Strange Highways

to some children.
     "You're not trapped in the cast," Meg said, as she piloted the jeep into the long, snow-swept curve. "Hampered, yeah, but not trapped. I'm here to help."
     Tommy had come home early from his first day of school after the funeral, bawling: "Daddy was trapped in the car, couldn't move, all tangled up in the twisted metal, they had to cut him loose, he was trapped." Meg soothed him and explained that Jim had been killed on impact, in an instant, and had not suffered: "Honey, it was only his body, his poor empty shell, that was trapped. His mind and soul, your real daddy, had already gone up to Heaven."
     Now Meg braked as she approached the midpoint of the curve, that curve, which would always be a frightening place no matter how often they navigated it.
     Tommy had come to accept Meg's assurances that his father had not suffered. Nevertheless, he was still haunted by the image of his dad's body in the clutch of mangled metal.
     Suddenly, oncoming headlights seared Meg's eyes. A car rushed at them, moving too fast for road conditions, not out of control but not stable either. It started to fishtail, straddling the double line down the center of the road. Meg pulled the steering wheel to the right, swinging onto the hard shoulder, pumping the brakes, afraid of putting two wheels in a ditch and rolling the station wagon. She held it all the way around the curve, however, with the tires churning up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage. The oncoming car skinned past with no more than an inch to spare, vanishing in the night and snow.
     "Idiot," she said angrily.
     When she had driven around the bend into a straightaway, she pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
     "You okay?" she asked.
     Tommy was huddled in one corner of the backseat, with his head pulled turtlelike into the collar of his heavy winter coat. Pale and trembling, he nodded. "Y-yeah. Okay."
     The night seemed strangely still in spite of the softly idling jeep, the thump of windshield wipers, and the wind.
     "I'd like to get my hands on that irresponsible jerk." She struck the dashboard with the flat side of her fist.
     "It was a Biolomech car," Tommy said, referring to the large research firm located on a hundred acres half a mile south of their farm. "I saw the name on the side. `Biolomech.' "
     She took several deep breaths. "You okay?"
     "Yeah. I'm all right. I just ... want to get home."
     The storm intensified. They were beneath the snowy equivalent of a waterfall, flakes pouring over them in churning currents.
     Back on Black Oak Road, they crawled along at twenty-five miles an hour. Weather conditions wouldn't permit greater speed.
     Two miles farther, at Biolomech Labs, the night was shot full of light. Beyond the nine-foot-high, chain-link fence that ringed the place, sodium-vapor security lamps glowed eerily atop twenty-foot poles, the light diffused by thickly falling snow.
     Although the lamps were set at hundred-foot intervals across the expansive grounds that surrounded the single-story offices and research laboratories, they were rarely switched on. Meg had seen them burning on only one other night in the past four years.
     The buildings were set back from the road, beyond a screen of trees. Even in good weather and daylight, they were difficult to see, cloistered and mysterious. Currently they were invisible in spite of the hundred or more pools of yellow light that surrounded them.
          Pairs of men in heavy coats moved along the perimeter of the property, sweeping flashlights over the fence as if expecting to find a breach, focusing especially on the snow-mantled ground along the chain-link.
     "Somebody must've tried to break in," Tommy said.
     Biolomech cars and vans were clustered around the main gate. Sputtering red emergency flares flickered and smoked along both shoulders of Black Oak Road, leading to a roadblock at which three men held powerful flashlights. Three other men were armed with shotguns.
     "Wow!" Tommy said. "Door-buster riot guns! Something really big must've happened."
     Meg braked, stopped, and rolled down her window. Cold wind knifed into the car.
     She expected one of the men to approach her. Instead, a guard in boots, gray uniform pants, and a black coat with the Biolomech logo