They'd been driving through the tunnel for five hours. She kept reading the dash-dash-dash pattern of overhead lights as a distress signal - even though each flash above was unrelentingly even, nothing like the short-long alternations of Morse Code.
It had been at least two hours since they had seen another car.
"A world's scenic drive in the world's longest tunnel. Thanks for inviting me," he said.
She didn't say anything. It wasn't the world's longest - far from. It was one of those ugly construction projects that everyone complained about in public, but kept mute about when using it as a shortcut. The problem was she'd never taken it before - in fact, she'd wanted to avoid it, but he'd pressed her into it, just to avoid the toll slapped on the route she'd planned on taking. She relented because it meant she could get rid of him quicker - even though they were grown up, she always felt she were still babysitting her brother.
"At least if we were going through the Chunnel, I'd be in London by now," he added.
Of course he'd prefer being a geezer in "Kangaroo Valley" rather than be in the more appealing-in-every-other-way Paris, she thought. It was like he plotted his life itinerary around booze and partying.
"It's not even the world's longest tunnel, smartass," she said. "That's in Japan, between two of the islands. No one really uses it because it's cheaper now to just catch a plane."
They drove on for another hour, making intermittent attacks at each other like twitchy snipers. She didn't know what made her madder - her brother, or the red flare of the "no petrol" warning, or the Groundhog Day-like tunnel. This bare, unending road would keep spooling on and on forever, until the crack of doom, she thought. Then another hour passed before her car clunked out entirely.
"Thank for chauffeuring me around on an empty tank, genius," he said.
"Looked pretty full when we left, asshole."
" Well, trust you to have a street directory from the Middle Ages, Miss Know-All - this tunnel's not even on it."
She got out. The tunnel was stifling and frigid at the same time. She was probably the first person to breathe in all this pollution-sifted air.
There was no reception for her phone. There hadn't been anyone for hours. She was stuck with her desert island nightmare.
"I'm gonna stick by the ve-hi-cle," he said. "You never know, might be safer. Me protecting your wheels.'
He'd love it to claim it as his own, she's not stupid. God knows he'd be too lazy to ever afford anything vaguely adult as a car. Adult to him meant porn, not unglamorous responsibility.
She was going to walk on - even though she was probably going to keel over from inhaling years of accumulated tunnel soot or some other killjoy airbone disease.
It was funny, as a kid, she had loved tunnels - zipping through dark passages that sent their family hatchback into a landscape unlike the one they'd first entered. Beaches, airports, foreign suburbs. It was like a slow and technically-crude version of teleporting.
She also dreamed of cruising through those massive redwood trees in California - the ones that had huge tunnels cut out of them. There was one that was designed for horse-drawn carriages to go through, that was how old it was. But it eventually fell down and now was just a historical note.
When she was 28, she sat in the back seat as her then boyfriend navigated their hire car through the Italian border to the Swiss Alps. The open-close bursts of monumental mountain scenery then tunnel monotony made her feel intensely alive. It made her think how much she liked tunnels - how you were forced to move forward, there was no other way to go - there was no room to change your mind and U-turn back. Unrelenting like life, in a way.
And now she was going to find out how this all ended.
