Story Time With Tim: Mr. Psychopath Part One

Greetings and salutations, faithful followers of this blog! I’m Timothy Scott Purvis and THIS is another installment of Story Time With Tim, an ongoing series showcasing my works that I’ve either self-published or have never gotten it further than the inquiry phase and is now gathering dust in the corners of my digital drawers. I’m trying to make the navigation of these stories on this site more manageable and able to navigate easier. Of course, there is just so much I have up already! Hope you haven’t tapped out yet…

Anyhow, this is part one of a story I wrote a few years ago called Mr. Psychopath. It’s based off of an idea I had for an animation once upon a time. The soul of a road rage driver seeks to take revenge on those who can’t drive or refuse to follow the rules of the road. Thus, this tale was born. It shouldn’t be longer than two or three parts.

Hope you enjoy and come back next week for part two!

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MR. PSYCHOPATH PART ONE

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MOONCAST SHADOWS ZIPPED by the Midnight Blue Pontiac GTO gunning down the isolated pathway of Route 19. It ran for nearly twenty miles with only a backroad peeling off from its reach here and there. It was because of how long and how out in the middle of nowhere the route ran that Jacob Hallerson enjoyed driving along it in the middle of the night.

  His wristwatch read almost half past one as Jacob pushed the accelerator down further, driving the speedometer beyond ninety. He loved nothing more than pushing the vehicle to its limits. No cops patrolled this stretch of road (they were too busy with the main thoroughfares north and south to give it much attention, particularly at this time of night). And other vehicles on this particular route were few and far between even in the middle of the day. Which meant he generally had it all to himself.

  Window rolled down, wind blasting at his face, his long raven hair blowing backwards across the rear of his seat, the growl of the engine hammering away at the only thing it was designed to do: howl out its rage towards a world that meant little anymore. The smile on his face growing wider and deeper the further and faster he traveled.

  Peace, man, peace. No Mr. Jeffries insisting I’m a moron at how I stack the dishes. Ain’t no father telling me I’m a loser because I ain’t got a good enough job. Ain’t no mother even shouting how I’m just some lazy never-do-well who won’t amount to nothin’ in the world. Whatever the hell that all means, he shook his head and then nodded at nobody and nothing in particular. Hell no, man, this is it. This is where life is. This is how life was meant to be lived. On the road racing like a bat out of hell to nowhere in particular. Gonna be nice racing it back!

  He leaned deeper into his arm braced on the driver’s side window and let the flowing wind stream over his body. The dark tree line flew by in a blaze, no shapes discernible as the GTO approached one hundred, and even the broken road lines blurred into one solid streak of dark yellow lit only by the bright halogen beams of his headlights. The roar of his engine echoed out towards the forest walls returning to his ears like the cacophonous applause of an approving auditorium full of his faithful followers.

  Jacob leaned deeper into his bucket seat and let the contentment wash over him. He didn’t care about anything in that moment. After all, he had all of the next day off. He may just even sleep in until noon and let the parents sweat out just what he was going to do with his young life. He wasn’t in any hurry to figure any of it out. Hell, he’d once heard it said a smart person didn’t know what they really wanted to do with their lives until their late twenties or early thirties. And he was a smart person, no doubt about that at all.

  What is that? He frowned and leaned forward bringing both of his hands to his high performance steering wheel. Is that a car? At one thirty in the morning? On my street? What BS is this, man!

  He let his frown turn into an angry downturn of the lips and gunned the vehicle harder. Within minutes he neared the vehicle in question. The red lights of its rear end bright in the darkness. Yet, the moonlight streaming down from the crystalline black sky with its millions, if not billions, of stars showed Jacob some raggedy station wagon puttering along at maybe sixty.

  Oh, man, what’s this nonsense? He grumbled and slowed down to come up on the station wagon’s bumper. There was less than five feet between them and he blared his horn and gunned his engine to demonstrate his frustration. Can’t you see this is the middle of the night and you ain’t welcome here, man? Come back tomorrow when the sun’s out!

  The station wagon’s brake lights lit up and Jacob was forced to drop back a few more feet. The car didn’t stop but the vehicle swerved into the oncoming lane for a moment before swerving back.

