As soon as he heard the police sirens, John immediately knew that he was busted. He turned his attention from the girl he was talking to, down to the other end of Bryson Avenue to see the cop car pull into the street corner. His heart sank down to his feet as the police car continued to pursue him.
They know it was me, he thought in his head.
The girl eventually noticed that he was not listening to her and began to protest about it before she also noticed police cruiser making its way down the neighborhood and towards the tanning salon parking lot where they were standing at. The cops were onto John, speeding faster than what would be advised from the “Slow: Deaf Child” sign in the middle of somebody’s driveway.
They got close enough for John to see the cops; their facial expressions looked like the excitement that hunters get when going after a runaway animal, and in the south, if you’re the target of people like that, you’re in trouble. John knew he had to do something, or else he would have a lot of explaining to do. The girl looked like she was about to ask him why the cops were coming their direction, but she didn’t get any time to after John took off right there. He didn’t have to think anything, his feet just reacted and he was off like a missile. Now, it wasn’t just the cops that he was going to get in trouble with, he now had a very angry girl that he had just ditched behind him.
“Hey!” she shouted, “Wait! Where are you going?! Hey!”
He yelled back, “Catch ya later!” because he knew that he couldn’t stop to explain to her what was happening otherwise the cops would get him; plus he knew now that his chances with her were out of the question, so he almost had nothing to lose at this point.
He would probably get in a lot more trouble now since he was running from the cops instead of just talking to them, but he knew that wouldn’t happen, so he had only one option left in his mind: run, and then explain later. It worked for him in the past, especially for times like when he got caught planting stink bombs in the school cafeteria and when he spray painted the gymnasium’s wall before middle school graduation. Obviously, John was a troublemaker. He loved messing with people and making everything a big mess. He didn’t like getting caught though, there were actually some occasions where he got ratted out and had to stay the night in a holding cell at the local jail and waited for his parents to bail him out. So when he would find out whom the person was that told, he would pull some pretty nasty pranks on them for payback. So after he loses the cops, he had to prank the guy that ratted him out for his latest masterwork.
He made his way around the other side of the block and ran towards the center of Bryson City. Basically the suburbs were just right next to the town, so it wouldn’t take a lot of time in order to get there. He crossed the street and tried to make it through the Dollar Mart parking lot when he just about got run over by a big diesel truck. He barely jumped out the way of the vehicle; he only saw it at the corner of his eye just in time before it could roll on him. He felt his life just flash before his eyes, but John realized that was just the reflection off of the truck’s front. John took a second to gather up what had happened while the driver was sticking his head out the window of his truck yelling at John. John could tell this dude was a hillbilly: he barely had any hair on his head but a lot of it on his long chin. His eyes looked like they hadn’t seen daylight in twenty years and he smelled like he hadn’t taken a bath in that long of a time either. John looked over at the back of this dude’s truck and happened to notice a bunch of jars that were partially covered up with a tarp. They were filled with what John thought was water at first, they even had water tags on them, but growing up in the south for as long as he has, John automatically knew that it was moonshine in those jars. Moonshine was big amongst a lot of the backwoods hillbillies that lived higher up in the mountains; most of the time they would get it from guys over in West Virginia and would exchange them to buyers down in the town. This dude looked like he was about to do the same thing cause he had a lot of it. There were also a few crates visible under the tarp that were probably also filled with moonshine jars. This guy meant business, and not just with moonshine distributing.
As the moonshiner continued his rant, John looked down at the front tag of the truck and saw that it read “American Beef Jerky” with a picture of a bag of beef jerky; John didn’t know why but that got him to start laughing at the lonely, beef-jerky-lovin’ lub of hair and beer stains. That didn’t really lighten up the mood of Hillbilly Beef Jerky; he then started shouting several curses and threats at John without even taking a breath. John looked around and could see several people’s jaws drop and mothers covering their children’s ears and putting them inside of their cars because of Beef Jerky’s little fiasco. John was amazed that the guy even knew as many of the words as he was saying. There were several cars behind him blowing their horns for him to drive off, but he didn’t care, he was just focusing on chewing out John.
“And next time,” Beef Jerky went on, “I won’t be stepping on my breaks if you get in front of my truck again.”
