After killing his wife with a blow to the head John put her in the driver's seat of her car and told it to go from California to Montana and crash against something large.
It was a bit more complex than that. John was a better-than-average programmer, and he knew plenty about the software that drove the car. He had already written a program that would make it avoid traffic with obsessive attention, keep all the windows at maximum opacity, and seek out automated self-recharging when it needed to.
And then not too soon but soon enough, in some flat stretch of Montana road, it would wait for the first fuel truck coming in the other direction and ram into it. The fire would cover the time of death, the crash would account for the injury on the head, and the car company would blame his wife for the crash --- John had coded the program so it'd delete itself at the last moment.
It was a good plan. John's was a well-coded program. But a better programmer wouldn't have trusted the cars'.
He noticed the video a day after it went viral, and for two hours he convinced himself it wasn't what he knew it was. It was short and blurry beyond software correction, showing through a very non-opaque window a woman asleep at the wheel of a black car.
The video had been taken at night and the light made the woman look like she was dead. Some people believed it was, and many more pretended to for the fun of it.
It took John half an hour to stop trembling. Fifteen minutes to realize the video had been taken in Idaho. It was a problem, but the location was a good sign.
Another video was posted later, blurrier and shorter, by somebody in Michigan. John smiled at that.
He did not smile at the two from Nevada. Was the car getting closer? He had programmed a very emphatically one-way trip, but could he trust the software after all?
As the Internet seemed to fill with posts about the Black Car —it was a tiny baby lore by most criteria, but all the platform algorithms had picked up on John's interest, so to him it loomed very large— it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to drive in the general direction of Florida. Hopefully the car would still crash, but even if it didn't, it would be better if he were elsewhere when it arrived.
John had chided his wife for her slow packing for years. In fact he had been the slower one by far. By the time he loaded two bags on his car and opened the garage it was already night.
He was just driving out when he saw his wife's car driving straight into his at full speed, and then everything was fire.