The Crashers

by Cubed, Magen

  “I mean, you know, she approached me when she figured out you were staying with me because she was worried about you. And then, she offered to pay me to keep an eye on and make sure you were okay.”

  “She what?”

  “I’m sorry. I knew I should’ve told you, but I knew you’d be upset, and I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Bridger closed the chamber. Something like hurt made his face tight, his voice sharp. “She paid you to take care of me?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I didn’t take it, I swear. She just wanted me to make sure you were okay for her.”

  “How much?”

  “Bridger.”

  “How much did she try to pay you?”

  Adam licked his lips, trying to buy himself time. “It’s not about that.”

  “My wife tried to buy you off so you’d put up with me. I have a right to know how much I’m worth.”

  “She tried to give me five thousand dollars a month.”

  “All right.” Nodding, Bridger holstered his gun in the back of his pants and stormed toward the backdoor. “Get in the car.”

  “What?”

  “Get in the car. I need to go to Camden and yell at my wife.”

  Adam didn’t want to follow after, but he found his keys and jacket as told. He wanted to stop, to just pretend he never said anything at all and go back to the way things were. That wouldn’t happen, so he followed Bridger to the car instead. The ride to Camden was silent as Adam navigated evening traffic. Narrow crooked streets grew wider with every turn. The cars parked on corners looked more and more expensive as he drove them to Caitlin’s townhouse. In the passenger seat, Bridger didn’t say another word, and didn’t even look at Adam. His hands tight on the wheel, Adam held a breath and realized he had made a mistake. He should have kept his mouth shut. He shouldn’t have tried to put his hands on what didn’t belong to him.

  It was dark by the time he pulled up to the townhouse that Bridger and his wife shared for twenty years. He put on the brake and killed the engine. Adam had never seen where Bridger had lived before he appeared in the garage and took him out for lunch. It hadn’t crossed his mind. He’d never contemplated what car was parked on the curb outside or what his furniture would look like. Such things were far too intimate to think about now. It was too unknowable a distance to cross by the time Bridger became the man he was when Adam met him.

  “Stay here,” Bridger said. He opened his door to slide out. “I’ll be back.”

  Adam nodded and did as he was told. He sat in the car with his hands in his lap and played voyeur as Bridger walked up the sidewalk to his front door and knocked twice. Caitlin appeared at the doorway in her dressing gown with her hair around her shoulders and no makeup on. This was a mere shade of the polished creature that came by the shop and interrogated him, and it revealed a human softness under her catlike artifice. Her eyes met Adam’s from across the manicured lawn and she nodded coolly before letting Bridger inside. Panic made him want to drive away and leave Bridger there to avoid the confrontation and cutting himself out of the inevitable resolution. To leave Bridger to return to Caitlin, right where he belonged.

  Adam sat like a scolded dog and waited. Bridger emerged from the front door twenty minutes later. Caitlin didn’t follow. He walked back to the car, opened the door and slid in.

  A pause. Bridger sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  Adam swallowed. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “Well, I am. She doesn’t have the right to put you in this position. It isn’t fair to you.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not. The thing is, my wife—she’s not like us. She only understands money and power, because that’s how she was raised. She means well, in her own way, but she just doesn’t get people. It doesn’t make it okay, but...” Bridger finally looked at Adam. “I’m not mad at you. I know you didn’t take the money. She told me you wouldn’t take it no matter how many times she offered. And I might come back here and yell at her tomorrow about it just for good measure.”

  “Don’t, okay? It’s fine. I just didn’t want you to think of me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m just here because you buy me things.”

  Bridger let out a soft, bitter laugh. “I couldn’t really blame you if you were, could I?”

  “Why?”

  “Look, I’m not a good guy, Adam. I’m just not. I spent my entire life doing everything I could think of to be something other than what I am.”

