Okay, I’ve teased it enough in the last two posts, so here it is: the first chapter of the unpublished Speed Racer: Leviathan novel. It might be a little rough—it was written over a decade ago, and it’s in its first-and-only-draft form—but I think it works for getting us right into the story….

CHAPTER ONE

He couldn’t feel his legs.

Pinned by the steering wheel in the flaming wreckage of the Mach 5, Speed Racer screamed in agony as flames licked at his bare arms and unprotected face. His right arm was bent at a disturbing angle; the elbow felt shattered. His body was numb from the waist down, and Speed wondered if he had severed his spinal column, or whether it was just shock setting in. At least two ribs had been broken when he slammed against the steering column during the crash—he could feel the bones grinding against one another beneath his reddened skin—and his breaths now came in ragged, phlegm-filled gasps.

Desperately, he grabbed hold of the driver-side door with his one good hand, to try and pull himself from the car before the flames ignited the Mach 5’s oversize fuel tanks. Yet with the vehicle lying on its passenger side, its open canopy flush with the rough, concrete wall of the office building against which it had come to rest, there was no avenue of escape for Speed.

He could hear the horrified shouts and screams of the spectators who had gathered to watch the race, could hear the wail of sirens as rescue vehicles arrived on the scene. Someone called out to Speed, told him to hang on—help was on the way.

Speed, however, knew that help would come too late. Acrid smoke filled the canopy, burning his eyes, singeing his lungs—smoke tinged with the unmistakable odor of high-octane fuel.

The tanks were leaking.

But then, above the deafening sounds of crackling flames and shouting bystanders and high-pitched sirens and the whirr of spinning helicopter blades from overhead, he could hear a female voice calling his name. A voice that grew more frantic.

The voice of his wife.

“Trixie!” Speed shouted, even though he was certain she couldn’t hear him. “Get away from here! The fuel cells are ruptured! They could blow any—”

The world disappeared in a blazing ball of light.

* * * * * *

Speed awoke with a start, a strangled cry of pain still issuing from his lips. Eyes wide with fear, he whipped his head from side to side, trying to make sense of his darkened surroundings. Slowly, his addled mind began to clear.

He was in bed. Not a hospital’s, but his own bed, in his home in Fontana City, California. He was safe.

Alive.

Speed sighed with relief, the sound coming out as a small, nervous laugh. He wiped sweat from his brow, then ran a hand through his thick, black hair. His fingers traced the edge of a scar that ran across the back of his scalp—a souvenir of the crash that had almost ended his life.

Four years, he thought moodily. Four years later, and I’m still reliving the crash.

He pulled back the sheets and stepped from the bed, then padded lightly across the carpeted floor to a set of bay windows. A full moon shone brightly overhead, its silvery rays illuminating the grounds of his northern California estate.

Speed glanced down at his bare body, noting how the pale moonlight seemed to highlight every scar, every abrasion. He grimaced as a short stab of pain shot through his right thigh: a constant reminder of the circulatory problems he had developed after the accident.

Twenty-eight years old, he thought, and I look like fifty miles of bad road. He chuckled softly. Ah, the glamorous life of a racecar driver . . .

Speed sat on the cushioned bench at the base of the windows and closed his eyes, resting his head against the cool glass. Massaging his thigh to alleviate the ache, he allowed his thoughts to drift back to that nearly fatal race of four years past—an event that had literally changed his life . . .

Like I said, it still works. Too bad I never had the opportunity to get beyond chapter 3 before the book was canceled…

Speed Racer™ & © 2012 Speed Racer Enterprises. Speed Racer: Leviathan text © 1998, 2012 Steven A. Roman.

So, yesterday I told you how Byron Preiss Multimedia had acquired the rights to Speed Racer, I was hired to write a brand-new novel titled Speed Racer: Leviathan, and then Multimedia went into bankruptcy. But before the doors closed, I was able to get the publishing rights on what I’d written transferred to me with a timely contract negotiation.

So, what happened? Well, in 2003, I got back in touch with the Speed Racer folks to see if they’d be interested in StarWarp Concepts picking up the licensing rights to publish the book. They were, and a new round of contract negotiations started. It all looked good; in fact, it all looked great. The Speed folks, who’d been excited by my plot and writing samples, couldn’t wait to see an adult Speed Racer novel hit bookstores.

Then everything came to a screeching halt in summer 2004.

An unexpected complication (well, unexpected for me) had popped up: cable station ABC Family and its parent company, Disney, had just opened talks for a new Speed animated series. And until a deal was reached or passed on, Speed Racer Enterprises couldn’t license any version of the character, including the one I’d cooked up. And if Disney ultimately wanted exclusive use of the franchise’s book rights, that’d be the end for me.

Okay, I was willing to wait to see how things turned out. It wasn’t like anybody else had come up with an adult Speed, after all.

Then the other shoe dropped at the end of the summer.

Apparently, Speed had a big fan in actor Vince (Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers) Vaughan, who walked into 20th Century Fox one fine day and announced he wanted to play Racer X in a live-action Speed Racer movie. At the time, those rights were held by Lauren Shuler Donner, one of the producers of the very successful X-Men movies; for years, she’d been trying to get a Speed movie in production. And now she had a big-name actor who wanted to be in it.

Well, that drove the last nail into the coffin of my Speed book. With Fox and Disney both giving some serious consideration to the property, and with publication rights involved in the mix, there wasn’t a chance in hell of a small-press publisher (me) being allowed to publish a competing version of the franchise. Which I could understand—if you’re paying major bucks for the rights to license something, you’re not gonna be too happy about a smaller publisher coming out with a novel featuring the same characters, especially when you’re trying to sell your own books.

So after getting an apologetic phone call from the Speed Racer folks I reluctantly threw a tarp over the Mach 5, locked the garage door, and walked off into the sunset…

(As we all know now, a Speed Racer movie did finally hit movie screens in 2008, courtesy of new producer Joel Silver and The Matrix directors The Wachowski Brothers—but not with Vince Vaughan as Racer X. That part went to Lost’s Matthew Fox. And it was…okay.)

But I gotta say, that Mark Zug cover painting for Leviathan sure was sweet. And the writing wasn’t so bad, either.  😉

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Speed Racer™ & © 2012 Speed Racer Enterprises