you would never get in the south.

We were taking off our scrubs when the doctor told me, “Your friend is lucky. You saved his life. He will recover, but he will never get to 100%. His lungs will never fully recover.” I already knew there was permanent damage. Whenever a liquid comes in contact with the outside of the alveoli, the alveoli tend to die.

When I get back to the waiting room, the two police from the accident were waiting for me. They appeared to be a bit glum. I thought it was because they had to attend two bad accidents.

The Cpl asks, “When is it that you fell asleep?”

“It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes before the accident.”

They look confused. I add, “I’m not sure how long it was since I was sleeping. Normally, I wouldn’t sleep, so I could help the driver to stay awake, but he had been sleeping since Yale, and I figured he should be able to stay awake for 10 minutes. I needed to take a nap so that I could be alert for the Hudson’s Hope Rd.”

You could see the relief on the cops’ faces. They thought I was driving and were trying to find a way not to arrest me. They admitted as much. Between buddy not having a license and me walking away without a scratch, the police thought for sure I was driving.

The next day buddy was transported to PG Regional Hospital, and I never heard from him again. He was ashamed that he wrecked my luxury car, and in his mind, almost killed me.

By the time I was 40, I was in four different cars that were totalled off. Each one, I walked away without a scratch, only bruising. In fact, I had been run over by a truck, drove a motorbike under a car and totalled another bike when stunting. Through all of that, I always walked away.

By the time I was 15, most of the extreme abuse in my life had already happened, so my bones were extremely strong when the car hit me. As an engineer, I can tell you that when you strengthen a part, it usually means something else becomes the weakest link. Because of this, I suffered from many dislocations. Every time I should have broken a bone, I dislocated instead.

Each dislocation stretches the tendons a little more and makes it so that your joint is easier to dislocate. The flip side is that it also makes it so that your joint is easier to relocate, and once it is back in place, you retain more of the strength in that limb.

I dislocated often enough that I could relocate any joint without help and retain at least half the strength in that limb. The knees were especially bad and would retain more than 90% of their strength. The shoulders and elbows were 75-80%. This tendon damage is what the doctor discovered that sent my parents to jail.

When the car hits me, my right knee dislocates. When I land on the other side of the ditch, my left shoulder also dislocates. The car doesn’t come to a stop until the front wheels are in the ditch, trapping the car.

Before my assailants get out of the car, I have already relocated my limbs and am standing up. Brad gets out of the passenger side car and Greg steps out the driver’s side. They are in for a rude awakening.

Most people don’t realize that kicks typically don’t use the muscles that control the knees. You push off with your toes and then use the hip for power. Relaxing the knee makes for a faster and thus stronger kick. Dislocating my knee was almost doing me a favour. It means my knee is looser, and therefore more powerful.

Greg is standing above me on the ledge of the ditch, thinking he has the advantage. He doesn’t realize the strength and speed of my legs even before he dislocated my knee.

Greg’s knee is at the same level as my head. His weight is all on his front leg, which makes the setup perfect. The added weight on his forward leg braces it, making it easier to dislocate his knee.

I kick with a right roundhouse, connecting solidly with his knee, dislocating it. He falls but stays out of the ditch. As soon as he hits the ground, he curls up in the fetal position. This is a natural tendency when a person receives a significant amount of pain in a leg or the torsal area. The pain shoots up his leg from the pinching of two of the three main nerves in his leg.

I don’t let him stay like that. I reach over, grabbing him by the hair, pulling him closer. When his head is near mine, I grab his ears. Bringing my head back, telegraphing my neck, I increase the power, so when I headbutt him, there is a loud and prevalent cracking noise. Releasing his ears, and bringing my head back to stand up straight, I see Greg’s face caved in and feel his blood trickle down my face.