Chapter 1

Dash

I gripped the wheel so hard my knuckles ached. My hands were dripping with perspiration, but I wasn’t about to ease up on my grasp. Our lives depended on my quick thinking. I wasn’t a race car driver, in fact, I wasn’t much of a driver at all. I’d always left that job up to someone else and had too many drivers in my lifetime, which bred an innate disinterest in the mundane task.

I wasn’t into driving, or video games or anything else that took quick thinking and skill and that’s why it happened. I was a nerd, a scientist, and to some, a life saver. My cancer inhibitor XM, which was an X chromosome manipulator, had just been FDA approved and whispers of a Nobel Prize peppered the conversations around me.

I knew there were competitors trying to beat me to a viable cure for cancer, but in my mind, it wasn’t a race against one another, it was a race against the disease. My finding a possible cure, which had shown tremendous success in some cancers, wasn’t as well received as I’d hoped it’d be by some; namely my former childhood friend and now nemesis Mark Laviathon.

He was my greatest competition in the research game, but we’d grown up just blocks from each other. Our parents played competitive Mahjong together and I thought he was down to earth, unlike most of our neighbors in the exclusive gated community. He and I built a tree fort club and fought bad guys, we dreamed of big breasted girls and being famous nerdy guys. Now we were at each other’s throats.

His company had just created a drug that was one of the world’s best pain relievers, but he was having a hard time getting FDA approval because of the heavy narcotics in the drug. It was a better pain reliever than any drug on the market, however, there were spooky side effects which drew numerous complaints. People voiced their grievances after using the drug saying they had powerful, realistic hallucinations that were either intensely scary or eerily euphoric, making use of the drug unpredictable. Also, if it was manufactured correctly, the drug was very costly.

There were suspicions Mark had taken this drug to the streets. He was rumored to be at the root of the Halo epidemic, which was thought to be a street derivative of his painkiller. Growing speculation supposed Mark was working with the Minneapolis drug cartel to manufacture Halo at half the cost of the legitimate pharmaceutical without waiting for final testing. The same rumors that indicted Mark also claimed there was a price on my head. My company, Rainseed was also working on an over-the-counter remedy that would help those addicted to Halo get off the drug.

Halo tricked the brain into not feeling pain and often made the brain see and feel things that weren’t there. The danger in tricking the brain to completely obliterate any sensation of pain was it could cause people to act without any caution. Pain was the body’s own alert system, with that disabled, people could possibly injure themselves, or die because of not knowing about or not caring about the pain.

The street version of the drug made you feel invincible. People were known to jump off buildings and cut off their own limbs when high on the drug, thinking they were impervious to consequences and believing the visions plaguing them were real.

The strange hallucinations made people think they were able to talk to the dead, see heaven, and walk through fire. Halo, in its pharmaceutical version, was only administered under a doctor’s supervision. I’d known about the drug when we were working on our cancer blocker and decided to try and iron out the kinks with our own brand of pain reliever which didn’t have the scary side effects. What we found was a stabilizer that could dull pain, but not block it out entirely and our drug could be used to wean addicts off Halo. We were able to get FDA approval relatively quickly and it was sold over-the-counter. Many treatment centers were using it as an effective step-down drug for Halo users.

Because of this, investigators believed there could have been a street vendetta against me and my company, propagated by the drug cartel. None of the rumors were substantiated, but we did travel with security and there had been more than one incident where the coincidences were questionable.

Mark wanted me out of the game. Rainseed had been my passion since college and I gave everything to the company. Killing me would kill my work. It seemed like Mark was fixated on this equation. I could read his tells a block away. He wasn’t someone I cared to keep on the streets; he was dangerous, so I told investigators all I knew about him and the work he was doing.

I was working against him, behind his back. He’d veered too far off course and a few years in prison, I hoped, would get his head back in the right place. Law enforcement and the FBI were close to nailing him on trafficking Halo the night everything went wrong, and my world disintegrated.

My mind was a chaotic mess. Here I was saving lives and doing good for our fellow man, and yet as I looked in the rear-view mirror the black sedan was bearing down on my wife and me. This wasn’t about science. The car’s merciless pursuit at breakneck speed was about death, obliteration, and money. Kill me, and Mark becomes the hero. It was a win/win for him. Kill me, his only real competition, back away from Halo taking a behind the scenes stake in the enterprise, buy my company, and go to the bank. The only obstacle to that perfect plan was my life, which someone was trying, and very well I might add, to end.

I looked over to Michelle, my gorgeous wife, just as the sun streaming in from the window shone through her hair. I thought myself the luckiest man in the world, being married to her. She was a woman I’d coveted in college. She was a popular, left-wing, liberal-minded activist who’d just published her first novel. I liked challenging women, people who were smart, strong, and unswayed by riches and fame. Michelle was that girl in every way. She’d just finished her second novel and was climbing the best seller’s list when the car chase stole everything.

