TECHNOPHOBIA
"No, not the accelerator! The brakes! Brakesbrakesbrakes!!!!"
::SCREEEEEECH::
Richard clutched desperately at the arms of the passenger seat, the leather squeaking in protest of the awesome force his trembling fingers exerted. His heart had taken a vacation from his chest and was now beating somewhere in the back of his throat. He couldn't remember ever being so frightened in his entire life.
"Scary," Jean-Claude commented shakily, staring out the windshield at the cement wall that had nearly been the end of both him and his werewolf companion.
Richard's eyes practically bugged out of his head as he whirled on the vampire. "Scary??!!! YOU thought that was scary?! I swear to God you are the most HORRIBLE driver I've ever met in my ENTIRE life!"
Jean-Claude scowled, still gripping the steering wheel with his graceful, pale hands. "Well, EXCUSE me! If memory serves me correctly, it was YOU, mon ami, who INSISTED that we come to this godforbidden place so you could personally TORTURE me!"
Richard carefully pried his hands off the armrests and found his hands were trembling like electric toothbrushes. "You're torturing ME, you idiot! You're going to kill us both! I think you're the only person capable of having a life-threatening accident in an EMPTY parking lot!"
"Shut up," Jean-Claude snapped, releasing his death grip on the wheel and folding his arms stubbornly across his chest. He looked absolutely ridiculous: the pale, beautiful, lace-clad Master of City seated amongst leather and metal with a black safety belt secured around his narrow waist. The vampire's slender hands were trembling something awful though Richard could see he was trying his best to hide the evidence of his terror.
//Well…I guess I do feel sorry for him. I was the one who dragged him out here and strapped him into the driver's seat, after all. Maybe I should be a little more considerate. He's just a beginner…//
"Alright," Richard sighed, raking his hands through his hair in an effort to calm himself. "Let's go into reverse. You think you can handle that?"
"I can handle anything," Jean-Claude grumped. "I was FINE until you started shrieking like a little child."
//Okay, screw being considerate…//
Richard blew his top again, wagging a chastising finger in Jean-Claude's direction. "I don't call hitting the accelerator instead of the brakes 'fine,' Jean-Claude!! Are you dyslexic or something?!"
Jean-Claude flashed angry vampire eyes at his passenger. "It's not my fault! I hate driving! This BEAST of a vehicle is noisy, smelly, and high-strung! I can't stand it! I quit! No more driving for me!"
With that, the vampire made like he was going to exit the car, taking his foot off the brakes in the process. The car started to coast forward. The cement wall loomed before them like a laughing visage of Death.
"Ahhh!! Put it in Park! Hit the brakes!!!!!!"
"Mon Dieu!!!"
::VROOOOOOM::
"NO, NOT THE ACCELER-"
::CRUNCH::
Richard was flung forward in his seat as the sound of grinding metal filled the peaceful night. His left hand shot out and blindly threw the car into Park, but it was too late. The front of the hood had crumpled as easily as tissue paper, and as Richard watched with a sick feeling in his stomach, one of the headlights sputtered and died.
"Don't worry! Don't worry!" Jean-Claude cried. "It's just a little scratch!"
Richard groaned.
** ** ** ** ** **
"Alright, you're doing good," Richard complimented his student. "Just keep the wheel straight. That's it. Good!"
Jean-Claude practically beamed with pride as he continued reversing down the length of the parking lot, one pale hand gripping the wheel while the other rested on the back of Richard's seat, precisely the method the werewolf had instructed him to use.
"This is grossly simplistic," he said smugly.
"Just like the driver," Richard muttered, more out of habit than any real animosity. When you got past the obnoxious attitude and the fact the vampire was a veritable walking hormone at times, Jean-Claude actually wasn't a bad person to hang around with.
