vignette from a pile of fiction that I keep trying to make into a novel (Patreon)

Hi! I wrote this last week to try and hone the direction I want to go in with a novel that I keep trying to make happen. No idea if that will ever actually work, but I think I'm going to read (a trimmed-down version of) this at Please (T)Read With Me next month, but I figured I would share the vignette here. Feedback is welcomed.

TW for vivid nightmares, implied violence.

The Ford Explorer

That night, Anna had a nightmare. She was being chased, and the cops were closing in. She ran down funhouse versions of Reno’s neon-soaked alleyways but the men were everywhere, and they were faster. One of them grabbed her, forced her onto the ground, pulled out a gun. She was on her knees trying to scream—to beg—but no sound came from her mouth. She felt his cold gun pressed to the back of her skull. She woke herself with her own scream.

Her pulse throbbing in her skull, she walked outside and lit a cigarette to calm her nerves. Ever since she’d cut back drinking, she had felt better in her waking hours but traded off the ability to sleep through the night. She opened her garage door and stared at her Celica.  That past weekend, she’d finally finished installing a new intercooler and charge piping; the weekend before, a new set of thicker sway bars. Ever since her tits had hit C cups and stopped growing, she’d felt stagnant; the only evidence of her ability to improve her circumstances came in the form of her ever-sharper, ever-quicker Toyota. The reminder of her progression through hard work helped calm her.

Her alarm would go off in five and a half hours, and she knew it would be an hour before she would be able to fall asleep again; there was too much cortisol left in her bloodstream. She could either lie in bed and peck at her phone for an hour, or sit here and chain-smoke for an hour. Alternatively, she realized could go drive for an hour. There’s no rule that insomnia has to be experienced at home. She fired up the Celica and headed south. 

Unlike most American cities, Reno doesn’t suffer from far-reaching suburban sprawl, thanks to the ring of mountains fencing it in. The downtown core—all seven blocks of technicolor-lit casinos—was clearly visible looking north out Anna’s front door, but by aiming the Celica south, she could find herself in the wilderness in just fifteen minutes. That was where she aimed tonight.

NV-431, better known as Mt. Rose Highway, bifurcates the pines of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest as it winds up the slopes that rise from Reno’s southwestern edge. Over 24 miles of road, it carries drivers from the floor of the high desert to a pass known as Mt. Rose Summit, which at 8,911 feet is the highest all-weather pass in the state of Nevada. After a spectacular descent replete with panoramic views of Lake Tahoe, it unceremoniously ends amid the million-dollar mansions of Incline Village, dumping drivers directly on the rocky shore of the crystalline blue water. 

Importantly to Anna, NV-431 had a good variety of angles and speeds of corners, some high-speed straights as the blacktop sliced through flat open meadows surrounding the very peak of the mountain, and a lot of elevation change. Due to the thinner oxygen at higher altitudes, her car performed differently at Mt. Rose Summit, 5,000 feet above the casinos; it made for valuable data. With its wide mix of environments, it was the perfect test loop for tuning her car, and so she’d found herself driving up and over the mountains almost every weekend after dark for months on end as she tweaked air/fuel ratios and suspension stiffness and boost pressures in pursuit of the optimal setup.

The rich assholes that came over the California side of the Sierras to shelter their money from income tax and push up rent prices and drunkenly catcall every woman in Reno all brought with them expensive high-performance cars. Their wealth made them bold; they tore up the mountain passes in broad daylight, exhausts echoing loudly off canyon walls, weaving their race-inspired machines through roads thick with minivans full of families. The cops, as a result, met their quotas easily in the daytime and nowadays never came out at night. Anna still kept a radar detector—a Valentine V1—suction-cupped to the windshield, to be safe, but it was 2:15 AM. She was going to drive like she wouldn’t see a soul.

And she didn’t. She turned the 21-minute stretch of road she used as her benchmark section—from the eastern boundary of the National Forest to the scenic viewpoint lying west of the summit that overlooked the entirety of Incline VIllage—into a 13-minute affair. She pulled off the road, took a few deep breaths of below-freezing air as she gazed at the cold still waters of Lake Tahoe and the warmly lit windows of the mansions looming above it, and then started back across the mountain, onward to home. Anything under 13 minutes, 20 seconds would be a new descent record for her; with the pavement still so cold, she didn’t possess enough grip to find more pace in the corners. Any time savings would need to come from the precious few wide-open sections, and she figured the new intercooler might help with that.

The largest straightaway on her return journey came just half a mile after the overlook. Just before the final ascent to Mt. Rose Summit was a wide-open straightaway that sliced through a meadow. Wide shoulders on each side, normally packed with parked hikers but now vacant, meant that her pace felt slow despite having the Celica’s throttle pinned in fourth gear. Headlights in the distance peeked from around the corner to the summit, beams glittering across the half-melted snow on either side of the road, but she kept her foot on the mat; there was enough shoulder here she wouldn’t need to worry about startling this lonesome soul off the road when she ripped past.

The Valentine awoke and with a staccato alarm. Anna jolted. Fuck. 

The SUV at the other end of the meadow started to hit the brakes and move to the shoulder. Anna was moving too fast to gauge whether it had a light bar or not, but it didn’t matter. There was no possible source of stray radar false alarms here, 8,700 feet above sea level and six miles from the nearest man-made structure. She didn’t need to accurately identify the make and model to know it was a cop. 

She let off the gas, slammed the clutch pedal to the mat, moved the gearshift to neutral and evaluated her options in the split second of coasting. In Nevada, anything more than 30 MPH over the speed limit was no longer a civil offense; it was a misdemeanor with a theoretical maximum punishment of six months in jail. She glanced down at her gauge cluster. It indicated 117 MPH. The speed limit was 55 MPH. She had not shaved her face or put on a bra before she left the house tonight. She thought, briefly, about what that would be like in a Reno holding cell for her tonight. 

The SUV ended her contemplation and switched on its roof-mounted lights; red and blue and white and a piercing siren shattering the dark still of the snow-covered meadow. Thought completed, she shifted to fifth and stomped the throttle to the floor. At this speed, she was certain the cop could never get the make or model; all she had to do was hit I-580 before backup was en route, and she would be home free. She didn’t so much as dare glance at the blacked-out Ford Explorer as she ripped past at 125 MPH. No idea which department it was, didn’t matter, she’d never find out. 

The next nine minutes of Anna’s life were spent in a flow state. The cop made a U-turn but still disappeared immediately from her mirrors; sure, that Ford Explorer may have had a cop engine and cop brakes, but she had a 120-mile-an-hour head start and an intimate knowledge of every switchback separating the meadow and the freeway. She merged onto I-580 North without seeing another cop, lit a cigarette, rolled down the window, and sat in the slow lane behind a Prius with an Uber light in its back window. 

She got home just as the adrenaline finished working out of her system. As she walked up to her apartment, she mentally made a note that her next modification needed to be a tail-light kill switch—just to be safe. She went to bed. 

When her alarm sounded at 7:15 AM, she woke up more rested than she’d felt in weeks.