Because if they were Rangers or Hunters, we were certainly going to be killed. But here, in Marbury, those riders could have been something even worse.
I opened the pack.
Ben whispered, “What are you doing?”
And Griffin said, “They’re kids.” He tapped my shoulder. “Jack, they’re Odds.”
I looked up. I already held the broken lens, covered in my hand. I slipped it inside my pocket.
The group was clearer now, maybe a hundred yards away, riding down the gradual slope of the knoll like it was covered in soft November snow. There were seventeen of them, all boys, with several riderless horses, packed and tethered in a line.
Odds.
It was difficult to say whether or not they noticed us standing there. In the fog, the three of us, skinny, wearing nothing more than ash-coated rags for pants, may have looked like just another random chunk of garbage, unworthy of any careful attention.
But the group continued slowly, deliberately toward us.
And riding at the point was a man who wore a loose duster coat and a dirty cloth hat that didn’t fully contain his sand-colored locks of hair. He was not just another Odd. I could tell by how he carried himself, adult-like, even though he looked like he was hardly out of his teens by much, and that was evidenced by the scant and uneven blond beard that curled in gapped wisps under his jaw and nowhere else on his face.
His gray eyes were pinned on me like he was waiting for me to step forward and say something to him.
I wondered if he recognized me.
Because I knew who he was.
I was looking right at Henry Hewitt, the man with the glasses. The guy who opened the door into the prison of Marbury for me the first time.
Henry was the reason I was here.
I stepped toward him as he rode closer.
Ben put his hand on my shoulder, like a warning, trying to pull me back.
But I slid my knife into its sheath and said, “I know that guy, Ben. I’ve known him a long time.”
I couldn’t help but think about all the other times, the other places, I’d seen Henry Hewitt. Most of those times, I hated him intensely for what he did to me, or for his inability to answer my questions. But now I saw Henry as a kind of anchor, a lifeline back to the world where we belonged. Now, maybe, he could finally help me.
I put my hand up as he rode to meet me.
The other Odds stayed back, watching, the horses uninterested in anything that was happening in front of them.
“Hello, Henry,” I said. “I can’t say it’s a funny thing, running into you here. Welcome home.”
Henry froze. Then he leaned forward, squinting and straining as though he were trying to read something—anything—on my face.
“You know me?” he said.
I looked back at the boys, then at the other young Odds who watched our meeting from a distance. But it was clear to me that Henry didn’t know who I was. Or he didn’t remember.
“It’s me. Jack.”
He shook his head. “I knew a kid named Jack. I lived by him in Bass-Hove. That was years ago. That Jack? His parents were named Mike and Amy.”
Of course it was me. It was meant to be. I remembered the time Henry told me about it. We sat in a pub, in London, and he explained how he knew me when I was a little kid, that he knew my mother and father. Here. In Marbury.
But I didn’t tell him.
I thought about being on the train.
Nickie.
I shook my head.
“Not from here. I know you from another place.” I whispered, uncertain whether or not I should even say it, “London.”
The word seemed to punch Henry in the guts. He pursed his lips shut, and shook his head. Then he got down from the horse and stood directly in front of me, so close I could practically feel the damp of his sweat.
And here I was, doing exactly the same thing to Henry Hewitt that he’d done to me, so long ago in a bar called The Prince of Wales, where he’d told me how he knew me from this place called Marbury.
“You’re from there, too?” he whispered, and his voice was urgent and impatient. And the way he said there left no question he was talking about a different world. It was the way you’d talk about heaven, or maybe hell, when you weren’t allowed to actually utter such names.
“I … I met you there, Henry. A few times. We’ve had beer together. I’ve been to your flat.”
He looked lost, scared.
“You don’t remember me, Henry? You gave me the glasses. The Marbury lens. It’s me. Jack.”
Henry grabbed my shoulder, squeezed. I could feel the tips of his fingers like they were biting into my skin.
“Can you tell me how to get back?” he said.
And those desperate words seemed to punch me in the stomach.
Was he stuck here, too?
How could he not know the way back?
How could he not know who I was?
I said, “I thought you’d tell me the answer to that question.”
Henry looked nervous, glanced at the boys in back of him, and then at Ben and Griffin, who started walking toward us.
“How long have you been here?”
“You mean this time?” I asked. “I keep popping in and out, but I can’t get anywhere that isn’t here. Marbury.”
“I want you to show me how,” he said.
Ben and Griffin had come right up behind me. The Odds riding with Henry looked a little apprehensive. Maybe they were worried the three of us were going to do something to the man.
“And you don’t remember Ben and Griffin?”
Henry shook his head. “Are they from there, too?”
Ben planted the end of the spear down beside my foot. It crunched into the dried crust of ash. “Who is this guy, Jack?”
Griffin said, “They have horses. We should go with them.”
Henry eyed Ben and Griffin up and down, like he was trying to gauge their abilities.
I asked him, “How long have you been here?”
Henry looked at each of us, thinking. “I started keeping track of the days. I tried to, at first. I was sixteen years old.”
