Passenger (21 page)

Ben and Griffin insisted that I drink first, and they watched my face to see if I’d show any sign that it tasted like anything other than what Quinn promised it to be. Griffin must have drank more than a gallon on his own. He said he was trying to make himself pee, because he wanted to see how Quinn’s still worked.

Eventually, everything had to be turned off in the night with the exception of one dim oil lamp, so we lay there, all of us just staring up at the ceiling, listening to the incessant roar of the storm against the concrete of the firehouse.

When Quinn finally lowered the mantle on the lamp and everything went black, I could tell that none of us had fallen to sleep. You know how you can hear guys breathing, moving around, flipping over, so you know they’re thinking; and the thinking is what kills sleep every time.

So I said, “Do you remember anything, Quinn?”

“What are you talking about, Billy? I remember saving your hide when you were two feet underwater with a big buck Hunter straddling you like he was going to make you his special boy, ha-ha!”

What a prick.

I sighed. “I meant, do you remember anything from before? From the beginning of the war.”

“Don’t you, Billy?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, what about your partner boys?”

“None of us do,” Ben said.

I heard Quinn roll over in his bed, could feel how he was looking straight across the room at me. I wondered if the little freak could maybe somehow see in the absolute dark of the firehouse.

“I remember being about half the size of not-Ben, without even the first strand of hair on my nutsack, and how we all were living inside a basketball gymnasium with wood floors. That is, to be honest, the first thing in my life I remember. Nothing else. I don’t remember having a mommy or daddy, or nothing about no brothers or sisters. Just us Odds.”

“How long was it like that?” Griffin said.

“Shit.” Quinn laughed. “Did you all three fall out of the sky?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well, not-Ben, it’s been like that forever. For-fucking-ever. But then there were a lot more of us Odds. Thousands, in places like that all over the city, too. Then, most of us started getting sick. We didn’t know what it was at first, but it was the bug. The Rangers came, took the sick ones. You know, just got rid of them. Who needs more Hunters, anyway? They took all the girls, too. That was … Shit, that was so long ago.”

“Yeah. Before you had hair on your nuts,” Griffin said.

“You fucking with me, not-Ben?”

“Well, it was, wasn’t it?”

I realized that Griffin Goodrich had a much more stylized way of fucking with people than Quinn Cahill did.

“I suppose it was,” Quinn said. I could hear how he lay back down in his bed, and his voice sounded relaxed, like he just assumed that Griffin, not-Ben, was a stupid little kid.

“How did you end up here?” Ben said.

“Well,” Quinn began. He sounded like he was an actor onstage, and he had waited all his life to have an audience for the incredible epic that was his story, even if his only listeners were stupid, lost kids. “Things got bad. They ran out of food, and the Rangers stopped bringing it around, since we were only boys left in the Orphan Detention Dormitories. Did you know that’s where
Odd
come from? Just boys. Odds. So, one day, this old Ranger come and he tells us to all get out and go, or else they were going to come kill us all. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not, because he got killed not two days after that. And so four of us came here to the firehouse, and we fixed the place up like this.”

“What happened to the others?” Griffin said.

“Shit.”

I could tell it was probably the only time Quinn Cahill didn’t have that annoying smirk on his face.

“How long have you been alone?” I said.

And Griffin blurted out, “Since he had hair on his balls. Oh, wait … he still doesn’t. Never mind.”

I heard Quinn’s feet slap down onto the floor, the relaxing of his cot springs as he got out of his bed.

“You fucking with me, not-Ben? You want to fuck with me? Let’s see who’s got balls, little shit.”

Something happened. I heard Griffin grunt.

“Get the fuck off me!”

Then Ben must have gotten up. From the sound of it, he threw himself onto Quinn, and in less than a second, both boys came sliding across the floor until Quinn’s head ended up banging into my knee.

“Don’t you fucking touch him!” Ben said.

I slid my arm down between the boys and pushed myself off the bed, taking Ben down onto the floor. Ben would have killed Quinn in a fight. No two ways about that.