John was getting pretty mad by this point, but decided to take that anger out by poking fun at the big smelling moonshiner. “Yeah, but you might stop if I offered you a bag of beef jerky.” he said.
The people around them began to laugh, except for Beef Jerky of course. Imagine the most amount of blood that could go into a person’s head when they’re embarrassed or mad, cause it was happening with Beef Jerky. By simply saying that his face became as read as a tomato was an understatement, he was plain bloodthirsty.
“Boy,” he finally managed to say in a lower, more venomous voice, “You want to see what hell looks like? Cause I’m about to give it ya.”
That just encouraged John. He began to tell him how he probably didn’t have much business because his smell would scare off all his clients, how his moonshine probably was only water and that his truck was probably a Chevy since it would likely breakdown if it were to try to run him over. John continued to drop jokes on the dude and people all over the parking lot were busting out laughing like all of the poser rednecks in the community that they were. There was one particular group of them piled up on the back of a pickup truck; a bunch of laid-back dudes and their girls holding their soda cans filled with vodka and literally falling off the truck laughing their heads off at the enraged jerky lover.
“That’s it, kid,” the guy said after snapping out of his blind rage, “You’ve asked for it.”
“Go time” said John to himself.
John was planning on cleaning this guy’s clock as he was getting out of his truck but he soon got a rude reminder of why he was there in the first place. Sirens blared over the shiner’s foul-mouthed rant and were quickly making their way towards the Dollar Mart. John wanted to teach the guy a lesson, but he didn’t want to have both him and the cops at him. So John did some quick thinking and said, “Come on. Let’s see if your fat hind-end can catch me.”
John turned around and took off. The dude tried to run after him but nearly tripped on some train tracks for the local train station. He cried out in pain as his ankle twisted next to the metal bars laid out there, but he knew people were looking, so he tried to make it look like he didn’t feel a thing and just went on to shouting about how much John was a coward for running. John could also hear all those rednecks cheering for John at the back of their truck still laughing in their drunken stupor. John began to laugh himself as he continued running down the sidewalk into midtown.
He was making the long run towards town hall while constantly bumping into people exiting out of buildings or just walking in his opposite direction. He didn’t mean to do that to any of them, but when he saw Dennis Cody coming out of the country store, he knew that something was going to have to be done.
Dennis was the quarterback of Swain High School’s varsity football team who was also a big show-off completely and only full of himself. He transferred over from Murphy High School to Swain during the last year and quickly began to treat the place as if he owned it. He would like to start crap with the less-popular group of people and even some of the other football players with dumb kindergartener jokes and tough guy threats; and for some reason, he became popular for that, people then started wanting to be around him and treating him like he was a king. John never saw anything in him except for an over-hyped and selfish Neanderthal who also tried to act like he was country boy by dipping and talking in a fake accent, but all he was was just a city slicker that tried to get mountain people’s approval; John didn’t need to get everyone’s approval because of his reputation of doing things that no one else had the guts to do. But Dennis didn’t like that of course, he even tried to start a fight with John one time after he began to make fun of John’s family and his record all because John was just as popular as Dennis was. Dennis wanted it to turn into a swinging fest, which he would’ve obviously lost against John if a teacher didn’t come by and saved his sorry hind-end from embarrassment.
Dennis even messed things up on the football team for John. During the last season, John was supposed to get the position as the quarterback on Swain’s team, but that was at the time when Dennis transferred from Murphy High School, and since he was a big shot as the quarterback on the Bulldog’s team, the coaches immediately fell in love with him and made him the quarterback, leaving John to be put on defense. John wasn’t too happy about that having happened, but no one paid any mind to him about it, even though John had been on Swain’s JV and varsity teams since middle school and that was his junior year. That didn’t make John any more happier about losing his quarterback position, especially after he got a broken collarbone during the previous season while playing against Tuscola when one of their players decided he would take out the defense on Swain’s team by tackling John and getting a big dog pile started with the rest of the team on top of him. It was now almost senior year and positions would be announced, but John already knew that Dennis would just be quarterback again. Swain was nuts because it just seemed that everyone all of the sudden just went head-over-heels over a guy who cared about nothing more than himself, parties, and how he could make himself seem bigger than what he really was. John was disgusted by it, and this time, it was payback for him.
