Passenger

  “Okay.”

  “Be careful.”

  Then Seth put his hands around mine and vanished. I could feel something like cool water flowing into the cut on my hand, and it made me not so scared. It felt good. I closed my hand tightly, then opened it.

  I unwrapped the bandage and dropped it onto the floor.

  The line on my palm matched the edge of the broken lens, the rent in the sky.

  “Seth?” I called out. “Seth?”

  I heard something rolling down the staircase, tapping every plank on the way to the bottom landing. That was how the kid did things. Seth was gone.

  It was time for me to leave, too.

  I fished the broken lens out from my pocket, and then dropped it down inside the sock with the other glasses. For just a moment, I wondered what might happen if I held the Marbury lens up to the sky, if I would see the red light that Conner had described.

  Jack was afraid.

  I wound the sock tightly and tucked it down inside the waist of my pants.

  The food and water were still sitting, wrapped in the blanket on the floor near the front door. My hand felt better, stronger.

  I slung my bundle over one shoulder and left the house.

  * * *

  I should have stolen that kid’s speargun.

  In Marbury, there was nowhere to hide for long, and now I had to watch out for two different sets of enemies: Rangers and Hunters. Maybe Quinn Cahill, too, if he was mad enough about Jack stealing things from him.

  One time, as I walked down between ruined rows of buildings that marked where Main Street had been, I heard the sound of horses approaching, and so took cover beneath a flat sheet of roofing plywood that lay inside the burned-out shell of a hair salon. I stayed there and watched while a group of Rangers rode past, slow and nervous.

  And they weren’t separated out into teams the way that Conner said, but at the front of the pack there were two girls—only two. One of them was pregnant. She was dressed mostly in black and her hair was shorter than mine.

  I knew it had to be Anamore Fent, from the way Conner had described her to me, and I knew they were looking for me, too. Me and Conner.

  Just behind the two captains rode the old man with his accordion. He started to play just as they passed in front of the building where I hid, and the preacher snapped his head from side to side like he sensed I was nearby.

  Maybe I was just fooling myself because he scared me.

  I counted as they passed me.

  Twenty-eight Rangers behind the two girls at the lead.

  It must have been all that remained of the five teams.

  It looked like they’d packed everything they owned on their horses. They were leaving, and I knew where they would go. I hoped Conner was far enough in front of them that he would never see them again.

  Maybe they would give up looking for me, too.

  After they disappeared, I waited nearly an hour before crawling out from under the collapsed roof. It was getting late; I had to keep moving.

  * * *

  I made it back to Forest Trail Lane without running into anyone or anything else after that. At times, I’d turn around quickly, thinking that I might catch a glimpse of a Hunter sniffing the air after me, or maybe see that crazy redhead kid slinking along, smiling, aiming his speargun, waiting for me to make a stupid mistake.

  In Marbury, there was nowhere to hide. If someone wanted me bad enough, I was dead meat.

  * * *

  First came the lightning in the late afternoon, and then the thick blobs of metallic rain that hit so hard it stung. Rainwater puddled almost immediately. I had no choice; I had to get inside.

  I pounded on the small door at the side of the garage, hammering with the edge of my fist until it began to go numb.

  “Ben! Griff! Please, let me in!”

  In less than a minute, it was as though I’d been standing fully clothed in a shower. The gray water pooled along the side of the house, flowing into a small river that ran back beneath the wrought-iron fence and toward the pool full of junk.

  A black worm snaked over the concrete slab at my feet.

  I rolled the edge of my boot sole over it, cut the thing in half, and kicked it away.

  I pounded on the door again.

  “Ben Miller! It’s me, Jack!”

  Then I heard something move on the other side of the door. Someone began clearing away the barricade they built when Ben and his brother kicked me out of the garage.

  I looked down. The water came up to the edge of the slab. If they didn’t let me in soon, I thought, I’d have to try climbing up the outside of the house. I didn’t want to fuck with those black things again.

  The door cracked open.

  In the sash of blank light, I could see just one of Ben Miller’s eyes and the tip of the sharpened steel spear held in his grip.

  He looked different. His eye was sunken in, like he’d been starving to death. It was terrible to see.

  Ben seemed to be trying to focus on my face, then he looked down the length of my body.

  “Jack? Is it you?”

  I was torn between wanting to shove my way through the narrow crack of doorway he braced with his foot, so I could hug my friend—it really was Ben Miller; he was here now, with me in this fucked-up place—and worrying about the black worms that began writhing up through the building water.

  “It’s me, Ben. I’ve been waiting for you. I have food.”

  Ben swallowed and turned his face back. I could see someone move in the dimness of the garage. It was Griffin.

  But he kept his spear pointed toward me. “Is it really you?”

  I said, “Mind the gap, Ben. Remember? Mind the gap.”

  He opened the door.

  * * *

  As miserable as Ben Miller and Griffin Goodrich looked when I first woke up here—lost, sharing the floor of their garage with a dead soldier—they looked that much worse, weaker and sick, now. They hadn’t been eating; I could tell. They didn’t have any water to drink.

  That was bad.

  And they backed away from me, scared, when I came inside.

