With a blood stained hand, he pulled his bruised and broken body forward, towards the source of the gunfire. He didn’t know who had fired the shots, but they certainly had to better than what he was crawling from.
Reaching out, his left hand slipped on what had to be oil. A warm, wet feeling caressed his cheek and a metallic odor nestled into his nostrils. He opened his eyes to find cold eyes staring back, the life already drained away.
He realized what he had slipped on.
Blood!
Bile rose in his throat and he choked it back. He had to press on. His life depended on it. With his right hand pressed to his stomach, he got to his knees and crawled. First an inch. Then another as he felt his life seep out between his fingers.
It had started as a drip, his hand trying desperately to ply pressure. But the dam could only hold back so much. Now all that he was was smeared across alcohol soaked pavement.
His clothes were in ruins. A shame. He loved the shirt. The concrete greeted him as he fell a second time.
Breath came in short, ragged bursts. Headlights from an unseen car blinded him, and he removed his hand from his gut to shield his eyes. He rolled onto his back, the chill biting at flesh. It wasn’t the cool concrete. No. He knew what it was. The blood, how his breath slowed, the abyss clawing at the edges of his eyes. It could only mean one thing.
Death.
I’m dying! He ran his hand through his short, brown hair, a reflex he had done thousands of times before.
I just…I just wanted to help…
His eyes. So heavy now. For weeks, exhaustion had been there. This was different. He knew that there would be now waking now. This was it.
As he prepared for the end, one thought rattled around over and over.
How the hell did it come to this?
For awhile now, I've felt like there was something missing from the beginning of Project Zero: BulletProof (besides maybe a more succint and catchy title, but I digress), something to pull the reader in. That thing that makes you go, HOLY SHIT!!!! What did I just read? I have to read more!
Or, as Dwight K. Shrute would put it, "Put the most attractive beets on top, the ones that make you pull the car over and go "wow, I need this beet right now" - Those are the money beets."
The opening is the money beet.
Normally, I don't preview writing until it's at a certain point, but I felt so strongly about this that I decided to post the new opening right away. Let me know what you think. If this were the opening to a book you picked up on the shelf, would you keep reading?
You can preview the rest of the book here to compare this new opening to the original. Should I keep the new stuff? Stick with what I had?
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