The Crashers

by Cubed, Magen

  “You signed a confidentiality agreement.”

  “And if you try to take me to court, I’m going to make my death a very slow, public affair on every cable news outlet in the country.”

  Mr. Baxter’s face reddened. “You’re a cunt, Bridger.”

  “And you’re a dick, Bob. So why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

  The staff of the thirty-second floor vacated the hallway as three security guards escorted Bridger from the department. He had only three framed photos, a lamp, and a jacket in his box. He carried it to the spiral staircase and down to the elevator below. He didn’t notice the swell of dizziness or the nosebleed that trickled down his lip as he descended the last steps. It was the hot blood dripping onto his chin that gave him pause. As he lifted a hand to wipe it, his muscles locked in a spasm. He couldn’t catch himself; he toppled to the floor at the base of the stairs. The box and all its contents followed after.

  Behind his eyelids, columns of fire spiraled toward the tops of inverted buildings. Water filled his lungs as he fell down, down, down into the black. There were faces in the dark and bodies emerging in the stuttered movement of a tape played in reverse.

  When he felt solid earth, he righted himself and clambered to his feet. He found himself standing in a patch of asphalt flanked by shop windows. A crisscross of busy streets intersected at the shopping plaza, which five other people surrounded, their faces emerging from the dark: two men, two women, and a little girl twirling in her white dress. They looked at him before a sudden explosion swallowed them up—first in the fire, then in the darkness, and finally in the crushing sound of water.

  All around him, the shops of Maison Boulevard were now pocked by violence and firebombing. Cars were overturned in the street. Glass had blown out from boarded windows. The sky was an ugly sea of lightning and gray. The wind gusted sideways in broad sheets of stinging rain and debris. People ran past him, around him, and through him, hands out and mouths open in silent screams. Unseen, he stood before the rumble of gunfire vibrating down the avenue. A hand reached from behind and someone screamed his name. They yanked him out of the line of fire.

  “Bridger,” came a man’s voice in the dark.

  “I’ve got you,” rasping and breathless.

  “I need you,” warm like honey.

  “Mr. Levi, can you hear me?”

  When Bridger finally came around at the foot of the stairs, he spat up water. No one could tell him why. As his senses returned from the destroyed cityscape, he could still feel the weight of a touch under his clothes.

  V.

  In the nights after the crash, Kyle realized he wasn’t sleeping. A week later, he admitted why. He didn’t say it aloud, just to himself as he sat on the edge of his bed in the middle of the night, staring into the dark. He counted the slivers of light peeking through his blinds. There, he resigned himself to the burn of wakefulness. It wasn’t the promise of nightmares that kept him up. He had no reason to fear twisted metal, broken bones, shattered glass or blood-filmed plastic. Five years on the police force had killed the part of him shocked by violence.

  For Kyle, it was the strange emptiness that seemed to follow tragedy. It was that hole in him left hollow by unanswered questions and nightly news updates. At 4:00 a.m., he took his phone out and thumbed a message to Amanda.

  “Are you asleep?”

  He held a breath.

  “Not anymore. Why?”

  “You want to do something stupid?”

  “Again: Why?”

  Kyle smirked. By 5:30, he was dressed and walking toward the entrance of the barricaded L Line stop. Amanda was already waiting for him with a flashlight in hand and a sweater two sizes too large hanging off her shoulders.

  “This is stupid,” she reminded him. She switched on the flashlight and ducked under the crisscross of police tape. “I just want to go on the record as saying that this is stupid.”

  “You didn’t have to come.” Kyle followed behind, hands in the pockets of his worn leather jacket. “I was just being sociable.”

  “Like I’d let you go out here by yourself. The last thing you need is to get picked up traipsing around my crime scene.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve done worse.”

  She chose not to acknowledge that as they descended into the tunnel and onto the platform beyond the defunct gates and turnstiles. They stood on the jagged vestige of the Lamar Street Station, which was fixed in time like a dig site. The platform remained half-broken, half-blackened. The explosion had left visible scorch marks. The tracks were taped off, but Kyle could still see where the L Line had jumped the track and rolled over. He looked the scene over for a long moment, taking in the smell of dust and dirt and metal.

  “It was an explosion, wasn’t it?” he finally asked. “What’re we talking about here, pipe bomb?”

  “Improvised device,” Amanda answered matter-of-factly. “Ammonia nitrite fertilizer, nitromethane and commercial explosives. Remotely detonated, likely by a cell phone.”

  “Domestic?”

  “Seems that way. We’ve kept it out of the news for now. This isn’t New York or Boston. The EBC gets its share of school shootings and mall stabbings, sure. We even get a few bomb scares every year. But this? People aren’t prepared for something this big. It just doesn’t happen here.”

  “People have the right to know if some asshole is trying to blow them up.”

  It was her turn to shrug. “Yeah, sure. But you say ‘terrorist’ in the wrong part of town and brown people start getting shot. FBI wants to keep it quiet until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “That okay with you?”

  “As a Lebanese girl from Merseyside?” She chuckled darkly. “Yeah, that’s okay with me.”