  Once I shut the door, it was almost too dark to see anything in the garage. I smelled the decaying rot of the dead soldier lying at the bottom of the main door, and I could sense by how they backed away from me that Ben and Griffin didn’t know whether I was even real or not.

  Dripping on the floor, I waited for them to do something.

  I put the package of things I’d stolen from Quinn Cahill down next to my feet.

  The rain roared against the outside of the house.

  “Thanks for letting me in.”

  Ben’s spear was still angled in my direction.

  “Where you been, Jack?” he said.

  “Fuck, Ben. Where do you think I’ve been?”

  Griffin stood beside his older brother. “You’re not sick, are you? You don’t have—you know—don’t have the bug?”

  “I’m not sick, Griff.”

  “Show us,” Ben said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “What?”

  “Show us you don’t have a mark,” Griffin said. “There was an Odd came here yesterday, looking for help. He had it. We didn’t let him go. We couldn’t. So, you better prove it.”

  Ben and Griffin had to kill a kid.

  “Take everything off, Jack,” Ben said. “That’s how it’s got to be. Then we’ll know it’s you.”

  I sighed. “Fuck it, Ben. I brought you guys food and water.”

  “You want to go back outside?”

  “Okay, Ben. Okay.”

  It made me feel like I was under arrest.

  Marbury was a prison, anyway. So nothing mattered.

  Fuck this place.

  So I did what he said. I stood there, naked, with my arms raised, turned around.

  Prison.

  “There. Are you satisfied I’m not one of them, Ben?”

  “Sorry, Jack.”

/>   And Griffin said, “Is it really you?”

  “Fuck.”

  I picked up my pants. They dripped metal-smelling rainwater. I wrung them out and managed to squeeze back into them without tearing them too much more than they already were. I put the sock with my glasses inside the bundle of food, and left everything else I’d been wearing on the floor of their garage.

  Then Griffin pushed past Ben and grabbed me around my chest.

  “I’m sorry, too, Jack,” he said. “This place is really fucked up.”

  “I got some stuff,” I said. “You need to get something in you.”

  * * *

  I followed the boys back inside their house.

  It was dark; the windows had all been covered by anything that could obscure their frames: upended furniture, mattresses that coughed tufts of stuffing from gashes, even strips of flooring that had been ripped up from the back of the kitchen, where naked joists lay exposed above nothing but dirt and trash that looked like it had been piling up there for years. And all the wall sockets and light fixtures had scorched burns around them.

  Ben said, “I know you’re the prisoner the Rangers came tearing through here, looking for, three days ago. They said they were after you, and they said Conner’s name, and another guy, too.”

  “Jay Pittman.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  I remembered the number on my shirt.

  “When did you get here?” I asked.

  “That same morning, before the Rangers came.” Ben stopped right there in the hallway. “I was so scared. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, Jack. I thought we were home.”

  “I was here once before that. You threw me out, Ben.”

  He knew it, too.

  “Right. I … I’m sorry, Jack. It’s just, I didn’t think me and Griff were going to make it. We never thought we’d find our way back without you.” Ben turned down the hallway beneath the stairs.

  “Well, it wasn’t you, Ben. Or Griffin. Not really.” I swallowed. “And I went back to Glenbrook. But everything there is different now, too. It’s all fucked up.”

  “Like how?” Griffin said.

  Like you’re dead inside a fucking trash barrel, Griff.

  “It’s … It’s not real,” I said. “It’s not really Glenbrook.”

  “Well, in that case, welcome home, Jack,” Ben said.

  Yeah.

  The boys’ house was laid out the same, just as I’d expected, but it looked like it had been through an earthquake. Worse.

  At the end of the hall, where it teed into Ben’s and Griffin’s rooms, Ben pulled back a baseboard. There was a handle there, and he lifted a hatch door that had been perfectly invisible.

  I could see the top of a ladder that dropped down into the blackness beneath the house. This was new.

  Or something.

  “We’re going down in there,” Ben said.

  Griffin climbed down first, and I lowered my bundle of food to him after he’d gotten a weak flame burning on some sort of candle. I followed him, and finally, Ben sealed us inside with a four-by-four post that deadbolted the hatch.

  “This is the box,” Griffin said. “This is where we spend our nights. You know. That’s when the Hunters come through.”

  “Here,” I said, opening the blanket. “I have good water.”

  The box was something like a bomb shelter. Griffin’s dad built it at the beginning of the war. The walls were concrete, but they seeped water along the upper corners. Nothing substantial, though. At least it was safe from the worms.

  That was about all there was to it, and it was aptly named.

  There were two narrow sets of bunk beds against one wall, a wooden bench, and a card table that held the boys’ little candle. I figured they didn’t burn it too often; that today was like a birthday party or something.

  A stained plastic five-gallon pail sat in one corner. I didn’t need to ask what that was for.

  Both the boys looked like skeletons, like the gruesome images of prisoners you’d see from ancient wars.

  Ben half squatted against the ladder and watched while I unscrewed the top to the old milk jug and passed it over to Griffin.

  Ben watched Griffin drink. He rubbed his eyes. I thought he was crying.

