The ride home
Chapter 10
"Where's Tyler?" Troy asked, scared, waiting for an answer.
Silence.
"Say something, Fred! What happened?!" He grabbed at him hard enough to nearly send the car swerving.
"Calm down, you're gonna get us all killed!" Chase snapped, shoving him back into his seat.
"They got him," Fred said, meeting Troy's eyes in the rearview mirror. "It happened so fast. They just kept coming out of nowhere — we didn't have time to react. Next thing I know, he's on the ground and they're on him."
Troy was left staring down the fact that his best friend of nearly ten years was gone without so much as a goodbye — their last conversation had been him agreeing to stick with Fred. Tears ran down his face as he stared out the window at the sunset.
Nobody said anything else. The rest of the ride back to the hotel passed in dead silence, the kind that fills up a car until it feels like there's no air left in it.
By the time they pulled up to the barricade, Troy still hadn't moved from the window. Chase killed the engine and just sat there a second, hands on the wheel, before finally getting out. He didn't look at Fred either.
Fred sat in the driver's seat a while longer after the other two had gone inside, staring at his own hands like he was expecting to find Tyler's blood still on them, though there wasn't any. There should have been. He almost wished there was.
Inside, word got around fast, the way bad news always does in a building with too many people and not enough distractions. Nobody said Fred's name out loud, not where he could hear it, but nobody looked at him either, and after a while that silence said everything the words would have.
Troy didn't come down for dinner. Chase didn't ask him to.
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