  A sharp wet pain dug into Adam’s stomach. It made his face warm, his hands empty and useless. “You think I pity you, don’t you? That I’m trying to fix you or put you up on some pedestal because I don’t have anyone else.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “I’m not here for the money, okay? Yours or your wife’s. And I’m not here to make myself feel better, either. Because I don’t think you’re broken, Bridger, and even if you were, you’re not mine to fix. You still love your wife, and I get it, okay? I do. And one day, you’ll go back to her because that’s where you belong, but I just thought... I thought maybe this could be enough for now. Just this, what we have right here. That I could be happy with things as they are.”

  Bridger looked firmly at Adam. “What are we talking about right now?”

  Adam shook his head and knew he was making a mistake. “I’m in love with you. I have been since the train. I wanted to know you—to have you in my life somehow— because I thought you were beautiful, but I knew I was too fucked up to be worth your time.” The words climbed out of Adam on the end of a silent sob. A hot and animal fear rattled its way out of him, after months of being swallowed and stuffed away. “Then, we met again at the bank and I thought... I just thought that maybe we could be friends—that we could have something, and that I would be okay with that. Because I don’t pity you, Bridger. I never did. And I’m sorry, I really am. If you don’t love me, that’s fine. I just want you to know that I’ll still be here no matter what happens between us.”

  The car was silent again. The air too heavy to breathe. Slowly, Bridger leaned across the space between them and cupped Adam’s face in his hands. He looked from Adam’s eyes, to his mouth, and back up again. Finally, he placed a kiss on Adam’s mouth—soft and dry and without pretense—and pressed their foreheads together. Adam closed his eyes. The tears leaked from their corners before he could stop them.

  “You’re the most worthwhile person I know,” Bridger murmured, thumbing Adam’s cheek dry. “You’re strong and you’re wonderful, and anybody would be lucky to have you. But I’m fucked up, okay? I don’t know if the cancer’s going to kill me or if I’m just going to be stuck dying like this forever, and that’s too much to ask you, or Caitlin, or anybody, to sit around and watch.”

  “Look, I’m not asking you to choose. If you want to go back to your wife—”

  “No, stop it. Listen to me. I left her so she wouldn’t have to watch me die. I can’t turn around and do that to you. I can’t. It’s cruel. I don’t know how much time I have left or what this will do to me before it’s all over. You’re the only friend I’ve ever had in my worthless life and if I found a way to ruin that, I could never forgive myself.”

  “You’re not protecting me.”

  “I’m protecting you from myself.” Bridger closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s not... the wanting that I lack, Adam. It’s the time.”

  Adam swallowed. “Does this change anything? Between us?”

  Bridger shook his head. “I don’t want it to.”

  Adam nodded and regretted the word before he even spoke it. “Okay.”

  III.

  Kyle was gone when Amanda woke up just as she had expected. She read his note twice, folded it, and put it in the drawer for safekeeping. Then, she showered, dressed, and had her breakfast and coffee before leaving for the station. Over her lunch of a sandwich and more coffee, she checked her phone and found no messages waiting for her. She thumbed, “Did yo
u talk to Ben?” into the keypad and sent it off.

  After pulling out her phone to check it an hour later in the women’s room, she found no response. It left her uneasy. She pressed her lips together to wet them as she stared at her empty inbox. Silence she was used to, but this was different; it was punctuated by the threat of strange men in dark suits that broke into houses and followed Kyle home at night. She sent him another message in the evening, but when that also received no answer, she decided to take a detour to East Essex on her way home. The address was still in her pocket, scribbled onto a gas station receipt and given to her. As Kyle said, just in case.

  When Amanda arrived at the boarding house on Chelsea Street, the lights were all on. Inside, people moved behind curtained windows, a living situation far louder and more crowded than she ever knew Kyle to indulge in before. Stuffing the receipt back into her pocket, she knocked on the door. In a few moments, Norah answered. Amanda recognized her from the arrests, the case files, and the interrogations. She smiled as politely as possible.

  “Oh, hey. Sorry to come by so late. I’m just looking for Kyle. You must be—”

  “Norah. And I know you. You arrested me.”

