David Maxwell ran up the stairs of his apartment complex. He wasn’t very fond of elevators. Once, when he was six years old, he got stuck in an elevator for six hours with his father and a few other people until someone came and got all of them out. Ever since then, he didn’t do elevators.

        His apartment was nine stories up. He was currently at floor seven. As he sprinted up the stairs his breathing was controlled, and precise. He was accustomed to this, so it took no effort at all. The backpack he had on kept swaying side to side as he ran, this annoyed him to end, but since there was absolutely nothing he could do about it he tried to keep his mind elsewhere. As he rounded the stairs to his floor he slowed and opened the door that led into the hallway where his apartment was. Apartment 902 was his. David opened up his door and stepped into his apartment and smiled. It was good to be home. He had been gone for two and a half weeks; away on business.

He looked around, everything was just as he left it. The radio in the kitchen was playing classic rock, and the place was cold because he had turned the thermostat off in order to save some money.

“Ahh,… home sweet home.” He said to the room. He stepped in through the doorway into the living room. He swung his pack from off his back and tossed it onto the sofa and immediately sat down beside it. He scanned around the room until his eyes eventually came to rest on the clock in front of his television. It read “5:17 PM”. It was time for some dinner. David stood and went out to his kitchen and opened up the door of his refrigerator and had a look around. Nothing. He closed the door and checked the pantry. Nothing.

“Crap has it.” He said aloud to himself, “I’ll just eat out.”

David went back to his bedroom to change his clothes before heading out. He threw on a t-shirt and an old pair of jeans from his dresser, along with a set of new blue and yellow nike’s right out of the box. It was starting to get late so grabbed a hoodie to wear in case the temperature decided to drop; it was late August.

As he walked out of his bedroom he stopped and looked into his mirror, “You look damn good there, Dave. Just sayin’.”

David was thirty-two, but most people said he looked as if were younger – mid twenties or so. He stood at almost six feet high and had a muscular, athletic build without being brutish. His head was covered with brown hair that was close cut, but not so close that he couldn’t style it. His face was starting to show the lines of age without making him look old. He had a defined jaw line and a strong chin. Lastly, he had dark brown eyes that matched his hair.

He walked out of the front door of his apartment complex and out into the city — his city; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg wasn’t a large city as far as cities go, but it wasn’t anything to scoff at. With nearly fifty-thousand people living right inside the city limits and over half-a-million within the three neighboring counties, there were plenty of people around.

David walked out into the parking lot in front of his apartment building and headed toward his motorcycle. In his opinion there was no better way to travel. Nothing could make you feel so alive as riding a motorbike could. His bike was a neon green Kawasaki Ninja, one of those ‘quick, crotch-rocket bikes’ as his mother always said. He picked up his helmet from where it hung on his handle bars, slid it on top of his head, threw his leg over top of the bike, and then started it up. He pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street and instantly cranked the throttle pulling a wheelie right down the street. He loved this more than anything – the feeling of so much unbridled power coursing right underneath you; and in order to unleash it all, you only needed to give one little crank of your wrist and there it went. David came up to a red light and stopped his bike. He thought it was unusually quiet for being so close to six o’clock on a Friday night. There should be more people out. The only other vehicle at the intersection was a blue pick-up truck on the opposite side of the intersection. As he sat and waited for the light to change again in his favor he had a slightly ominous feeling course through him. Before he had a chance to think on it for any longer, the light changed and he prepared to set off again on his way out of the city for some food. Just then he heard the roar of an overpowered engine coming up behind him. The last thing he saw was the blue logo of a Ford Transit plowing right through him at well over forty miles-per-hour. He was flung from his bike and skipped across the road as though he were a sort of cross between a rag doll and a skipping stone thrown across a pond of asphalt. He appendages were flung in every direction as he tumbled head-over-heals, completely unconscious. His body eventually came to rest about three yards down the street, past the pick-up that had been across from him. His  bike slammed into the ground and did a flip over its self before coming to a stop. The van came to a halt in the middle of the intersection and immediately the side door slid open and three men jumped out and went towards the mangled heap that was once a motorcycle. Two men came out of the pick-up, and ran towards David’s seemingly lifeless body. The picked him up and carried him to the van that sitting there in the street. Meanwhile, the three men from the van had lifted the motorcycle and put it in the back of the pick-up and had gone back to clean up the shards of glass, plastic, and metal that were left there in the street. The two men who had carried David to the van had strapped him into a gurney that was inside the van. The van itself had suffered no considerable damage other than a slightly broken front grill and a few scuffs in the paint on both the hood and the front bumper. The inside of the van was stuffed to the brim with medical supplies and equipment. There was a heart and vitals monitor there that one of the men immediately went to work setting up onto David. The other man removed the helmet from David’s head and had begun going over his body looking for bone breaks and other things that would need to be attended to.

Within minutes of the accident, the pick-up pulled away with the motorcycle in the back in the same direction it had been pointing at the time of the accident. Soon after, the van, with David inside, pulled away as well in the opposite way of the truck. There was nothing left on the street other than a few scrapes in the pavement where the bike had dug in. It was as if the accident had never even occurred.