Ficorpio
Chapter 1
I had cruise control engaged on the expressway when I realized the brakes had stopped working.
No matter how hard I stomped on the pedal, the car held steady at sixty-two miles an hour.
A semi-truck was up ahead on the right.
To the left, crawling along in the passing lane beside the truck, was a white sedan.
Claire was in the back seat, feeding Lily a snack. When she saw we were about to crash, she asked why I still hadn’t slowed down.
I turned to look at her.
In the rearview mirror, I met her eyes and said bitterly, “Buckle your seat belt. Hold on tight. And… I love you.”
As I leaned on the horn, Claire already understood what was about to happen.
The car ahead continued crawling along at barely forty-five miles an hour.
I hated drivers who blocked the passing lane while moving that slowly.
I kept honking without pause, and at last the white sedan began to pick up speed.
But before I had time to breathe easy, something terrifying happened.
The sedan’s brake lights suddenly came on.
There wasn’t a single obstacle in front of him. He had simply gotten annoyed by my honking and hit the brakes on purpose to scare me.
The problem was, I couldn’t brake at all.
With a thunderous crash, my car slammed into the back of his.
The impact sent the vehicle lurching violently. Claire grabbed the handle above the door, and I locked both hands around the steering wheel. If I drifted out of my lane, the semi beside us would swallow the car whole.
Fortunately, Marcus had only meant to frighten me. He must have hit the brake for an instant before switching back to the accelerator.
So when I struck him, he panicked and floored the gas, pulling ahead to create some distance.
We passed the semi. The white sedan’s window rolled down, and the man inside waved at me while shouting something I couldn’t hear.
Then he started edging toward the next lane, clearly ordering me to pull over.
Claire lowered her window and shouted desperately, “The brakes are out!”
But with the wind roaring past us at that speed, how could her voice possibly reach him?
When I kept driving, the white sedan immediately came after us.
The man was furious. He had been crawling along in the passing lane and had deliberately slammed on his brakes to frighten me, yet now he acted as if he were the one who had suffered some terrible injustice. He even raised his middle finger at me.
He hit the gas and surged ahead of us again.
That bastard was trying to brake-check us on the expressway.
When an irresponsible driver gets behind the wheel, he can deliver death straight to an innocent family.
The moment his front end blocked my path, I slammed into him.
Another deafening crash exploded across the highway. I smashed the front of his sedan apart, but the force of the collision sent my own car shooting forward and threw it off balance.
I engaged the blind-spot monitoring system and fought to keep the steering wheel straight.
Chapter 2
The faster you were moving, the less room there was for panic. One wrong twitch of the wheel, and both cars would be wrecked, with everyone inside them dead.
From the back seat, Claire burst into tears. “How did we end up running into someone like this?”
I wanted to tear Marcus apart with my bare hands.
My wife and my child were in this car.
We were hanging on the edge of death, and he still couldn’t see that he’d done anything wrong. As far as he was concerned, we were the ones who had rear-ended him on purpose and fled the scene.
Sure enough, the white sedan soon caught up with us again.
Its front end was practically destroyed, but Marcus still refused to let us go.
My speed could only stay fixed at sixty-two miles an hour. He stomped the accelerator as hard as he could and shot ahead of us once more.
My heart dropped.
Something was wrong.
Suddenly, his window rolled down.
A bucket of leftover instant noodles flew out of the sedan and smashed directly into my windshield.
Broth splattered across the glass, completely blocking my view.
I immediately switched on the wipers, but the noodles smeared into a greasy film across the windshield.
At that moment, our lives were in the hands of fate.
We couldn’t see a thing in front of us.
The more the wipers moved, the dirtier the windshield became. All I could do was clear away the chunks of noodles first and let the remaining grease dry in the rushing air. That was the only way I could barely make out the road ahead.
Claire was trembling in the backseat, crying so hard she could barely catch her breath. Even so, she snatched up her cell phone and called highway patrol.