  “Yeah, well.” Amanda tried to laugh, but the sound came up short. “Sorry about that. I got a little overzealous.”

  Norah shrugged. “It’s not like I’m holding a grudge if that’s what you’re worried about. C’mon inside.”

  She led Amanda to the dining room table, which opened files and scattered papers now cluttered. The sounds of television from the next room brought Amanda to peek around the corner; there she found Hannah’s makeshift art studio spread across the floor in an explosion of pencils and markers. The seven-year-old sat in the middle of her mess, sketching while attentively watching her colorful spectacle of a children’s show. Norah quickly tended to the chaos by picking up her daughter’s discarded shoes and jackets and putting them away.

  “Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company. And Kyle’s not in right now, actually. He’s been out chasing the lead you gave him the last few days.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Have you heard from him today?”

  “No. Then again, that’s not weird. Why? What’s up?”

  Amanda shrugged. “Not sure yet. He hasn’t been responding to my messages all day. Last I heard, he was going to go talk to his friend Ben about this whole Kyrios situation.”

  “What Kyrios situation?”

  “The stalking.”

  “Ah. Oh, hey, you want something to drink? I have tea, juice, water, beer...”

  “I’ll take a beer if you don’t mind.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Norah laughed softly.

  While Norah retreated to the kitchen to get the beer, Amanda looked around at the files on the table. “So, this is mission control, I take it?”

  “More or less.” Norah popped the caps off the bottles and came back to hand Amanda a cold, Irish beer. “We’re not exactly well-organized here. Kyle does most of the heavy lifting. We just try to help where we can. I’m going over his files again, trying to see if there’s anything we might have missed.”

  “And you’re his friends.” It wasn’t so much a question, but Amanda didn’t know how else to phrase it.

  Norah took a drink and swallowed with a nod. “Yeah. I mean, we’re roommates mostly. Kyle’s a good guy. He’s just hard to know. But I guess you already know that, right?”

  “Yeah.” Amanda chuckled. “I get that.”

  They took a seat on opposite sides of the table. Norah set down her bottle as they sorted through crime scene photos and autopsy reports. Seeing the same sad parade of case files that were stacked on her desk day in and day out made Amanda’s stomach tighten. She took a hard gulp of her beer and wiped her mouth with a knuckle.

  “So, all of you guys live here?” she asked just to make conversation. “Everybody from the crash?”

  Norah nodded while comparing photos of the waste left behind at the subway and the bank. “Yup. It’s Bridger’s place. He renovated it and let us all move in.”

  “Isn’t that a little weird, though?” Amanda shrugged. “I mean, I’m not judging here. I just don’t know if I could move in with a guy I was in a plane accident with, you know?”

  Norah laughed. “Yeah, no, I get it. But after getting killed twice and figuring out I can alter with gravitational fields for fun, this is the most normal thing I’ve got going on right now.”

  “Do what?”

  From the next room, there was a crash, a shout, and the sounds of stomping feet. A cinderblock flew through the living room window in an explosion of glass and wooden splinters, striking the television and knocking it from the coffee table. On the floor, Hannah screamed and scrambled away from the broken glass. Norah leapt to her feet. She rounded the corner to pull her daughter out of harm’s way. Amanda reached for the gun at her hip and went to the window in time to see three men flee down the street. More men roamed around the streets in a shambling assembly; some shouted, others had blood on their knuckles.

  “What the hell was that?” Norah asked.

  Amanda shook her head. “There’s something going on out there. Get your daughter upstairs. Where are the rest of your roommates?”

  “Clara’s out picking up dinner, and I don’t know where Bridger and Adam are.”

  “Call them.” Amanda was already at the front door with her gun drawn. “Figure out where everybody is. I’m going to my car to call this in.”

  Nodding, Norah and Hannah retreated upstairs.

  IV.

