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Chain book
I was on the Borders website the other day, and discovered a competition. The competition is basically this: some famous author that I've never heard of writes the first and last chapters to a book. 28 lucky winners write a chapter each to fill in the blanks. The prize is having your chapter compiled with the others and published in the book. The grand prize is having a phone call with said famous author (did I mention I've never heard of him?). To enter, one had to write 250-odd words following this starting sentence: "The sky had turned grey as the four men walked nervously past the police car.". Since the competition has closed, and evidently I didn't win, I figure there's no harm in publishing my entry. So here it is:
The sky had turned grey as the four men walked nervously past the police car. The car hadn’t moved in days. At first, Dean and his friends had assumed the local cops were trying to keep city hall’s promise of being more visible. But apart from the car itself, there was no trace of New York’s finest. No surprise, really. It was the sort of neighbourhood that even the cops were scared to visit.
But what about the car? Dean and his friends kept walking, nervously scanning the street. They stopped at the end of the block, paused, then turned back to the car. They huddled briefly, whispering amongst themselves. The men stood back, and Dean sauntered up to the car, trying to appear casual while his friends kept watch. He peered into one of the car’s windows as the first few spits of rain fell on his head. Damnit, too dark to see. He tried the driver’s door. He prepared himself for the scream of a car alarm. The door opened. Silence.
Hands shaking, he pulled the door fully open and looked inside. It looked like the inside of every other cop car he’d been in, complete with requisite coffee stains on the dash. Everything looked like a regulation issue cop car. Radio, notepads, batons clamped to the centre console. No guns, though. Didn’t cops keep shotguns in the back somewhere? Dean popped his head out of the car, looked around at his friends keeping watch, then lifted the trunk release latch. It clicked open, and he walked quickly to the trunk.
Predictably, the rest would surely involve finding something awful or surprising in the trunk and the rest of the story grows from there. I might just go ahead and write the rest of the chapter anyway, just to see what I can invent!