I could see the fear in her eyes, but she remained calm and steady as she quietly spoke with the 911 operator, “Yes, they are right behind us, two men, both are wearing face masks and one has a gun…”

“Get down, Shelly!” I screamed as I saw a second car flank us on the right, the driver opening his window with his gun poised at Michelle’s head.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This was it, I was going to have to just grit my teeth and test my skill. The driver had his gun aimed at us and as hard as Michelle tried to tuck herself away, still on the phone with the police, there was no way she’d avoid getting hit if he fired. He would end her life with mine. Miraculously, at that very moment, I saw a break in the traffic. To most, I was going to be the asshole that cut them off on Highway 169 and caused the accident that totaled their car, six cars in fact, but to me, it was the lifesaving chance we needed to survive.

I pressed my foot to the floor and gunned it into the adjacent lane, the guy on the right couldn’t possibly follow me without crashing, but the dumb ass tried anyway and crashed into the cars around him. He wasn’t our problem anymore but we weren’t in the clear as the original car, the one I first noticed trailing me, had avoided the crash and was still a few cars back. As I weaved in and out of traffic, Michelle got confirmation from the authorities they were above us in a chopper and had two squad cars on the ground.

For one moment, for one stupid moment, I let my heart beat again. I felt as if we were safe, like we were going to actually beat them. I was dreaming of a cold McClellan on the rocks and seared salmon with tarragon. I was going to make love to my wife all night long. We’d been wanting to try for a third child and I aimed to try till I passed out. I was daydreaming about keeping her naked for days, forbidding her to dress that gorgeous body as we went for round after round of exotic baby-making sex. We’d been into Kamasutra lately, and seriously, I was planning on bending over backward and seeding her from every direction.

I only allowed myself one indulgent moment, one tiny hiccup relieving the stomach-churning fear and brain-battering stress the last twenty minutes of being pursued by a killer had wrecked on my body. I could hear the sirens, we were almost home free.

Michelle let out a sigh, “Oh, thank god,” she told the kind 911 operator on the phone.

Even though the car was still in hot pursuit behind me, all I had to do was get to safety and let the police do their work. Traffic was clogging up again and while we could hear our rescuers behind us, we weren’t free. I took a risk and floored it around a silver Honda Civic with a bumper sticker that said, ‘If you can read this, you’re too close.’ I thought that was ironic. I didn’t see the cement barricades tapering into our lane into the next and blocking off the road construction that was causing all the traffic. I wasn’t thinking traffic safety, I wasn’t seeing neon orange vests or yellow helmets, I was just thinking, get the fuck out of my way, they’ve got guns!

I don’t remember much else from that night, just the sound of steal grinding and compacting in. I don’t want to think about Michelle that way, the way they said to help me understand that her death was most likely sudden and painless. I didn’t want to know how I escaped the car and the ensuing flames that engulfed the love of my life.

There was nothing left… of her or of me. I woke up in a faraway hospital in the witness protection program, my name changed, my identity obliterated. I’d died in the crash along with my wife it was announced to save my life. I was supposed to stay where they couldn’t find me, but that kind of hiding was like a living death, so I opted for my own kind of hell, a hell in which I could manage to live the rest of my life.

The rest of my life was an anvil of dread and damnation I wore around my neck. The rest of my life was the little existence I allowed myself. After fleeing the witness protection program, I hid out in the mountains. My sister finally told law enforcement where I was, and I made a deal with them. I stayed put, and they’d do their best to protect me and my family.

I see Michelle in my dreams sometimes. In the dreams she comes to me, wearing white, like you’d expect an angel to be wearing, her long blond hair flowing in the wind. I look for wings, but there are none.

She slides into bed with me and strokes my neglected cock, bringing it back to life, in the gentle way she had that was able to arouse my deepest passions.

She’d bite my earlobe and feather hot kisses over my tender neck as I rolled into her, my cock sliding between us, ready to claim her as she glided over it, spreading her legs to let me in.

My mouth would find hers, warm and inviting as my tongue tasted her sweetness. My hands flailed on her body, clawing her closer to me like a wild unbridled animal. I needed her. I needed to be inside her thrusting hard and deep, pumping and pumping until I’d unleashed all of me, every last drop, within her. Oh, the ache was painful and raw. I longed to lay sated by her side, my hand lazily swirling around her rose-colored nipples. I wanted to dance my fingers over her trim waist and dip them into the swollen lips of her beautiful pussy, feeling it glazed with our carnal ambrosia.

I’d lay in her heat and let her tiny body snuggle into mine until she fell into a deep and peaceful sleep, our child forming within her perfect body. In a satisfied haze, I’d drift off to sleep only to be awakened with her framed picture staring at me. Her eyes still aquamarine, her smile wide and mischievous; just a photograph, forever frozen in time.

She was only in the photograph now, locked away from me forever. Beside the simple wooden frame encasing the candid photo I took of her on Cass Lake was an equally simple wooden urn… all that was left of her. I’d bought a double mausoleum and a lovely epitaph with both of our names and a poem, but I couldn’t bear to put her in it. She stayed with me, haunting my memories with happier thoughts of times long gone.

Now, I was buried here.