Passenger (13 page)

“I know.”

Neither did I.

ten

He was waiting for me in the dark, in front of his house.

I knew it was Conner as soon as I saw his eyes.

We hugged, and he slapped the back of my head, and I swear I thought I could almost feel him starting to cry. Maybe he was laughing. Conner would never cry over … what? Being lost?

He’d been in Marbury for more than a week, he said, but the rest of us weren’t “there” yet, and he’d popped back here once, too, but this wasn’t Glenbrook.

And it was so hard to get out.

It’s what I figured.

I wondered if Ben and Griffin could be safe, wherever they were.

They’re in a fucking garbage can.

Time to fill things in, replay the pictures I never thought had been taken.

*   *   *

Conner and I sat in my truck. Through the windshield, we watched the little light show in the sky, a pulsing ghost of a stab wound that tore through our universe.

So I went first.

I told him everything I could remember since swinging that hammer at our lens—about waking up in the garage and Ben throwing me out, the rainstorm, finding the dead people in the house where Conner had written messages for me on the wall. I told him about the black slugs, too, and all the while he nodded his head. Finally, I told him about Quinn Cahill and how I’d stolen food from him and escaped at night when the Rangers showed up—that I was intending to bring it to Ben and Griffin, but I went home first, and next thing I knew, I was here, in another Glenbrook that wasn’t Glenbrook.

But I couldn’t bring myself to tell about Ben and Griffin, what Freddie had done to them.

We were not going to stay here. Not in this world. I’d already made my mind up about that, and I was pretty sure Conner had been thinking the same thing, too.

He didn’t need to know about the cop.

“But I just don’t get how I can wake up in that garage and you were already there for like a week or something. And Ben and Griffin haven’t landed yet. Or, if they did, they’re not in Marbury with us,” I said. “And they aren’t here, either.”

“I never figured out any of this shit. One day, one second, one month.” Then he said, “So, how’d you get
here
?”

I pulled the glasses out from under my seat, and Conner stared at them, his mouth hanging open.

“Damn. Those look like the same lenses from Seth.”

“This little green one is what does it. When you flip it over the bigger one there, that’s what brought me here.” Then I thought of something. I looked at my friend. “How did
you
get here?”

Conner pressed his lips into something that wasn’t a smile. I could see how he was biting the inside of his cheek. “You remember how Seth left those other lenses? Two blue…” He pointed at the eyepieces on the glasses in my hand.

“Yeah?”

He shifted in his seat and looked away from me. “I didn’t tell you. I took one of them from your room. A long time ago.”

At first, I felt myself getting mad at him. He wasn’t supposed to
take
one. That wasn’t how we did things.

And, as if he understood what I was thinking, Conner said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to get messed up again, Jack. I had it in my pocket, the day we were in the guys’ garage. It must have disappeared or something when I went through. But I had that one broken piece. That’s what did it. But it never worked right, and everything’s been getting crazy fucked up. Maybe that’s why Seth brought you to these glasses.”

The light in the sky faded, then pulsed bright green again.

“It’s like you can see stuff falling through that hole,” I said.

“I don’t know what that is,” Conner said. “But I’m pretty sure we had something to do with it.”

And I kept replaying in my head all those times Quinn Cahill tried telling me I’d fallen out of the sky.

“Everything’s different. Before … when we went to Marbury, the lenses never came through. It was only us. Did you think about that, Con? Now, the broken lens is in that other Marbury, and these other lenses are here, coming through with me.”

Conner shrugged and shook his head.

I said, “It makes me wonder. Maybe we’re trapped. Maybe wherever the lenses are is the real world now.”

Conner looked ahead. His fingers nervously tapped the armrest beside him. “I think it’s all Marbury. I think
this
is Marbury, too.”

“We have to get the kids out, Con. We have to get out of the hole.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Okay, Con. Then you tell me. What’s going on there, and what do I need to do when we go back?”

“What if we can’t get back?”

“I’m not going to think about that. But we’re not staying here. We can’t.”

“I know.”

