My knife lay pressed to the ground beneath the back of my forearm.
Quinn Cahill.
Quinn found the glasses. I remembered how he was holding them in his hands. It was the last thing I saw.
Before Conner and Nickie.
I sat up in the dirt. I immediately vomited all over myself, down my chest, onto my lap. It was mostly just water. Hot, burning with bile. I remembered drinking the river water. I smelled like algae and puke.
I threw up again.
This was Marbury.
Jack’s fun back-and-forth games.
A seesaw, an arrow.
I am King.
“Quinn?”
I spit.
How long had I been lying here? It couldn’t have been long.
It could have been a lifetime.
I had to get up. I had to get back to Griffin and Ben.
“Hey! Quinn!”
My voice echoed in the black void of the Under.
I got to my feet. I was so dizzy, I had to concentrate on not falling. In one hand I held the light; in the other, my knife. I put them carefully in front of myself, ready to break my fall if I collapsed.
I swept the light around me, everywhere.
Quinn was lying on his back with his face turned away from me.
I had to kill the kid.
He was sick.
He was dangerous.
I was going to kill the kid.
Where do you stick the knife?
Where do you stick the knife so the kid will not fight and scream too much?
“Quinn?” I whispered his name.
The kid was not moving. I knew what it was like. Who knew what world or not-world he was in? Maybe he was whole. Maybe he was decent. Maybe he was lying at the side of a pool in another Glenbrook, talking shit with me and the boys.
I was going to kill the kid.
I moved.
I had to be sure.
“Quinn?”
Nothing.
My stomach twisted and retched. I unfastened Quinn’s pants, pulled them down past his knees so I could see the burning red crook of the mark that snaked through the kid’s pubic hair and curled across the top of his thigh.
He was a monster.
I was a monster, too.
He was not heavy. He did not struggle.
I was the king of all the monsters.
I dragged Quinn Cahill to the edge of the river, rolled him into the water, watched as the soft whiteness of his naked body fluttered toward consciousness and was sucked between the teeth of the churning spill gate.
I vomited again.
I pressed my face down into the dirt and cried.
* * *
At the edge of the river, I drank. It made me feel alive. I slid out of the backpack and lowered myself over the side. I had to get the smell of puke off my skin, out of my pants.
I had to wash my trespassing hands.
Better.
When I climbed out, sloshing, I picked up the pack and turned around, scanning the ground with the flashlight.
Quinn’s solitary boot sat in the dirt, about fifteen feet from where I stood. I walked over to it. When I kicked it, I uncovered the glasses.
Instantly, the dark cavern filled with moving light.
Look away, Jack.
A flash of that cop, Avery Scott, fanning out photographs on a table in a small room with no windows.
Look away.
I shut my eyes, turned my chin back into my shoulder, the way you’d snap your face away from a burning fire. I groped around blindly in the dirt until I had the glasses twisted up inside the sock in my backpack. I felt the wad with my hand, made sure the outer lens was flipped out of place. Then I zipped the pack shut. Hidden again.
“Quinn?” I whispered.
I shined the light out onto the surface of the water, looked for something white, pale.
Nothing.
I picked up the pack and ran into the tunnel, back to where I’d left the boys.
* * *
When I had gone far enough that the pale haze from Griffin’s flashlight glowed dimly at the mouth of the smaller side tunnel, I began to pick up my pace. And every few feet, I’d look back and sweep the beam of my light across the tunnel.
I was sick about what I’d done, what I’d had to do.
I thought about Ben and the boy he killed and then dumped in their swimming pool.
I imagined Quinn Cahill was following me, dripping water, smirking, blazing the red slash, the question-mark brand of disease.
Then I ran toward Griffin’s light.
* * *
It scared the boys when I came clattering up into the rise of the tunnel.
I dropped my flashlight and it clanked against the metal, scattering a frenetic dance of light that looked like a soundless firefight in the dark.
Griffin and Ben looked good. My friends.
It felt like I’d been away for months.
“Jack!” Ben lowered the spear when he recognized me. I could see the energy in his eyes. He was back, healthy.
And Griffin said, “He’s fucking clean.”
I put my arms around the boys; squeezed into them with my face between theirs. I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t let it happen. I had to force myself to think about something else, not Nickie, not Quinn, not what happened on the train, or back at the river.
Think about getting out of here.
“How long was I gone?”
I let go of the boys, stood back, wiping my face.
Griffin shrugged. “Seemed like a couple hours. I wanted to go looking for you, but Ben wouldn’t do it.”
“I found a way out. We need to move.”
“Jack.” Ben’s voice was low. I already knew what he was going to say. “What happened to the kid?”
I looked directly at each of them.
I didn’t have to spell it out.
“It’s done.”
Griffin bent down, picked up the second pack. I heard him mutter, “Fucking bastard.”
“We have to just get out of this shithole,” I said.
I shook my head, trying to get the image of Quinn out of my mind.
Ben’s eyes were locked on mine. I could tell he understood exactly what I was thinking.