Dennis came out of the store holding a purchasing bag filled with stuff while talking to a girl (obviously). John recognized the girl as a cheerleader who had just been accepted into the cheerleading team but he didn’t know who she was. She apparently was already head-over-heels for Dennis from the way she was smiling at him and messing around with her hair. John only hoped that she would realize what a self-absorbent jerk he was before he started hitting on every other girl in the high school. But in their conversation itself, John saw as an opportunity for revenge.
John ran up to the clueless lump and yelled out “Hey there, Sugar Foot!”
The quarterback looked up with a confused expression as the sprinting John came up and wacked him hard in the face. Dennis didn’t even see it coming.
He immediately went down as hard as a rock and the girl cupped her hands over her mouth and just stood right next to his limp body in shock. All of the stuff fell out his bag and went all over the sidewalk: shirts, belts, a cowboy hat, change, you name it just spilled out on the ground.
John looked down at all of Dennis’ fallen stuff around him and focused on the cowboy hat laying there. He picked it up and placed it on his head; he was going to have some fun. He looked down at the defenseless yuppie with a crooked smile and grabbed ahold of his pants waist as a cowboy would and began to mock the would-be country boy.
“Now listen, chun--” John said in a deep, mock-country accent to the dazed Dennis, “maybe if ya had ‘nother dip a snuff in yer lip, ya probly wouldn’t have felt that hit, now wouldn’t ya say?”
People around them including the girl started to laugh as Dennis began to regain his composure. He stumbled a bit trying to get up but kept slipping back on his back and that got people to laugh even more including John this time. Dennis looked up at John with big, bulged out eyes that were completely full of fiery rage.
“Stevens….” Dennis said in a low voice as he finally got back up to his feet.
John didn’t even let the guy finish; he took the hat off his head and threw it right at Dennis’ face and took off across the bridge. People were still laughing as the enflamed and embarrassed Dennis jumped forward and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Stevens!!!!!”
John thought that the look on Dennis’ face was probably priceless. John was so preoccupied with his encounter with Dennis that he had completely forgotten about the police being after him. He determined that he had probably lost the cruiser back at the Dollar Mart and that he was now home free and began to relax a bit. John walked up to a curb that was across the street from town hall when the cop car appeared again; it was again coming up from behind John and was quickly closing in on him. Great he thought. But John got lucky because there were a bunch of cars in a traffic jam waiting on the red light on the left side lane of the road. It was getting ready to be fall, so Bryson usually got a lot of tourists to come into town to look at the color-changing trees and the mountains. And because of that, there was a lot of traffic in this tiny town and that did not sit well for a lot of the locals here. However amongst all the craziness, John was fortunate for it, for the cops also became caught in the traffic behind him.
The sound of a million honking cars pierced John’s ear as he quickly concocted an idea. It was a stupid idea, but John was the best at coming up with those kinds of ideas. Since he couldn’t cross using the blocked crosswalk, he made a left turn off the sidewalk and began to make his way across the middle of the street in between and over the stuck cars. There were people in their cars screaming and honking already at the drivers in front them, so obviously their moods did not lighten up any when they saw a skinny blonde kid all of the sudden jumping over their hoods. John tried to avoid tripping cause he probably would’ve been crushed under one of the cars and fortunately, he managed to stay on his feet and make it to the other side of the street.
“Man, I should probably remember this for next season” he said to himself.
John was about to take a breath when he turned around and saw the cops getting out of their cruiser and starting to run towards him. People were honking and in a rage at the cops, who had just left their vehicle parked in the middle of a busy street, blocking everyone behind it. Here we go again John thought.
John took off again towards town hall, but this time, he had the upper hand against the cops. The apparent donut-stuffed cops were not as fast at running as they were at driving; they panted and tried to keep the pace at getting John, who was now running on pure adrenaline. John left them in the dust as he turned the corner and passed by town hall. John was feeling on top, but he wasn’t unstoppable. He didn’t know where he was going to go now. John just continued to run instead of stopping and thinking about what he was doing, but the cops would catch up to him if he stopped, plus he made it this far in this chase, why stop? It didn’t matter if he would’ve had to spend the night in a holding cell at the local prison again; it was all going to be worth it for John. Still, he needed a plan, and acting wasn’t going to be enough for him to escape from the donut-eating trotters who were slowly, trying to catch up behind him. John had nothing, so he just continued to run down the sidewalk and was eventually running against the rail posts on the side of the road when the sidewalk ended.
