Mercedes

Who you are supposed to be and who you become aren’t always the same person.

Mercedes grew up privileged, as you would expect given her parentage. Her father was Harold Duke, San Andreas Congressman with his eye on the senate, and her mother was Margaret Sullivan, heiress and investor. Together, they had a great deal of money, and Mercedes never wanted for anything, save want itself. She often found herself bored and unstimulated, with her friends approved by her parents for maximum social benefit, and her hobbies and interests hand curated for her college portfolio. She was the perfect political daughter and hated every second of it.

So it was that she found new friends, friends her parents wouldn’t approve of, on the internet. They introduced her to new ideas, and new activities, many of them illegal. Mercedes reveled in those thrills, the ultimate middle finger to her father. She broke into supercars she could have easily afforded just to drive them blocks away. She stole jewelry that wouldn’t be fit for costuming in her strata, to pass out to random homeless people. She even started to shoplift, just because she could.

Months passed, and with each passing month the thrills got bolder. Street racing stolen cars with police in pursuit became a common weekend practice. Mercedes was quickly becoming an action junkie, and like any junkie, the next score had to be bigger, or it wasn’t going to scratch the itch. Which is how she found herself breaking into a warehouse to steal something, anything. The details weren’t important to her, just the sport.

She and Rodney (one of her frequent cohorts) were sneaking through the darkened warehouse, lighting up shelves to see what was on them. Rodney was dismissing everything, and Mercedes was getting impatient. “Rod, just grab something, I’m getting tired of creeping around this place,” she hissed. “Merse, just relax, will ya? None of this shit is worth the trip.” “What do you mean ‘not worth the trip’? I thought we were just busting in here for laughs!”

He was about to respond when they heard something from the front of the warehouse. A beam of light swept through the aisles. “Shit!” Rodney whispered. “See what you did now with your bitching?” Mercedes slapped his arm hard. “Don’t blame me for this, asshole! You’re the one turning this into a whole thing. I just wanted to — “ “Hey,” a man in the darkness called out, the beam of light coming their way. “I hear you two! Hold it right there!” Rodney pulled a pistol out of his belt. Mercedes looked at him with wide eyes. “Hey, what are you going to do?” Her answer was Rodney firing into the darkness. She screamed and dropped to the floor. A shot was fired at them, and Rodney cried out, falling to the ground.

There was a clatter, and she saw that Rodney’s pistol had fallen to the ground next to her. The light was getting closer. She panicked, grabbed the pistol and fired at the light. The light fell to the ground, and she heard a loud thump a second latter. She got up, and with shaking hands she approached the light that now lay on the ground, one hand holding the pistol and the other her flashlight.

She was unprepared for what she saw. An older man, maybe in his fifties, lay on the ground, clutching his side. Blood covered his hands, staining the security uniform he wore. His face was twisted in a grimace of pain, the heavy flashlight and his own pistol laying near him. He looked to her, fear in his eyes instead of anger or hate. Her own eyes were filled with terror. She shot someone. She shot someone! She’d never fired a gun before, and this guard had a hole in him from where she’d hit him. She hadn’t meant to shoot him… had she? But here he was, possibly dying. That’s when she realized they weren’t alone.

Rodney was clutching his bleeding left shoulder, but seemed all right otherwise. He reached down, and picked up the guard’s weapon. Before she could say thing, Rodney pointed the pistol at the guard and removed any trace of pain or fear from him. Mercedes jumped at the shot, and turned to him. “What the hell, Rodney! You fucking killed him!” Rodney glared at her, and turned the gun toward her. “I wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t whined your damn head off, you stupid bitch!” She could see in his eyes that she was next, so she swung the pistol at him. He grunted as the gun hit him in the face. She then did what came naturally to her; she turned and ran as hard as could.

She heard shots ring out as she sprinted through the darkened warehouse. She had to remember where the aisles were, and she had to make sure not to get shot. She could hear Rodney running after her, and occasionally his light swept over her. She finally made it to the door, burst through it and nearly ran into a brightly colored sports car. The passenger door opened, and the driver (a young woman, if Mercedes had to guess) said to her, “Come with me if you want to live.”

The driver laughed a second later. “Sorry, I’m fucking with you. I always wanted to say that. But get the fuck in, I’m bouncing in five seconds.” Mercedes didn’t need a second invitation. She dove head first into the passenger seat even as the warehouse door burst open and Rodney fired at them. Thankfully, the driver was already speeding away, and Mercedes finally righted herself in the seat. She leaned her head back and started laughing. “Oh my god, that was amazing! I thought I was dead and you happened to be there holy shit he was really trying to kill me!”

“Well,” the driver started. “I didn’t ‘happen’ to be there. We kinda been following you.” Mercedes looked over at the girl, she had to be even younger than Mercedes herself. “What do you mean, following me? Who are you?” The driver waved a hand. “Hold off on that chica. Your boyfriend drives a Comet, yeah?” “Uh, he’s not my — yeah, Rodney drives a Comet.” “S’what I thought. ’Cause he coming up on us kind of quick.” Mercedes turned back, and saw that his red Comet was barreling toward them. “Oh shit. If he catches us, he’s going to kill me!”

“Relax, he ain’t gonna catch us,” the driver said as she picked up a handheld radio. “What do you mean he isn’t going to catch us, he’s gaining!” She could hear that the girl was saying something quietly into her radio, but the words were drowned out by the thunder of her adrenaline-filled blood rushing through her ears. She saw the Comet get closer, and when it was barely two car lengths behind, she saw Rodney lean out of the window with a gun in his hand. “I told you,” she screamed. “I told you he was gaining!”

At that moment, as they passed through an intersection, a heavy military style truck barreled through from the cross street and the Comet disappeared, little more than a hood ornament on the automotive beast. The sounds of heavy engine and crunching metal quickly faded as the car they were in ate up the blacktop. “Yeah, I didn’t say we were faster, I said he ain’t gonna catch us.” Mercedes finally turned to face the girl again. “Who the hell are you?!”

The driver grinned, and said, “I’m the one who’s getting you to safety. Specifically, to my business partner. She’s got an offer you’re gonna wanna hear.” Mercedes looked back another time, and then said “This offer, is it basically to do the kind of shit I went through tonight?” The driver tilted her head slightly and said “Well, not necessarily. I mean, you wouldn’t have to — “ Mercedes cut her off. “Are you shitting me? That was awesome! I mean, not the getting shot at part, that sucked, but that rush? Fuck, if that’s part of the offer, I am so in!” The driver waited a moment before speaking into the radio again. “Uh… thanks for the assist Eagle. And tell Miss T that I’m pretty sure this one’s gonna work out.”

Related posts:

While I was working at one of my customers I learned from colleagues(dev and test) to create a test repository in Outsystems as an artifact to test the system under test. While this artifact was…

If you check around the web looking for the best affiliate niches in 2020, you get a lot of the same old crap. It’s people who did 15 minutes of research and came up with the same topics last year…

One writer takes you on their journey to clear up their cystic acne. With hourly check-ins and a list of surprising products that can drastically shrink the unwanted bumps.