THE INTERVIEW ON THE ASPHALT
Chapter 1: The Rain of Despair
The rain on I-95 wasn’t just falling; it was attacking. It was a sheet of grey violence, a natural assault turning the East Coast’s main artery into a slip-and-slide for eighteen-wheelers. My windshield wipers were working at maximum capacity, thrashing left and right like a madman trying to fight off the inevitable.
My name is Stuart Miller. I am twenty-eight years old, and as of last Tuesday, I was technically “redundant.” That’s the corporate euphemism for unemployed.
I had spent five years of my youth grinding at MIT, graduating as the Valedictorian of Aerospace Engineering. I had dreamed of the stars, of designing propulsion systems that would carry humanity to Mars. But reality had grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me into the mud. After three years of dedication to a mid-level firm, I was cut loose due to “budget constraints.”
Today was a bad day. I was driving my 2012 Ford Focus, a car that smelled of old fast food and despair, returning from a failed interview in Philadelphia.
The interviewer, a guy my age wearing a shiny Armani suit, hadn’t even bothered to look at the thick portfolio I had spent three sleepless nights preparing. He scrolled through his phone while I presented my noise-reduction blade design. Finally, he looked up and said something that made me want to punch his smooth, moisturized face: “You have the theory, Stuart. But you lack ‘street smarts.’ You lack grit. We need warriors here, not librarians.”
Grit? I wanted to scream at him that I was living on instant ramen and selling my vinyl collection to keep the lights on. Wasn’t that “real” enough?
I was tired. I was broke. I just wanted to get to my damp basement apartment and sleep for a week, maybe longer, just to forget this cruel world.
And then I saw them.
On the emergency shoulder, hazards flashing weakly through the whiteout conditions, was an ancient beige Buick Century. It looked like a relic from the nineties, utterly lost amidst the stream of modern traffic tearing past.
Standing beside the car, hunching against the gale-force wind, was an old man. He wore a thin, soaked windbreaker. He was wrestling with a tire iron, but his posture was frail. Inside the passenger seat, through the fogged-up glass, I saw a woman curled in on herself, her face a mask of terror.
Cars were whizzing past them at seventy miles an hour, spraying dirty road water over the old man. BMWs. Mercedes. Teslas. The symbols of success and wealth. Not a single one slowed down. No one cared. The world was moving too fast to worry about an old man and a broken car.
I sighed, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have the energy. I was worried about how I’d afford gas tomorrow. Why should I stop?
But then I looked at the old man again. His foot slipped on the slick pavement. He stumbled, nearly falling into the active lane. A semi-truck blared its horn as it barreled past, the slipstream nearly blowing his thin frame away.
“Dammit,” I whispered. My damn conscience.
I hit my right turn signal and pulled over.
Chapter 2: The Lug Nut Test
I grabbed the heavy raincoat from the back seat—the only thing of value in the car besides my engineering textbooks—and stepped out. The wind hit me like a physical blow. The rain was bone-chilling.
“Sir!” I shouted, trying to cut through the roar of traffic.
The old man jumped. He turned around, his eyes wide behind glasses fogged with steam. He looked like a drowned rat. His hands were shaking violently—I couldn’t tell if it was the cold or Parkinson’s, but he looked pathetic.
“I… I can’t get it loose!” he yelled back, his voice thin and reedy, like wind whistling through a crack. “It’s rusted on!”
I looked down at the wheel. The rear right tire was shredded, torn apart as if chewed by a monster.
“Get in the car!” I ordered, not out of rudeness, but concern. His lips were turning blue. “You’re going to get hypothermia. I’ve got this.”
“But—”
“Go!” I gently but firmly guided him toward the passenger door and helped him climb in beside his wife. The woman, with her silver hair in an elegant bun, looked at me with gratitude mixed with anxiety.
I closed the door and knelt in the mud.
The old man was right. The lug nuts were seized. Whoever had installed this tire last had used an impact gun with the force of a gorilla. Combined with years of rust, they were practically welded to the axle.
I took a deep breath, letting the rain run down my neck. I engaged my engineering brain. Brute strength wouldn’t solve this, especially for a hungry, exhausted man like me. I needed leverage. I needed physics.
I went back to my trunk and rummaged through my messy toolbox. There. A hollow steel pipe I had kept from an old project. I slid it over the handle of the tire iron, effectively doubling the length of the lever arm.
Torque equals Force times Distance. Basic mechanics.
I placed my foot on the steel pipe and put my entire body weight into it.
CREAK… SNAP.
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