Ben inhaled deeply. “Sorry, Jack. She just scared the shit out of me.”
I heard Griffin making his way down the aisle toward us, opening compartment doors one by one.
People, bodies, in beds in most of the compartments, but we’d found one that was unoccupied and arranged as perfectly as it would have been at the moment the train left its last station.
I said, “We can sleep in here later.”
The last car before the locomotive had the most people in it. There were twenty-two of them—we counted them. They were all soldiers, dressed in uniforms, their canvas duffel bags with stenciled names lined perfectly beside one another atop the luggage racks.
Ben dropped his spear. It clattered on the stained linoleum.
“They have guns!” Ben rushed past me.
I saw them, too.
In Marbury, guns made gods of boys like us.
Every one of them, save one, had been shot through the side of his head. Brown fireworks of blood were sprayed everywhere, in every direction imaginable. Some of the men still clutched their pistols in their leathered grips. A few of the guns rested in the place where the final spasms of death delivered them.
Suicide.
Every one of them. Griffin didn’t know; I was sure of that.
Ben froze in his tracks. “Jack, these guys are…”
“I know,” I said.
Ben swallowed and looked at me.
There was one rifle. It had a folding stock that had been collapsed, held upright between the thighs of a soldier who was seated on the floor, his thumb still curled around the trigger, his mouth hanging open at the end of the barrel, a whale spout of brown blood and crystallized bits of his head splashing upward along the fading rose patterns on the wallpaper of the car.
I watched as Ben scanned around the room from one body to another. I thought he was trying to read the names on the soldiers’ uniforms.
“What do we do?” Griffin said.
“We take guns now,” I said. “That’s a good thing, Griff. We take guns, then we close this place up. And let’s get us some clothes from these soldiers’ bags. Then we’ll see if we can’t find something for us to eat and drink. It’s a good thing, Griff.”
Twenty-Six
It was a good thing.
The three of us stripped, naked and dirty. Ben began opening the soldiers’ bags. I stood, twisting my head back so I could see the stitches Griffin had put into my skin. It was time to take them out.
Hanging on the wall beside a fire extinguisher was a metal case with a red cross painted on it. I pried it open and fingered through the contents: bandages, silver tubes with antibiotic ointment—they looked like the same stuff Freddie Horvath put on my ankle one night in that other hell—latex gloves, tape, tweezers, scissors.
And it was all the same, I thought—here, Freddie’s house—all connected. Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe none of it was real.
“Hey, Griff. Come help me get these stitches out.”
Ben continued digging through the bags, laying garments out, sometimes holding them up, squinting to read the tags that told the size of the men who’d never wear such things again.
Griffin, a moving skeleton of a boy, looking even smaller and more fragile without any clothes to cover him, took the scissors I held and began snipping away at his lacework. When he finished, he rubbed antiseptic over the places where the arrow had gone through me and we taped the wounds over with gauze and medical wrapping that still smelled like candy.
“I think you’re going to be okay,” Griffin said.
“I don’t have a choice.”
A tapping sound. A cylinder of white tape rolled down the aisle toward our feet, and we looked back and saw Seth, standing at the end of the car, watching us.
“Okay. You can get the fuck out of here now,” Griffin said.
The ghost faded, just slightly, and hunched down on his calves between two dead soldiers. Seth watched me.
I felt lighter, somehow. I tried looking at Seth’s eyes, but he turned his face down.
Ben began passing out clothes to us. We dressed. The boys couldn’t remember wearing socks or underclothes before, it had been too long since the start of the war, since they’d been left alone. They wondered how it was that I even knew what to do with the things. I had to show them how to dress.
Griffin didn’t like the way the underwear felt.
“It’s too much,” he said. He started taking them off.
“Keep them on,” I said. “You’ll get used to it. It’s better for you. Trust me. Clothes are a good thing, okay?”
Griffin didn’t say anything. Ben didn’t like the way they felt, either. I could tell.
The pants we took were lightweight fatigues, camouflaged, with lots of deep pockets, button flies, and cinches inside the waists that held them up snug on our hips. We tied the pant legs tight to our ankles and fed thick webbed belts through the hoops. We tucked our shirts in, too, and each one of them had name tags sewn across the left side of the chest.
Ben’s and Griffin’s shirts came from the same bag. They said STRANGE across the pockets. Mine said RAMIREZ.
“That’s a good name for you guys,” I said. “Probably the best name you could have in a place like this.”
Ben smiled. I hadn’t seen the boys smile. “You want to trade shirts, Jack?”
I picked up the scissors Griffin used to snip out my stitches and began cutting the threads that held my name tag over the pocket.
“I’ll be the guy with no name,” I answered.
The boots we found were canvas with heavy treads. They’d never even been worn. They laced halfway up our shins.
Griffin didn’t know how to tie shoes, but he learned after just one try at it.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” I said. I stood there, looking at Griffin and Ben in those clean clothes, the first time I’d ever seen them fully dressed.
Griffin shook his head.
Next thing: the guns.