  He said, “It’s good—lucky—you found us, Jack. I’m sorry about your clothes. After what we seen, I was scared it wasn’t really you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, dude. We’re here now. It’s okay.”

  Griffin handed the jug to me, but I passed it over to Ben without taking a sip.

  “What happened to Conner?” Griffin asked.

  “I know where he is, Griff. He’s going to be okay.”

  I heard every swallow Ben took from the water in the plastic jug, how he exhaled a sigh when he tipped it down.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Another Odd. A kid named Quinn Cahill.”

  “Did you have to kill him?” Griffin asked.

  I shook my head. “I stole it from him. He’s going to be pissed about it, but he’s got plenty. Here. You guys need some food.”

  I began placing the things I’d taken from Quinn out onto the table. I had a can of evaporated milk, some mandarin orange sections, beans, a small ham, and at least a dozen more cans that had no labels. I figured we’d save the ones without labels until we were really desperate. Desperate enough to maybe eat dog food.

  “Well, whoever he is, thanks and Merry Christmas to Quinn Cahill,” Ben said.

  I smiled. “Yeah. Thanks and Merry Christmas to the wack job, wherever he is right now.”

  Then I took out my knife and asked Griffin, “What do we eat first?”

  * * *

  Things were different; I knew that.

  And we were all tired.

  I tried to explain to them, to piece together what had happened to me and Conner, about how all our paths had crossed before any of us really knew what was going on here, but it was a difficult map to draw out from memory.

  And then Griffin said, “I’m tired of all this, Jack. I want to go home. I want my mom and dad.”

  What could I say?

  And I’ve always wanted my mom and dad, goddamnit. It’s not my fault.

  But if it wasn’t my fault, then whose was it? I fucked these kids up. I never should have brought them here in the first place, and now the lens was broken, and we were trapped.

  You fucked things up good this time, Jack.

  As far as I knew, none of us could ever go back home.

  Ben took a deep breath. He just sat there, chewing, watching me, like he was waiting to see if I could fix everything on the spot.

  And I almost choked when I said, “I’m sorry.”

  But I couldn’t look Griffin in the eye.

  Ben put the tip of his finger down on the table between us and traced out a jagged line. “That kid yesterday had a mark shaped like this right here.”

  He put his left hand on his ribs, just below his right arm.

  “You know how they get those marks on them,” he said. “So I killed him, Jack. Didn’t have a choice. You know, he’d just come back for us. It’s dumb, ’cause I know I’ve killed things before here. Lots of times. But this is me, Jack. Me. From Glenbrook. Me in tenth grade. I don’t belong here.”

  I looked from Griffin to Ben. I couldn’t eat any more.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Griffin sniffed.

  I was afraid he was crying, so I kept my eyes locked on Ben’s.

  And he said, “It took a long time for that kid to die. A real long time. It was harder than you’d think. You know, when someone doesn’t want to die. I pushed him into the pool when I was done with it.”

  I reached down to the floor and picked up the sock where I’d stashed the broken lens, the glasses. “Here.”

  I placed the lens in the center of the table. I held out my hand so I could see how the pink scar on my palm matched up to the jagged edge.

  ?
??Can you see anything in it?” I said.

  The boys leaned over. Each of them put their eyes directly above the lens.

  Then they both sat back in their places. They didn’t have to answer. For us, the Marbury lens was dead.

  That door was locked.

  “I think it can be fixed, but I’m going to need to find Conner.”

  “How did you get back to Glenbrook?” Griffin asked.

  I pulled the glasses out and placed them beside the lens.

  “These. But it isn’t Glenbrook,” I said.

  Ben picked up the glasses, peered through the lenses from both sides. “Can I try?”

  He looked at Griffin and bit his lip.

  I thought about it. The small green lens was flipped out of position. They just looked like old-fashioned airman’s goggles to me. But I knew what they did, too.

  Ben pushed the table, startling me. “Jack. I said, could I try them?”

  “What if we lose you, Ben?”

  “Then Griff follows me. And you can do whatever you decide.”

  I couldn’t stop him. I’d done too much to them, anyway.

  “I can’t look,” I said. “When you put them on, you flip this little one on top.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben held the glasses up to his face. “Don’t look, Jack.”

  I lowered my eyes, studied one of the holes on the left leg of my pants. It looked like a sea anemone. I wondered if such words existed here. Then I heard the sound of Ben as he put the glasses back down on the table.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Black. I couldn’t see anything, Jack.”

  “Let me try,” Griffin said.

  But Ben covered the boy’s hand. “Not if I can’t go.”

  That was done.

  I have to admit I was relieved. The biggest part of me was terrified that Ben and Griffin would both end up somewhere and I’d never find them again; that maybe, eventually, all four of us would be trapped in separate universes, and they’d each be worse than the other.

  I gathered up the glasses and the broken lens and hid them away.

  Ben said, “You told me what it meant, Jack. If you looked through the lens and saw nothing.”

  “I don’t know what anything means,” I said. I wanted Ben to just drop it, change the subject. But what else are you going to talk about when you’re buried alive, inside a cement coffin?