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Um...I can't think of a name so this will do.
I just wrote this last night, tell me what you guys think. I am hoping to turn it into a short story eventually. This is the beginning though. Thanks.
A bolt of lightning streaked across the nearly black sky, the ensuing crack of thunder drowned out by the roar of the rain on the roof of the dark blue 1981 Plymouth Roadrunner. Twenty-six year old Raymond Trines unconsciously inched himself closer to the windshield as he strained to see the road through the flood of water and the persistent repetition of the wiper blades. He glanced at the gauges of the ancient automobile for the third time in two minutes, hoping that the dwindling fuel predicament might somehow fix itself. Finding no solace in the barren audacity of the fuel gauge, he punched the gas and looked to his watch, two forty-five; with a sigh he lay back in the seat and prepared for hour seven of straight driving.
He had left his tiny one room apartment in southern Colorado around noon the previous day. After stopping for dinner and dumping the little amount of money he had left into his gas tank, he had jumped onto highway 285 and headed south into New Mexico. The rain started shortly after he crossed the state line, right around the same time he smoked his last cigarette. He could really use one of those about now.
Raymond stared at the dull white lines on the road as they flew past; the drumming of the rain on the roof practically lulling him to sleep. Forcing his eyes to stay open, he stared through the sheet of water on the windshield; his vision swimming with fatigue. His headlights briefly illuminated the first sign he’d seen in over an hour, squinting through the rain he read the faded white letters.
“Chaves County,” he mumbled in dreary aggravation as he grasped exactly how distant civilization was, “fuck!”
He stomped on the gas, the fuel pump straining to bleed every drop of fuel from the already empty tank. Raymond quickly glanced at his speedometer, eighty-five mph; the rain only pounding the deteriorating car more as it slowly picked up speed. The Roadrunner became no more than a blue blur as Raymond hurriedly put Colorado behind him. And as the tiring driver pulled himself closer to the steering wheel, the wiper blades raced vigorously back and forth, unable to keep up with the immense downpour. “One hundred,” he muttered, glancing at his gauges once more.
As he brought his weary eyes back to the highway, he was surprised to see some type of large animal sitting in the middle of the road directly ahead of him. Acting as quickly as he could on no energy, he jumped on the brake pedal. The decaying brakes immediately locked, Raymond jerked the car to the right to keep from obliterating the animal now mere feet away from him. And as the car spun to the right, narrowly missing the creature, he got his first look at his unintended antagonist.
The animal was a monster, at least five feet tall; it hadn’t moved once inch. It was covered from top to toe in dark fur that had been arbitrarily matted down by the mass amount of rainfall and despite the creature’s awfully unusual look, there was nothing about the beast the made it really stand out. Even as the car continued to spin and the creature dropped from Raymond’s view, only the fact that he was still inside a crashing vehicle kept him from forgetting he ever saw the beast.
He was abruptly thrown back in his seat as the Roadrunner spun off of the road and slid sideways into a massive boulder, crippling the driver’s side of the car and sending Raymond flying into the back seat. The momentum of the car kept it flipping sideways, and with a series of thunderous crashes, the dated metal automobile barrel rolled over the boulder, and several times afterwards, before coming to a stop over sixty feet from the road on its roof. The wheels still spun from their inertia, kicking sprays of rain water towards the heavens almost as fast it fell and as the wheels began to slow and the open plains of the New Mexico badlands silenced their roaring echoes; the exhausted driver lay barely conscious, sprawled between life and death in a concoction of mud, blood, and various crude chemicals leaked from the car.
Then for Raymond Trines there was silence...briefly.
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“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde
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