“Hey!” I pushed my face right into Ben’s ear and pinned him against the jumble of twisted sheets where he and Griffin were supposed to be sleeping. “Fucking cool it! And you back the fuck off, too, Quinn! The kid was just joking around. Back the fuck off, all of you!”

For a moment, there was nothing, only blackness and the sound of the three boys panting like they’d just run a footrace. I felt around on the floor until I found Griffin’s bony bare knee and gave him a little swat.

“Apologize,” I whispered.

Griffin didn’t attempt to keep his voice down. “That fucking pervert had his hands on my fucking balls, Jack.”

“Apologize, Griff.”

“Screw it. I’m going to take a piss.”

And Griffin slapped his feet across the floor toward the shower room. In no time there came the echoing sound like someone was emptying a garden hose into a tin drum.

He called back, “I’m sorry, Quinn. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Which was just another way for Griffin Goodrich to fuck with the kid. But for all his ingenuity at game playing and survival, I didn’t believe Quinn had any idea what was going on when it came to communicating with other boys.

Quinn didn’t say a word, just stepped over me and Ben and went back to his bed.

“I made this place,” he said.

Griffin came back. “I filled that shit up.”

Then he lay down on the floor next to his brother, and I went back to my bed.

I said, “This is a fucking palace, Quinn.”

Quinn rustled around in his bed. It sounded like he threw the covers off him. It was so hot and stuffy in the firehouse, made even worse by the heavy, damp smell of four boys who’d been wrestling with one another. And finally, Quinn said, “What about you, Billy? What’s the farthest back thing you remember?”

I said, “Honest?”

Quinn said, “Honest.”

“Waking up on the floor of Ben and Griffin’s garage, wearing a prisoner uniform. What was that, four or five days ago?”

“And you don’t remember nothing else?”

I cleared my throat and rolled onto my side. There was the dribbling, metallic sound again. Ben had gone off behind us, and was peeing noisily into Quinn’s trough. And I realized that it stopped raining outside.

“Well, some things my friend Conner told me about what I’d done. And you remember that cut on my hand? How you fixed it up?”

Quinn said, “Oh, yeah. That was a nasty one, Billy. How’s that thing doing?”

“It’s gone.”

“Nuh-uh. Let me see if it is.”

And Quinn raised the light and got out of his bed again.

He kneeled at the side of my cot and grabbed me by my right wrist. I opened my hand, and Quinn put his face an inch or two away from my palm, staring at the pink and jagged scar that had been left behind when Seth healed me.

“Billy, this looks exactly like that—”

“I know.”

The hole in the sky.

Ben stood over us, watching. “Like what?”

“That thing in the sky,” Quinn said. “It’s like a picture of it, stamped right there into Billy’s hand.”

“What thing in the sky?” Ben asked.

I pulled my hand away, closed it. “The boys haven’t seen it.”

Quinn’s mouth just hung open, like he couldn’t believe there was anybody—any Odd—who didn’t know about the hole in the sky.

He looked from Ben to me, back to Ben again, and I could see he was trying to figure out what our story was, even if we didn’t know enough about ourselves to tell it.

“Well, let’s go look then.” Quinn nudged Griffin’s butt with his foot. Griffin tried to cover his face in the dingy sheet.

“You, not-Ben—stop tugging on your little pecker or it’s going to fall off. Heh-heh-heh. Let’s get up on the roof—there’s something you boys need to see.”

And as Quinn led the way back to where his metal ladder stretched through the ceiling and onto the roof deck, Griffin pulled my shoulder down toward his face and whispered, “I want you to give me permission to kick the living shit out of that fuckstick, Jack.”

I just nodded and followed the redhead.

“One of these days, Griff. I promise.”

sixteen

The rain was gone; the air, thick and hot.

It felt like we were bugs, competing for air, trapped beneath an overturned cup.

The four of us stood at the edge of the roof of Quinn’s firehouse, barefoot and sweating, looking at the thing above us while the pale redhead pointed it out like he owned it or something.

Quinn stared at Ben, noticeably taller and more muscular. Maybe the kid was sizing Ben up, using his “intellectual reasoning” to conclude that if I hadn’t gotten between them in their fight, Ben would have inflicted some serious damage.

