Passenger

  “I’ll fucking blow your head off, kid.”

  I blacked out.

  * * *

  It is not time.

  There are strings—the most delicate imaginable strands—and they connect everything. I think they’re something like the gaps between neurons—the trigger mechanisms in your brain—so that when someone asks you what your phone number is, or how to spell your middle name, you don’t need a roadmap to find your way home, to the right answer, to the real world.

  You just follow the string.

  You mind the gap.

  But what if every time you answered, every destination, gap, each connection on the map, was different, and they were all equally real, correct?

  I am the worm, and I am the hole.

  I am the King of Marbury.

  You can’t just have something like the Marbury lens drop into your hands one day and then not begin to wonder at it, to figure out what the fuck’s been happening to you.

  Wait.

  It didn’t happen to me.

  None of it did. Not from the moment I splashed down on Wynn and Stella’s goddamned floor, and all the stops along Jack’s roadmap: my parents who’d left me on my own, what Freddie Horvath did to me, how Conner and I killed him, Henry Hewitt, Seth, Griffin, Ben, Nickie.

  Nickie.

  Marbury.

  The not-worlds.

  None of it happened to me.

  Everything happened because of me.

  I fucked up.

  It’s the strings. Like tuning a fucking television channel, and there’s always that moment, a fraction of a second spent inside the gap, in between stations when who knows where you’ll end up?

  And I thought, in those moments on the train lying tangled up with Nickie, that I could simply decide to make the randomness end. That this would be Jack’s world from now on. But something happened when I swung that hammer into the lens at the boys’ house.

  It was like swinging a baseball bat through a universe made entirely of spiderwebs.

  The strings were broken, and Jack was trapped.

  All of us were.

  Bouncing around, endlessly.

  Inside a gap.

  * * *

  So I was lying against a corner, my arm trapped beneath me, bloodless and numb, in the space where the floor met the wall.

  Who knew how long I’d been there?

  I had some memory that I’d been dragged down the hallway, tossed into this corner. When I fought them, something hit me in the head.

  Two men talked over me. They sounded agitated, tense. My mouth and nose were full of blood. The taste gagged me, and it felt as though my guts had been yanked out with fishhooks and were stretched along the stinking carpet, trailing all the way back to the spot outside our door where that fuckhead stepped on my balls.

  One of them laughed. “Caught the kid having sex with that girl in one of the compartments.”

  That girl.

  Something about the way he said it, with a certain finality, like they knew the end of our story.

  I felt the jabbing prod from the toe of a boot. It lifted my hip, turned me onto my side.

  “Little fucker didn’t even get his fly buttoned up. Who the fuck’s kids are these nowadays?”

  Funny. Someone laughed about it.

  Open your eyes.

  I slid my hand along the raspy carpeting, up toward my face.

  Inhale.

  The shapes blurred in front of me. The Ranger pulled his boot away from me, and I rolled back onto my stomach. I curled my knees in, tried to get up, moaning, spitting blood into the corner. There were pink roses printed on the wallpaper.

  Nickie.

  I managed to push up to my feet, steadying myself, leaning with my naked shoulder. They had me in some kind of storage car, one for baggage. There were very few seats inside; mostly open floor space with luggage racks that had already been stuffed with canvas duffel bags—the gear for the soldiers.

  Six Rangers stood there, making a semicircle that pinned me against the wall. They all looked so dirty, hungry. Their eyes seemed to say they needed something. Maybe something from me. And every one of them was carrying at least one gun.

  A bloodstain dried in a crusted line from my chin all the way down my belly to the button on my pants, and another handprint of mine was stamped in blood over a pattern of roses on the wall.

  The train stood still, and I could hear people shouting, crying, through the open doorway that led to the other cars.

  “Return to your seats,” I heard someone announcing, a Ranger.

  “Return to your seats immediately. The train has been commandeered.”

  My head began to clear.

  Somewhere, a woman and a little kid were crying, terrified.

  “There’s an army of Hunters ahead. Return to your seats now, or you will be shot.”

  I needed to get to Nickie.

  * * *

  More Rangers begin filing into the baggage car.

  Most of them seem disinterested in me. Half of them are my age, anyway. Maybe they remember being treated exactly like this on their conscription days, how they became men through abuse, the shit they had to go through before they got their issues—the uniforms they wore, the guns they carried.

  Two of them are twin brothers. Just kids, maybe fourteen years old. They look like kids we’d take on in basketball at Steckel Park. The Rangers aren’t picky. They take what they want, even if they have to dress them in clothes that are far too big for them.

  The kids’ last name is Strange.

  This is real.

  I remember who they are.

  In another Marbury, Ben and Griffin wore those boys’ clothes. Everything those kids have on. In another Marbury, we stripped their corpses.

  In another world.

  I can’t look at them.

  I push through the soldiers, toward the doorway. Barefoot, beaten, I’m walking like a drunk.

  At the end of the car, there is a side door that is standing open. A Ranger balances outside on the rocky bed of the train tracks, pissing into the cornfield.

  Maybe something happened to me.

  What’s that in your pocket, Jack?

  This is Marbury.

