The Final Leg

Tom felt the trickle of sweat as it dripped from his hair into rivulets which raced down his sticky back. The required full-body fireproof overalls clung to his sweltering body as the high-performance rally car raced onwards, tearing through the blistering heat. Tom’s face, mainly obscured by the thick helmet, was a picture of concentration as he turned the wheel this way and that, round tight corners and down the long straights in between.

The speed of the car was such that he could barely absorb the view as it rushed past the window; the rising cliff faces stretching high into the cloudless sky, the rocky outcrops interspersed with sprawling vegetation. The dense ferns and tall grasses, giving splashes of green in a landscape of dusty brown, appeared as blurs to Tom as he raced on.

Tom knew what he had to do. He was behind, but only just. The final leg of the rally and just one car still ahead, the finish line was tantalisingly near and yet victory seemed impossible. No matter how hard he drove the flash of blue ahead was always whipping out of sight whenever he rounded a bend. Hairpin after hairpin it continued, steadily climbing the sheer cliff slope. His co-driver beside him yelled instructions, but Tom was lost in his world of focus, acting out of instinct, getting everything he could out of the car. He had to push harder and harder; second place just wasn't an option. The tailor-made vehicle bounced up and down over the uneven terrain, the suspension stretched to its limit after one particularly hard landing, causing untold damage.

The car rose steadily up the mountain side rising past the sheer rock face, just centimetres from the bodywork. Speeding and accelerating, like a rocket at take off, Tom kept on pushing, determinedly keeping the engine at full throttle. The wheels skidded in a perfect slide as they span round one hairpin, then another, then came a longer straight where he could really put his foot down. Nothing else mattered but here and now, this race, this car, these corners. Everything was coming down to this. Tom twisted the wheel sharply again as another corner sprang up out of nowhere, first place suddenly appeared closer as the driver ahead looked to have made a mistake and misjudged the turn. If he could only perfect this one, maybe he could get past.

Thoughts of winning vanished as soon as they came however, something was wrong. The wheels weren’t responding, he turned steering wheel, but they were still going straight ahead, driving towards the expanse of sky and nothingness.  He braked even harder, willing the car to slow down and stop, his mind was blank. What was happening? They weren’t really going to crash, were they? Beside him the yells and screams of his co-driver washed over him without registering. He was completely numb with the shock of what was going on.

Branches scraped the car as they burst through the bushes, clean through the wire fence, long since rusted, and out into the sky. Turning over and over, Tom felt his body straining at the safety harness holding him fast into his seat as the world rotated, but always falling. The dusty brown ground became the empty blue sky as the car tumbled, but the ground was getting nearer at an ever quickening rate as the sky moved further and further away. Tom thought he might black out any moment, but his eyes remained open long enough to see the rocky valley floor rush up towards him, the plumes of dust, the waste of life. It was over. His race was lost.