Criterium: Extended Edition by Jones Tyler

Author:Jones, Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

The dark room grew brighter. Zach’s body slowed down and eventually came to a stop. Without kicking, or waving his arms, his body was thrown back toward the windows. He flew faster and faster, and those strange windows grew so big he was afraid he’d go crashing right through them.

​The outside world filled his vision and he held up his hands to protect his face.

​Then—

​His eyes fluttered open. Pain hammered a straight line from his leg to his brain. He blinked a few times, looked down at his hands on the white grips, his legs moving without his permission. He opened his mouth and felt something stretch and crack, around his lips, his chin.

​The wind hit colder on half his forehead, and it burned. He lifted his eyebrows and felt skin separate, opening and closing like a second mouth. Whenever he did, a fresh rush of blood ran down around his eye.

​His heartbeat was like the bass in one of those souped-up racers with the subwoofer pounding. With each revolution of the pedals, the broken bones in his leg shifted, scraped together. The muscles in his thigh were going numb.

​What he wouldn’t give for some morphine, right now. Wrap that pain in some chemical gauze and suffocate it.

​“Let me off,” Zach pleaded. “I’m begging you, just make this stop.”

​As if hearing his voice, the pedals stopped turning and the bike coasted as it came to another intersection. They had slowed down enough for Zach to read the street sign just as the bike took a sharp left onto Archer Way.

​“No!” Zach yelled.

​The pedals turned again and the bike picked up speed. Zach almost didn’t feel the bone-scraping pain anymore. All he could hear was his own breathing, filling his ears like the ocean waves on Mom’s sound machine.

​“Not this street,” Zach said, “any street but this one.”

​The bike rode straight down the center of the road, narrowly avoiding a car that passed by. The driver, young, wearing a gold chain, held up his middle finger at Zach.

​Zach tried pulling up on his hands to lift the handlebars, but the front tire didn’t leave the road. It was as glued to the asphalt as Zach’s hands were to the rubber grips.

​“Why won’t you listen to me?” Zach asked.

​He couldn’t go any farther down this street, couldn’t stand to see that gray house again, and if that meant purposefully crashing he was willing to do it. Zach threw his whole upper body to the side, then to the other side, trying to knock the bike over. It didn’t move.

​He wondered what he looked like to the people he’d seen. Did something appear strange, or did he just look like a frantic young man riding somewhere as if his life depended on it? Zach’s heart sank a little to think that most of them probably thought he was on his way to score drugs. Where else would someone wide-eyed and sweaty, covered in cuts, bruises, and blood be going in such a hurry?

​What they couldn’t see, couldn’t know, was that Zach had no control over his actions.

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