Today is Thanksgiving.
The inside of this old car is loud. Louder than any car I’ve ever driven. I can’t believe the kids are asleep. I can hear the tires gnawing the pavement. Their rough vibrations are translated right through the steering wheel and into my hands. When I push the brake with my foot, it moves a lever that applies friction to the wheels. Even the knobs and buttons jutting out of the dash are solid and mechanical.
The only worthwhile thing about the car is the satellite radio. Sleek and modern, it churns out pop music that manages to keep me awake and distract me from the road noise.
I’m not used to this—doing the work for my technology. The buttons I usually push don’t need my force, only my intention. Buttons are supposed to be servants, waiting to deliver your commands to the machine. Instead, this loud, dumb piece of steel I’m driving demands that I pay strict attention to every turn of the road, keep my hands and feet ready at all times. The car takes no responsibility for the job of driving. It leaves me in total control.
I hate it. I don’t want control. I just want to get there.
But this is the only car I could find without an intravehicular communication chip. The government made IVC chips standard more than a decade ago, same as they did seat belts, air bags, and emissions criteria. This way, the cars can talk to one another. They can figure out ways to avoid or minimize damage in the milliseconds before a crash. There were glitches at first. One company recalled a few million cars because their chips were reporting to be three feet ahead of where they really were. It made other cars swerve away unnecessarily—sometimes into trees. But in the long run, the IVC chip has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
New cars come with IVC chips, and old cars require a safety upgrade. A few cars, like this one, were grandfathered in because they’re too primitive even for the upgrade.
Most people think only an idiot would drive such an old car, especially with children on board. It’s a thought I try to ignore as I focus on the road, imagining how people used to do this.
As I drive, a feeling of unease creeps over me and settles into a knot in the middle of my back. I’m tensed up, waiting. For what? Something has changed. Something is different and it’s scaring me.
I can’t put my finger on it. The road is empty. Scrubby bushes cluster on either side of the dusty two-lane highway. My kids are asleep. The car sounds the same.
The radio.
I’ve heard this song before. They played it maybe twenty minutes ago. Hands on the steering wheel, I stare straight ahead and drive. The next song is the same. And the next. After fifteen minutes, the first song plays again. The satellite radio station is looping the last quarter hour of music. I switch the radio off, not looking, punching at the buttons blindly with my fingers.
Silence.
Coincidence. I’m sure it’s a coincidence. In another few hours, we’ll reach my dad’s house in the country. He lives twenty miles outside Macon, Missouri. The man is a technophobe. Never owned a cell phone or a car made within the last twenty years. He’s got radios, lots of radios, and that’s all. He used to build them from kits. The place where I grew up is wide-open and empty and safe.
My cell phone rings.
I scoop it out of my purse, scan the number. Speak of the devil. It’s my dad.
“Dad?”
“Laura, this is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gotta go.”
And the phone cuts off.
“Was that Grampa?” asks Mathilda, yawning.
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“There’s been a change of plans. He wants us to meet him in a different place, now.”
“Where?”
“Indianapolis.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
Something flickers in the rearview mirror.
For the first time in a long time, there is another vehicle on the highway. I feel relieved. Another person is out here. The rest of the world is still fine. Still sane. It’s a truck. People have trucks out here in the country.
But as the truck accelerates and grows closer, I begin to feel scared. Mathilda sees my pale cheeks, my worried frown. She can feel my fright. “Where are we?” she asks.
“Not far now,” I say, watching the rearview.
“Who’s behind us?”
Mathilda sits up and cranes to look back.
“Sit still, Mathilda. Tighten your seat belt.”
The newish brown pickup truck grows rapidly in the mirror. It moves smoothly but too fast.
“Why’s it coming so fast?” asks Mathilda.
“Mommy?” asks Nolan, rubbing his eyes.
“Quiet, you two. I need to concentrate.”
Dread rises in my throat as I watch the rearview. I ease the accelerator down to the floor, but the brown truck is flying now. Sucking up the pavement. I can’t take my eyes off the mirror.
“Mommy,” exclaims Mathilda.
My eyes dart back to where the road is supposed to be and I swerve to negotiate a bend. Nolan and Mathilda hold each other tight. I get the car under control, veer back to my lane. Then, just as we come around the bend to a long straightaway, I see another car in the oncoming lane. It is black and new and now there is no place for us to go.
“Get in the backseat, Nolan,” I say. “Get buckled in. Mathilda, help him.”
Mathilda scrambles to push her brother off her lap and into the backseat. Nolan looks at me, stricken. Big tears are welling in his eyes. He sniffles and reaches for me.
“It’s okay, baby. Just let your sister help you. Everything’s going to be fine.”
I make a steady stream of baby talk while I focus on the road. My eyes alternate between the black car in front and the brown truck behind. Both are closing fast.
“Okay, we’re buckled in, Mommy,” reports Mathilda from the backseat. My little soldier. Before my mother passed away, she used to say that Mathilda was an old soul. It was in her eyes, she said. You could see the wisdom in her beautiful green eyes.
I hold my breath and squeeze the wheel. The hood of the brown truck fills the entire rearview mirror, then disappears. I look to my left in wide-eyed wonder as the rattling brown truck swerves into the oncoming lane. A woman is looking back at me through the passenger window. Her face is warped by terror. Tears stream down her cheeks and her mouth is open and I realize that she’s screaming and pounding her fists—
And then she’s gone, obliterated in a head-on collision with the black car. Like matter and antimatter. It’s as if they’ve erased each other from existence.
Only the awful mechanical grinding crunch of metal collapsing into metal echoes in my ears. In the rearview, a dark lump of metal rolls off the road, throwing smoke and chunks of debris.
It’s gone. Maybe it never happened. Maybe I imagined it.
Slowing the car, I pull off the road. I put my forehead on the cool plastic of the steering wheel. I close my eyes and try to breathe, but my ears are ringing and that woman’s face is on the backs of my eyelids. My hands are shaking. I reach under my thighs and pull tight to steady myself. The questions start from the backseat but I can’t answer them.
“Is that lady okay, Mommy?”
“Why did those cars do that?”
“What if more cars come?”
A few minutes pass. My breath squeezes painfully in and out of my clenched diaphragm. I strain out the sobs, choke down on my emotions to keep the kids calm.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to be okay, you guys.”
