Chapter 12
12
“Enjoying yourself much?”
I looked out the left side mirror and laughed as I saw Chaos’ tongue lolling out of her mouth and the amount of drool that was hitting the side of my Jeep. Thank God Sue’s husband had turned me onto Groits Garage car care products. That stuff took six hundred miles of bug goo off my windshield and everything else. A little bit of Chaos drool was nothing.
“Isn’t that right, girl?”
She ignored me. She was liking this road. I was too. Well, kind of. It was a little steep for me, but that’s what you got when you were living in the Smoky Mountains. I looked behind me again, making sure I wasn’t holding anyone up. That was one of my biggest fears. The last thing I needed was someone tailgating me on this narrow two-lane highway.
Nope. Nothing.
I turned up the radio, and when Bonnie Raitt’s song, “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About” came on, I turned it up real loud. That’s what Kai and I had been doing in Jasper Creek for the last three weeks. People were really talking about us.
I actually saw a woman with purple hair point at me. Point. With her finger. Then she said to the lady she was standing next to in the post office line that I had been kissing Grady Beaumont on his front porch.
“Florence, get your story straight. She wasn’t kissing Grady. Grady is Beau, and he’s still not home from the service. She was kissing Brady.” That came from the man behind the post office counter.
Normally I would have wanted the floor to swallow me up, but I was too amazed by all their knowledge.
“Brady doesn’t like to be called Brady,” the woman at the front of the line said. “He calls hisself, Kai. What kind of name is Kai, anyway?”
The lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Honey, is he going to be staying in town, or is he going back to where he came from?”
“I don’t know.” I answered.
“That’s a shame,” she said. “Try to get him to stay.”
Then everyone chimed in about how sad they would be to see Brady leave.
Yep, we were definitely giving the town something to talk about. I started singing along with Bonnie.
Woof!
Woof!
Why was?—
Wham!
Something hit me from behind hard enough that I jolted forward against my seatbelt then whipped backwards.
Owwww!
God, that hurt. I tried to get my shit together, but the pain in my head and neck was shorting out my brain. My rearview mirror showed me a huge truck falling behind me as I sped forward.
Wait!
“Chaos!”
Nothing.
“Chaos! Answer me!”
I heard her whining. I couldn’t see her on the seat, so I figured she must be on the floor. She sounded pitiful, but at least I knew she was alive.
“Thank you, Jesus.”
But we had a bigger problem. I was now in the oncoming traffic lane and if I didn’t do something about it, we were both goners. At least we were on a stretch of straight road but that was going to change a quarter-mile ahead, where the road curved to the right around the rock-wall side of the mountain. I jerked the wheel to put us back into the correct lane just as a car appeared around the sharp curve. The driver honked and flashed their headlights at me as they passed. I hit the brake to slow down for the curve and still took it too fast when?—
Crunch!
Something hit us again from behind after we cleared the curve. Not as hard this time, thank God. My foot was on the brake but I was picking up speed. That made no sense.
What the hell?
Chaos kept whining from the back seat, terrified or possibly hurt. I looked in the rearview mirror to see what had hit me. It took a moment to decipher what I was seeing, because it looked like just a big slab of black with a shiny grill. I blinked. Then blinked again. It was the truck that had been behind me earlier, hitting me a second time. Not a semi, more like a Ford One Thousand or something. It was right against my back bumper, pushing me.
Why?
Maybe the driver was having a seizure or a heart attack.
The truck pushed me back into the oncoming traffic lane. I was going to have a head-on collision and end up accordioned between the truck and God knew what other vehicle.
What is happening? People could die!
I honked my horn. Then I just leaned on it, trying to warn any cars that might be coming around the next bend—this one about half a mile ahead—while I tried to figure out what to do.
I craned my head out my window and turned to get a look at the driver.
He grinned at me.
Holy hell. He wanted me to die .
If I didn’t have a head-on collision, then he was going to shove me into the flimsy looking guardrails and right off the cliff.
Think!
I spied my purse on the floor of the passenger side. It had my phone in it. That was it, I needed to call 911. But first I needed to stop them from pushing me. I took a deep breath. My regular brakes weren’t doing any good, just burning my tires. I engaged my parking brake, and that slowed things down, but it didn’t stop us. I reached down for my purse but I couldn’t grab it, not with my seatbelt on.
