TEARS OF RAGE

Chapter 38

With the whine of police sirens reverberating about the night, Swaylo sped away from the curb with a screech of tires; no headlights.

A series of gunshots followed in his wake, shattering the Cadillac's rear window.

Bullets ricocheted from off of the car bumper, like coins rattling through a slot machine.

Swaylo accelerated to more than eighty miles per hour, his only source of light being the illumination of streetlights.

A hard turn off of the street sent the car swerving into traffic on Kennedy lane.

Four blocks past that intersection, Swaylo hit Union Road.

From Georgia Avenue to Martintown Road the slush of car tires, speeding over wet pavement rent the air.

Three miles east of Avendale Highway, two blocks past the Jensen Road intersection, Swaylo watched in horror as cops began to erect an armed roadblock.

Several vehicles had to stop, creating a buffer of cars to reduce his speed.

Tire spikes could be seen being spread across the roadway.

Swaylo veered across oncoming traffic, turned onto a darkened street, and accelerated.

Two blocks from Jensen Road, he hit Carolina Avenue and sped past the Hinton street plaza.

Four miles southeast of the Hinton street plaza, Swaylo fishtailed onto a dead-end street.

The residential area was sparsely lit by the streetlights.

A glance into his rearview mirror displayed that there were no police cars following him.

Preoccupied with his survey of the police pursuit, Swaylo did not see the Dodge truck pull from a driveway, at his right. The rear reflectors lit up before his headlights.

He tried to veer clear of its path, but the driver did not see him, with his headlights out.

There was no way to avoid the collision.

The night erupted with a crash of metal upon metal.

The front end of the Cadillac hit the Dodge truck, crumbled like an accordion, and went airborne.

When Swaylo came to his senses, the car was laid on its driver's side, and rain was pelting across his face.

The front windshield was shattered. His body ached.

Shards of glass were sprinkled about like popcorn.

The wail of sirens could be heard in the distance.

There was no time to linger or assess his injuries.

It was time to get moving...

He pulled himself through the car window, and laid across the wet pavement, trying to inhale oxygen into his lungs.

Move, he kept telling himself.

Cop cars could be heard in the distance, the wail of sirens sounded as if the calvary was about to bend the corner.

Sway stumbled to his feet, his vision blurry.

One step led to another. One foot before the other, and he was at the side of someone's house.

He could hear police cruisers turn onto the street, moments before he reached the backyard.

He could hear the screech of brake pads, as cop cars came to a stop at the crash site.

The blue and red flash of emergency lights lit up the darkness, beyond the front of the houses.

Swaylo jumped the gate and stumbled into a woodland.

Darkness was his only companion amidst the frantic feel of being pursued.

As rain cascade from the sky in swirling sheets, Swaylo ran through the cluster of foliage blindly.

There was no direction for where he was running.

All he wanted to do was create enough separation between himself and his pursuers, to have a chance to escape.

Forty yards into the thicket, he emerged into a clearing.

From a brief estimate, there were about eighty yards of running, before he could reach the abandoned ruins of a paper mill.

The prospect for success was akin to clinging to a rope that held his life at the other end...

The burden to push himself to the limit was not an option.

It was move, or die...

There was no surrender, he decided.

A crackle of lightning flashed, illuminating the darkness before him. The ruins resembled a stand of warehouses, broken windows, trash, and debris giving it a haunting image.

Weeds that grew waist-high, large steel beams and lumber were what stood about the two hundred yard oval of property.

The business entrance sat at the opposite end, with a collection of homes along its western side of the street.

Swaylo ran, stumbled to his knees after forty yards, and almost went faint with fatigue.

From the southern horizon to his left, he could see the bubble flash of sirens approaching his location.

The bark of dogs could be heard amidst the torrents of rain. Bobbing flashlight beams could be seen through the trees. The police were searching through the woodland.

In the race to make it to the cover of the building, Swaylo had to exert himself with a determination strong enough to safeguard his freedom.

His body felt like a block of lead, moving through the mud of a stream...

As hard as it was to take another step, Swaylo pushed himself to continue moving.

Once he made it to the corner of the warehouse buildings, he ducked into a clump of wild brush and watched the cops emerge from the woodland.

He watched them separate into three groups.

One group went right. One group went left.

And the third group continued to march across the open field, heading toward the warehouse buildings.

Swaylo stayed low and scurried into the abandoned building. His senses were keen on everything around him.

With the net of capture closing in, Swaylo began to entertain ideas of dying...

The thought of prison made him want to eat his pistol.

From the far side of the building, there was the growl of engine acceleration. Cop cars speeding to surround his realm of escape, moving in from the front entrance.

When he stumbled into the bowels of the abandoned building, the stench of pigeon poop hit his nostrils.

Layers of darkness stood before him.

The patter of rain resounded through the building, its empty interior echoing loud.

The flash of lightning lit up the structure for a brief second, allowing him to get a glimpse of an elevator shaft.

Rusted machines stood like dinosaurs in the darkness.

Swaylo followed the path that led to a promise to rest, even if it was only for a moment...