No fight. No flight. Not yet. This is the quiet part. The deep breath before the engine screams. He's leaving the boy on the floor up there with the broken gift. He doesn't know what he's going to be yet, only what he's not.
Johnny's mind was a white wall of static. The image of Emma and Marcus was burned onto the back of his eyelids, a looping, silent film of betrayal. He didn't feel the stairs beneath his feet. He didn't feel the cool metal of the front doorknob in his hand. He didn't hear the click of the latch as he pulled the door closed behind him, leaving it unlocked, just as he had found it.
He moved through the night like a ghost, his face a blank, porcelain mask. He got into his car. The engine turned over with a familiar rumble, a sound that had always meant freedom but now felt like the closing of a tomb. He pulled away from her curb at a perfectly legal speed, his hands at ten and two, a model of calm. He drove one block. Two. Then he turned onto the main road leading out of town, the road that led toward the dark, winding country lanes. The mask cracked.
His jaw clenched so hard a molar screamed in protest. A strangled, animal sound tore from his throat, and he slammed his foot to the floor.
The old car, never asked to do more than commute, shrieked in protest. The engine roared from a grumble to a scream as the tachometer needle leaped toward the red. The world outside the windshield, once a collection of houses and streetlights, dissolved into a chaotic smear of light and shadow. He wasn't driving to a place; he was driving away from a memory, trying to achieve a speed so profound it could outrun the image in his head.
He hit the first turn on the back road far too fast. Any normal driver would have hit the brakes, would have skidded into a ditch. Johnny didn't. On pure instinct, his hands became a blur. A flick of the wheel, a perfectly timed downshift that made the engine howl, a feathering of the accelerator through the apex of the turn. The tires screamed, holding on by a thread, and the car shot out of the curve, straight and true. It was terrifyingly precise. In the chaos, there was control. In the raw, suicidal speed, there was a sliver of focus that silenced the screaming in his skull.
Some people turn to a bottle. Some turn to a fist. Our boy Johnny? He's turning to the redline. He's discovered a beautiful, terrible truth: you can't hear your own heart break over the sound of an engine about to blow.
The car flew through the darkness, a missile of anguish guided by a talent he never knew he possessed. He wasn't just driving; he was dancing with the machine, pushing it past every rational limit, finding a strange, violent grace in the space between control and catastrophe.
On the passenger seat, a phone began to buzz violently against the worn upholstery, its screen lighting up the dark cabin. Her name glowed there: Emma. It buzzed again. A call. He ignored it. It stopped, then immediately started again. A second call. A third. In a motion fueled by pure rage, he snatched it from the seat. He didn't throw it. That was too distant. He gripped it in his right hand, his knuckles white, and squeezed. The plastic groaned and the screen spiderwebbed under the pressure of his thumb. With a final, furious clench, he crushed it, feeling the sharp edges of broken glass and circuits dig into his palm. He threw the ruined device into the back seat without a glance and put his hand back on the wheel, oblivious to the blood now smearing the worn leather.
An hour, maybe two, bled into a high-octane blur. Finally, deep in a forgotten industrial park on the edge of town, the car gave up. The engine sputtered, coughed, and died, coasting to a silent stop in the shadow of a derelict warehouse. Steam hissed from under the hood like the last breath of a dying beast.
Johnny sat there for a long moment, his chest heaving, his body trembling with a mixture of adrenaline and exhaustion. The sudden, absolute silence was a physical weight. And in that silence, the image rushed back in, as clear and as horrifying as ever. The escape was temporary. The pain was permanent.
He shoved the car door open and stumbled out, leaning his back against the hot, ticking metal of the fender. He slid down to the cracked asphalt, his breathing ragged. He was empty. Stranded. Broken.
As his eyes adjusted to the profound dark, he saw it. A splash of color on the grimy brick wall of the warehouse across the way. It was a crude, spray-painted flyer. The image was a stylized tachometer, the needle buried deep in the red zone. Below it, a date for the upcoming Saturday, a time—midnight—and a set of GPS coordinates. It was raw, illicit, and spoke the same language his blood was now screaming.
He stared at the graffiti, his head tilting. He connected the feeling of the last two hours—the absolute focus, the intoxicating power, the silencing of his own mind as he flirted with oblivion—with that simple, aggressive image. It wasn't a solution. It wasn't hope. It was a direction. It was a way to feel that again, on purpose.
He looked from his dead car, a relic of a life that no longer existed, to the outlaw promise painted on the wall. A new, cold light began to flicker in his eyes, extinguishing the last of his boyhood warmth.
The tank is empty. The engine is shot. But look there. A sign. Not from God, mind you. Something far faster. He didn't find an answer tonight, reader. He found a replacement. A new addiction to swap for the old one. And this one? This one pays.