The green metallic gloss of the BMW Z3 Roadster sparkled as the car glided viscerally over the black asphalt roads of Green County surrounded by silver maples, oaks, and sycamores; agrestal sentinels staggered in their lines and deep in number.  An orange aura of a summer’s twilight was seeping through the natural sanctuary, and shooting out in a magnanimous splendor, as though the forest itself was exhaling the beauty of the late April day. 

Malcolm Reynolds, twenty-four years of age, sat in the driver’s seat of the coupe, and felt every little bump of the road in the low and delicate car.  Black asphalt was narrowing in his vision, amalgamating with the road marks, highway signs, and frightened cars into a dark void in his windshield.  He felt like he was being stretched along with his car atop a razor sharp plane of balance.  The speed was dangerous.  Each digit the speedometer passed meant more force, more force meant more pain.  Maybe death.  One false turn could send him and the stolen car flying into the side of a fat slobbering minivan.  Perhaps death was better than pain.  If he drove fast enough he might escape it.  Freedom from it all might be found at light speed, or in death. 

Apprehension was stretching his skin to a pale shade of ivory around his knuckles accentuating the bloody scabs around them that had struck a man earlier that day.  Mal had kicked him while he was down and threw him on the back of the car.  Denting the metal and breaking the retractable roof.  A swirl of heavy wind was blowing around his ears now.  The engine’s cacophony was singing to him in the octave of red on the tachometer.  He might have heard his thoughts, if they weren’t the only things moving faster than the spinning of his tires.

The violent speed of the tires was scaring the submissive roadways; leaving the police cruisers to rattle and smack off of themselves as they struggled to negotiate the concrete river, and the sirens played an accompaniment to the discordant symphony of the chase. 

            Scarier than the chase itself, was the realization that he had overestimated himself.  He knew it in the pit of stomach, and it was wedging a fear and a doubt the likes of which he had never known before.  All that he had thought about himself, a maverick, a renegade, a rough and tough cowboy, was crumbling down as the helicopters flew over top of him, sealing his fate of never escaping.