  Oh, great! A drunkard in my lane! Perfect, man, just perfect! Jacob dropped back further and then made to move into the other lane gunning his accelerator in the process. The station wagon matched his move preventing him from tearing around whoever was driving the car. Alright, jackass, you want to play, let’s play!

  He dropped back and swerved right in an attempt to take the station wagon on its passenger side. The station wagon replicated this action giving Jacob the perfect opportunity to open up the GTO and zoom around the station wagon’s driver’s side. He went flying by and raised the bird to his erstwhile road-hog. He laughed and dropped his hand back to the stick shift and clutched back up into gear to bring the GTO back to nearly one hundred. The station wagon disappeared from view as he zoomed along the dark road.

  You mess with the bull, you get the horns, my man, he grinned again and continued along the road now doing better than a hundred and five.

  Another mile came and went and his arm was back on the window edge when a bright light showed up in his rearview mirror. What the hell? Before long, a pair of headlights came up right behind him riding so close to his bumper he could make out the silhouette of the driver. Who is this now?

  And then his jaw dropped. No way… it’s that station wagon again! He dropped his hands to the steering wheel once more and pushed the accelerator down. The GTO gained another ten miles an hour yet the station wagon stayed on his bumper matching his speed. Did you supercharge your wagon, man?

  The wagon zipped to the left and overtook him on the driver’s side. It traveled some quarter mile ahead and then got into his lane. Jacob’s heart pounded. The anger burned in his skull, of course, but something else made his arms tremble and his chest heave. The station wagon slowed back down to sixty forcing him to do the same.

  I was doing a hundred and fifteen! Ain’t no way that station wagon of yours could be matching that! Ain’t no way!

  Now he pushed down that part of him that wanted to tremble and scream. There was just no way he’d allow himself to give into all of that. No, he wanted the anger. He wanted the rage. Needed it. He was tired of all of these no names getting in his way. Exhausted by these weak-kneed cowards who wouldn’t live life to their fullest but would only get in the way of those who could.

  He’d show Mr. Station Wagon just what it meant to drive and truly live. He dropped into third gear and once more made for the driver’s side of the station. Only, this time, the station wagon didn’t swerve like he expected and was able to zoom beside the idiot in front of him. He swerved back in front of the station wagon meaning to show him some exhaust in the face. Instead, the GTO clipped the front of the vehicle and it went careening into the ditch off the side of the road. It rolled over six times with parts of the car flying off in the process.

  Jacob slammed on the brakes clutching the stick into second to help the process. The GTO screeched to a halt and he stared out of his backseat window at the wreck coming to rest upside down.

  “Oh, sh—ttt!”

  Putting the car into park, he threw the driver side door open, and tried to leap out of the car. His belt drew him back as he barked out another curse and yanked it loose. He ran around the car and came to the edge of the ditch in a skidding stop.

  “Oh my God! Dude! Are you alright?” He heard nothing except the creaking of the car settling. He hurried down the side of the ditch and towards the overturned station wagon. Dropping down to his knees, he looked inside the smashed window of the passenger side and saw the shadowy form of the driver squashed lifeless against the steering wheel and one arm hanging out of the driver’s side window. Blood dripped from the torso into pools around what was once the ceiling of the vehicle but now was a crushed slab of metal.

  Jacob leapt to his feet and stumbled backwards several feet. “Oh… God… Oh God! Oh God! No, no…”

  He ran his hands over his face and up his brow and across his hair down towards his neck. Staring at the wreck, he half expected it to blow up. Only, it just sat there. All the momentum gone out of it, no sounds coming forth any more. Around him, the wildlife in the woods began its constant calls. Crickets and nightbirds and wild dogs and all manner of other creatures he didn’t care to meet the acquaintance of. And all through it all, the car remained deadly silent. The driver inside making no noise, no movement at all.