  It is all so brilliant—the color of the sky, the huge stalks of the green plants that aren’t really corn, the diamondlike glint of light that shines through the arc of the soldier’s piss stream.

  Ramirez appears at the doorway to the next car and blocks my path into the hallway.

  “Where are you going, recruit?”

  Fuck this place.

  “I’m not a recruit. I’m going to get my…”

  “Your what? Girlfriend? Underwear? Shoes? What? Your room’s emptied out, kid.” Then he puffs up his chest and adds, “Recruit.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  Ramirez swallows. He looks out the open door, smirking. Outside, the soldier is buttoning up his pants. He wipes a smear of piss from his hands onto his leg and squints in the sunlight.

  “Fuck her. Last I saw, she was out there. In the field.”

  I feel the blood drain from my head. It is a sickening sensation, like being in a very fast elevator. My knees buckle, and I catch myself on the edge of the doorway.

  “What?”

  Ramirez pushes into me. He smells like sweat. He calls out to the men in the car, “Someone get this kid some clothes!”

  I worm around the sergeant, squeeze into the hallway.

  “Nickie!”

  The sleeper is one car back. I stumble down the aisle between rows of seats. There are a few passengers in here. I don’t look at their faces, and they aren’t moving from their seats. I can tell they’re trying not to look, not to see.

  Ramirez spins around, comes after me.

  “Stop!”

  My foot catches one of the rows of seats. I trip, just as Ramirez fires his rifle. I hear the bullet whiz over my head, the thunk it makes when it cuts a perfect hole into the wall at the e
nd of the car.

  This is real.

  Nickie’s okay.

  She has to be okay.

  This is supposed to be my forever.

  I squeeze between the seat rows, over to the side of the car. I can hear Ramirez stomping down the aisle toward me. There is another side door here. I pull the lever down and slide it open. I fall from the train, land hard on my back against the sharp and grimy rocks of the rail bed.

  My head spins. It is so bright, and my eyes fill with water. I lie there for that brief second and gaze up into a blue I’d never seen before in Marbury. And I can clearly see the gaping, oozing maw of the hole in the sky.

  This is not the world.

  I know what they’ve done to her. I don’t need to see it.

  I sit up. I hurt everywhere. Ridiculously enough, it bothers me that my fly is open. There is rustling in the field, and a group of Rangers, some of them shirtless, sweating, come wading through the green and perfectly lined stalks. They move tiredly toward the train, carrying guns.

  One of them is wearing the T-shirt I’d discarded on the floor beside our bed.

  I feel Ramirez standing behind me. I know he is standing there, that he is pointing his gun at me. I can tell by the way the Rangers in front of me stop and stare, wide-eyed, ready for the show. And I am certain he is just trying to decide how to kill me. The quick way, or maybe the fun way.

  For a moment, I imagine lying beside the pool at Ben and Griffin’s house.

  I look up at the sky.

  I slip my hand inside my pocket.

  I take out the lens.

  twenty-one

  At first, I believed Ramirez shot me in the head.

  I thought, this is what it’s like to die.

  The pain was blinding, deafening, when the red light poured across the horizon and stretched in every imaginable direction. I tried to grab my head, to cover up, but I couldn’t move my arms.

  There must have been a wind.

  But it wasn’t wind.

  I couldn’t feel it.

  And all the stalks in the field collapsed, blown toward me, to lie flattened against the perfect plain of the farmland. In the distance, the wire-frame structures of the windmills crumpled, too, disintegrating, sinking into nothing like ashes from the end of a cigarette.

  “Holy shit!” The sergeant fell back inside the train. The door slammed shut behind him.

  Then came the rain of arrows.

  This is the center of the universe.

  All arrows point to home.

  All arrows point to Jack.

  Beyond the outer edge of the fields, a massive black line had assembled: Hunters, tens of thousands of them. The ones at the back sat atop horses, and were covered with electrified, writhing coats of harvesters. I could hear their shells clicking, the buzzing of their wings. And then came a chorus, the tense snaps from the bowstrings, the whooshing flights of black-fletched arrows that flew in swarms as thick as locust plagues, collecting in a whirring and angry cloud against the sunlight.

  Screams—the shuk shuk shuk of the arrows as they mowed down the Rangers in front of me, every one of them struck dozens of times. The stone arrowheads came down so hard, arcing so steeply, that several of the men’s skulls split open, halved like melons before their thrashing bodies descended to the ground.

  The Rangers had no chance against the onslaught.

  And not one of the arrows so much as fanned air onto me. It was like I wasn’t there at all. When the second wave came, pointless, the gruesome swarm of arrow shafts picketed the ground, reforesting the field in death, hacking apart the corpses of the Rangers who’d made their way in from the field where they’d discarded Nickie.

  Some of the boys were half naked, some wore the cast-off clothes that had been mine. Those who weren’t dead moaned and writhed, pinned into the ground, contributing their innards in great liquid waves to a collective pond of gore that stretched along the entire length of the rail bed as I sat and numbly watched it.

  This is real.

  Everything had gone red.

  The color washed over the world like the spout of a fountain, erupting from the center of my hand.

  A second wind came, the exhalation to the first. It blew out, away from me.