“Fuck the seatbelt!” I yelled out.
Chaos whined again.
“It’s okay, girl, I’m going to get us out of this, I promise.”
I did something insane and popped the seatbelt to grab my purse.
“Got it!”
And then I almost cried when I saw that the phone had fallen out. I had no chance of reaching it before we got to the second curve.
I pulled my seatbelt back on and almost had a heart attack when I saw how close we were to the curve ahead. I threw my whole body into turning the wheel. I knew deep in my soul they were going to push me into the barrier so that I would go careening over the cliff.
Metal screamed as the side of my Jeep kissed the barrier as I flew around the curve. The truck stayed right up against my rear.
Braking didn’t work, so I did the opposite. I took off the emergency brake and started to gun it, hoping I could put a little distance between us and at least get back into the correct lane. But the other driver knew immediately what I was doing and got there first. He drew up parallel to me, then swerved. He hit the passenger side, trying to send me through the barrier again.
Chaos yelped.
I hit the accelerator again, practically pushing it through the floor. For an instant nothing happened.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then my Jeep jolted into life. I miraculously sped ahead of the truck, back in the right lane, but I had overshot and was close to hitting the side of the mountain. I corrected course. My clammy hands were so slippery that trying to steer was almost impossible, but at least I was now kind of in my lane as I started to race down a steeper slope. My eyes were constantly shooting between the view in front of me and my rearview mirror. I tore around another curve, losing my view of the truck. When the road straightened again I looked back.
I saw neither hide nor hair of the truck.
I never aspired to be a NASCAR driver. I never played driving games at the family fun centers, but by God, I was planning on winning a trophy today. I was almost doubling the speed limit. Nobody was going to kill my dog!
It wasn’t until I fed onto Hwy 321, with no appearance of the truck, that I began to feel safe. Not calm, just a little safe.
I knew where the animal hospital was located since I’d met the vet at the grocery store one day. I drove straight to it, a block down from the hardware store, right next to the beauty parlor.
For the first time I didn’t smile when I read the word ‘parlor.’ I was too worried about Chaos. Another miracle happened, and I found a parking spot right in front of Jasper Creek Animal Hospital. I threw open my door, slammed it, then opened the back door.
Chaos was lying on the floor on the passenger side. She lifted her head and whined. She never did that. I climbed in and crawled across the passenger seat to get to her. I tried to see what was wrong with her.
“Oh baby, I want to hug you so bad, but that might hurt you.”
Woof.
It was such a soft bark that I could barely hear it.
“I’m going to go get you some help. Okay?”
I crawled backwards, got out of the car, and ran into the vet’s office. There was a nice young kid at the front desk and I immediately started talking.
“I was in a car wreck. Someone rear-ended me then hit the side of my car. Bad. My dog was in the back seat. She’s not moving. I don’t know what’s wrong. But she needs immediate help.”
The kid, who couldn’t be more than twenty, bit his lip. “You don’t have an appointment.”
A brunette with a cat carrier came up to the desk. “Rick, go back and talk to Kizzie. You’re an animal hospital. This is an emergency. She needs to know about this.”
“Ms. Avery, she doesn’t like it when I interrupt her when she’s with a patient.”
“She’ll be more upset if you don’t. Trust me, okay?”
The young man looked at her like she hung the moon, nodded, and went through a door to the back.
“Thank you,” I told her. “I wasn’t going to handle that well. Would you tell them I’m right out front? It’s a green 4Runner.”
“I’ll tell her. She needs a stretcher, right?”
I nodded as I went outside.
I opened the other back door this time, the one near Chaos’ head. I put my hand near her muzzle and she licked it. She tried to lift her head, but it seemed too much for her.
“It’s okay sweetie, just rest. Kizzie will take care of you.”
“Marlowe, right?”
I hadn’t even heard Kizzie come up behind me, I’d been so focused on Chaos. I spun around and looked straight into Kizzie’s concerned blue eyes.
“Yeah, I’m Marlowe, and this is Chaos. I got a pretty bad jolt when we were hit, and I was buckled in. Chaos wasn’t buckled in, so I don’t know what happened to her.”
Kizzie took one look at Chaos and said, “We’re going to have to get her out of the car and onto a stretcher.”