  A slight wind caressed his face and he stumbled backwards once more, slipping on the incline leading back up to the road. The steady purr of his GTO’s engines brought him back to himself and he turned to hurry back up the side of the ditch and raced towards his car. He flung himself into the driver’s side and pulled the car door closed behind him and threw the stick into first twisting the vehicle around and gunning it into second. Within moments, he was racing back down the road and towards town where he lived. He didn’t bother looking back at the wreck and ignored the seatbelt slapping against the inside of the door.

  It was nothing… I was never here… just one more accident is all, man…

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JACOB AWOKE TO a pounding on his door. He sat straight up in his bed, the covers and pillow drenched in sweat, his hair plastered to his nude back and neck. His glance cast around his bedroom. It was a small room. Cluttered with clothes and furniture too close together, his dresser so close to one side he could only exit his bed on the other. And the dark blue painted walls looking even more of a prison this morning.

  “Jacob! Open this door!” his father’s voice boomed deep, a raging din beyond his door.

  “Wh, what is it?” he stammered trying not to sound out of breath or lacking in any sort of sleep.

  “Open this blasted door now, son!”

  Jacob’s breath hitched in his chest. Something was wrong in his father’s voice. Something that he remembered from his childhood. In the times when he’d do something so wrong that he knew he was about to get a very swift and brutal beating to the buttocks. He slid off his bed and hesitantly approach his door. He was forced to kick a pile of dirty laundry out of his way as he walked down the narrow path between bed and the wall with his closet built into it. He reached out a trembling hand and turned the golden doorknob. He pulled the door towards him, pushing more scattered clothes with it out of the way. He really needed to do some laundry, he suddenly realized. It might be safer in the long run if he’d been at the laundromat rather than on some dark secluded road where a man had lost his life.

  No, he didn’t. If it was an accident, I wasn’t there.

  The door swung open as far as it would allow, a chair with tattered upholstery stopping it from opening all the way.

  “Yeah? What is it?” Jacob asked leaning into the fresh opening.

  His father stood there, his hands on his waist, wearing the same tired clothes he was want to wear: red polo, grey khakis, brown house shoes. His black rimmed glasses hung at the tip of his nose. His grey eyes fixated on Jacob’s brown irises.

  “Where were you last night?”

  Jacob swallowed. Hard. His throat a dry well in desperate need of some sort of hydration. But he knew if he took a sip of any sort of drink, it might be coming up again in a wave.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, boy! You were off work at seven but you never came home! Where were you?”

  “I just… needed to take a drive… that’s all. Hang out with some friends a little while and go take a drive…”

  “Til three in the morning!”

  “I just… you know, needed the air, man.”

  “Don’t call me, ‘man’! Look at you! Sleeping in your jeans, again! And no socks! Just come in and toss your clothes all over the place and don’t even bother being responsible! Especially given what’s happened!”

  Jacob swallowed again. “What’s happened?”

  His father scowled and turned away from him to walk down the hall. “Your mother made breakfast. Maybe it’ll be your last real breakfast in a while.”

  “Uh, what?”

  His father didn’t stop and Jacob felt compelled to follow. His heart raced uncontrollably and a sense of dread deep in his gut as he entered the kitchen. His father sat down at the small table in the middle of an equally small kitchen. There was enough room in there for a stove and a short countertop. The sink was a single tub and a rack for the dishes took up half of the counter space. His mother stood at the sink smoking a cigarette and doing her best to wash the dishes in that small sink. Really, she was just soaping them off and rinsing the scum away before placing the dining ware into the small rack with its lip hanging over that single sink tub.

  His father glared up at him. He picked up a newspaper and rattled it towards Jacob.

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  Jacob took the paper and glanced at the headlines. It was a small local newspaper but the headline on the bottom of the page was enough to cause a shiver to run up his spine.

  ‘Ethan Higgins, local high school student, dead in freak accident out on Route 19 in late night cruise.’

  Jacob swallowed yet again and looked towards his father shaking his head. “I, uh, don’t know what you want me to be looking at. I’m sure that, uh, none of this concerns me, you know?”

  “What are you talking about? You haven’t even looked at it yet!”

  “I just saw that this, uh, Ethan kid, uh, was uh—”

  “What? No, the classifieds, son! Turn back there!”