John managed to clear a large distance past a gas station, a Catholic church, a grocery store and a restaurant without getting a bit tired. However, John knew he couldn’t keep that up for much longer, so he tried not thinking about getting tired as much as he could to see if that would help any. Although at that point, John felt that if he could run like this all the time that he could’ve run clear across Swain County to Graham County and back all within a few hours. He entered into East Main Street, which was almost like a suburb except it was also filled with a bunch of business buildings and such between houses, so John could possibly find somewhere to slip into and get out of the cops’ sight. But just when it seemed that he had a full-proof plan and a perfect escape, John made the mistake of noticing how he did not feel so tired from all that running that he had done and his feet immediately began to hurt.
“Are you kidding me?!” he asked himself panting.
He went from being like a track runner to slower than a turtle in the matter of a second. He felt like he was walking on hot coal and felt some weird nerve irritations flaring up in his feet with every step he took. He became worried and began to wonder if he was going to be able to get away, because he then heard the cops’ voices getting louder and closer behind him, shouting for him to stop and to surrender to them. Although John was tired, at this point, surrendering was the last thing on his mind, since he knew that his latest masterwork would get him in more trouble than a lot of the others that he had done in the past. How someone knew that he had done it, it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to figure out; although John was pretty sure that someone had to have seen him do it, and once he found out who it was, he was going to do something bigger than what he had already done down on top of the tattle-tale’s head.
But John was feeling like there was no hope for escaping as he kept jogging down the sidewalk; everywhere that he would look he would only see open areas between buildings and the road was starting to lose a few more buildings for him to go possibly hide in, and he knew that once he was basically out in the open, he was toast. He knew it. He started to panic. How could he have been this stupid to even run from the cops in the first place? John then began to curse himself for it, he was a wreck. He finally told himself to just focus on the law chasing after him for now; he would already get enough people to criticize him when he had to go face his parents. Now that thought scared him more than the cops. John then began to wonder why there weren’t other cop cars, state troopers or whatever coming after him at this point; he quickly put that thought aside.
With one last bit of run left in him, John took off downhill and made a turn to a least get out of the cops’ sight for a moment. He had managed to get that far in this police chase without thinking, but he needed a plan now and he needed one fast. He dug deep into his mind, thought deeper than he ever had before in his life, and when he came back with what he had thought up, he had nothing. It was over. John had now accepted defeat. In this moment of failure, he stopped next to a fence post, leaned against it and sat down. He had managed not to notice it while running, but now that he was sitting down, his feet felt like they had been put through a meat grinder. Every little muscle in his feet he could feel, like a thousand little needles piercing his feet. He thought they were going to fall right off his ankles.
Now, John was somewhere where he had never been before in his life: absolute helplessness. He didn’t know what to do now. He didn’t care if he would had to go to prison again, but he definitely didn’t want to get caught either. He couldn’t explain, he just didn’t understand. Basically without him purposely doing so, he was now just waiting for the cops to just come by and arrest him. This was also something he had never done before, but he had nothing left to do, nowhere else to go but just to sit and accept that he couldn’t get away this time. In previous attempts, he would either be running in different parts of Bryson, in the park, outside of town, expecting for the cops to chase him and for him to get away, but only on a few occasions did he actually get arrested; but all of his close encounters with the law, whether first caught or not, all ended the same way: he had to meet up with law one way or another. And that’s what would’ve happened here; even if he had actually escaped from the cops this time, he would still have to face them some time later. Which would probably made this whole chase a waste of time, but that was part of why John did this kind of stuff, he just liked to mess with people and to get a kick out of it.
Well this time, he wasn’t getting a kick out of what was going on. That’s how he felt on his previous arrests, and that is what lead to moments in the future when he became better at running from the law. Well, running from the law didn’t help him this time. He had finally timed out; John fought the law, and the law had won.