Crash

by Elana Johnson

  “How did you come to be living on the streets?” Julie asked.

  “Oh, that’s a family saga story,” Lucas said with a forced smile. “Can we save it for another time?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I know families aren’t perfect. I mean, look at mine.”

  “Sweetheart.” Lucas grinned for real as he took her hand in his. “In my book, your family would be about fifteen steps closer to perfect than mine.”

  She didn’t smile or chuckle with him. She just squeezed his hand and said, “Then we do better when it’s our turn.”

  He lifted his eyes to hers, a bit of surprise moving through him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “We do better when it’s our turn.” He wasn’t sure what he was saying. That he wanted to have a family with Julie? That they could do better than their parents had done?

  He leaned forward, and she met him halfway, giving him a sweet kiss that only lasted a few seconds.

  “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat. “A plan. We need a plan.” The phone on his lap brightened, and he glanced down at it. “It’s Maverick.”

  He lifted the device, Maverick’s words on the screen so comforting for him. “He wants us to figure out how many people we’re dealing with here. He wants as many details as we can give him about what they’re doing. And then he and Jordan will be able to feed us strategies from the outside.”

  He looked at Julie, who wore her doubt right on her face. “What?”

  “I don’t know, Lucas,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a plan here. I think there’s intuition and a gut feeling.”

  “Okay.” He laid the phone back in his lap. “What does your gut tell you?”

  “It tells me that Frogger is definitely the meanest one,” she said. “And that Mustang is second, not Fire.”

  Lucas was impressed Julie had seen what he had. “And let’s not forget about Daddy. Tyson says he’s the worst biker he’s ever met.”

  “Haven’t even seen him yet,” Julie said, shivering beside him.

  Lucas readjusted his grip in her hand, wishing he could do more to comfort her. He wasn’t great at providing comfort in the first place, and he didn’t know what to do now at all. They sat in silence for a few minutes, and Julie finally asked, “Did you see Mustang when he brought this food?”

  “No.”

  “He said they’d decide if we could go home tonight at church.”

  “They’re going to let us come to church?”

  “I doubt it,” Julie said. “He just said they’d decide.”

  “We should try to spy on that,” Lucas said, standing up. He went to the door and tried the handle, something he hadn’t done yet. It went down easily, and the door clicked open. “Where do you think the bathroom is?”

  “Mustang said it was down the hall to the right. His right. He was facing our door.” Julie joined him in the doorway and pointed. “Our left.”

  “I’ll be back in a second,” he said, tucking the phone under his arm. “I’ll see if I can get a call out. You’ll be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Lucas held her gaze for a moment, decided she’d be okay, and headed down the hall. In the bathroom, he locked the door and immediately dialed Maverick.

  “Lucas,” the club leader said. “Talk to me.”

  “Number one, tell Tyson he needs to learn how to pull his punches,” he said darkly. “Number two, they got Julie this morning and brought her to the club. She talked to Lawrence, and he’s fabricating documents. It’s unclear if they’re for people leaving the country or trying to come into it.”

  “I’ve got Gramps and Sammy Boy working on it,” Mav said. “As soon as Vice, Bomber, and Electron get off work, we’ll be pow-wowing here.”

  “This is Julie’s second cell phone, and she has no charger,” Lucas said. “Apparently, they’re having church tonight, and they’ll decide if we can come home or not.”

  “I hear something else in your voice.”

  “How many Breathers are there?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know. We’ve never kept track of their membership.”

  “Do they have a website?”

  “They’re an outlaw club,” Maverick said. “I can’t imagine they’ll have a site. Give me a second.”

  “We think there might not be as many as we think there are,” Lucas said. “This place is pretty dead.”

  “It’s barely noon,” Maverick said. “The only reason you’re talking to me is because I made sure to keep my phone next to me and on.”

  “We’re in a hospital,” Lucas said next. “An old one. Julie said it’s in the middle of the town.”

  “There’s no website,” Maverick said. “And a hospital? There’s not a hospital in Williamsburg.”

  “There used to be,” Lucas said. “Julie and I both work in one, and the layout I’ve been able to see is definitely an abandoned hospital.”

  “I’ll look into that too.”

  “If we can convince them staying here is too hard, they might leave,” Lucas said, voicing his greatest hope. “Especially if there’s only a few of them.”

  “I’ll need solid numbers before anything is done.”

  “Agreed.” Lucas glanced at the door though he hadn’t heard anything. “I’ll keep you as updated as I can. I should go so I’m not using battery.”

  “Lucas,” Maverick said. “You’re stronger than you know. Don’t give up in there, okay?”

  Lucas’s throat closed, because he wasn’t sure anyone had believed in him as much as Maverick Malone. He nodded, but Maverick couldn’t hear the gesture through the phone line.

  “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll talk to you tonight.” The call ended, and Lucas shoved the phone in the waistband along his hip. His emotions volleyed all over the place, and he hated how out of control he felt.

  He splashed warm water on his face, set the phone on the sink so he could use the bathroom, and started toward the bedroom. The hallway stretched in front of him, utterly nondescript and purely white. How they kept this place so clean, he didn’t know. The Sentinels clubhouse always seemed full of grease and motor oil and chocolate sauce drippings.