  Clara was at the deli on Fern Avenue when she received Norah’s message. Her phone was buried in the bottom of her messenger bag; she was too busy ordering sandwiches at the counter to notice the vibrations. Norah was the one who sent her out for food that night with twenty-five dollars and her eternal thanks as she chased Hannah around the house. They were low on groceries and it was Adam’s turn to cook, but he had disappeared earlier after shrugging on his jacket and following Bridger to the car. Now burdened with two bags of cold cut subs and every kind of potato chip the deli carried, Clara made her way back to Chelsea Street.

  Earlier that day, she had barely managed to convince her mother not to panic. The attacks were an international scandal, subject to endless debate and grandstanding on primetime news every night for the last month. New anti-terrorism measures coming from the FBI and the mayor’s office were garnering criticism in the media, and everybody on the internet had an opinion on the matter. In the EBC, people went out less and less, came home early, and stayed off the streets at night. Checkpoints at subway stations slowed the city down as people had to adjust their schedules around pat-downs and bag searches. Highway traffic in and out of the city was getting unbearable.

  But Clara wasn’t thinking about all of that; she couldn’t afford to. She didn’t hear the explosion, either. If she had, she would have ducked out of the way of the scatter of shop-front glass. She would have seen the cluster of people running through her neighborhood. Their faces were covered by bandanas, throwing bricks and bottles stuffed with flaming rags. Had she known of the riot spreading into East Essex’s quiet streets, she wouldn’t have gone out. Then, she would have missed the concussive blast that knocked her off her feet and filled her ears with a piercing hum. She most certainly wouldn’t have ended up bleeding out on Carroll Street with a piece of glass in her gut.

  The entire world went black, then white, and then black again. Clara opened her eyes to find Adam hovering over her shoulder. Bridger hovered over his. She blinked twice. Adam held up his hand.

  “How many fingers?”

  “Three.” She coughed and tasted blood. “What happened?”

  “I have no idea. We were driving back from Camden and the neighborhood was a wreck,” he said. “Bridger saw somebody lying in the street and when we pulled over we realized it was you.”

  “Cops have broken up most of the riot, but nobody seems to know how it got started,” Bridger chim
ed in. “We better get out of here before they start asking questions. Our track record with law enforcement isn’t all that hot.”

  Adam helped Clara to her feet. Noticing the bloody hole in her shirt, she groaned.

  “Are you serious? These assholes killed me?”

  “Sorry.” Adam shrugged.

  Locating the bloodstained shard of glass, Bridger held it up to the nearby streetlight to examine its jagged edges. “Nasty fucker, too.”

  “I’m going to find these dicks.” She reared back and screamed into the air, “Because every time I go out, somebody tries to blow me up!”

  “C’mon.” Adam put an arm around her neck and patted her shoulder gently. “Let’s get you home, okay?”

  V.

  The text from Norah read, “There’s a riot outside. Get home now.” By the time Kyle found it in his inbox, it was buried under three other messages from Amanda. Guilt made it difficult to respond to Amanda’s belated messages, but he felt a bit stupid for not checking his phone sooner. Norah’s blanket text put a fire in his gut to get home.

  By the time he got back, police were all over East Essex quartering off stores and apartments with blown windows. People sat on the ground in handcuffs. Blood and gasoline on the street painted a better picture than the news feeds on his phone could muster in 140 characters. Demonstrations in Camden and Merseyside started off as peaceful protests of the widespread allegations of police brutality at security checkpoints. Sometime between 5:00 and 7:00, men in bandanas broke into the passive crowds with violent chanting. They called for an end to foreign terrorism on American shores. Before it was over, police arrested six people as the crowds dispersed, but the sentiment carried over into nearby neighborhoods as people took to the streets. By the time the riots arrived in East Essex, people were out for blood.

  When Kyle got home, it was to a house in lockdown and a hole in the living room. In the kitchen, he found Norah smoking one of Bridger’s cigarettes and furiously texting her family. Hannah was nowhere in sight.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “There was a riot outside.” She put her phone down and shook her head before taking a shaky drag. “Somebody threw a cinderblock at my kid.”