It was the crisis-mode of self preservation. But, what ever fight-or-flight there would have been was already long gone, down the length of the State Road, or, in the case of the car Marcus actually collided with, a burning husk by the side of the road, spun into an unlikely angle. Needless to say the other driver was dead, well beyond dead, really, occupying the wreckage at the base of a ball of flame. The human figure still recognizable as such, making it all the more macabre.
The California hills were tree-less. The sun now burnished all -and all too late. The splintered shards of safety glass cast over the surface of the road mocked the glint of stars, long invisible. Daylight blazed on. It was now all revealed in glaring sunlight.
The memory of Angel now long gone. Marcus had been traveling alone in his car, trying to make time. And he had been going all too fast for that narrow county road. Marcus’ and the other card had collided with sudden violence.
There was the growing realization that he must have been hurled upon the road from his car, through the windshield, no doubt, as evidenced by the splintered glass, which crunched mutely with the slight movements he managed torso-wise, before surrendering again to an all-encompassing gravity. Blood drenched his shirt. He tried and failed to take a thorough stock of his injuries, other than one horrible fact he slowly came to realize. There was a barely audible grunt that no one would hear, not even Marcus. It would be hours before he was discovered on this infrequently traveled county road. And the asphalt baked like a second, black sun.
The deadly fog had evaporated quickly, after the accident, as it turned out. His hands had been crushed. This was a horrible fact. The realization came as a horrific flood over his body; the sensations did his thinking for him. His hands had been crushed. It was an impossibly grizzly image to comprehend in his condition -his hands crushed into the asphalt and pummeled by the wheels of what it would be come to be known as the delivery truck -the third vehicle involved in -the accident.
Stunned by shock, he was in an animalistic state of mind -a place of steely survival as his body hardened in agony, arms outstretched above his head like a once-perfect but now shattered statue. Hurled from what temple would he be, from the stratosphere perhaps? Once beautiful, now pulverized; was the sensation. It was all that remained after the ability of coherent thought vanished even more thoroughly than the fog. His former life would become but a beguiling memory, or worse, a trick of his own mind.
It would be commented on later how the tire marks left a swervy kind-of ‘S’ on the asphalt. Apparently the truck driver had tried to, at least, slow down, and, failing that, turned to avoid hitting Marcus. The driver had tried valiantly, given his speed, and, almost missed entirely Marcus’ prone body. One must be grateful to walk away with one’s life, at least. Is it the same life? – he would come to wonder.
Marcus, driving the nearly deserted state road in his red Lamborghini, suddenly found himself in the blinding whiteness of fog, seemingly from nowhere. It was an instant wall of white. While trying to intuit how to steer to remain on his side of the road, while slowing down, he saw the orange lights of an oncoming car headed straight at him all too late. And, as it would be noted afterwards, there were not just two, but three vehicles involved in the accident. There was one collision in the thickness of the fog, and then the truck some minutes later as the whiteness dissipated and then revealed the scene of the accident.
Although, Marcus would not be aware of the truck, face to the asphalt, surrounded by splintered safety glass, the red Lamborghini in the roadside ditch, the black sedan not too far along the road behind him with a battered front-end and a non-surviving passenger at the wheel, deflated airbag along his lap, with orange flames still trailing well into the sky.
*** Chapter 4: A vision that is not realized ***
As though tossed from the stratosphere Marcus remained perfectly motionless in shock from the hallucinations as much as from the physical shock of the crash itself. He thought back to his times practicing the piano at his mother’s home in the California hills. It was the Cubist home of light. The sensation that he could not dislodge was that his father was watching, not here beside the road, but, while he played the stately glossy-black piano. How often during his life he thought his father was watching over his shoulder as he played, only to find, upon glancing to the side after the ending of his performance, that his father was not there. He was not present. And, that it had simply been an illusion all along. This never failed to disappoint him.
And Marcus’ father would work long hours as the chairperson for the floundering Bio-tech company, from finance to science, the hours simply never ended for his father. The value of the stock tumbled in just one direction over the many years. Sound science does not always make a firm investment.
The problem was, how to monetize the cure to an illness that would never be acknowledged.
Scientifically respected research and costly clinical studies did not yield a recognizable product.
The Alpha Wave project – a DNA-related treatment that boosted awareness in its subjects would prove to be more suitable for military applications than medicine, as it turned out. But even selling to the military would prove a daunting task. An overdose of the newly discovered waves would cause psychosis in those unfortunate enough to be exposed to that extreme level of Gamma waves. An ironic turn of events, it would turn out to be, for someone ostensibly laboring for peace, as was his father.
Marcus considered that the last sensation he may feel before death would be this same ghostly illusion of his father’s watchful gaze. The feeling of a presence that simply wasn’t there proved more frightening than the considerable physical pain.
Copyright Protected Work, All Rights Reserved. by- James Legare 3-20-17
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