I turn my head away, not bearing to see her fall to her potential doom.
Chapter 20
When I do look up, Tabby is far off in the distance. I see a black spot on the highway, which is no doubt her, but I can’t tell if she’s alive or how badly damaged her body is.
Being this close to the window, I get a good feel for how fast we’re going. It makes my stomach queasy because, as nimble as cats are, that is a nasty fall at an incredible speed.
I have seconds to decide if I should jump out after her, but it’s an easy decision. I could die — and probably would — if I jumped. Best-case scenario, I would break every bone in my body, which would be no good for either of us.
I start crying when I think about her helping me in the woods. It’s very possible I would have made it out alive, but then again I might not have. Now and forever I feel Tabby saved my life. That little black cat was there for me at a time when nobody else was and now I’m abandoning her.
My sadness turns to anger as I see the black car continue to speed along. Someone is behind all of this. Whether it’s a human being or some higher power, there’s someone accountable for this happening to Tabby. If there were a way to control the car, I never would have broken through the window — and Tabby would never have fallen out. I’m going to kill whoever’s responsible.
Deep down, I know I’m at fault as well. I knew I had to keep a very close eye on her because she wouldn’t know any better. What a terrible parent I would be. I’ve had a cat less than a day and for all I know she lies dead on the road.
I move to the front seat to see if I can whip up any more great ideas. I’m starting to get hungry, but it doesn’t look like we’re stopping through McDonald’s any time soon.
Am I going to starve to death? Of all the ways to die, I think this is up there as one of the worst. How long am I going to be in this car with no food or water? A few days? Maybe a week? How long would it — or should I say will it — take before I jump out that back window?
I only wish I knew the time. I don’t know why it bothers me so much not knowing, but in my entire adult life I’ve never gone more than a few waking hours without checking a watch or a clock. It’s pretty sad when I think about it. I doubt cavemen were constantly looking up at the sun for the time.
As I sit in the passenger seat, I look in front of me and kick myself for not thinking of this earlier. I’m not sure what most people call it; my mom always called it a glove compartment. It’s the little storage area that sits right in front of passenger seat. I’ve never seen a car without one. When I look at it, this car’s glove compartment is sealed and hidden unlike any other car I’ve seen. I suppose all expensive cars have some fancy way of disguising this standard feature. For this particular car, the latch blends in with the rest of the panel. You wouldn’t see it unless you looked really close. Nevertheless, here it is so I take the latch and pull it down — giddy with excitement for what I’m about to find.
When the compartment opens all the way, I’m instantly creeped out by what I find. While most glove compartments I’ve seen are jam-packed with stuff — owner’s manual, other various car papers, GPS devices, CDs, etc. — this car has one tiny item that sits oddly centered facing up. It’s my wrinkled picture of Abby that was in my wallet — the one with the written message on the back.
I reach into my back pocket and see the picture is indeed missing from my wallet. When or how someone took it from my pocket, I’ll never know. I think back to any time my wallet hasn’t been right with me for safekeeping. When I slept each night, I always took my pants off but always had them next to me. When I took that bath, I was obviously naked but, again, my pants were nearby. As long and hard as I think about this, the more convinced I am that I’ve never had a moment where someone could have easily taken the picture out. And why would they want that picture in the first place?
I look around in my wallet for anything else they may have taken, but it all looks accounted for. There’s sixty dollars in cash they didn’t bother taking, but I guess that’s not surprising since money is pretty worthless now. The most disturbing part is knowing that the wallet I have in my hands was recently in the hands of somebody else. I put the wallet up to my nose but can’t detect any kind of a scent.
It’s terrifying to think someone has been this close to me. Did they come in the middle of the night when I was sleeping? Yes, that’s the only time they could have done it. I’ve always been a very deep sleeper. Countless times Abby has woken me up in the middle of the night because she heard something.
She always thought there was a burglar trying to break in, but each time I would get up and never find anything. I knew Abby would never fall back asleep unless I did a thorough check so I would always run outside, check the basement, and go everywhere else I thought a burglar or boogieman would be, but I never found or saw anyone.
I’d never admitted it to her, but there were a few times when I went outside and had an odd feeling someone was out there. Of course, when I came back inside, I would over-enthusiastically tell her everything was fine. I’m not sure I always convinced her but I usually did enough to get us both back to sleep.
If Abby were here and she knew someone came in the middle of the night and took a picture out of my wallet, she would never sleep again the rest of her life. I take the picture out of the glove compartment and put it back in my wallet. I hope I never see anything in that glove compartment ever again.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, I say to myself. I take my gun and decide it’s time to start blasting again. With Tabby gone, I only have my own life to account for, which I care less and less about by the minute. I go to the backseat and decide to start blasting at the dashboard. Kicking it did nothing, but let’s see how it handles being shot at.
Abby’s picture, I’ll admit, has me feeling a bit crazy. I get into position, propping the gun on the backseat. I figure the seat can protect me from any of the debris that will hopefully come flying off.
When I pull the trigger, the sound from the blast is unlike anything I’ve heard from a gun before. Even though the back window is gone, being in this enclosed space magnifies the sound. Without being able to have my feet firmly in place, the gun knocks me to the back of the seat. I can’t see the dashboard because of the seat, but when I look at the backseat I see pieces of shattered glass and plastic and I know I’ve done a good job. When I do look, I see the dashboard has, in fact, been blown to pieces. Unfortunately, when I look through the front window, the car is no longer the precision driving machine it used to be. Before, I’d seen it drive everywhere exactly centered on the road. Now, it’s starting to drift dangerously left.
As fast as my body can move, I leap to the front seat and am surprised by my own quickness. I turn the steering wheel and get excited when I feel the car move where I want it to go. Turns out, the dashboard was the brains of the vehicle.
The black car is still going the same speed so I ease on the brake, but this doesn’t do anything. Before, the brake pedal seemed stuck and unable to move; now it moves but doesn’t do anything. The gas pedal does the same, which means I still have no control over the speed of the car.
I steer the wheel from left to right, making sure it still works. My situation doesn’t seem much better than before if I can’t control the speed.
One thing I can do now that I couldn’t before is go back and see Tabby. If she’s alive I want to know I did everything I could to help her. Although, at ninety miles per hour I can’t just turn around at the nearest exit or make a U-turn on the highway. I would die trying. My only chance is to find an outer belt that allows me to circle around and head back south. I try to imagine the map in my head and know I can take the Louisville outer belt around until I merge back onto I-65 south. There may be a faster route but with no map I’d just get lost. This is going to work, and for a brief moment I think I’m Einstein until I realize that even if I do make it back to where Tabby fell out, what good would that do? I’d drive by where she may or may not still be, but I wouldn’t be able to help her. I’ll only confirm whether she’s alive or not.