The Headlights – Part 2

It took him a second to see the white box.

Another to recognize it as a similar size to the box behind him.

One more to realize what was going on. The box contained explosives.

It took him three seconds to do the math. Five seconds at 55 mph means that the explosive has a radius of at most 75 yards; so, it was not a huge explosion but it could still be bad news for a car and its passengers.

He now had about 22 seconds before he would reach the box. The question was whether or not he should slow down. What was the assailant’s intent? If it was truly the car and its contents, then blowing it up would not be the best way of acquiring their reward. Something was off.

If he slowed down, there was a chance that the assailant would go for the tires again; there was a good chance that the second box was a fake, designed to make the victim panic and slow down. Well, the first bit the assailant was doing properly – he was panicking.

18 seconds. Somehow, he had to figure out the assailant’s intent. After all, there was a good chance that the explosive was merely designed to stop the car, which meant that while it was unlikely that the explosion would kill him, it would effectively blow out the tires.

“Tic-tac-toe…” he thought to himself. There is a moment in tic-tac-toe when one realizes that they have lost; it is when the opponent’s symbols are in such a position that blocking one of the possible victory would still not prevent the win through another row, column, or diagonal. These situations would usually occur when one doesn’t think about the game, since it turns out that if both parties always played optimally then the game always ends in a draw. Anyways, he felt he was in one of those situations, and it was due to the fact that he wasn’t thinking optimally.

16 seconds. It struck him then that he had at least fifteen seconds to make a decision. The big uncertainty that needs to be explained is where the assailant’s gun was pointing. If the objective was to have the bomb explode underneath the car, then the gun merely needs to point at the box, not paying attention to the car itself. If not, the gun was pointed at either the tires or his head.

15 seconds. He decided to experiment to try and figure out the assailant’s intent. He decided that he was going to start slowing down, and once he reached about 30 mph, he would swerve.

14 seconds. The Bhizon started slowing down. Due to this slowing down, he had more time before he would reach what could possibly be an explosive that would end his journey far sooner than he hoped.

13 seconds. The Bhizon was going at around 40 mph now. He was nervous. He frantically switched glances between the speedometer’s red needle and the road, making sure he was giving the shooter no sign that he was going to swerve. He was trying his best to keep his head straight while the eye muscles did all the work, so as to make it seem to the shooter that he was focused on the box and the box only.

12 seconds. The needle approached and finally passed the 30 on the speedometer. At this moment, he turned the handle clockwise, to make the car go left; this way, the bullet would miss its target (hopefully) and he won’t go off-road.

11 seconds. It took him a little bit to process the ‘ting’ that he heard. He was now confident that the box was a ploy.

10 seconds. The Bhizon started picking speed up again, and accelerated right up to 45 mph. He was smiling all the while. So was the shooter.

9 seconds. He was excited. In fact, he was so excited and focused on the road, he didn’t realize that his right foot was pressing on the accelerator with a little more pressure than he intended. The Bhizon was going at about 55 mph now.

8 seconds. The car was going 65.

5 seconds. He realized that he was pressing on the accelerator too much when he, out of habit, looked down at the speedometer and saw he was going at 85 mph. Scared that he was wasting his fuel, and free from the fear that the shooter had once posed to him and his car, he pressed on the brake a little too eagerly.

3 seconds. This caused the metallic pill to fall to the footrest of the passenger seat. This displeased him.

As he drove over the box with a smug grin, he leaned over to the metallic pill to pick it up, causing the car to swerve a bit to the right. He didn’t notice this, since he was confident in his ability to pick up a metallic object quickly, thus he wasn’t paying attention to the road. What was he going to do, crash into another car?

A moment later, there was an explosion.

In his tattered clothes, he walked up to the hole that was dug into the mountain. It was a tunnel. A long, boring tunnel that would take about five hours to walk through. He considered the possibility of walking through the tunnel in the morning, when there was more light, but decided that even that this was a stupid idea; he would be in darkness anyways, and who knew what was at the other side of the tunnel. It would be best to come out of the tunnel to darkness, rather than blinding night.

Besides, it was really down to the wire. It’s been a day since the Bhizon broke down, which meant that his car ride was stopped a bit sooner than he had hoped for. A lot sooner, in fact.

Somehow, the metallic pill dropping in front of the passenger seat, and him reaching down to grab the pill, swerved the car just the right amount, and increased the speed of the car just the right amount, that the car merely did a front wheelie and landed back on its four wheels. To him, it felt like an unexpected somersault; one moment he was reaching down to pick something back up, the next moment he was in the air, in the same sideways fetal-like position, holding the metallic pill, and then the next moment he was continuing driving. It was by some strange chance that physics had worked out just right such that he was able to continue driving, unharmed.

It took him a few seconds to process what had just happened. Somehow, the pill had saved his life.

A day later, the Bhizon broke down. Upon closer inspection, he found out that the explosion caused a leakage in the fuel tank, causing his trip in the car to be cut short by a few days. So, he picked up his day pack containing all of his important things, including a bit of clothes, a lot of water, and some food, and grabbed his messenger bag containing his revolver, which he stuck the metallic pill in. He was a bit worried, but the only thing that occupied his mind was the idea that he needed to get to the Western shore.

“I will get there, Meg…” he thought, as he took his first step West.

After a day, he saw the mountain range in the distance. If his information was correct, there was a long tunnel that went through the mountain range, and then it was a day’s journey from there. The problem was he was already running out of water, and the desert-like environment was relentless after those merciful clouds were scattered away.

It took him all of the day, afternoon, and evening to reach the base of the mountain range. For some reason – he suspected cost – only the Western lane of the freeway went through the tunnel; the Eastern lane went around the mountain, south, and joined back in about three miles later.

Now, in front of the narrow tunnel, he was scared. This was a bit of a gamble; if, somehow, another car, even one as small as the Bhizon, happened to be making a trip, then the unfortunate consequence would be that he would be run over by the car, unless the driver was extremely quick to their reflexes and was able to stop the car in a moment’s notice. But the time period being the time period, he strongly doubted that anything of the sort would even occur. Not many had the luxury of driving around a car, and even less were alive, after all.

There was no other way to go. He had to go in. Irrational fears aside, the man, motivated by his desire to reach his final destination, no matter the cost, stepped into the suffocating darkness.

It was a dark darker than the night sky. At least, now without the light pollution, he had the universe’s bright balls of flame to guide him on the path. In here, in the chilling remnants of artificial landscaping, there was no natural light that leaked in to show him the way. It was absolute darkness.

Even after a few minutes, he had to rely on his sense of touch to know where the walls were. It was so oppressively dark that his pupils, dilate as they might, couldn’t adjust enough to let in what little photons were bouncing around such that the brain could make some sense of the tunnel with his eyes. And thus he continued on, step by step. He closed his eyes so he could just focus on his sense of touch.

About two hours in, he started hearing a noise. He could see that the tunnel was incrementally getting brighter. At the far end, he could see two lights.

A pair of headlights.