THE COLD OPENING FROM MY NEW STORY

A black Mercedes barreled down the dirt road like a runaway freight train, throwing up tails of dust and scattering small stones, left over from some ill fated attempt at smoothing out some of the deepest ruts, to the wind. The vehicle’s air suspension was dialed in to a setting called “Sport 2” which was supposed to improve handling by providing more agility on bumpy road surfaces. Considering how the terribly maintained dirt road felt even through the finely tuned suspension, the driver wondered how rough the ride would have felt in a cheaper car as he decided to blow straight through a pock-marked stop sign and yanked the wheel hard to the left. The German engineering in the car’s steering and a bit of luck were the only things that kept him from leaving the road and plowing through a sand pine and the thicket of blackberry bushes that stood between the road and a thick looking wooden fence. The driver was just about to relax, mentally patting himself on the back for the all the clever maneuvering he’d done in the last fifteen minutes, when the headlights from before reappeared in his rearview mirror.

The driver swallowed hard and stepped down even harder on the accelerator. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought to himself. He was an important man. He was above this, or at least he should have been.

He chanced taking one hand off the wheel long enough to check his cell again. He was rewarded with an onscreen message telling him the phone still couldn’t find a signal and had entered standby mode to conserve power.

With a roar from its big v-8 engine, the truck started gaining on the Mercedes, despite its own modest 3.0 liter diesel v6 humming along admirably. The driver gave up on his cell phone and tried to put everything out of his mind except for making it back to the paved road. Once he got out of this godforsaken warren of dirt trails and dead ends, he knew he could get away. From the second his tires kissed asphalt again, it would be a seven mile straight line with no reason to slow down whatsoever. From there, a quick jog to the right would put him within sight of the interstate. There was no way that lumbering gas guzzler on his tail could keep up with the one hundred and fifty five miles an hour the Mercedes could do in its sleep.

All he had to do was get there in one piece.

With the flick of a pair of dashboard mounted switches, the row of lights on the truck’s roll bar, as well as the extra pair mounted below the front fender, snapped on. The sudden glare painted the Mercedes’ basalt gray interior a stark white. The driver couldn’t help flicking his eyes up to the mirror to see where the flash came from, and likewise couldn’t stop himself from reflexively flinching away and blinking his eyes.

That was all it took. Well, that and a doe with a very unfortunate sense of timing. The driver saw the deer too late and over-corrected. The big car skewed sideways, momentum following a straight line despite where the front wheels were pointed. The animal made a loud and distinctive thump against the passenger side rear quarter panel but didn’t have much of an effect on the vehicle’s forward speed.

The driver clenched his teeth hard enough to crack one of his fillings as he fought to regain control of the car. He managed to get straightened out only to drop a tire off of the side of the road. The car’s collision response system sensed there was a problem and had already locked the sun roof, tightened the seatbelt down across the driver’s chest and tilted his seat into a crash safe position. The car did almost everything except get itself back on the road. Unfortunately, it was the back end of the middle of nowhere, so there was only a sharp decline where a soft shoulder should have been, and absolutely nothing to stop the rest of the car from careening down the slope, where it came to an abrupt, and total, stop as soon as the front bumper plowed into the massive concrete culvert below.

The radical slant the driver had on the wheel during the crash worked against him as the airbag inflated, driving his own forearm into his face with enough force to fracture his right zygomatic bone. It was still an entirely survivable crash, except for that sudden numbness in his left arm and the feeling of intense pressure in his chest that he, despite the fact he knew better, hoped he could simply blame on the self tightening seatbelt.

He briefly considered trying the phone again, but even if he could find it in the aftermath of the crash, he knew it wouldn’t have done him any good. When he realized he could hear again, the driver noticed that the vehicle’s horn had somehow been locked into the on position by the crash.

The truck lurched to a stop even with the wreck, giving up both a subtle screech from one of the brake pads and a sound similar to a twisting spring from the suspension. The driver was able to hear the sound of one of its doors opening over the low gallop of the engine’s idle, followed by a scuffling he figured was one of the men who had been chasing him sliding down the edge of the ditch. As the car door swung open, the driver entertained a brief fantasy that it had all been in his head, that these men hadn’t been trying to kill him. Maybe they were just good old boys out for a night drive, knocking over mailboxes or whatever the hell they did for fun around here, and maybe now they would turn out to be good samaritans as well and save his life.

“He don’t look so good,” this voice was close, but for some reason the driver’s vision had begun to white out around the edges so he couldn’t see the man it came from.

“You see the papers?” another voice called back, this one was further away. It was harder to hear. The driver realized he’d stopped breathing at some point and couldn’t start again.

“I think he’s having a heart attack or something,” the nearer voice again, but this too was getting more difficult to make out.

“Saves us the trouble,” the other voice called back.

By then, of course, the driver wasn’t really paying attention. He was getting cold and really wishing he could take another breath.

One last breath.


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About the project:

I'm trying to take my own advice and write what I know, so even in this cold open we have callbacks to my time driving cars for a dealership, my pre-pre med days, and my history of speeding down dirt roads.

The story is going to be set in a fake rural county in Florida and revolve around a powerful family that owns a lucrative construction business with many state contracts, as well as the private gentleman's club they run that deals both in illegal gambling and prostitution.

The idea is something I've had kicking around in my head for a few years now. At one of my band's shows, I ran into the older brother of a guy I went to high school with. He was blown away by my band, and very drunk. Personally, I think the latter had a lot to do with the former. Anyway, he said "When you're a gangster in a small town, you can run the whole world."

It also tied in with discussions we had about how far we wanted to go with our band. Every step up the ladder means a whole new set of issues. You can be a great local band, but run out of steam when you try to go regional. You can be a hot regional act but get ignored when you try to go national, etc.

It gave me the idea of a "big fish in a small pond" sort of set up, and the problems that could start surfacing when the fledgling backwoods mafia tries to expand its reach.

The main driving point at the start of the story is the Hewes family trying to kill legislation that would legalize gambling in the county, thus removing their criminal monopoly.

I'm kind of planning it for my NaNoWriMo entry this year, provided I can keep from getting started on the rest of the story for that long. (To keep things honest, I just wouldn't count what I have written for the intro). If it starts burning a hole in my brain and I have to get it out earlier, so be it. (I could always just count from the day I start on chapter one, proper, and make sure I finish within a month's time.)