Neanderthal Jake
Stuart Mills snapped out of an empty daydream, his heart racing and both hands with a death grip on the steering wheel. He checked his rear-view and side mirrors, then torqued his neck for a frantic glance over each shoulder. Where was he? Was there cause for panic? No answers quickly came to mind, which was a rare and puzzling state of unawareness for a man priding himself on scrupulous attention to detail. His foot had just been yanked off the accelerator and was now poised to stomp on the brake pedal, but why? He neither saw nor sensed danger in any of the three southbound lanes. Feeling nonplussed and more than a little foolish, he dropped his foot back on the gas pedal. A little more time was obviously needed to process this fuzzy state of affairs… Just a little more time.
His disorientation slowly began to fade as he reviewed the events leading up to the here and now. He was driving to the airport, he recalled. Yes, that was it: he was going home for Christmas. Home…
A Cheap Price to Pay
Ryan Sears floated into a hazy state of semi-consciousness. He was just now emerging from a dream in which he was the lone passenger on board a ghost ship, the mythical vessel sailing blind in a dense fog bank. That sea voyage had ended, he was reasonably certain, but he hadn’t a clue where he was at the moment, nor how he had gotten here, wherever the hell here was.
He flashed back twenty years to his college days, when on more than one occasion he had awakened in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar dorm room, with an unfamiliar girl at
his side. Excess alcohol was usually to blame. No harm, no foul, in those libertine times. But Ryan, a more temperate drinker since undergoing the sea change of fatherhood, sensed that this present state of affairs was something altogether different. And this something felt wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.