  He wondered how far down the hall he could get before someone would block him. Surely they wouldn’t let him wander the clubhouse here. Julie appeared in the doorway of their bedroom, concern on her face. “There you are.”

  “Do you want to use the bathroom?” He continued looking down the hall. “Then maybe we can see how far away from our room we can get.”

  Julie looked down the hall too, her nerves easily filling the air between them. Lucas wasn’t sure how much of a ruse they’d need to pull off, but Julie wouldn’t be great at it. Of course, she’d done just fine with the bikers earlier, shouting them all into silence and demanding she be taken to her brother.

  She disappeared into the bathroom for at least ten minutes, during which time Lucas walked a circuit from the bedroom to the bathroom, trying to make sure his injuries would heal as quickly as possible. He’d been with Jordan through the recovery of his ribs, and it required a lot of sleep, interspersed with bouts of walking to remind his body that it was still alive and needed to fight to heal.

  Julie finally came out, and she looked fresh with a scrubbed-clean face, and her hair slightly damp and slicked back into a ponytail. “Ready,” she said.

  “Best guess?” he asked, both of them looking down the hall.

  “We should try every door along the way,” she said. “See if we can’t get an idea of how many Breathers are here.”

  The last thing Lucas wanted to do was come face-to-face with the rival bikers by barging into their personal spaces. But he nodded, because he needed an accurate headcount for Maverick. How he could take a census of everyone in the club by opening a few doors, he didn’t know. But he was going to try.

  Doors lined both sides of the hallway, and Lucas and Julie walked side-by-side past their bedroom, which seemed to be the last one in this area. The first
door he came to was locked; Julie’s was too.

  He listened, but he heard nothing. Down the hall. Repeat. His door didn’t open; Julie’s did.

  She pulled in a breath, and Lucas swung his attention toward her. The bright, industrial lights from the hallway lit only a little bit of the room. But it was enough to see that someone lived there.

  With a shaking hand, Julie reached inside the room and felt along the wall, flipping a light switch a moment later. Single bed. A desk filled with clutter—papers, a picture frame, a laptop, empty soda bottles, a Styrofoam container, and other bits and bobs.

  “One,” Lucas said. She quickly switched off the light and stepped into the room to pull the door closed. They continued down the hall, trying every door. About half of them opened. The other half were locked, and Lucas wasn’t sure if he should count them or not.

  Every room only had one bed, for one person. None of them were all that clean, though there was one with more purple than anything else, and Julie had said, “This must be Sweet Pea’s room,” before they continued on.

  The corner approached, and with it, Lucas’s heartbeat started beating more rapidly. He remembered walking for a long time, but that could’ve been from his injuries. He paused and looked down the hallway from where they’d come. They’d tried twelve doors and found confirmation of seven bikers living on this floor.

  He faced the corner again, Julie’s hand in his tightening. Before he could take another step, he heard what had her gripping his hand like a vice.

  Footsteps.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Julie froze to the spot, though every cell in her body screamed at her to retrace her steps, and quickly. But she couldn’t move, and so she stood frozen to the spot as Mustang rounded the corner and almost ran headlong into them.

  Surprise crossed his face for a moment, replaced by distaste and then fury. He settled on complete displeasure as he rocked back onto one foot and folded his arms. “Exploring?”

  “We can’t stay in that room forever,” Lucas said.

  “You don’t get to go wherever you want,” Mustang said. “I told you not to leave the room without one of us.”

  “I called and no one came,” Lucas said sarcastically.

  Mustang practically growled his sneer was so wide. “I brought you something to eat.”

  “Thanks for that,” Julie said quickly, before Lucas could further annoy the rival biker. They needed him on their side—didn’t Lucas know? She cast him a look without really meeting his eye.

  “We’re just wondering what we do now,” Julie said, looking back to Mustang.

  “I told you I’d update you after church,” he said.

  “If I can’t go to work tomorrow, I need to be able to call my boss,” she said, keeping her voice as even as she could.

  “Me too,” Lucas said.

  “Well, I’ve had one of the boys digging,” Mustang said. “And it seems like you live with a Sentinel, Lover Boy.”

  Lucas positively glowered at Mustang, clearly not appreciating the nickname.

  “So you can’t go back there,” Mustang said. “Unless you’re lying about breaking from your club.”

  “I’m not lying,” Lucas said. “What? You think I had my roommate beat me up?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past the lot of you in Forbidden Lake,” Mustang said. “But pretty little Julie Paige here lives alone.” He looked at her with a predatory edge in his eyes. “So if we do let you go back to Forbidden Lake and your jobs, you’ll have to stay with her. And I’ll have to stay there too.”

  “You?” Julie asked.

  “And last I heard, the front door had a broken window.” He tsk’ed his tongue like such a thing was a naughty thing to do, not that her home had almost been broken into. “So that will have to be repaired and the house properly heated if I’m expected to live there.”

  “Live there?” Julie repeated again. She hated that her brain had been reduced to such simple things. “You can’t come to work with me,” she said.

