The air gun.

When the light turned green Papadimitriou shrugged and gunned the BMW. The truck roared its engine and cut in behind him. Papadimitriou didn’t have any way of seeing that the young man in back had stood up and now leaned forward, steadying his elbows against the cab roof. In his hands he aimed a gleaming, chrome air gun.

What happened next was a complete surprise to Papadimitriou. He felt a horrifyingly painful sting at the nape of his neck. He smacked at whatever had caused the pain and felt something feathery fall down along the back of his spine. Papadimitriou’s little Beamer swerved dangerously back and forth as he tried to get rid of the object that had caused such a throbbing twinge. All he could sense with his hand was a small bump below his hairline.

***

Multiple spasms ripped through Papadimitriou’s body, and his body didn’t obey any of the commands from his brain. As the BMW flew off the roadway, Papadimitriou felt his eyes nearly popping out of his head. The pretty little BMW carried his incapacitated body up into the sky as if it had been thrust into the heavens by a gigantic slingshot.

His eyes fixed on the gush of bright red and purple mixed into the gray sky. A sliver of gold appeared, as the sun’s last rays worked their way through the edges of the clouds that were layered onto the horizon like soft cotton balls cushioning fragile leaves of gold parchment. The source of this kaleidoscope of colors was no longer visible, only the reflections left behind.

Papadimitriou floated in the air, his vehicle suspended between heaven and earth. He experienced an illusion of weightlessness that was as close as any human could ever come to this exhilarating feeling without leaving the earthly atmosphere. The only constraint that denied his body the right to float freely was his tightly fastened seat belt.

From Killer Drug, by Peter Rost.