His voice was a whispered rasp. “I was sixteen years old when I got the glasses. Sixteen! It’s been ten years in this hell. I can’t be certain.”
He grabbed me again, shook me. “Tell me how I can get out of here.”
twenty-five
They knew it was long past time to leave.
What remained of the city was completely overrun with Hunters. There were no more people here.
No more Odds.
No more Glenbrook.
Ben pleaded with Henry to take us along. In the end, he didn’t really have a choice.
They gave us horses.
We rode with Henry and his Odds.
It was what we were supposed to do, and I knew it. It was the only way for me to find Conner. And Conner, the rest of the lens, was our only chance to get out of here.
* * *
Henry barely said anything else to me after our first meeting in the Knolls. Maybe he was waiting for me to do something, but I didn’t know what it could be. I got the feeling he was saving something up, planning. I knew he was scared about telling the other Odds about where he came from; that they might somehow turn against him if they knew the truth about Henry and me, and the other two boys who didn’t act quite like Odds.
It rained once more before the first evening came. We stayed on the horses, but in the foothills there was no flooding like we’d see drowning the old streets. That probably meant none of those black suckers, but I wasn’t going to get down on the ground just so I could find out.
And it turned out to be the last rain we would ever see in Marbury, too.
When it stopped that night, the hole in the sky seemed bigger, more intense. It spread open directly above us, and showered cascades of what looked like burning-hot embers downward, shards of stars that disappeared and died in the Marbury sky. The hole began
to resemble a gaping mouth, its upper lip a sneering mirror image to the wound on my hand: hungry, drooling, yawning open, wide enough to swallow the world.
It was coming.
By mid-morning on the third day, we had crossed into the desert, heading on a path toward the settlement called Bass-Hove. Our direction was decided for us by a plastic toy compass Henry kept in his pocket. It looked like something a kid might have dug out from a box of breakfast cereal at some other time, in some other world.
Nobody knew if the compass meant anything at all. Its needle seemed to be made from tinfoil, half of it painted blue, and every time Henry consulted it, he would have to carefully pile a loose hill of ash on the ground as a support to tilt the thing at a steady angle so the indicator could find a balance point and not stop up against its red plastic case.
Seventeen kids rode with Henry. We made twenty. And nearly all of them, from what I could tell, were fourteen or fifteen years old. It made sense. Younger kids had been easy prey. They got taken first. And older Odds were always conscripted into the army, or something worse.
It was natural and every other kind of selection.
So, next to Henry, I was the oldest in the group, which gave everyone enough reason to be suspicious of me.
It was almost as though that prisoner number—373—had been plainly tattooed across my chest, and they all could see it.
Some of the other Odds flatly refused to talk to me at all. To them, I seemed nothing more than a non-paying passenger. But for the most part they seemed to accept Ben and Griffin easily. They were younger, the right age to be part of the group.
I’d heard the riders talking about the boys—how some of them recalled stories about the two Odds on Forest Trail Lane who lived in a bunker beneath a house and killed a Ranger in their garage.
They gave us clothes that had been taken from the dead, so at least we were covered against the desiccating heat of the desert, even if our uniforms were hole pocked and bloodstained. The band of Odds carried water and food that they carefully rationed, stored in bundles of blankets and drapes that were lashed to the pack horses with anything that could bind—electric cords, networking cables, even a rotting garden hose.
In the group, there was a loose and unstated hierarchy. Everyone followed Henry. And a tall, black-haired Odd named Frankie, who was missing the little finger on his right hand and had a wispy tuft of fuzz sprouting beneath his chin, seemed to enforce rations and turn taking when it came time for jobs or sleep.
But they were all boys. Naturally, there were episodes of conflict and cussing, sometimes fighting, and even nastier stuff than that.
Boys.
I don’t think any of them had the intent to stay within their association once our group made it to the settlement.
On the fourth day, Frankie showed the others how we could use two plastic tarps and a collector can to distill drinking water from our piss, so we wouldn’t have to open the precious bottles we carried. He explained we’d have to save them until they meant the difference between living and dying. That day, we stayed camped in the middle of a formation of melted lava rocks—maybe they were giant meteorites—where we rested the animals.
The boys never gave us any weapons.
The other Odds were scarcely armed themselves. A few of the boys carried bows they’d taken from dead Hunters, with a supply of arrows that had been pulled from carcasses of their friends, of people they’d known.
There were some Odds with knives, and many of them carried spears made from all sorts of metal debris.
And then there were the rocks. Rocks for throwing—they were kept in whatever pockets were available—and every one of the boys had a favored rock for bashing, one that fit comfortably in his grip, some of which had been scabbed over with tarred blood. No one would carry the maces or cudgels of Hunters, though. Those were always made from sharpened human bones.
But out here, in the desert, there was no life.
Only ash and salt.
* * *
The days were monumentally boring, made worse by the fact that the Odds only stared at me; they never spoke.
Ben and Griffin felt guilty about the ease with which they fit in among the other boys, but I couldn’t hold a grudge against them for it. I put us here, after all.