  Jacob did as asked and furrowed his brow. He saw an ad for a job fair happening that day. “Oh, you gotta be kiddin’ me, man!”

  “Stop with the ‘man’ bit, kiddo! This is your day off, right?”

  “Yeah, so, what do you—”

  “This isn’t the seventies where you can sit around getting high and hoping somehow, someway a good job is going to fall into your lap! You’ve been working at McMahon’s for the last six months and what do you have to show for it? Huhn? Are you really that content being a dishwasher? You can’t even afford to help us out with the rent! All you do all day is sleep and go put in a few hours scrubbin’ plates. Then spend all night driving that damnable car of yours all around town trying to act like a bad cuss. You ain’t that guy! It’s time to find some real work. You’re not sleeping in all day again!”

  “I don’t need a new job, pops. I’m happy with where I’m at, okay?”

  His father let his look grow a little more compassionate. Not by much, but by some. “Happy, huhn? I can’t see how. You’ll be twenty-three in August. You have no ambitions. No drive. You just want to walk through life hoping for handouts. Well, son, I have news for you. You’re a man now. And men work. They don’t ask for handouts. They don’t wait for the better times to arrive. They go out there and make their lives better. For themselves, and for their families. So, as such, here’s the deal. You go to that job fair. Find something better for yourself. Something that pays well and has a future in it. You refuse to do this simple thing, then, well, you’re going to have to find your own place.”

  “Oh, come on! Seriously? Where’s this coming from, man?”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” his father put his toast down and folded his hands into a ball as his eyes stayed on Jacob for a hard, long time. “It’s time you got serious about yourself. I’m tired of you living out of our utility room. Your mother can’t get the laundry done efficiently with all of her cleaning supplies under the damn sink! You get a better job,” he pointed a long index finger his way, “or you get the hell out. Those are the terms.”

  Jacob turned away with a growl and went to get dressed.

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Thanks for reading and hope you had fun! There will be more to come next week! Until then, have a good week!

~Timothy S Purvis

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SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION STARTS!

I would appreciate if you have Kindle or even if you want some paperback goodies if you’d head on over to my page and maybe show me some love there. I mean, if you’ve been reading a while and see something you like, wouldn’t you like to have it in your personal library? I have some cool short stories available for cheap. Also Tales From A Strange Mind that collects my short stories (there’s also a Kindle edition but, for some reason, Amazon wouldn’t let me link them together) , Tales From A Strange Mind II which collects my old novellas, Red Star Sheriff (Which also has a Kindle edition but Amazon, am I right?) my first novel ever released, though, yes, it does have some grammatical errors and drags on for way too long, sigh. But I still love it and I will be writing a follow up sometime within the next few years. I have a collection of my poems called MisAligned: The Heart Waxes Poetic which collects my old poems but not some of my newer ones included those flash fictions! I’ll probably do that in the future as well. And if you love the perfectly inane, why not check out my Star Cloud scripts presented in book form? Star Cloud The Original Scripts. Another one where Amazon was being difficult with me in connecting the Kindle and PB versions. Still, the paperback they let me sale for cheap and it’s well worth a look if I say so myself. Or, if you don’t want to click on individual links (all of which will take you to my author’s page anyway), just click on my author’s page directly by tapping my name: Timothy S Purvis See for yourself what all I’ve published since I began this venture in 2016.

I mean, if you like my work, of course. No pressure. Just trying to find my way in this world without working menial tasks and suffering physical and mental issues as a result. If only I could merely stay home and write. That would be my most epic fantasy brought to life. Well, if you don’t want to do that, you could also donate to my cause down below after all is said and done. It would help. You know, if you liked what you saw and all. Up to you. I don’t have a lot of reviews on my materials because of low sales. I mean, very, very low sales. In the single digits. Right now, I have to rely on Pubby for reviews and those people only read your synopsis and recap it for a five star review. I want honest opinions. Not mean ones, but honest. So, if you ever find yourself buying some of my work, I’d certainly appreciate some feedback. Again, up to you.

Also, I’m selling my work for cheap over at Smashwords.com! Check out that page here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TSPurvis

End Shameless Self Promotion!

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