The rust-colored Dodge Ramcharger sped down Southie’s D Street and slammed into a man. The video appeared to have been captured on a smartphone, its pixelated frames prominently displayed on the TV in the EVOC garage, commonly referred to as the “fleet section.” The volume was off—or at least low enough that I couldn’t hear it over the old-school Aerosmith blasting from somewhere among the shelves and toolboxes that littered the warehouse-sized building.
“Looks like Slummerville’s driving,” a familiar smart-ass voice said from behind me.
“You wish you could drive like Max,” came Cam’s retort from next to me. I could always count on Cam to have my back. And I especially needed that today.
The television continued to flash between the anchors, looking suitably worried, and the grainy footage of the shitty truck flying down the congested streets of newly gentrified South Boston. The text RAMCHARGER KILLER flashed at the bottom of the screen.
“Good porn name,” cracked Andrew from a row over. Typical.
A door slammed. “You like picking on the wounded ones, Johnson?” EVOC instructor Sergeant Diaz walked into the shop. He looked at the television and shook his head.
“No, sir,” my verbal assailant responded. “It’s just—”
“No, I think I understand perfectly. You like to kick people when they’re down.”
Sergeant Diaz was a no-nonsense man of Hispanic descent nearing retirement. He was short, maybe 5’8”, and despite his age, still in what looked like great shape. He stepped in front of the gathered students and continued.
“Max is indeed driving like my paralyzed grandma, and she’s dead…” There was a chorus of laughter in the shop, and I, too, found myself chuckling. “But he’s also been kicking all of your asses across the board here.”
EVOC, Emergency Vehicle Operator Course, was phase four of state police recruit training, and the phase I found most interesting. Our class of recruits had been traveling from New Braintree to Devens, Massachusetts, for the last four weeks to study high-speed driving, evasive maneuvers, skid control, emergency response driving, and night driving. I had, until recently, excelled at high-speed driving and evasive maneuvers—that is, until everything started falling apart this week.
I first noticed it during PT. Each morning, we woke at 0430 to form up and condition. Primarily, we ran intervals, and we’d already worked our way up to five miles in under thirty minutes. On Monday, I noticed discoloration on my shins and forearms. Bruising, when you were in the academy, wasn’t all that abnormal—but the new pain during my morning run was concerning. My bones ached. Each step was difficult, and I found myself gasping for air as I fell farther and farther behind the rest of the recruits.
On Tuesday, my performance was even worse, and by Wednesday, it was so bad that our drill instructor sent me to medical, where I was subjected to a battery of tests before meeting with a trooper my age who was clearly not a doctor.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” the medical sergeant asked.
I’d always been the bad-news-first kind of guy. But after these last few days, I needed him to ease me into the diagnosis. “The good news,” I replied.
“The good news is you don’t have Hepatitis or HIV. Those can sometimes manifest as bone aches and fatigue.”
“That’s good…” I said, relieved. “What about the bad news?”
“Based on your bloodwork, you likely have some form of cancer.”
Well, shit. I should have started with the bad news.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
By this morning, I had a confirmed diagnosis of acute leukemia, which, at my age, didn’t have an excellent prognosis. I’d at least managed to convince the medical officer to let me finish out the week before they decided whether I was fit to continue with the last two phases of the academy. I wanted to at least finish EVOC.
My best friend, Cameron Sullivan, was in my class. We’d grown up together on the mean streets of Winter Hill in Somerville. Things in the last two decades weren’t nearly as bad as they had been when Whitey Bulger and Buddy McLean were running drugs and guns as part of the Winter Hill Gang, but we did have to deal with MS-13 and H-Block in high school. Even so, life between Highland Ave. and Broadway in those years was where I called home. I’d been absorbed as an honorary member of Cam’s noisy Irish Catholic family, and Cam was more like a brother than a friend. He’d always had my back, even when I decided I wanted to take the Civil Service Exam and become a State Trooper. We’d received our invitation “cards” to the academy on the same day.
The television flashed to bystander interviews. The closed captions told the story of a Dodge truck seen all over the Greater Boston area, mowing people down. Every time the police seemed close to catching the driver, the vehicle vanished into thin air. There were no leads and no descriptions of the killer.
Over the last few years, witnesses had described the Ramcharger with different details. In some, the windows were taped up with Duct tape. In others, the tires were equipped with studded chains. Yet more descriptions reported that the truck expelled a cloud of smoke as it made its getaway.
A state trooper appeared on the news and talked about a tip line that had been set up to report any information on the Ramcharger Killer.
“Of course, Toohey’s on the news,” Sergeant Diaz said, laughing. “That guy loves hearing himself talk.”
“You know him?” Johnson asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Diaz replied. “We used to teach this course together, maybe twenty years ago. The guy never shuts up. And boy, did he have some whopper stories.”
“Like what?” Cam asked.
Diaz shrugged. “I actually ran into him a few weeks ago, and he told me he saw one of our old students from our first year of teaching EVOC.”
“Doesn’t sound much like a whopper,” Johnson said.
Diaz shot him a look, and I could have sworn his muscles grew two sizes in the span of five seconds. “Since you seem so interested, Johnson, I’ll tell you why it was a whopper.”
He leaned against the workbench and pointed to one of several pictures of recruits hanging on the wall. “We had a kid back in our first EVOC class, named Dan Driver.”
“Another good porn name,” Andrew interrupted again, snickering.
“Anyway…” Diaz continued. “Best student we ever had. Toohey swore he ran into him a few weeks ago at O’Connor’s.”
Johnson smirked. “So?”
Diaz’s brows rose. “So, according to Toohey, the guy looked the same as he did twenty years ago. Not ‘good for his age.’ Not ‘held up well.’ I mean exactly the same. Not a day older. Toohey swears by it. Driver’s still out there, living the bachelor life, drinking at O’Connor’s every night by the sounds of it, getting into fights.”
That alone was strange, but Diaz’s following words caught my full attention.
“Here’s the real kicker. Driver was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer right after he graduated from EVOC. Dead in a year, that’s what the doctors said. But when Toohey saw him last week…” Diaz spread his hands. “Peak of health.”
Cam whistled low. “No way.”
Johnson shook his head. “That’s impossible. Pancreatic cancer’s a death sentence.”
“That’s why I called it a whopper, recruit!” Diaz barked, his voice echoing in the shop. The room went silent. No one wanted to risk being the next target.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the engines of our buses starting up, ready to take us back to the academy. In the foreground, Steven Tyler’s voice came in slowly with one of Aerosmith’s most famous songs.
Every time that I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
The past is gone
Oh, it went by like dusk to dawn
Isn't that the way?
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay…
The lyrics hit me hard. I sat, frozen in my own thoughts, until Cam’s hand on my shoulder reminded me it was time to leave. Tomorrow would be my last day in EVOC with Sergeant Diaz, and I would likely find out my fate as a trooper candidate.
Regardless of my future profession, I likely had a rough year ahead of me, and from everything I knew about this kind of leukemia, the academy was the least of my concerns. I was dying.
- - -
? Copyrighted 2026 by The Longwinded One
No permission is granted to translate, copy, repost, or convert this original work of fiction into audio format. If you are viewing this on a site other than my Patreon or RoyalRoad.com, it has been stolen without my consent and violates the DMCA. Please note that this work is the result of my creative effort and is protected by copyright law. Removing or modifying this notification acknowledges that you are aware that you are violating the DMCA. No permission is granted for my original work to be used to train AI.
https://longwinded.one/
For more information on my Celtic LitRPG, you can visit
For my Patreon, you can visit
-Jared (The Longwinded One)
