Darren sighed indignantly.

He was simply baffled. No matter how he conceded to their demanding suggestions they continued to push. For generations his family had been keeping the sharks at bay, always circling, waiting for them to enter their waters. However, it was becoming increasingly difficult to do what his father had done before him. To some degree his father before him. Not to mention much more expensive than in years past. The corporations tirelessly swallowed the privately owned farmland that surrounded his own; his enemy building an impenetrable wall around him. He was only one man and they were many. If he never had to sleep or try and enjoy life it wouldn't be so hard.

Unfortunately, he was only Human.

The ancient leather chair that cradled him creaked in protest as he leaned back, head resting against the high, majestic back. It was the very same chair in which his father and his father before him head waged war; a war Darren refused to lose. It gave literal meaning to the phrase 'arm chair general.' His forearms rested on the supple, worn brown leather. He closed his eyes and took several measured breaths. He hadn't been raised to lay down and give in when under duress. No, he told himself, he would not bend to their avarice need.

Darren opened his eyes and looked around his small, familiar office. The two walls adjacent to his desk were occupied by bookshelves, stuffed to the gills with books ranging in age from bought last week to practically prehistoric, stretching to scrape the ceiling. They were a point of personal pride, a library of topics covering every corner of agriculture, earth sciences, automotive, motorsport, fiction and non-fiction imaginable. The collection always reminded him of a distant past when this sort of extensive knowledge base would have denoted moderate wealth and assumed wisdom. Darren figured himself an intelligent man, taking pleasure in that fact.

Sun cut into the room in horizontal red-orange swaths like precise watercolor brushstrokes. For a moment some of the books appeared to be aflame and he resisted the urge to jump out of his seat. Motes of dust surged through the air, agitated by the ceiling fan blades, slicing through the warm air with an incessant sigh. White wisps of smoke curled languidly from the gray ash of a cigar, perched on the finger of a black ceramic ashtray, emblazoned with a fancy corporate logo. Darren turned his attention to more pressing matters spread across his, equally old world, desktop. It seemed gauche to cover the rich mahogany in unkempt piles of paperwork, no matter how necessary. Despite his best efforts to organize the stacks never stayed covered and aligned for long.

Despite his objections growing up there was never any doubt that he would inherit the family business. There were no other siblings to pass the task off to and he was not going to pay someone to manage his birthright. He certainly didn't want his deceased family members turning in their graves. Which they would most certainly do if he sold the farm. The fact was, no hired help would have lasted as long under the weight of the salubrious monetary incentives that were being, not so subtly, slopped onto his plate; which would be preferred by the fat cats compared to his own intransigence.

A chirp emanated from his wrist and Darren glanced at his watch, another archaic family heirloom, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was the time of the day he self pronounced as the time to stop working. There wasn't anybody else around to tell him he had put in enough hours for the day. That he worked too much.

His hired help was largely autonomous and only stopped by his office twice a day, morning and late afternoon. Setting himself boundaries came as a suggestion from a close friend who, after coming over and finding him still behind the desk, drooling on a stack of important papers, fast asleep at three in the afternoon, on a Sunday, insisted he set limits on himself.

He studied his cigar for a moment, holding it up for closer scrutiny. Veins snaked across the maduro leaf wrapper. The wrapper itself had a faint oily sheen; the sign of a well made and kept cigar. He took several long drags, holding the smoke in his mouth to taste the layers of flavor, exhaling a small sample through his nose to pick up the nuanced flavors. The smoke billowed from his mouth as he slowly exhaled and set the cigar back on the ashtray. The cherry slowly fading from red hot.

Darren stood and stretched, reaching for the ceiling as if held at gunpoint. He turned slowly and looked out through the blinds, gazing longingly at the closed pair of garage doors. Snatching a set of keys from his top desk drawer, nestled against his father's classic Springfield .45, he made his way through the house to the laundry room where the interior garage door stood silent guard.

