That song played inside of his mind, just like The Man in the Gray Suit had always played it inside of his car when they had taken their rides to natural places, to the track where he was not supposed to run too fast—and somehow he was running faster than all get out now, even though he was in that dreamy trance that used to accompany his caretaker’s words as he coached Pozer on being ‘special’.

His anger seemed to heat up his head and engage his ears again. The sound of his feet could be heard chopping through the snow-covered turf. The rumble of hungry determination in the bear’s cavernous chest rolled across the snow to him. He could hear it sucking in breath through its nose.

Pozer turned his head as he sprinted, like some hotdog punt returner wanting to know if he had time to do his end zone dance. What he saw froze his blood—and then caused his heart to race faster. The bear was a quarter mile back. He should not be able to hear it breath from this distance. Also, although the bear had gained on him, it had not gained that much, even though it was probably running at about 35 miles per hour. Maximum human speed—he thought he remembered The Man in the Gray Suit telling him—was 25 miles per an hour. Any faster than that and muscles would rip off of bone. He had never imagined he would be at human potential in anything.

“Hell yes boy, eat my dust!”

He swiveled his head to get eyes forward again even as the deep plaintive wolf of the beast came to him. He swiveled his head over the right shoulder now and got a good look. It was a fine animal, bigger than a smart car and as fast as a four-by-four ATV, and tall enough to bite his head off without standing. Its shoulders were as high as his head and he was six feet even—too short to be running this fast, and he well knew it.

He swiveled back eyes forward and scoped the tree stand that was now a quarter mile off. He was able to see with startling clarity at this distance. His vision had always been good, permitting him to read the line on the vision check that they never even asked you about. But, this was a little too good.

There were five trees in the distance, three stunted pines in the foreground, only about ten feet high, one in the background off to the right about thirty feet tall, but with broad sweeping branches that he would have to wade or leap into, and the other; a charred lightning struck remnant of a tree—a burned splinter—almost thirty feet high.

His shin knifed into a log—no, just crusty-cold on the outside—and then through what had to be fifty pounds of animal crap. The residual heat and gas hit him as the squishing sound of his feet and shins ripping through prehistoric animal poop on a grand scale assaulted a sense of smell that was somehow sharper than he remembered. But the lightest dusting of snow covered what was a minefield of elephant crap. His view of this morning’s Columbia Mammoth family latrine and the two foot wide depressions in the snow from their feet, was ruined by the fact that, while his shins were now plowing through crap, his upper body was still hurdling along, slinging him face first into the frozen grass—which was pretty hard underneath.

Tucking and rolling had been instinct for him ever since he was a little yard ape and The Man in the Gray Suit used to take him to the junkyard and make him climb the fence and steal that nasty dog’s food bowl and get back over the fence without getting eaten. He had always loved those times. Then, after a while, the dog had just given up, and would lay there and whine when he came to get the bowl. At that point his strange guardian seemed to lose interest in the junkyard dog and began taking him to the track…

He rolled up right into another giant pile of mess and stumble-bummed right threw it onto his face, in a long shit smear on the snow. The smell was disgusting. But, he had gotten his mud back on, and this stuff was even stickier.

Unfortunately, as he came to his feet and took off again he could hear that the bear had halved the distance, and was now closer to him by far than he was to the trees.

Pozer Sensky was determined not to be eaten alive by his favorite prehistoric beast, especially not because he had stepped in God’s own crap.

He knew then, in that moment, as his skeleton seemed to gyrate into its proper place at the command of his muscles, like some claymation crack-head, that he had never known his potential, that he had never run nearly as fast as he was about to. Nothing in his life had ever felt so right as the way his feet, knees, hips and arms aligned and cut the world in half along the line on which he streaked through it.

He was now running so fast, that he sensed what he had not seen with his trickster eyes; that the mammoth toilet was on a slight rise. He was running so fast across this seemingly flat expanse that actually sloped toward the distant trees, that the ground was falling away under his stride, lessening his progress as he was compelled to reach down a little to get traction for his next stride.

He adjusted, and was flying across the snowy grass faster than he had ever moved on foot in his fast life. Just ahead the snow was deeper he sensed, as the whitening was more intense before him. By the time the atmospheric anomaly registered in his mind he was in it, running under it, with his head bobbing in a river of cold mist.

Pozer had no time to enjoy this natural phenomenon, indeed it irritated him. He was afraid the thick cold mist—colder than that below it where his poop-smeared body tore through the cold clear air—would gum up his lungs. This river of mist could be felt flowing over and around his head and shoulders even as it appeared to just hang in the air like a cotton blanket. He was through it in seconds, and, as he felt an incline begin again, he had to turn and take in the view as he ripped up hill faster than he had ever run on the level.

Pozer had just run through a depression down which a river of icy mist flowed to some silent destination. It had to be silent, for he could imagine no noise sounding from that river of cold cloud. Then again, he did not have to imagine it, for the throaty snort of his pursuer issued from the serene mist stream even as he saw the thick brindle paws loping greyhound like, but on a monstrous scale, beneath the mist, the massive canine head lost in that dream of a liquid cloud.

He needed more speed as he oriented himself on the splintered tree a mere hundred yards off, and up slope. He needed to find the condor place inside, to transcend the pained warnings his over-taxed body shot to his brain. There was that one rhythmic place in his mind that he tended to go when he went to the greenway to run away from daily troubles. Once The Man in the Gray Suit took him to a riverside park, a long stretch of grass along a poor excuse for a river and bordered by trees that he told Posie were poplar, oak and elm.

That one day an older lady, a fat lady really, was walking this pretty long legged dog. When the dog had seen Posie run it just wanted to take off with him. Eventually the lady approached The Man in the Gray Suit and told him how the dog was a greyhound, a rescued race dog, and it loved to run but could not be let loose because race dogs never learned about cars and liked to chase little animals. She certainly could not run with the dog.

Posie saw the dog’s question in his dark eyes and extended his hand for the leash. Twenty years later he still clearly remembered, like a game won just yesterday, the look in the dog’s eyes; its sideways doggie smile, as it’s haunches twitched and it legs quivered and its tail did that tail thing. Posie—for his name had been Posie until he knocked out his first man—took the leash and they were off, the dog’s shoulders nearly as high as his. That had been the only time in his entire life that he had felt one with another creature. Even fighting men and loving women later in life had never brought that feeling of oneness; that sense that he was doing what he was designed for.

Now, on this cold day, in this crappy situation, in a snowy depression that would one day be the Chesapeake Bay, Pozer found that feeling again; that feeling he had shared with the nameless greyhound—for it did not talk and Posie was not supposed to talk to stranger ladies—on that day in the long park as they ran. In his mind, later learning of the name for the dog’s color from Mom, he had always thought of him as Brindle.

When he heard the massive clawed forepaws of the giant dog-bear come together to grip the frozen turf so the rear paws could leapfrog past them and permit its high shoulders to propel it forward that much faster, he recalled the stride of the greyhound, and that he was able to match it. The lady, of course, had been so amazed that Posie kept up with her dog that he was not allowed to go to that park again. He never forgot that feeling that he could be as fast as the fastest thing that breathed.

He had forty yards to go and the thing that wished to eat him was forty yards back. They were in synch, which left no time for a leap, no less a scramble, up onto the splintered tree. But he would not lose this race. Even if he got eaten, he would get there first.

Continued in Out of Time #10: The Splintered Tree