We took as much as we could carry. We went through every soldier’s bags and clothing and then carefully sorted and stacked every container of ammunition and metallic pouch of food we found on two of the tables.
I took the rifle. I slung the strap across my collar so it hung diagonally behind my wounded hip. Each of us fastened two semiautomatic handguns—9 millimeters and .45s—to our belts. It was all so heavy, but I could sense how much stronger we’d become just by touching those things.
Seth stayed at the far end of the car, drifting back and forth like some sort of fading pendulum from one row of windows to the opposite. Sometimes he’d disappear entirely, especially if I caught him looking at me, and when he did, there would always soon come the impatient sound of his rolling and tapping noises.
For some reason, I just didn’t feel sorry for those soldiers the way I’d felt for some of the other people in that train. The car was a gruesome mess when we opened it, and it was that much worse when we left it and pushed the door shut behind us. The bodies were scattered everywhere, mostly stripped of their guns, pockets out turned or torn completely open.
We went back through the sleeping car with its shattered windows and cracked paneling.
Ben shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry about this, Jack. I got scared.”
Griffin said, “Shit, Ben. No one cares.”
I put my hand on Ben’s shoulder and pushed him along, past the compartment where we’d sleep, to the buffet.
Ben broke into the car’s water lines and fashioned a siphon pump from a hose and mop bucket. We’d be able to save the horses now, I thought.
“Don’t drink too much,” I warned. “It’ll get us all sick.”
There were so many treasures in that dining car we didn’t know where to begin.
Griffin went behind the bar and placed a few bottles of liquor on the countertop. He opened an amber bottle of whiskey and sniffed at it, grimacing.
“Let me see that,” Ben said.
I watched
him with a look he understood to mean no.
“Don’t be stupid, Ben.”
“Just a little.”
I watched him tip the bottle back, counted the gulps he took. Five. Despite the fact that Ben Miller didn’t have the guts to watch little Griffin pull an arrow from my side and sew me shut with the rags of my own useless shirt, he was a survivor; and in my reckoning, both those STRANGE boys were monstrously tougher than I could ever be.
“You too,” Ben said. “Just a little.”
I shook my head. Griffin held up a football-size can that contained a whole chicken. And Ben argued, “We’re never going to have a day like this again, Jack. Never. So have a little bit, too.”
I looked at Griffin. “See if you can find a way to open that, Griff.” Then I took the bottle from Ben and said, “But you’re not going to have any, right? It’s not good for you, Griff.”
“Fuck no I don’t want any of that shit.” Griffin wiped his nose along the sleeve of his shirt. “And what do you know what’s good for me? You told me to put all these clothes on—that they’re good for me, too—and my nuts feel half-strangled. As soon as you two pass out, I’m taking this shit off again.”
Ben laughed.
I drank.
It felt real good.
I sat down at a table and smiled, alternating my glances from the stacks of food Griffin had been arranging, to the crooked feet of the three dead train workers we’d hidden in a corner, and the lonely half-shadow of Seth, who sat across the aisle from me, watching.
Before I’d eat, I took a bucket of water and another with some dried fruit and old pieces of candy and bread outside for our horses. I made sure they were securely tied to the train; and I walked around the entire length of it one more time. I needed to be certain the harvesters hadn’t followed us, and their chasers behind them, too. When I passed the dining car, Griffin and Ben stood up on their seats and pounded on the window and waved at me.
Ben was drunk.
Even if it would only be a few hours, I knew Ben was right: that we’d never have a day like this again, and it felt like we all were getting more than we’d ever deserve.
You’re just drunk, Jack.
You haven’t gotten away from anything.
The same voice came back. And I tried to think about Conner and Nickie; about Wynn and Stella, but they were difficult to picture, like they were images from a book that I’d read too many years ago to remember how the story came together.
Fuck you, Jack.
It was easy, somehow, to remember Freddie Horvath.
“You ever going to talk to me?”
Seth stood back, a dim shadow at the end of the train, watching me. He dropped his chin and began to fade, but I said, “Goddamnit, Seth, don’t go.”
He held his hand on the side of the train, like he was keeping it in place.
“You were in that room, weren’t you? When Freddie…”
“Yes,” Seth said.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said. “You didn’t have to do it.”
“You remind me of someone.” His voice was just above a whisper.
Then he was gone.
Nighttime in Marbury never turned entirely dark. The horizon stayed white, and the sky overhead became a starless, chalky, ash color; if color’s even a word that could fairly be used to describe anything in this world.
We were full.
Ben and I could hardly stand.
We drank too much.
We followed Griffin through the hallways of death, found our sleeping compartment, and went to bed.
I woke first.
The compartment we’d slept in had four beds, two stacked against either wall. I lay on the bottom, across from Ben. Griffin slept in the berth above me. And every last article of his clothing had been taken off and thrown down into the small space on the floor between the bunk beds. He lay there on his belly, naked on the sheets, barely breathing, with his hand resting on the guns in their canvas holsters beside his pillow. I picked up his scattered clothes and put them on the bed next to him.
I stepped into my pants and laced up my boots. I slipped the sling of my rifle over a bare shoulder. Then I shook Ben’s arm.
