Two Captains

Chapter 3

The corvette fishtails out onto the dirt road, Jim behind the wheel. I look over at Jim and see in his expression he's as nervous as he is determined.

He turns on the updated, modified radio which replaced the original one in the car. As he scans radio stations, he momentarily loses control of the car and it starts to swerve off the smoother dirt road and onto the rockier landscape.

"Jim!" I scream, and right before we hit a random boulder Jim swerves the car back onto the road.

"Sorry." He says, then switches the radio one more time, finding a hard rock song. He leaves it there and the car speeds up even faster and then Uncle Frank calls, Jim answers, the music tuned down once the phone call is answered.

"Hey are you outta your mind? That car's an antique! Think you can get away with this just because your mom's off planet? You get your ass back home buddy, you live in my house and that's my car, you get one scratch on that car, and I'm gonna whip your a-!"

Well at least Frank seems to have forgotten about me-for now.

Jim hangs up on Frank before he can finish his threat, the music turns back to it's original volume, the music blasting from the speakers. Jim reaches up to a convertible roof latch, then the other one.

"Wait, Jim-!"

Before I can finish my warning of what would happen if he undid both of the roof latches while still mainting the fast pace of the car, the whole roof rips off of the car and Jim and I both glance back behind us wearing wide-eyes expressions. The roof tumbles through the air and lands in the dirt behind us. Jim turns back to the wheel and screams, not in terror, but for the love of it. The freedom. Clearly loving his plan.

He speeds up even faster.

"Jim! Slow down! You're going too fast! Especially on a road like this!" I shout over the wind as my hair whips around me.

"Come on, Natasha! Enjoy it!" He shouts back, a huge smile on his face.

"Frank's going to kill you." I mutter.

Then we see, walking on the side of the road, is George. He knows a car's coming, but doesn't know who's inside, and he carelessly sticks his thumb out. But Jim speeds past him, practically stands up in the car, with one hand on the wheel, and waves widly to George.

"Hey Georgie!" He shouts as we speed by, George just stops and stares at us in disbelief. Jim turns back to the road and sits back down.

Soon after, a cop on his hovercruiser comes up beside us, matching the speed of the corvette.

"Citizen," He points to Jim. "Pull over."

But a few seconds after the cop orders Jim to pull over, Jim turns a hard right onto a smaller dirt road,  leaving the cop in the dust.

"What?" Jim looks at me. "I pulled over."

"No you didn't!"

"I pulled over! Just in a different way."

"When a cop tells you to pull over, that means stop at the side of the road!"

I look back a the cop, who's pursuing us, getting a face-full of dirt and dust along the way, but his darkly-tinted mask attached to the black helmet obviously protects his eyes and he doesn't seem to care whether or not the helmet is filthy by the end of the day.

I turn back to the road just as Jim yells to me.

"Natasha, duck!"

I duck down just in time as Jim crashes through a metal gate. We sit back up and see, just a couple hundred feet ahead of us, a huge dropoff. He pushes the car to it's top speed.

"JIM!!!" I scream, and just twenty feet before the edge he turns a hard right and we both leap out of the car at the same time as the car falls off the edge sideways. Jim and I land hard on our stomachs and chests and slide backwards until more than half of ours bodies are hanging off the edge.

We pull ourselves up until we're laying flat on the ground. Jim and I stand just as the car crashes on the ground far below and we both look behind us over the edge and see the car smashed to pieces. The cop stops his hovercruiser just thirty feet in front of us and steps on the ground, looking directly at us.

"Is there a problem officer?" Jim asks as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

"Citizens, what are your names?" The officer demands in the same tone he used when he first spoke to Jim.

"James Tiberius Kirk and this is my fr-"

"Natasha Evelyn Adams."