He said, “Which way?”
And we kept Griffin between us as I led them out into the main tunnel.
* * *
It energized the boys to see the pale light on the other side of the river, even if it was still only Marbury up there. At least it showed a way out of here.
And anything was better than here.
I shined my light onto the rushing surface, down toward the falls.
“Right there is how I got myself clean, Griff.”
“Is it good water?” he said.
“It’s good.”
Griffin seemed to be calculating the distance, the flow. He shined his light at the edge, where the river tumbled over the precipice and into a chasm so big and dark, it looked like a starless and growling universe.
That was where Quinn’s body was now.
Ben knew his brother was worried.
He said, “You can make it, Griff.”
Griffin shook his head and sighed. “Shit.”
We sat down in the dirt and removed our boots. We stuffed them inside the packs that Ben and I would pull across the river, last, with Griffin.
I uncoiled the nylon rope and tied it to my waist as tightly as I could. Then I fed the opposite end through the straps on the backpacks and knotted it, finally, in a loop around Griffin’s chest.
“Listen. Don’t be scared. When I get to the other side, sit down, so we can anchor Ben. He can hold on to the rope and use it as a guide to pull himself across. Once he’s over, I want you to put the flashlights inside one of the packs. Then Ben and me can pull you over.”
Griffin nodded.
Ben said, “Let’s do this. Let’s get the fuck out of here, Jack.”
So I dove into the river, as far out from
the edge as I could jump.
The swim was much farther and more difficult than I thought it would be. Before I got to the other side, I felt my legs begin to drag below me. I was out of breath, and started drifting toward the falls.
If I had been doing it alone, I probably wouldn’t have made it across. But I just couldn’t stand the thought of letting Griffin and Ben down again.
When I finally did pull myself from the river, the flashlights on the other side looked like tiny specks—fireflies—and my muscles burned so bad that I couldn’t stand up.
I heard the boys shouting to me.
I blew long strands of snot from my nose and yelled back to them.
“Ben! Wait! I’m not ready yet!”
I wanted to get directly across from the flashlights, so I could make the rope shorter, tighter for him. When I was in place, I gave Ben the signal to come, and told Griffin to get down onto the ground.
I’d underestimated the force of the current on Ben. The rope tore into his palms, blistering his flesh, and the tighter I tried to pull it, the deeper down the water seemed to drag his light body.
Ben nearly drowned.
I couldn’t believe how long that kid could hold his breath.
The pull of Ben’s body in the water dragged Griffin through the dirt. I watched the glint of his flashlight as it scooted downstream and closer to the edge, but there was nothing any of us could do now.
When Ben finally got over to my side of the river, his pants were pulled completely off, inside out, twisted around his ankles so bad that he had to flop up onto the shore like a beached dolphin.
It took him several awkward minutes to free his feet from the tangle of his dungarees.
“Fuck that,” Ben said. He spit and held his hands out like they’d been burned.
“Hang on, Griff! I’ll tell you when!”
I took up all the slack in our rope. Ben pulled his pants up. I could tell how much his hands hurt, but Ben would never say anything about stuff like that. So I wrapped a double loop around his waist and said, “Don’t grab it, dude. Your hands are fucked up. Let’s pull him over with our legs, by walking that way.”
I pointed back toward where the gray light seeped down into the Under.
Ben nodded. “Okay.”
Then I yelled for Griffin to jump, and Ben and I nearly ran as we pulled the kid over to our side as fast as we could.
When he came up, Griffin gagged and coughed up big mouthfuls of river water. The weight of the packs had pulled him under. We had no way of knowing the kid was submerged for his entire trip across the river.
But at least the three of us made it over, alive.
So far.
But the fucking flashlights had been destroyed by the water.
So we had to guess at which boots belonged on whose feet. We were certain we’d all gotten it wrong, too, but we had to move quickly in the dark.
None of us wanted to spend another minute in the Under.
“At least we have something to aim for,” I said.
So we ran toward the light.
twenty-four
None of us had any idea how long we’d been in the Under.
But when we made it to the source of the light, I saw that it was daytime on the outside; could smell that it had just finished raining.
Great.
Hunters, spiders, worms, and some lost boys from California who didn’t belong here.
The food chain.
And it was impossible to tell exactly where we had arrived in Glenbrook, or not-Glenbrook.
Our way out was obstructed by a wall of junk: enormous broken boulders of concrete, an overturned fire engine, the remains of a crumpled mobile home, and what looked like about three-fourths of the tar-papered and shingled roof from a gas station. The gaps we found in the barrier weren’t big enough for Ben and me to squeeze through. When we tried to, we ended up scraping gashes on our bellies and backs, so we abandoned attempts to get out in several places before Griffin finally managed to wriggle through an opening that was just wide enough for us to follow him.
Once we crawled out, the three of us sat there on a chunk of cement, dazed, raked with scrapes that looked like claw marks across our chests. We stared down at a concrete flood basin that widened out and dipped away from the piles of wreckage blocking the way back into the Under.
