Jeff Abbott - Collision

“Not the kind I like.” Whatever brand he offers, I will instantly hate.

“Poor students shouldn’t be picky,” Husayn says. Next to him, the boy with the scarred mouth nods, gives me a nervous smile, and offers to walk with me.

“No, I’ll just be a moment,” I say. I give a false-note awkward laugh. I want out of the room. Maybe I’ll take a bus home and tell Mama and Papa that their two oldest sons have lost their minds. I excuse myself and walk into the rain.

The store sits on the corner. I buy the cigarettes and I stand under a store awning, the warm honey of smoke calming me, in no hurry to return, watching the pedestrians a block away on fashionable Rue Hamra. My brothers. Getting involved with a wannabe terrorist-slash-bookworm who lives in an expensive apartment. Madness. I start to build the arguments in my mind, the words I will use to tell them they’re making a mistake. Blood of Fire, what a name. I imagine the drive home as my brothers will try to convince me that they’re serving justice. Perhaps they are. Yes, I understand their frustrations with the political system, with the West, with the rest of the Arab world, and…

The blast sounds more like a truck coughing up a ton of grit, more a rumble of machinery than death. I have heard explosions before. This one’s boom grabs my bones. I freeze and then horror fills my skin. I am running down the street, the cigarette crushed between my fingers and I don’t feel the cinder scorch my hand.

The boy with the scarred mouth, the other Khaled, smacks into me, knocks me down, slams a foot into my chest as he keeps running. I get up and run toward the apartment building.

Smoke from Husayn’s building roils into the rain. The third floor, where Husayn’s apartment is. Was.

A body, burning, crumples from the window. Falls, arms cartwheeling, smashes into the rubble-filled sidewalk as I run toward it.

Gebran. I start to scream. His arms that carried me burning, his fingers that strummed Bach and folk songs burning, his dark curly hair burning. He lands in front of me, ten feet away. I land on top of him to smother the flames. I don’t feel his flames, I don’t feel pain, I feel his death pass through me.

Hands grip me and pull me up from Gebran. A mask of surprise covers his dead face. Smoke wafts from his shoulders, his hair. Sirens wail. I bolt up the stairs, fighting against a surging tide of panicked tenants fleeing the building.

The floor is a ruin. Husayn’s apartment and the one next to it are destroyed. The fire rages in the two apartments, but from the stairwell I see fragments of the dead: The remains of an arm smeared along the floor. A head and the shoulders of one of Husayn’s friends, burnt and torn. A fetal-shaped crisp that was once a person.

And Samir. The edge of the blast caught him; perhaps he was coming out of the apartment to fetch me on my cigarette errand, to lecture me on my rudeness for leaving and not hurrying back. He is crumpled against a far, unsteady wall, legs bent like wind-churned twigs, his face pale, gore seeping out of him as though he is melting, his whole body turning to blood.

I kneel by him, try to pick him up, and he starts to come apart. He is beyond broken.

“Kill… kill them…” His lips manage to shape the words and he looks at me as though he doesn’t know me and he dies.

The ceiling begins to collapse and I run down the stairs. Out into the streets, past the sirens and the fire engines, smeared with my brothers’ blood, I run home.

Mama and Papa are standing at the doorway, watching me stagger toward them. The television is full of the bombing. I have to find the words to tell them Samir and Gebran are dead. I don’t even remember what I say. Probably, “Samir and Gebran are dead.”

Papa shakes his head, keeps shaking his head. Mama screams. They are lost in their grief and shock; they clutch at me, suddenly their only child.

When they can speak-when I can speak-they ask questions. No, I do not know why the apartment was bombed. No, Husayn, I had never met him before, he was my brothers’ friend. No, I only went to get cigarettes, I was only gone a few minutes. Papa starts to wheeze in shock.

“Who did this?” I ask, kneeling before the television to watch the news footage. “Who has claimed responsibility?” Because whatever division of the police or counterterrorism group has killed Blood of Fire will surely be trumpeting their victory.

Through his tears, Papa shakes his head. No one has claimed it yet.

Then that means the Israelis, the CIA, perhaps a rival cell. I think of how Hamas and Fatah, in the Palestinian camps, happily murder each other.

“Who is this terrible friend, this Husayn?” Mama demands. Then she is screaming a new trill of grief, because Papa’s hand closes over his shirt, disappointment in his eyes but also a surprising relief. He slumps into his chair.

We call an ambulance. I am calm on the phone. Me bloodied and singed and battered, Papa dead in his chair, Mama clutching my arm. We stand, looking at Papa in his recliner, my hair smelling of burnt blood, Mama sobbing.

Our world is gone. Gone, in an hour. I want to kill someone for the first time in my life, and I don’t know how to, who to hunt for, who to hate.

The police talk to me in the days and the weeks that follow. I am questioned for hours. I can give them nothing. I never say the words Blood of Fire aloud. The papers argue that the murdered men were a peace-committed organization, cut down by the Mossad or the CIA. No arrests are made.

No one knows who the boy with the scarred mouth is. Rumors fly: The boy was an American agent, an Israeli-bribed traitor who planted the bomb and made his escape, nothing proven. But now I know the truth.

Mama sits at her window and moans and cries and the sound of it will drive me slowly insane. The sound of her grief cuts me slow and deep, like a sword drawn over my back again and again, laying all my pain and hate and anger bare.

That night, I make a simple vow. Those who destroyed my family will pay, with blood spilled a thousand times more. My promise sounds ancient. It feels modern. Timeless. Hatred doesn’t seem to expire.

It is why I am coming to America, and am eager to do my duty.

Teach put a motherly hand on the big man’s shoulder, ran her other one across his burr of hair. “You literally dodged a bullet.” The relief in her face was vivid. “Pilgrim.” Teach leaned close to him. It wasn’t his real name but it was the name she had used for the long, dark ten years of working together, so it was as real as anything else in his jigsaw life.

Pilgrim nodded. “I must have moved just enough as he fired and it saved me. I felt the shot pass by my head. I hit the floor and the sniper thought he’d taken me.” Pilgrim stepped past Teach into the den in the rental house, which stood on a quiet bend of Lake Travis, near Austin. Teach and her assistant Barker had already started tearing down the scant equipment in the safe house: erasing the laptop’s drive, looping cables. They always packed lightly so they could vanish quickly. She told Barker to finish loading up the cars.

Pilgrim sat at the table, rubbed the back of his head as though the bullet had left a trail in his hair. “I should have just kidnapped Adam, forced him to tell us how he found us, who he worked for.” He shook his head. “I don’t like losing, Teach.”

“We couldn’t tip our hand early that we were watching him. You made the only approach possible.”

“Whoever he works for didn’t want him talking.”

“You should have brought him back here.” This from Barker, stepping back inside the house to pick up a box containing eavesdropping equipment. Pilgrim wondered if the kid had wiped the milk off his lip. He couldn’t be more than twenty-three or so, bespectacled and thin. He had more opinions than experience.