The clinically bright white of the overhead lights momentarily blinded him. He felt for the button that opened the garage door and finding it, pressed it. Metal screeched and machinery rumbled, lifting the heavy door up to slowly reveal the outside world. The burning orange glow of a world set on fire clashed with the perfect white created by man, bathing Darren's favorite toy in a ghastly ochre.

He walked in a slow circle around the car, trailing his fingertips across the pristine, waxed surface. Dents, dings and scratches lay beneath the fresh carnauba but the car remained a crisp pearlescent white. Friends asked why he bothered on a car built specifically to get beat up and dirty. His simple answer was, 'it's my hobby.' A hobby he was passionate about. Darren stopped at the back of the car, gaze cast into a corner of the garage where a small, hand built wooden shelf held several trophies. A thin layer of dust coated each, dimming their luster; a reminder of a time not long ago when he had been actively pursuing his dream. Before life got in the way.

Daylight would be giving way to twilight in a couple of hours. The car had a fairly simple roll cage, no bracing across the door to squeeze between. He slipped easily into the deep bucket seat and secured the three-point harness; two over the shoulder and one between the legs. A helmet sat quietly in the passenger seat and he left it there. There was little need for it on his own property; besides that, there was nobody to talk with on the built in intercom anyway.

He inserted the key, twisted it half way and watched as all the lights came into seething crimson existence. The car made several clicks, needles wound to the top of the gauges and back while several LED displays indicated running self-diagnostics. Once all the indicator dashboard lights winked out he twisted the key another half turn and the starter whined, engine chugging unhappily. One of the quirks of the engine, it didn't always like starting. The electric starter motor disconnected happily as the engine fought to life, rumbling roughly, chassis shivering in anticipation. The engine labored with a harmonious baritone, amplified by the enclosed space, as it settled into a high idle. Darren smiled to himself. There was no sound deadening anywhere in the car, in the name of weight reduction, to mask the mechanical clatter and chemical combustion.

To his ears the racket felt as good as having your prostate milked by an angel.

Darren switched on the headlights, dual HID beams cutting out like gleaming blades into the fading light. For night time situations he had an auxiliary cluster of four more headlights that mounted to the hood, capable of thoroughly vanquishing the dark. Grasping the worn leather shift knob he pushed to the left and up. A meaty, mechanical 'clunk' responded as the spur gears meshed solidly. He expertly balanced the finicky clutch and gas pedal, pulling the car smoothly out of the garage. The deep, sibilant rumble of the horizontally-opposed four cylinder engine soothing his frayed nerves.

Gravel crunched under the all-terrain tires as he rolled off of the cement driveway onto one of the side roads. The road would eventually split into a spiderweb of access roads that spanned his entire property. Darren slid on his sunglasses to tame the late evening glare and grinned to himself. The car squeaked to stop in the middle of the road. Several pairs of ruts marred the road, all bunched in the same spot. Darren held the clutch pedal down and tapped the gas, looking to the left as if a light tree was there, displaying a row of red lights. He pressed the pedal until the revs sat precisely at four thousand five hundred. An imaginary crowd on either side waited eagerly for the green; arms waving and voices cheering. Darren's count hit zero and he popped the clutch, gravel shooting twenty feet back as the tires dug a new set of trails among the old. Someday he might fix the ruts but, for now, they were a good starting reference point.

The road appeared to stretch as he banged the car into second gear, then third and fourth. It was the longest straight on his property and the experience of going ninety miles per hour on dirt was like no other. The feeling was like trying to control a raging bull with a gentle voice. The steering became floaty, responding to the slightest of adjustments. Going strong in fifth gear and he would have it no other way. Screaming in sixth towards the first ninety degree turn, wanting to stay on the throttle as late as possible but not miss the braking point. It was a ballet about control, speed and calculated risk, all about the art of attaining the fastest stage times. One day he promised himself he would go back, race again and win.

Just as soon as his memories stopped haunting him.