Corpse: Submission #10

This, of course, is submission #10 of my story, Corpse. I liked the way the story was flowing up until this point. I've read over the additional 15 or 16 pages I have and decided I am going to a rewrite as I really don't like the next chapter. I am also looking at changing my writing style a bit (thanks Mary B. for the suggestions and candid criticism). That said, it may take me a bit of time to get the next sections written. I really hope you've enjoyed what I've written up to this point. I know I had a good time writing it and hope to continue with it. I really don't think that this is going to end up a book that gets published, but I certainly hope I can learn something about the process and use it to further my writing abilities with the overall goal of eventually having something put to print. Okay, that's it from me. Hope you enjoy this most recent submission and as always, feedback is welcome.

Jonathon put the car in reverse, and backed blindly out of the parking spot. He put the car in drive and hunching forward, peeked out the small defrosted spot in the glass before punching the gas and roaring out of the parking lot.

He decided he would take the back roads home, figuring he could get the car up to speed without worry about police and avoiding the heavy truck traffic that cursed this particular stretch of the expressway between here and his place.

The little sports car hummed along at seventy-five along the tree lined road, fence posts and farm house zipping by as he headed east. There was relatively little traffic on the county roads and that which got in front of him was quickly passed and left in the rearview.

The window was starting to defrost pretty well when he eclipsed a hill and saw the lights of an oncoming cargo van. Pressing the brakes slightly, Jonathon wrinkled his brow and wondered what the opposing driver was all about when the guy flipped his headlights on and off.

Jonathon looked down to see if he had inadvertently left his brights on as he had come up over the hill but immediately noticed that the little light green in the corner of the control panel was off. He barely had time to look up when a small herd of deer numbering eight or nine crossed the road in front of him.

The little sports car slammed into a small doe at seventy miles and hour, the aerodynamics of the car throwing the animal into the air. Jonathon tried to avoid another one, a much larger buck that had simply stopped in the middle of the road. As he twisted the wheel to the left, the back end of the car came around and he began to spin out.

While the accident seemed to take forever to play out, it was a mere second before the little car crossed the center line, went down into the ditched and started to roll. The tumble was very short lived when while upside down, the driver’s side door slammed violently into a great oak tree growing beside the road. The car twisted around the tree and Jonathon’s body absorbed the impact. Glass from the broken windows exploded all over him and a great pain erupted from his left hip as a shard of twisted metal stabbed into his hip. The crumpled roof slammed down into his head when the car had flipped over and it didn’t take long for Jonathon to lose consciousness, bleeding profusely while still strapped in and hanging upside down inside his now unrecognizable Crossfire.

A passing motorist saw the results of the accident and immediately called 911 to report it. It took about fifteen minutes for the responders to actually reach the crash scene and many more to cut Jonathon out of the wreckage. When they finally got him out and laid him out on a sheet of plastic on the side of the road, Jonathon was barely alive, blood having poured out of the deep puncture wound on his left side.

“This guy is a mess Pete,” a female paramedic in her fifties told her partner. “I’m not sure he is going to make it, he’s lost a ton of blood and we still don’t know how serious this head injury is.”

“Well, let’s get him into the wagon and back to U of M,” her partner responded, adjusting a gurney that the attendants had just pulled from the nearby ambulance.

Within moments Jonathon was strapped down and loaded into the back of the bright yellow emergency vehicle. Traffic in both directions was stopped and curious onlookers stood beside their cars trying to get a glimpse of the scene. A bloody body of the unlucky doe had been dragged to the side of the road, secondary to the crumpled remains of the speedy sports car that still lay twisted around the unyielding tree.

Inside the ambulance, the attendants went to work on Jonathon, trying to stabilize him and staunch the prolific flow of blood. The heart monitor beeped steadily, evidence that their patient was still holding on to life. In the background the scream of the ambulance sirens blared, the vehicle bounding back down the same road Jonathon had just careened down on his dash to get back home so he could make it in to work on time.

Two minutes out from the University Hospital Jonathon flat-lined, his heart stopping leading to a steady tone from the ambulance heart monitor. The attendants flew into action, beginning CPR and trying to bring Jonathon back. He was dead, but they weren’t going to call it until they did everything they could to bring him back.