“I’d rather fucking die than go back down there,” Ben said.
“I have a feeling whoever piled all this shit up here was thinking the same thing,” I said. “Or they just wanted to keep what’s in there from ever getting out.”
“Any idea where we are?” Griffin said.
I looked around.
Nothing.
I shook my head.
So we sat there and waited while the rainwater receded. None of us was too eager to get to his feet and commit to a new direction.
I opened the backpack and took out one of our water bottles. I felt for the glasses.
A habit.
I always felt for the glasses.
We had one can of stewed tomatoes and a can of something called hominy, which I’d never heard of before in my life. Still, it was food, and after I opened the cans, we passed them around and dipped our fingers into them, scooping out what we could.
And when the cans were empty, I wedged them down into a crack between the chunks of concrete.
Griffin nodded his head. “That was good. Thanks.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The water eventually disappeared. The ground dried. For some reason it was incapable of absorbing anything; so it returned to its usual ash and dust. To get out, we needed to climb the walls of the channel. It was the only way for us to get some idea of where we were, to see if there was anything I could use as a landmark to direct us toward the old ag school, where we might find horses.
The sides of the ditch were slanted concrete. They were steeper and higher than they looked from where we’d been sitting. Our boots couldn’t grip at such an angle, and we ended up having to pull ourselves to the top by crawling on our raw bellies.
When we got up, and could finally see beyond the concrete walls of the channel, all I could guess was that we had somehow ended up far outside of what used to be Glenbrook.
There was nothing at all that looked familiar to me here.
I could see the lost expressions on the other boys’ faces, too.
On the opposite side of the canal, there was what looked like an auto salvage yard. Of course I knew it wasn’t actually a salvage place. Maybe it had been a commuter parking lot at one time. It was filled with cars, trucks, even a few school and transit buses. Maybe half of the vehicles had been turned completely over, or were resting on their sides.
Ben nodded his chin at one of the buses. “Skulls.”
Even as far across the wide channel as we were, we knew they were skulls. Skulls had a certain shape; a color that you never saw on anything else.
Everyone in Marbury knew what skulls looked like.
And we knew what they smelled like, too.
A row of them—one above each broken window—adorned the rusting roof of a school bus that sat crookedly on its axles next to the bent supporting galvanized poles that at one time held a chain-link fence in place.
Hunters liked to decorate with their castoffs.
We saw a few harvesters crawling around on the outside of the bus, too. Their presence meant that some of the dead in the yard were recent kills.
I looked back over the vacant terrain on our side. There was nothing to see except for the dead skeleton of an old oak tree and the remains of two homes: a crumbling chimney column that marked one of them, and an empty frame for a garage door on the other.
That was it.
“We’ve got to get as far away as we can. I don’t think there’s any of us left at all around here.”
And Griffin said, “Fucking Odds.”
* * *
So we set off in a direction I could only assume was east.
br /> Once we’d passed beyond the wreckage of the homes, the ground rose in gentle undulations.
There had been a housing tract outside of Glenbrook called The Knolls, and I felt like this could be it—if I imagined that subdivision being wiped out in a nuclear flame.
I’d used my knife to cut out the lining of one of my pockets, and this I fashioned into a sort of fingerless glove that I kept tied tightly on my right hand. The boys knew why. They’d seen what happened to me on the roof at Quinn’s firehouse, and ever since we’d stumbled out from the Under I worried about keeping the scar on my palm covered.
We walked through fields that had been littered with bones and the small things that could offer quiet testimony to a different world: empty eyeglass frames, a microwave oven, a television remote control, the front door of a dishwasher. And with every step we would kick up and uncover from the ash smaller clues of a different past—the shining curve of a compact disc, acid-encrusted batteries, and the constant scattering of bricks.
Griffin stopped suddenly. “I smell horses.”
I kept my eyes on the kid, watched how his nostrils flared, chin pivoted, and his stare focused, so alert, scanning for what he knew had to be out there.
Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but as soon as he’d said it, I could smell them, too.
A sudden rush of adrenaline electrified me. Tense, muscles twitching, I spun around. But there was no place we could hide. There was nothing here; only trash and bones.
It was habit, survival. The three of us faced outward with our backs forming a triangle so tight we were practically leaning into one another. Ben had his spear ready, and I held the knife.
Griffin didn’t have anything.
I saw them first.
They appeared like smoky black phantoms through the ashen fog kicked up by the flat and shoeless hooves of the animals; coming slowly into focus through the scrim and swirl of the constant Marbury haze.
They were neither Hunters nor Rangers; I could tell that right away, but it didn’t lessen the tension at all.
I pointed. “Over there.”
The boys turned, watched the riders, who seemed to hesitate, clump together.
I slid my pack from my arms without taking my eyes from the horses. I let it drop into the ash behind me.
I needed to get the lens, I thought.
The lens fucks with everyone here.
Except for us. The people who don’t belong in Marbury.