  “Fair enough. You have a profile yet?”

  “White male, mid-forties to early fifties. College educated, probably with a background in science or engineering of some kind. Maybe law enforcement. Upper middle class, married, maybe a kid or two. Can’t get a bead on the motivation.”

  “Angry people target public institutions. Self-righteous people want to make a point by blowing up state buildings or churches.”

  “This is random.”

  “Or personal.”

  “Revenge, maybe?”

  “I don’t know, but you don’t splatter five hundred people without a good reason why.”

  She nodded and looked to the scars left on the pavement. “So, are we not going to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “You. Here. Now. At the ass crack of dawn.”

  He pressed his lips together to wet them and tried to think of something good to say. “I haven’t been sleeping. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “You survived a terrorist attack, Kyle. You’re allowed to be a little fucked up about it.”

  “I know,” he said, even though he thought better of it. “I am. I’m just working through it. I called, right?”

  She sighed. “I guess so.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Thank you... for coming.” He meant to smile but faltered. “I needed this.”

  “Yeah.” After a moment, she nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  VI.

  “It’s Wednesday again. I thought about not coming today. I thought about not coming last week, too. I’m sorry for that. Things have... They’ve just been hard. I’m not living with your mother anymore. I’m sorry about that, too. I know you wouldn’t have wanted that for us. I miss her. I never see her here anymore. I guess she had the good sense to stop torturing herself. But, look, I just wanted to come by to tell you that I’m going to be busy, like I talked about before. I may not be able to come back for a while. Something very big is about to happen. They’ll know before long. They’ll all know why I did this. I’ll make sure of that.

  I know.

  I know, I know.

  This isn’t... This isn’t what I wanted for my life. I just need you to know that. I had pla
ns for us—for you. But I was forced into this. That doesn’t make it any easier to explain, I know. It’s just what it is. Pain makes you do things you wouldn’t expect. It makes you ugly, so I guess part of me is glad that you’re not here for this part. Just know why I do it, okay? I just needed to tell you that, and that I love you. I miss you. Me and your mom, we both do, even if we’re not together anymore. I’ll see you soon.”

  Damon White came to the Primrose Pine Cemetery at 2:30 with a single flower. It was the same long-stemmed, yellow flower he’d brought at 2:30 every Wednesday for the last four months. Twenty minutes later, he left without it just like he always did. He couldn’t bear to look back at the tiny headstone where he’d just made his peace for the last time.

  Chapter Four

  I.

  “Adam? Adam? Private Harlow?”

  Adam looked up to face the group circled around him. He tugged at his dog tags and sat as straight as his rickety folding chair would allow. Swallowing, he closed his legs and propped his free hand politely on his knee. It had taken all of his concentration to occupy as little space as possible. He blended into the washed-out basketball court like a ghost. It had taken just as much concentration to get into the car that morning, to make the crosstown drive to Camden in rush hour traffic, to will himself into the building, and to take his seat in a room of amputees and angry, young service people.

  “Yes?” Adam said.

  “Is there anything you’d like to share with the group today?”

  He took a deep breath and let his shoulders sag. His knuckles still hurt where he had buried them inside that girl’s engine block. His skin was peeled back and covered in bandages, but of course he said nothing of that. Jamie hadn’t said anything, either; he’d promised not to tell anyone. Adam had nothing to be ashamed of—not really—having just saved both of their lives and spared the young driver the real trauma of the accident. Still, the idea of stopping the car with his bare hands filled him with a hot and inexplicable dread, which his latest family of medications couldn’t fix.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  It was a stall tactic. Dr. Bell knew as much. He was just too nice to call Adam out on it in front of the group. “Anything you want. This is your time.”

  “Can I pass?”

  “Adam.”

  “I was a mechanic stationed in Delaram on my second deployment. I’d been through two IEDs before, but the last one...” He swallowed again and tried to collect his thoughts. There were three new faces in the basketball court that morning: a helicopter pilot named Samantha, an infantryman named Yancy, and a kid half his size who was a linguistics specialist. Each of them had a sad story, and none of them knew his. “I thought for the last few months that the ambush was the worst thing that would ever happen to me. You just get used to that level of fragility. It’s like stasis, you know? You’re just kind of hovering there all the time... in that moment.”

  “What moment is that, Adam?” Dr. Bell prodded gently. He took down some notes as he looked through Adam like he was barely there.

  Sand kicked up in an explosion of dirt and rocks. It rattled teeth and doors, and it cracked glass, and that was just the beginning. The crude device ripped the chassis of the truck behind them to shreds, turning the four men inside into puddles of black blood where the oil mixed in the earth. There was a crash of bone and metal, and the desert turned dark in the corners of his vision when their convoy vehicle flipped. Adam would be trapped in the rubble by the piece of steel in his side until somebody finally reached them. He would later learn he’d been out there for twelve hours.