  At first, the arrow shafts shook in the gust. Then the flattened cornstalks began to move, tumbling, lifting, carried back toward the army of the Hunters. The arrows themselves tore free from the ground, twisting in reverse, cracking through the tattered rib cages and splintered heads of the Rangers, blown back, assailing the ranks of archers who’d delivered them.

  The wind continued to howl, smearing everything with blood. And all the fragmented parts of the soldiers’ bodies reanimated, disjointed, separate; they began some ghastly migration—arms, limbless trunks, feet, heads, and hands—away from the train, away from the boy with the broken lens, until the ground was clean again.

  But it didn’t end there. The rocks of the rail bed thundered and clattered, pulverized in the red sky until everything was blanketed in gray dust, salt. I could taste it. The powder covered me, coated my hair, clumped in the sweat under my arms and on my chest, clotted in my nostrils. I closed my eyes.

  I squeezed my hand shut around the broken lens.

  And everything stopped.

  It was so still, so quiet.

  This is Marbury.

  It was me.

  I did this.

  * * *

  I sat there for the longest time, waiting for something, but I didn’t know what.

  Breathing, blinking, looking out at the desiccated blankness of Marbury. Everything was gone.

  But Jack was used to losing things, being left alone.

  In my mind, I tried to devise a way, calculate some mathematically precise method for finding my way back through the broken strings, inside those hours and minutes Nickie and I spent together on the train; looping them around, endlessly, forever.

  I felt paste, salt mud, forming around my eyes.

  I sat there crying.

  This is what it’s like to be dead.

  Fuck you, Jack.

  Finally, I stood up.

  For a moment, I thought about brushing myself off, but that was as pointless as worrying about my unbuttoned fly.

  I looked like a ghost.

  Everything, every spot on my body, was covered in salt. It looked as though I wore some perfect suit, even though the only article of clothing I had on was a pair of pants.

  That, and a broken piece of lens, were all I owned in this entire universe.

  I licked my lips and spit.

  Welcome home, Jack.

  Now this looks like good old Marbury.

  Everything is nothing.

  Everything is everywhere.

  Flat, colorless, and dry—as far as I could see.

  The sky that had been blue and perfect was now shrouded in the washed-out gray of Marbury. Maybe the hole in the sky closed. Who knew? I couldn’t see anything.

  The Rangers were gone. Everything wiped away, or covered under salt and ash. No horizon. No fields. No Hunters.

  No Nickie.

  But when I turned around, the train was still there, sitting behind me, ominous, now buried above its wheels in fine dust that seemed to cough up small unsettled clouds where the last of it came to rest.

  Maybe I was totally crazy, damaged, but it almost felt good to see Marbury again the way it was supposed to be, to stand there, completely alone and abandoned, just like I was the first time I fell into this place.

  It smelled the same, tasted the way I remembered it.

  I slipped the lens back inside my pocket.

  Something moved in the train, inside the car where the Rangers had dumped me after dragging me down the hallway from the sleeper. I could hear it, but nothing showed through the windows. They were as obscured beneath dust as my own skin.

  One of the side doors on the last car had been left open. I could clearly see the gap of the doorway, like the mouth of
a cave facing out onto the storm that wiped everything away from the world.

  Barefoot in the silt that covered the ground, I felt like I was walking on a perfectly clean beach as I made my way toward the open door.

  I should have known not to go inside.

  * * *

  A second-class passenger car: just rows of seats, most of them point forward. Some are grouped together; they face each other over small tables.

  There are fifteen people seated in this car.

  I count.

  Fifteen.

  All of them are dead.

  They look artificial, like clay models that have spent too long inside a kiln. But they are perfectly arranged, seated peacefully, frozen in the final eyeblink of the moment that swept them away.

  I pass through each of the train’s cars, moving toward the last one, where the Rangers have gathered, the place where they’d dumped me facedown in some corner on the floor. In every compartment, more of the same. The people are all dead, hollow mummies that look as though they’ve been sitting on this train for centuries.

  Maybe it has been centuries.

  The dining car is perfectly clean, arranged for the afternoon meals. The three servers, immaculate in white, statues of saints, lie huddled against the far doorway. I have to step over their bodies to make my way through to the next car, and, from there, into the sleeper.

  Ramirez wasn’t lying. I didn’t think he was, anyway. The compartment where Nickie and I had slept together is completely empty. All of my things have been taken. The bedclothes are freshly replaced, changed with cleanly pressed linens, and the other fold-down beds on the opposite wall have been lowered, as though the new passengers, the soldiers, intend on using them for their own rest.

  I don’t think they’ll be sleeping here now.

  I slide the door shut.

  The way into the baggage car is blocked off behind a windowless double door. I wait there, holding my breath, listening. There are Rangers inside the car. I can hear them talking, arguing. I can’t make out the words, but I know they are scared.

  Worse than scared, they sound terrified.

  Panic.

  I don’t care about them at all. I wonder only about those two boys, the twins; what will happen to them? They’re just little kids. I consider opening the doors, going inside, but—really—what will I say?

  Hey, guys, want to go outside and play flashlight tag with Jack?