It was Steve. What was Steve doing driving Kyle’s car? A homeless man who stole my phone and ate free pizza every night. This was the first time I could see him up close. His eyes were bright with excitement and his hands were stained with dirt. The nails of his hands were black and his clothes were tattered and old. When he smiled back at Jack his teeth were yellow and I could imagine his breath reeking of stale pizza and sewer water.

With the way he spoke to Jack and my captor, it seemed that Steve was with these guys and tipped them off that Kyle and I had been looking for him all day. Probably were going to get all the money out of me and Kyle--

Where was Kyle? I saw him earlier, walking freely around…was he in on this? Had he been in this gang of guys that go around and steal money from people. He had to be either dead by now or with them in some odd way. How could it make any sense for them to be paired up with Kyle. However, where was Kyle? He wasn’t in that car anymore; I looked into all the windows. He also wasn’t in the gas station parking lot; my eyes peered around there too. Where could he be then? Why wasn’t he here saving me?

None of that mattered now. I needed to get out of this. Eventually they all went to their respective cars, still no sign of Kyle in the process, and went to whatever warehouse building you could guess they would take me to. The important part to this though was that I had been untied and put in the back seat. They only tied my hands now, so I was free from the seat. I had already planned what I was going to do and how I was going to do it by this point. I was going to get out of the car led by Jack or some random man that I still didn’t know. Then I was probably going to get into said warehouse and tied to another chair and asked to do all of these awful things. Somewhere in there I would escape, though, and I would be free or die in the process.

I don’t know, by now my mind was running wild with different ideas to what could happen to me. It wasn’t until Jack opened his car door from his car parked next to ours and the other two men piled out of their cars with him did I realize that this wasn’t what I thought it would be. Jack started fiddling with something out of his jacket pocket and I still couldn’t see where Kyle was. I was alone now in this car, my car. A place that seems to foreign to me now that it’s been taken over. That I’ve been taken over.

My car door opened, and everything started happening so fast. My heart was racing, as I looked up at the person that held my fate in their hands.

The last thing I heard was a gunshot.