  “The explosion. You know, the IED. I don’t remember much, but I can still remember what it felt like when the truck’s windows blew out and it tumbled over the dirt. It was like I was deaf, because I couldn’t hear anything but this humming sound. Like static, but emptier, you know? Like everything was just empty.”

  “And how do you feel now?” Since the subway crash, Dr. Bell didn’t say.

  Adam tugged at his dog tags and wanted to disappear. “I feel empty now, too.”

  “Why do you feel empty?”

  “Before, back in Afghanistan, I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t have another way out. But here, back home? I’m broken. Everything hurts. It’s like I’m trapped inside my own body just—just crushed by the weight of everything. And every time I start to feel like there’s a way out, I’m pulled right back in again.”

  “You’re not broken, Adam. None of us are. We just need time to heal. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I can’t help that feeling that somebody made a mistake. Somebody else should have survived that crash, not me.”

  “You mean... the latest incident?” Dr. Bell asked cautiously. “The subway crash?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You survived three IEDs, Adam, and you survived this. That is a testament to how strong you are.”

  “I don’t feel strong.”

  “You should.”

  “Then why do I feel like I don’t deserve to be fixed?”

  The basketball court fell silent. Adam closed his mouth and looked back to the floor. Dr. Bell concluded the session, and Adam got up to walk outside and remember how to breathe. He looked at the sky between the building tops. The sun on his face made him temporarily forget the horrors of honesty, though they still tensed in his spine and the hollow of his gut. He felt numb again, which was a marked improvement. Stuffing his hands into his pockets to keep them busy, he walked the two blocks to his car.

  Around him, the narrow side streets of Camden were busy with bodies and noise as people warmed the pavement on their lunch breaks. On 32nd and Donner, outside a coffee shop and organic market, stood the girl in the white dress. She smiled at Adam just as she had on the train that Monday morning. He stopped at the edge of the curb, separated from her by the cars flowing across the intersection. His hands were as useless as ever. His body was numb and too stupid to move. The traffic light wavered and changed, opening the crosswalk. The girl turned to walk down 32nd. She was like a beacon begging Adam to follow. Walking across the street, he knew he didn’t have any other choice.

  II.

  “Are we going to stop buying groceries?”

  “Are we going to live on the street?”

  “Are you going to set me up for adoption?”

  By 7:00, Norah had given up any defensive position against her daughter’s onslaught of questions. Hannah considered the possibilities flippantly around bites of cereal or mouthfuls of toothpaste, asking whatever came to mind. Norah’s immediate reaction was panic. She was horrified that her child seriously contemplated their impending socioeconomic doom. By the time Hannah’s line of questioning dissolved into inquiries about the periodic table chart pinned above her school supply shelf, Norah felt less disturbed. She hadn’t told her daughter they were already behind on the water bill, or that she had no idea how they were going to pay next month’s rent. Hannah didn’t need to know the full extent of her mother’s troubles.

  “Are you going to get a new job?”

  “Yes, as soon as I can.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  Norah shrugged. “Whatever pays the bills.”

  “You should be a NASCAR driver.”

  “I don’t think I’m qualified, honey.”

  “Laney’s mom’s a doctor,” Hannah offered. “She says they have a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, and Laney’s grandparents had money to send her mom to school to be a doctor. Either that or Laney’s mom is up to her butt in school loans and Laney’s a little liar.”

  “One time, Laney stole Alex’s pencil box and said I did it.”

  “See? Laney is a liar.”

  “Are we gonna move in with Grampa and Gramma?”

  “No, we’ll stay where we are. I just have to get a job.”

  “Alex says the eco-no-me is bad and that’s why his dad doesn’t have his job anymore.”

  “Hey.” Norah squeezed
her daughter’s hand as they approached the elementary school. “You don’t need to worry about any of that stuff, okay? Let me figure it out.”

  Hannah nodded and pushed her smudged glasses up her nose. Stopping outside the school, Norah smoothed her daughter’s hair and stooped to hug her.

  “Be good today, all right?”

  “I’m always good.”

  “You are not. Listen to Ms. Bradshaw and don’t spend all day doodling.”

  “I won’t.”

  As Hannah trudged up the steps to join her classmates, Norah waved goodbye and turned back to the street. Chris’s white sedan appeared on the curb and slowed to a halt. Before he could get out to meet her, she marched away from the school and any chance of Hannah seeing or hearing. Chris locked the car and followed.

  “You never returned any of my calls, Norah,” he said as he caught up with several long strides. “I had to find out from your mother. Do you have any idea how worried I was? I thought you were dead.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  He sighed. “Please don’t be like this. I just wanted to know you were okay.”

  “I’m fine, Chris, so go home.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “What about?”

  “You know what about, Norah.”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, you don’t. You can’t possibly think we’re going to do this today.”

  “I’ve been patient and I’ve tried to do this your way, but you’ve shut me out. I’d really like to do this without getting the lawyers involved.”

  “Chris, not now, all right? I’m not in the mood for this conversation. I have to go find a job right now so I don’t end up on the street.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Norah.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop, keeping her close. “I want to help take care of her—to get involved. I have that right.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “How far along is Beth?”