“You never seen that before?”

Ben shook his head. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Nobody does. It looks like the end of the world, doesn’t it?”

“It looks like fireworks to me,” Griffin said.

“I’ll tell you what it looks like, not-Ben.”

Then Quinn reached over and grabbed my wrist.

He pinned my arm against the edge of the block railing, and I was surprised by how strong the kid was. It hurt. I clenched my fist.

“Show them, Billy.”

“That hurts. Let the fuck go, Quinn.”

I kept my hand closed tight.

“What are you scared of? Just let them see it. Prove I ain’t crazy.”

You are fucking insane, asshole.

I pulled my arm back, but Quinn’s grip was like a vice.

Remember the last time you used a vice, Jack?

“It’s not funny. Let go!”

I tried pushing him off me with my left hand. The kid didn’t budge. I glanced at Ben and Griffin. Somehow, I almost got the feeling that they were curious to see the scar now, too.

“Fuck this shit,” I said.

I punched Quinn square in the center of his rib cage.

It wasn’t intended to hurt; I was just trying to knock him away, make him let go. But he got this crazy grimace on his face, and he began twisting and prying at my fingers.

I guess he was fed up with us, with our intrusion into his perfect world. Quinn Cahill was always trying to prove something about being in charge. After all, he was the king here. He didn’t like or want company. Just me, for some reason. And whatever that reason was, it bothered me from the first moment the kid started hovering over me.

Ben put his hand on Quinn’s shoulder and pulled him around. “That’s enough, kid. Leave Jack alone.”

I could tell that Ben was trying to restrain himself.

But Quinn nearly broke two of my fingers, so I gave up, let him have his way, and I opened my hand.

*   *   *

The first time Quinn showed me that thing in the sky, I knew it had something to do with me. Or, more likely, that I had something to do with it.

I felt it.

It was like a wound, a stab, an incision that somehow cuts through all the layers, stack after stack after stack, piercing all the insides and outsides that collapse down and converge at the center of Jack’s universe.

And here I am now, standing with my hand open in front of Quinn Cahill’s face. I accept it.

I accept the fact that I fucked up—that all of this isn’t happening
to me
—it’s happening
because of me
.

I knew it all along.

I knew it when I was tied to a fucking bed at Freddie Horvath’s house.

But I just didn’t want to think about it.

*   *   *

I open my hand.

The light comes first. It is always the light, and then the sound.

Of course the mark is the same. Everyone can see that.

The scar in my hand.

The hole in the sky.

The center of the universe.

The boys are saying something. I can’t hear them. We are standing inside a thousand jet engines, beneath a churning wall of water that endlessly crashes upon sawtoothed rocks.

And I am looking directly through my fucking hand.

I am looking directly through.

The boys are saying something.

Quinn is screaming.

He’s afraid.

Fucking prick should have left me alone.

So I am looking.

In my bathroom, at Wynn and Stella’s house, a house that is in a place called Glenbrook, the mirrored door of Jack’s medicine cabinet opens in such a way that I could put my head between the door and the larger mirror above the sink, where Wynn taught me how to shave before I ever needed to. And there would be an infinity of layers there, accordioned together, blurring away into dark blue nothingness ahead of me, behind me, and I am the center.

That’s what this looks like now.

Only there are no mirrors, and I can see step after step, endless ladders like train tracks, each of them framing a narrow glimpse of here, another Marbury, a Glenbrook, Marbury again, the inside of a Cadillac, Marbury, that fucking cop, inside a barrel, the fucking inside of a plastic barrel and I am there, cramped among the bones of the friends I love, a dirty fucking bed where I am tied down, bleeding, Freddie Horvath’s hands on me, fuck this place, fuck this place, fuck this place.

And out of the infinity that expands before me, a throng of ghosts, faceless and bleak, run toward me, step after step, in the bed, in the barrel, Marbury, another Glenbrook, the barrel again. I am tied down on top of a bed, a naked photograph of Jack where I must be asleep, so don’t wake me up. This all must be inside his head. The ghosts coming and coming, out from my hand, out from my mouth, and I finally see among them a boy’s face.