So, maybe he did know what was going on with me, the cop, Ben and Griffin. Maybe he found his own fucked-up little rearrangements, too, and he didn’t have the balls to tell me about it. And maybe my friend just didn’t want to say the words, that we just might have been trapped for good this time.

C
ONNER’S
S
TORY
[1]

I woke up sitting on a horse in the middle of a rainstorm.

It was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.

Can you imagine? Blink. You shut your eyes inside a garage, and when you open them, you’re dressed in some kind of uniform on top of a stinking horse, totally drenched, holding on to a shotgun, riding along with a group of guys no older than kids, all of us looking for something to screw, eat, or kill.

And I’m just wondering where the fuck I am, and where the fuck are you and the others?

That’s what it was like.

Eventually I learned if you’re going to pop into Marbury, you’re better off popping in as a Ranger, rather than an Odd or something worse.

But I don’t know how to tell time—what’s the point of minutes and hours in Marbury? So I think I just followed along with the rest of the team—there were six of us—for a pretty long time, just shutting my mouth and trying to remember who I was.

When the rain started building up, and our horses had to walk through streets that almost became rivers, the others all began taking off their boots and stripping out of their pants without getting down—riding bare assed. And I thought,
Okay, fine, I guess we’re all going skinny-dipping or something,
so I followed along.

What would you do?

Crazy shit.

In Marbury, you just have to kind of wing it so you don’t stick out and look like a total dickhead, or an Odd, which was worse, because who wants to pop in as some orphan kid with a target on his ass?

My strategy was to just keep my mouth shut and learn by doing. So, off with the pants and on with the new experience of my bare nutsack getting crushed into a very unpadded, old saddle that I couldn’t stand up in because my legs were now an inch shorter without the boots on my feet.

Fucking Marbury.

But I found out later the reason we stripped was so we could keep a watch on each other’s legs for those things that crawl up inside you from the water. Black worms as long as your lower arm. They called them
suckers
.

Those things were bad news, but they weren’t interested in the horses, and apparently they didn’t have a taste for Hunters, either. They only wanted human meat. Just like the Hunters.

We were always potentially on some asshole’s dinner menu in Marbury.

Charlie Teague caught one on Jay Pittman.

They rode just in front of me and I about gagged when I saw the black oily thing squirming its way up Pittman’s calf. But Charlie casually swung over and pinched the thing’s head between the nails of his thumb and index finger, and it wriggled and spit blood in his grasp before Charlie flung it over his shoulder like he was flicking a cigarette butt out the window of a passing car.

Don’t ask me how I knew the names of the Rangers on our fireteam. If I just looked at them and thought about it, the names instantly popped into my brain, like I’d known these guys all my life. Well, they weren’t all guys, obviously enough now that we were waist-down naked, but that wasn’t something I immediately remembered, either—who had a dick or not—especially because I was feeling so sick and scared and freaked out about what the fuck was going on.

Then I got one of the things on me. I couldn’t even feel it or anything, and so I was lucky the Rangers had this kind of rhythm about switching off so that every so often a different rider would take the last position. Except for the one up front. That was our captain, Anamore Fent. A woman.

But the rider behind me swooped up and pulled the thing right off the outside of my thigh. That’s when I leaned away and I really did throw up. Blood kept streaming down my leg in the rain. I guess those things had some kind of anti-clotting shit in their bites, because they could pretty much suck you inside out before climbing into your dickhole and turning you into a bug. Screw anyone who tries telling me how beautiful nature is. Come to Marbury, Nature Boys.

So I wiped my face off and said, “Thanks, brother,” to the dude who saved me from turning into one of those Hunters, because the Rangers, the guys, had this way of calling ourselves
brother
all the time, and that’s when I saw he was Brian Fields, from our cross-country team in Glenbrook.

I was almost stupid enough to say something, like, “Dude. Brian. What the fuck are you doing here?” But I caught myself. I knew Brian wasn’t popping in and out of Marbury with us, and I’d been back and forth enough times to know that’s what happens—sometimes, you’ll run into people you know.