//I think he's getting better at this…//
Then Richard noticed the car was starting to back up crookedly. "Hey! Straighten the wheel! Straighten the-"
::THUMP::
Jean-Claude immediately proceeded to freak out. "What the bloody hell was that?!" he cried, gripping the wheel fearfully with both hands as the plastic squealed in protest of the vampire's strength.
"It was just the curb! But make sure you-"
::CRUNCH::
For the second time that night, Richard was thrown against his seat belt straps as the back of the car collided with some unknown object that had apparently just materialized out of nowhere. The anomaly was solid enough to bring the car to a grinding halt, its wheels still spinning vainly until Richard once again flung the vehicle into Park, thus stopping the wheels' fruitless motion.
In unison, the werewolf and the vampire whirled to stare at the back of the car, nearly knocking their heads together in the process. The back windshield had been reduced to a network of cracks, like spiderwebs run rampant. But through the myriad of fractures, Richard could see that their mysterious object was none other than…
"We hit a flagpole," Jean-Claude commented in bewilderment.
"You hit a flagpole!" Richard exclaimed at the same time. "How did you manage to hit the biggest object in this entire parking lot?!"
Jean-Claude spread his hands gracefully and gave Richard his best innocent smile. Which had absolutely no effect whatsoever since the words "Jean-Claude" and "innocent" didn't even go in the same sentence.
Richard covered his face with his hands and moaned, "Now the front AND back ends of the car are crushed!"
The vampire smiled charmingly, no fang. Grin was about the only thing he could do in such a disastrous situation.
Richard groaned again and resisted the urge to slam his head against the dashboard, oh, a couple of hundred times.
//Technophobes suck//
** ** ** ** ** **
Half an hour later, an irate and very shaken up Richard steered the completely beaten up car down a dark street, having ousted Jean-Claude from the driver's seat after the vampire had lost control of the vehicle and turned a complete 360 in the middle of the freeway. Richard nearly had three heart attacks in the space of five seconds and was now seriously considering enrolling himself in some sort of therapy. His hands STILL wouldn't stop trembling.
Of course, Jean-Claude, seated comfortably in the passenger seat with a seat belt secured over his chest, seemed unperturbed by the fact that he had nearly brought his supposedly "immortal" life to a gruesome and terribly mundane end barely fifteen minutes earlier. Richard could still see the headlines declaring: "MASTER OF CITY AND PERFECTLY-NORMAL-AS-IN-CERTAINLY-NOT-A-WEREWOLF MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER KILLED IN NOSEDIVE OFF THE FREEWAY." Just remembering the squealing tires, the incessant spinning, and the blaring horns made him want to wet his pants…again.
"Mon ami, what is that noise?" Jean-Claude asked timidly.
"We're dragging the back bumper," Richard mumbled, squinting in order to see through the cracked windshield.
"When did that happen?"
"Hell if I know. Maybe when you backed into your fifth mailbox? Maybe when you ran over that stop sign?"
"I'm a rather bad driver," Jean-Claude admitted with a sigh.
Richard snorted. "No kidding. I'd rather take on five alpha males at once than one technophobic vampire and his car." A cheerful orange light suddenly flared on the dashboard. "Crap…we're almost out of gas even though I filled up RIGHT before we went on this little road trip. How the hell did you manage to rupture the gas tank, Jean-Claude?"
The vampire shrugged gracefully. "I don't know. Maybe when I ran over that barbed wire fence?"
"No," Richard countered. "I think it was bottoming-up in that ditch that did the trick." He looked ill. "Man, this car is completely totaled!"
"I'll be happy to repay you for all the damage, mon ami," Jean-Claude quickly said. "I'll even buy you a new car if you want."
Slowly, Richard's pouty expression was replaced with a wicked grin. "Don't worry about it. This isn't my car."
For a moment, Jean-Claude blinked his blue eyes in confusion. Then, he took one more glance at Richard's fiendishly pleased smile before realization dawned on him like the rise of the murderous sun over the horizon. "No!! You can't mean…"
"Man, Anita is SO going to kick your ass when she sees what you did to her car."