So I sat beneath a craggy overhang on one of the boulders, watching, absentmindedly flipping the broken lens between my fingers inside my pocket, carefully tracing the sharpness of the edge that had cut my hand so bad. And I stayed there, tucked into my little hiding place with my pack jammed into the crevice behind me.
We’d been taking turns on the watch, seven or eight at a time, posted on top of the jagged boulders around our perimeter where we could look out in every direction.
Of course the Hunters would be following us, tracking game.
It was Ben’s and Griffin’s turn up on the watchposts.
Frankie stood in the center of our encampment, carefully shaking out the top sheet of plastic, filling his can with the dewy distillate. That day, the entire place reeked with a thick fog of piss, and every hour or so, Frankie would remove his can and dole out a portion of drinking water to whichever Odd came up on the mental list he managed.
I was always last in line.
But I kept myself occupied by watching him, observing the other Odds in their bored frustrations.
One of the boys, a wiry and frail-looking skeleton of a fourteen-year-old named Ethan, had an English accent like Henry’s. He rarely spoke. The boys teased him about how he’d peed himself when he slept every night the first week after they found him alone, hiding beneath the ruined grandstands at a soccer field.
A few of the other boys were relentless in picking on Ethan.
There are always small clusters of boys like that within larger groups. They congeal together like cold grease in water. The assholes. Three of them: a small, muscular tank with white hair named Alex, and his two followers—a slow-witted nose picker who everyone called Fee, and his brother, a towering pole of a kid named Rum, who never wore a shirt so he could show off the tattoo of a dragon that wrapped across his belly and around his back to the spindly knobs of his spine.
They were like pack animals, I thought, and the English kid was chosen to die first.
That’s just how things worked for kids like Ethan.
He must have been strong, or fast, or something the others underestimated, for him to have survived for as long as he had. And I thought if anyone was going to talk to me, maybe Ethan would. But then I realized trying to do that might just get him picked on even worse.
I was lonely, and I wanted to go home.
It scared me to think that home might not even exist at all anymore.
When it was my turn to drink, Frankie glanced in my direction and raised his dingy can. Then he called for Henry and I watched while the boy asked him to bring a drink share over to his friend, “the Ranger.”
I glared at him.
“Fuck you, kid.”
Frankie puffed up his chest and grabbed his basher from his back pocket. He came storming over to where I was sitting in the rocks. Henry just stood there, holding the water can, quietly watching us.
I hated being forced into doing the “guy thing,” but I couldn’t let Frankie start off this new day by labeling me as some kind of enemy outsider in front of the other boys, either.
That’s just how things were.
It meant there was going to be a fight, and neither one of us questioned or doubted the laws that dictated our nature.
So before he’d even taken three steps toward me, I launched myself up and ran straight for him. I wrapped my arms around his midsection and slammed him down into the ground.
Frankie managed to hit me one time on the back with his rock. It hurt. I could feel the point of the basher as it cut into the flesh above my shoulder blade. Then there was a general roar, and whatever kids weren’t on posts immediately formed a tight circle around us.
I kept wonder
ing why someone didn’t do something. I was convinced that one of us was going to end up dead, but I wasn’t going to look around and plead for intervention, either.
I pinned Frankie’s hand beneath one of my knees. Hard. It felt like I was grinding dried chicken bones against a sidewalk, and I knew it had to hurt him. But Frankie refused to let go of his basher. I twisted my fingers into his greasy hair and pressed the back of his skull down into the gritty ash.
Frankie had his free hand up at my throat, clenching, trying to push me back, but he wasn’t really doing much. He squeezed, and I could feel his dirty fingernails cutting into my skin, but I didn’t even hit him or anything. And I knew I could have messed him up bad, but I just looked down at the kid and saw how his eyes started welling up with tears, and I realized right then how horribly foul Frankie smelled, so I was kind of disgusted. I loosened up on him.
I said, “Don’t fuck with me, kid. We all want the same thing here.”
And then I looked up at the circle of Odds who were watching us, right at the faces of the assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—and I let go of Frankie without so much as punching him even one time.
I stood up and wiped my hands on my legs.
That kid stunk like rotten meat.
Then Alex said, “You should have made him kiss your nutsack, kid,” and his followers shoved each other’s shoulders and laughed.
Frankie got up, stinging.
I wasn’t sure if he was going to come back at me again, so I watched him. He was wet with sweat, and gray ash like bone dust coated the back of his head. He still gripped the basher.
I took the water can from Henry and swallowed just one gulp. Then I handed it over to Frankie.
“Here. Fighting against each other in this heat is a sorry waste of our energy.”
Frankie tucked his rock back in his pocket and nodded. He looked at Henry, then at me, and he took the can from my outstretched hand. He drank.
Frankie licked his lips. He was thirsty, and I didn’t realize he’d been making everyone else drink first, even me.
* * *
“It may be some time before you get another sip of water.”
Henry sat down next to the place where I was trying to sleep beneath the crag of the rock. I’d been using my backpack as a pillow. It was dumb, though. It was just as hot beneath the rock as if I’d been staked down like a martyr in the middle of the ash field.