Sometimes, they’ll be monsters.

Sometimes, they’ll even be dead.

Fucking Marbury. What can I say?

But the fifth guy in our team was an old man who kept his gun slung on his back and played a little accordion while we rode. I would say it was weird, but words like
weird
don’t make any sense in a place like this. His music was constant and almost hypnotic. I didn’t mind it at all, because it sounded real, like home, like where I wanted to be if I could just find my way back—and find you, and Griffin and Ben, too. He played to let everyone and everything know we were coming, and like I said, us showing up meant if you were alive you only had three possible uses as far as the Rangers were concerned.

Except for the Odds.

Rangers don’t screw Odds—well, the decent ones don’t—and we definitely don’t eat them, and usually there wasn’t any reason for killing them.

But anything else, if it moved, well … it was a simple multiple-choice problem and all the answers were correct.

Everyone called him Preacher, but that wasn’t his name. I honestly don’t think I knew his name until he said that one certain thing that kind of rang in my head—
All things have been accomplished
—and then it all began to click about the guy with the accordion and who he was, because I definitely knew his face, so it wasn’t until I paid close enough attention to the name that was stenciled on his shirt that I began to put it together about him. He was the same guy, the preacher, Seth killed in Pope Valley maybe a hundred and fifty years ago.

Fucking Marbury.

So we followed Fent through what was left of Glenbrook. I knew we were going to the old train station. We passed the drive-in theatre that used to sit beside the 101. The white covering had all been peeled away from the giant screen, so it looked like a big patchwork of girders and crossbars. The Hunters had come through the night before and caught some of the Odds. I think there were about fifteen boys’ bodies up on those beams. Most of them were tied there, stripped, upside down. None of them had a head. Most of them were missing arms or legs, had been gutted and castrated.

Hunters liked to eat those parts: livers, kidneys, balls.

I couldn’t believe there were any Odds left at all. And the framing of the big screen vibrated and buzzed with feeding insects—harvesters so thick you’d think their combined weight could bring the entire structure down in pieces.

Jay Pittman was the first on our team to start taking trophies. He considered it psychological warfare, but he was just a sick asshole. Hunters didn’t have any soul you could fuck with. Pittman tried arguing that it was magic, too. Who could say for sure? We never lost a single member of our team, even during the really bad times. Fent didn’t like what he did, but Jay’s collection of dried penises he cut from the Hunters unlucky enough to run into him wasn’t one of the things she’d choose to fight over. So he kept them on a cord that hung from his saddle horn. Thirty-five of them, he bragged, counting the two he’d added that morning.

Charlie Teague liked the horns. They were harder than shit to break off, but he had enough of them on his string that, times it wasn’t raining, they’d make a musical sound like wind chimes when we rode.

The army had broken up, at least, as far as we could tell. All that was left of it were these independent fireteams of Rangers, competing, sometimes cooperating, just so we’d stay the most important humans still standing.

That’s how it was in Marbury. We had the guns.

But we were losing anyway. Every day there were fewer and fewer people, and the Odds were as good as invisible. It was a rare day when any of us would even see one of them. They didn’t trust us, besides, and the ones who were still alive were pretty good at hiding and scrounging for their survival. Except for that one crazy redhead kid who kept to himself in the firehouse. I believe there were Rangers who were afraid of that kid. I didn’t fuck with him, but I know that Fent made deals with him from time to time.

There were only five teams of Rangers left in this entire area, and we organized and made agreements or trades between the teams every day or so when we’d gather in the train station.

Politics.

Also, after the weather started changing, with the rains and the suckers, the main hall of the station stayed dry, elevated as it was, and it was big enough for all the fireteams to have sleeping space, and room for the other stuff we did.

Four of the fireteams were organized around women, girls really, because not one of us was past twenty years old, except for Preacher. The fifth team, their captain was taken a week earlier by the Hunters. Unlucky guys in that crew. No sex. Well, not with any girl, at least. So now there were four females left, maybe in the entire world. It didn’t matter anyway. Whenever one of the captains got pregnant, she’d just bleed out.