“My husband and I are on the expressway. Our brakes have failed.”
“A car is deliberately blocking us. He threw instant noodles at our windshield.”
“Please… Officer, please help our family!”
Wiping at her tears, Claire connected the phone to the Bluetooth hands-free system. “Honey, they need to know where we are, but I don’t know.”
Once the call came through the car speakers, I answered, “We just passed the Huangjiadun Expressway Exit, heading south toward the city.”
“What color is your vehicle? And what’s the license plate number?” the officer asked.
“Matte gray. Plate number 72C32.”
“We’ll close the relevant expressway entrances ahead and send patrol cars to escort you. Can you see the plate number on the vehicle interfering with you? We’ll contact the driver and order him to move away.”
“I didn’t get his plate. I can’t see it right now. He’s driving alongside me.”
“Understood. We’ll check the surveillance cameras immediately. Keep driving.”
I swallowed hard and asked the only question that mattered.
“How far is the nearest runaway truck ramp?”
There was a pause on the other end.
Then the officer said, “Eighty kilometers. We’ll do everything we can to protect you.”
In that instant, all hope drained out of me.
Eighty kilometers.
That was practically the distance between two cities.
Chapter 3
The white sedan was still keeping pace beside me. Its driver was shouting through his window, cursing me nonstop.
I couldn’t hear the words, but I knew they were ugly.
What mattered more was that an emergency shoulder had begun to appear ahead.
If I could move over onto it, our chances of surviving would rise dramatically.
But that white sedan was in the way.
He held the exact same speed in the lane to my right, blocking me from changing lanes onto the shoulder.
Claire wiped her face in the backseat. Then, suddenly, she unbuckled her seat belt.
“Honey, do you have blind-spot monitoring on?”
“Yes.”
“Get out of the driver’s seat. Switch with me.”
I looked up and stared at her through the rearview mirror.
Tears streamed down her face. “The backseat is safer. Let me drive!”
I said nothing. My hands only tightened around the steering wheel.
She kept begging. “What am I supposed to do if you die? How am I supposed to raise Lily by myself? I don’t make enough money. You have a better chance of taking care of her than I do.”
I turned and looked at my daughter.
Lily was still babbling away, completely unaware of the nightmare around her. She held a little cookie in one hand and waved it happily through the air.
I forced a smile.
“Sweetheart, say Dad.”
She had never called me Dad before.
If I was going to die today, I wanted to hear her say it just once.
Lily giggled at me, waving her cookie as she chirped, “Ah-boo, ah-boo.”
When I still didn’t move, Claire reached forward and tugged at my shirt.
My nose burned. In a low voice, I said, “Don’t use Lily as an excuse. Listen to me…”
I wiped away my tears, but my voice still broke.
“I’ve never believed in ghosts. But if I ever get the chance to see you again… I hope there’s a next life.”
Claire stared at me, stunned.
Then my chest tightened.
The white sedan had accelerated past us again in the right lane.
I didn’t know what he was planning, but every move he made set my nerves on fire.
I knew exactly what kind of person I had provoked.
Anyone willing to crawl along in the passing lane was either an idiot or someone with no respect for human life.
And from everything this man had done, I knew he had none.
His window rolled down again.
Something flew out.
Before I could make out what it was, it smashed straight through my windshield.
Claire screamed in pain.
I whipped my head around toward her and froze.
A screwdriver tore through the windshield.
It didn’t just shatter the glass. At a hundred kilometers an hour, it punched straight through the passenger seat and buried itself deep in Claire’s shoulder.
I twisted around and saw my wife pinned against the back seat, one hand clamped over the wound as blood poured between her fingers.
For one terrible second, my mind went blank.
Then a single thought took over.
Kill him.
Lily had been smiling only moments ago. Now she let out a terrified wail. I looked at her and saw a shard of glass lodged in her tiny cheek, blood streaking down her face.