"Well they showed you a statue - told you to pray. They built you a temple and locked you away. Ah! But they never told you the price it would pay. The things that you might have done.... Only the good die young."
Billy Joel - Only The Good Die Young
It had been eight grueling years since the Grim Reaper and Scott Edwards had first made acquaintance. To his family and him, it felt like a hundred. At the still tender age of twenty two. Most assumed his dalliance with the Reaper was at its end. It wasn't! The Reaper had grown incensed with Scott. He had tried and tried to make Scott his and was rebuffed every time. "This time nothing is going to stand in my way. I will get this bastard if it's the last thing I do." The Reaper's thoughts were as firm as ever as he packed his bags for yet another visit to the young Mr. Edwards.
"Let's get something to grub on. I am starving." It started as just another typical Saturday night in small town Kansas. The scene was familiar, four guys cruising the main drag, killing time, yelling at girls and then one of them decided they were hungry. "Where do you want to eat?" the driver quipped to his hungry passenger. "Let's go to Taco Hell. I am broke and the eats are cheap." Scott and the other passenger in the backseat suggested McDonald's, but in the end they were overruled. Taco Bell is located on the south side of 6th street in Emporia. Scott and his friends were traveling west on 6th and were going to have to turn across traffic in order to get there. The turn proved tragic.
As I stated earlier, most had believed the affair between Scott and the Reaper to be over. Unfortunately, it was now getting ready to reach its highest level! "Jesus Christ, watch out!" It happened in an instant. A drunken eighteen year old had slammed his Camaro into the side of the car Scott was riding in. "I'm going to kill you! You hurt my friends!" The driver of the car Scott was in fell into an instant rage when he looked into the back seat and saw his two cohorts motionless. Unfortunately, his frantic yells were a mere whisper to Scott as he faded in and out of consciousness. All the near misses, all the treatments, all of the heart ache, all of the surviving. None of that mattered to The Reaper. "I can't find a pulse!" When the paramedics arrived Scott and his friend in the backseat were trapped in the wreckage. Neither were breathing. "There it goes. He is breathing again." When the paramedic lifted Scott's head, he resumed breathing. The two were pulled from the wreckage and subsequently air-lifted to a hospital in Wichita. After a lengthy period of rehabilitation, Scott was released.
Just like that, Scott Edwards had used up another one of his nine lives. But things were different this time, much different. The Reaper didn't walk away empty handed that fateful night. Scott's friend, the one who was sitting next to him in the backseat, had absorbed the ultimate brunt of the crash and ended up passing. The waste of a promising young life, by such a selfish act, would loom over Scott and the rest of Madison for many years to come.
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