[ WP ] In a world where humans have nine lives , a reckless young man who wasted all but his final revival contemplates his own future

First response to a WP, something about the prompt sparked something. Do be gentle. 
 
 Tom turned the engine off and sat in the empty car park, waiting for the police to come. This would be the end of his ninth life, which had been his shortest one yet. 
 
 With the cold steel of the gun in his hand, Tom thought back to his mother before her first death. The woman he had known growing up was warm and gracious, with a will so strong that even her husband and father of her only child walking out on her with her sister could't dim her spirit. She devoted all of her considerable energy to Tom and he loved her like nothing in the world. 
 
 That was before she came under the wheels of a 12 tonne truck courtesy of its drunk and depressed driver. Months after months of reconstructive surgery and therapy followed and left his mother an obscene distortion of her former self. Her accident had robbed her of both the use of her legs and her sporting ability, the only passion that could have competed with her love for her son. Tom got used to going to the tennis court alone, while his mother would lie on the sofa, scratching the itching wounds that burned like fire and hopelessly screaming as she remembered she had eight more lives of this hell. 
 
 His own first death came four years after his mother's accident, when he was fifteen. The crowd he'd gotten into at school was bad - but the parties were anything but. Especially when John McNulty threw them. One night some of John's older brother's friends came by, and brought bags of strange little pills. Tom, hammered on a potent combination of cheap vodka and lust for John's brother's girlfriend Gerri Flanagan, took too many funny pills that night and ended up dead. 
 
 Tom came into his second life with an unanticipated sense of elation. Even his stint at the Bradfield Young Offenders Institute could n't break this new-found buoyancy, even when they would kick him in the balls until he cried or when a couple of particular orderlies would fuck him in the shower. He could look them right in the eyes when they stripped him naked and hit him and spat on him because he knew he had eight lives left to get revenge. And they hated him for it. When he returned home and saw his mother again, lying blistered and raw on the living room carpet whispering nonsenses to herself, he knew he could n't stop now. 
 
 The next five years had been a ride alright, Tom burning through lives like chapters in an airport thriller. Highlights? The bank robberies he'd pulled off with John and the boys were always a blast, with one audacious heist ending in Tom getting a bullet in the chest from an over-zealous rookie cop. The money from these endeavours financed a couple of his other more spectacular deaths - there was the avalanche that wiped him out ( and sadly, a handful of Sherpas ) at Everest. And there was the snorkelling vacation he'd taken in South Africa which would have been memorable enough without that shark taking a chunk from his right arm and causing massive blood loss. 
 
 There were of course, other deaths he looked back at least fondly. A cocaine-fuelled argument with Gerri on the night of their honeymoon which ended in her pushing him off their hotel balcony made him cringe ( he missed the pool by about five inches ). And he liked to pretend the erotic asphyxiation incident in that Taiwanese brothel never happened. 
 
 But they were past lives, Tom thought to himself. Past deaths. Now there was only this moment. He could hear the sirens. Behind him, the Bradfield Young Offenders Institute was ablaze. He hoped the kids deaths would give them some kind of opportunity for a new start, and use it better than he did. He hoped the orderlies that used him would be scorched to the ground until they had no lives left. 
 
 Before him, he could see the red and blue lights. He turned the engine back on. Ninety miles an hour, he raced towards his final and greatest death. 
 
 
 
 