“Hey. I’m going out to give the horses some water, okay?”
Ben half-opened his groggy, yellow-crusted eyes.
“What? Oh. Okay, Jack.”
I patted his arm. “That was good shit last night, huh?”
“Heck yeah.”
I went back and forth twice, filling the mop bucket for the horses, bringing them the bits of food we’d scrounged that seemed acceptable to feed them. The day before, I had been certain the horses were going to die, but now they seemed stubbornly restored.
The sky became pale white, the ground was already steaming again before the day fully broke across the Marbury desert.
I’d left my shirt in the room with the boys, and I looked at the pads where Griffin had taped medicine over my wounds. A little pus, some blood. It itched. I’d have our young doctor look at it again, before we’d leave the train for good.
I can’t stay here much longer.
But it was already too late.
I saw the still form of one of the Hunters at the edge of the horizon, silhouetted against the blank sky: tall, lanky, spider arms, he stood perfectly still. And I could see the red mark on his chest, molten, burning like an eye, even at so great a distance.
They all had different marks somewhere on their bodies. They couldn’t be covered, would burn through anything. Beacons. It made them easy to see.
It made it impossible for us to hide.
I was certain he was watching me—they could see better than we could. At the very least, he’d seen the horses, or smelled them.
I crouched against the train, watched him kick up bits of salt dust as he strode, unafraid, coming closer.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The window behind me.
I turned, looked. Nothing.
Tap.
Seth.
Then came the banging, pounding against the glass. I heard things flying around inside the train, crashing against the walls.
He was getting too close.
He carried a hatchet, swinging it casually, pointed downward at the side of his knee. No bow. He would have already shot an arrow at me if he’d had one.
Seth, pounding inside.
“Quit it, Seth!”
I weighed my options: Would I wake Ben and Griffin, or deal with this scout on my own? I dropped to a knee. He was close enough now that I could clearly see him.
He was tall and arrow-thin, naked except for a loose codpiece of braided feathers and blackened, hairy skin tied around his waist on a narrow twine of dried sinew. It was made from a human scalp. They did that. His hair fell past his shoulders in twisted clumps, and oval purple splotches the size of grapefruits painted his sides from the tops of his thighs to his armpits.
Some of them got those spots, too.
The only other thing he wore was a necklace, draped over his shoulders. It had been made from old DVDs.
The mark on his chest burned like a red W, whose twin arrows pointed down to his rippled midsection from each of his nipples. The hand that held the hatchet was a three-fingered claw with long, shining spikes.
Some of them got that, too.
He stared intently at me, had to be wondering why I waited there in the obvious open. He twisted his neck, just a bit, raised his nose, and sniffed the air.
One eye was entirely white. The other was entirely black.
Every one of them had eyes like that.
He crouched, raised the hatchet.
I looked both ways along the length of the train. Things were still bashing against the walls on the inside. Ben and Griffin had to be awake now, I thought.
I unfolded the stock on my rifle and braced it against my shoulder.
The thing came running toward me at a full sprint.
I shot him twice in the neck, and as he spun ar
ound, he made a perfectly spiraled pinwheel of blood around the white ground where he fell silently dead.
I lowered the rifle, stood. Three more waning sprays of blood fountained from the side of his neck. I could hear the thick warm drops pelting his skin. I kept the barrel trained on his head and walked over to the spattered circle of ground where he’d fallen, legs twisted in a ridiculous ballet.
No more breath.
No more blood.
I looked at his face.
I knew him.
Brian Fields, my friend from the Glenbrook cross-country team, lay staring up at the white sky behind me with dead eyes, a hole as big as my hand lay open the side of his neck just below the crease of his young jaw.
“Brian?”
This isn’t fucking happening.
“Brian!”
I spun around, and just then another of the things leapt down from the top of a train car and took me into the ground. His mouth was open, dripping his slobber over my face. I twisted my head to the side and the thing licked my mouth. I saw the teeth, sharp and long; and he squealed and put them right against my chest and bit into me.
I howled, tried to roll over on top of him. I tried pulling my gun around, but the stock was pinned beneath my leg. He clawed at my belly, brought his hand right up into my balls and twisted; and I screamed and let go of my rifle. I fought against his hand and he pulled his face back, mouth open. He was smeared with my blood, but I couldn’t feel where he’d bitten me, only the pain in my crotch, where it seemed my guts were being pulled out from my body.
It was my best friend, Conner Kirk, who was attacking me.
“Conner! What the fuck!”
He tried biting again, aimed for my throat, but I palmed his forehead back. I heard the licking, smacking of his lips.
“Conner!”
Then there came the crack of a gunshot. Conner ducked and rolled off me. He ran away on all fours, scampering like a frightened dog, toward the front end of the train. I looked back and saw Griffin, wearing nothing, trying to steady his .45. Shaking, he took another shot at Conner, hit the locomotive, and Conner disappeared around the front.
I stood up, saw the blood running down my chest, the double moon-arcs of blackened teeth marks above my right nipple. My guts hurt so bad, I bent forward and threw up.