  “Someone will be at the hospital whenever the two of you are,” Mustang said. “That stuff takes time to coordinate. So I think it would be safe to say you won’t be able to go to work tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” Lucas said. “We need a phone.”

  “I’ll bring one to your room.” Mustang took a step forward, practically herding them back. Julie fell back with him, but Lucas held his ground for so long that Julie had to let go of his hand.

  “Lucas,” she said.

  “Go on, Lover Boy,” Mustang sneered, and Julie thought she might have to step between the two men. Not that she would be able to keep them apart. And she’d probably get knocked out in the process.

  She reached out and put her hand in Lucas’s, breaking the tension between the two bikers. “We don’t have all day to wait,” Lucas said. “I can’t lose my job over this.”

  “You won’t lose your job.” Mustang actually rolled his eyes, and Julie wondered what it would be like to not have a job she worried about keeping. Or worried about making sure she double and then triple-set an alarm so she wouldn’t be late if the forecast called for snow.

  This guy never even left the clubhouse. Out of the two of them, Julie would rather have her life, even if she did have to work in the middle of the night sometimes. She at least got to choose what she wanted to do.

  A door opened behind her, and Mustang focused over her shoulder. That got Lucas moving too, because it was a door that had been locked a few minutes ago. Now a biker stood there, looking like he’d been run over by an ambulance. Then the emergency vehicle had backed up and done it all over again.

  He snuffled and snorted, completely unaware of anyone in the hall. “Dane, we have company,” Mustang said. The other biker looked up, obviously not caring that he only wore boxers. He glanced at Mustang and Lucas before focusing on Julie.

  Her skin crawled, but she couldn’t make him look away from her. He smiled at her and leaned against the wall like he might be picking her up in a bar.

  “Get off the walls, greaser,” Mustang said. “I just had them cleaned.”

  “Yeah, because Bridge and Jericho had to—”

  “Dane, shut your mouth,” Mustang barked. That got the biker to stop talking, and he actually looked like he felt bad for almost giving away club secrets. Well, at least Julie knew now that Mustang ran this place, and that when members got out of line, Mustang had them clean the walls. No wonder everything was so gleaming white. Even a real, working hospital wasn’t this clean.

  “I’ll bring you a phone,” Mustang growled. “Now go back to the room and don’t leave it again without a member of the club. No, without me, or Fire, or Frogger.” He spoke in a voice that no one disobeyed, and Julie found herself backing up one step at a time. She turned eventually, glad that Lucas came right to her side.

  They made it back to the room, and Julie closed and locked the door before she leaned into it. “I think it’s safe to say every door down that hall has a biker behind it,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair and down his beard. “I think you’re right. The real question is, whether the next hall does too.”

  “So that’s twelve,” she said. “That’s a lot of people, Lucas.”

  “The Sentinels have over eighty members,” he said. “Twelve is not a lot.” He pressed his eyes closed. “And there are what? Six doors down that other hall? That’s only eighteen people.”

  “Do you think—well, what do you think?”

  He pulled the phone out and tapped. “I think I need to call Maverick.” He smiled—like, actually smiled—but Julie didn’t get what he was so happy about.

  She listened to him talk to his friend, but she didn’t understand most of it. Lucas didn’t say a whole lot, only, “We think eighteen…no…yes…okay.” He repeated the one or two-word answers, said, “I’ll keep you updated,” and hung up.

  Julie had migrated to the bed during his short conversation, and he
sat next to her on the bed, a sigh leaking from his mouth. Julie looked at him; he looked at her. She had nothing to say, so she kept her mouth shut.

  Lucas apparently felt the same, because he didn’t say anything else.

  Julie couldn’t quite make sense of her feelings, but the adrenaline from snooping down the hall had worn off, and a sense of depletion ran through her. She picked up the leftover sandwich she hadn’t eaten, took a bite, and lay down on the bed.

  “Can I lay by you?” Lucas asked in a quiet voice, and Julie sat back up.

  “Yeah. Are you okay? Are you in pain? Can you slide up on the bed, or do you want this spot?”

  “If you could move in, that would be great.” He gave her a shy smile, and Julie found him absolutely adorable. She did what he asked, and he took the spot on the edge this time. It felt easy and natural to roll into his side and nestle into him.

  So she did.

  The hours passed in a mind-numbing way. By the time Mustang returned for them, Julie felt sure a week had passed. Her stomach growled, and she bolted to her feet when he knocked on the door.

  “How dare you leave us in here for so long?” she demanded when she yanked the door open. “And we need to eat, Mustang. You can’t just keep us here like prisoners. That’s called kidnapping.”

  Mustang stood there, and he had the decency to blink at her. “I have dinner for you. You can come out to the common area if you’d like. I’ll take you. Church is about to start.”

  “Thank goodness,” she said, sighing. “What time is it?”

  “Almost nine,” he said.

  “At night?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The first night?”

  Mustang cocked his head at her, his lips curling up into a small smirk. “Yes. Come on.”

  Lucas groaned as he joined Julie, and they followed Mustang back down the hall, around the corner, and into the large room with the couches. Immediately, the scent of something baked met Julie’s nose, and her stomach gave one loud growl. Lucas sat on the closest sofa, and Julie joined him.