Full contact!!

It all happened so fast. While going to my mandatory break, I was walking by a birthday party group when I heard one of the customers say, “Today’s your last birthday!” This was followed by loud screams.

So, obviously, I took that as a customer threatening another customer. I immediately rushed to them, took out my taser and tasered the would-be perpetrator to the ground.

Then, a flurry of questions unloaded. 

“What did you do?! It was just friendly banter!” How should I know?

“Who gave this guy a taser?!” The seller.

“Why are you even wearing sunglasses indoors?!” I suffer from being cool.

And so on.

Even though I had good intentions, I got berated and dismissed by my boss because I assaulted a customer. The police were supposed to be involved but I fled.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had a feeling that this was it — as if the final circle of a battle royale game was closing in. If I can’t even hold a dishwashing job as an 18-year-old countryside punk, how bright is my future going to be?

Well, from the start, I never really thought I’d have a big, bright future ahead of me. Every night, my alcoholic dad would come home and deliver a severe beating to my mom and me before bed. I also have crippling gambling debts — and probably some student debt mixed in. But that can be fixed with bankruptcy, so I’m not too worried about it.

Maybe if my dad didn’t throw all his money away into alcohol, we could’ve lived a decent lifestyle in the city. Instead, he decided to throw those beer bottles at us for sport.

And you already know that those beer bottles don’t break that easily, not like in all those action movies. So they would sometimes just bounce back and not break after I dodged them. Hence why he never ran out of them; it was kind of like reusable ammunition for that nut job.

Anyway, now that I’m no longer a human dishwasher, I have to drive back home, which is two whole towns away. It’s 3AM right now in this rural part of the city; the highway is particularly empty tonight, not many trucks or cars.

And naturally, being the responsible person that I am, I’m currently driving at 120 kilometers per hour on my way back. To be clear, that rush of adrenaline from when I tasered that guy was still kicking in. I felt so alive.

I was swerving left and right between lanes. If there were any vehicles blocking the way, I’d zoom past them.

Halfway in, two lorry trucks in both lanes were blocking my way and neither of them were going fast enough to pass the other.

That’s when a lightbulb appeared in my head — not too bright and a bit flickery.

I’ll pass them both on the opposing lane!

Seeing how I was kind of tailgating them, I had to turn my steering wheel a hard 90 degrees to the left to make a flawless pass. From a broader perspective, I was probably one of those drivers you see once in a while, the wild ones chasing a high by racing through normal traffic with a passenger filming the highlights.

Out of nowhere, a mildly blinding beam of light — dimmed by the tint of my cool sunglasses — appeared before me from the opposing lane.

As the source of those incoming headlights bore down on me, the sound of its horn blasted through my ears. But before I even realised, my hands sharply jerked the wheel, and my foot tried to reach for the brake pedal as the screeching sounds of tires filled the air.

In that singular moment before impact, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the figure of a woman on the other side of the windshield, framed by the moonlight.

I couldn’t exactly tell what she looked like because one, everything happened too quickly, and two, I didn’t open my headlights — perhaps wearing my sunglasses didn’t help either.

It felt like my heart stopped beating for a moment and all I could let out was a final “Sh-”