The Long Unwinding Road - 0.1
Like an asphalt and concrete ribbon slicing through
lightly rolling grasslands, I-90 went on as far as the eye could see. Paralleling this man
made scar were parallel lines of obsolete telephone and electrical wires. Behind
the wheel of a lone vehicle crossing the Badlands of the Sioux Nation, was a
man with a single minded purpose, to get to New York as fast as he could.
He did not rate high enough in Evo
Corp to warrant a suborbital flight. Well, officially, he did not
even work for them, so. He was the one the 'suits' came to when they
needed something taken care of... "off the books". He was only
ever referred to as, "Mr Johnson". Definitely no glory or fame,
but the pay was good. Especially when there were no records of expenses
to be kept. Normally, something like this, the retrieval of a corporate
"asset", he would just put a word on the street, and the rabble
crawled out of the shadows for the work. But when an exec comes to you
directly, you make sure you see to it personally. If the 'asset' proves too
difficult to regain on his own, he would just hire some local talent.
Yawning, the man shook his head and lowered the windows to try and wake himself up as he accelerated to two hundred kilometers per hour. He looked to be maybe in his mid-thirties, with a slightly thinning rumpled crop of hair. His beard was growing thick having gone unshaven for four days now. Although he had gone nose-deaf to his situation, he sat in a crumpled casual business suit that had not been taken off of his body for longer than the beard was old. He pulled out his last pack of cigarettes, took the last one from the packet with his teeth, then crumpled up the pack and tossed it on the passenger side floorboard. It fell alongside the growing pile of empty soykaf cups, and containers from Stuffer Shack that were mostly
empty.
It didn’t help that the only thing that the headlights on his SK Bentley could reflect off of were the lines along the highway, and the rumble strips along the shoulders to let you know that you’d fallen asleep. But, even in the early morning hours, the driver could tell he was coming up on a storm, and fast. To his left, right, and rear view mirror, there was the dim illumination of moonlight, but the view out his windshield was only a wall of black, punctuated with frequent brilliant flashes of cloud to ground lighting.
With a blink and twitch of his right eye to the left, he checked his tracking readout within his field of vision of his cybernetic eye. The target marker was still solidly locked in New York, “The City that never sleeps”’, he chuckled to himself. With another twitch of the eye, he switched to the MapSoft display, and then another blink and and a flip of his right hand, he switched the display to the windshield HUD. “If I keep to just fuel and essential pit stops… I should roll into New York in just under... twenty hours”, he says aloud to the empty cabin.
Another ten kilometers down the road, and the wall of black now filled the entire view to his front, and most of the side windows. The wind wasn’t doing it for him as he fought with having gone over four days without sleep. He reached into an interior pocket of his out of date suit jacket, and pulled out a hard case, the size of a long cigarette pack. Cracking it open, it revealed five thin metallic cylinders. He pulled one out and placed it between his lips. Once he closed the case, and returned it to his pocket he reached up to grasp the cylinder, which he was now clenched between his teeth and with a swift tug, he pulled the cylinder free from its lid. With practiced ease, he simultaneously turned his head to the left and spit the lid out through the open window, while, with his right hand he fliped the cylinder over with his fingers and then jammed the open end into his upper thigh. He was used to the sting of the spring injected needle, and didn’t flinch. He just relaxed and enjoyed the slow spread of coolness through the muscles in his leg, as the dose of ‘Long Haul’ spread throughout his blood stream. When it finally began to wind its way into his brain, the fatigue induced mental fog just melted away. With a smile crossing his lips, he tossed the empty injector vial to follow its lid and then put the windows back up. Leaning forward he retrieved the smoldering cigarette from the small ashtray in the console, sat back to let his head lean against the head-rest, took a long drag of the cigarette, held the smoke briefly, and then let it slowly exhale from his mouth and nose. He was only twenty four hours from the biggest payday in his life, and nothing was going to stop him now.
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