Passenger (22 page)

Seth.

I cannot breathe. I am hanging by my neck, my hands tied behind me, kicking, kicking so hard my shoes come off, my pants begin to fall off as I twist in a circle, winding and winding, a spring, facing the sun, the tall trees around me, silent in the brilliant light of afternoon.

I can smell the hangmen.

And then I see Seth in Marbury, and he is a boy—a real boy—not a ghost at all, but it is a different Marbury, and I can remember it. It was like this.

Someone is screaming and screaming.

Quinn Cahill.

I look away from the image frames.

I force myself.

Shut my eyes.

Close my hand.

Make it stop.

The door slams shut.

I hear music.

An accordion.

*   *   *

I didn’t wake up until the following night.

Later, Ben would explain how he alone carried me tied to his back down the ladder, using rope they found in Quinn’s garage. He’d wrapped it beneath my armpits, across my chest. He shrugged apologetically and showed me how the nylon cord had cut marks into the flesh around his shoulders.

They refused to leave me up on the roof, even if they did believe, at first, that Jack was dead.

Everything hurt.

It felt like my ribs had been broken.

Maybe I was dead, I thought. Nothing made sense. The last thing I remembered was breaking up the fight between Ben and Quinn, and now here I was, lying on my side on a sweat-soaked cot, staring at what looked like someone’s kneecaps right in front of my face. And I swear I could hear the faint sound of accordion music coming from somewhere.

“Ben! He opened his eye. Jack’s waking up!”

Griffin’s voice was a rasping, urgent whisper.

“Shhh!”

I couldn’t see where Ben was standing. Only knees. They looked like clay faces where all the features had been pressed down into nothing. But they were staring at me.

I couldn’t focus on anything but the little gold hairs on Griffin’s bony kneecaps.

I tried to say something, but my mouth wouldn’t move.

Why can’t you understand me, Griffin?

I am talking to you, kid, listen to me.

But I wasn’t talking.

He couldn’t hear me.

I shut my eyes.

“Hey! Jack?” Griffin lowered himself to the edge of the cot. He shook my shoulder and I opened my eyes again. “Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

That was a trick question, right?

“Um. No. What happened?”

“You fucking did it again, Jack.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m thirsty, Griff.”

I heard him pop open a plastic jug that sat on the floor beside my cot. And then I could see Ben, leaning against the wall, pressing an ear up to the seam where one of the windows had been sealed over and covered by a blackout curtain.

He concentrated on listening, but he watched me as I drank.

There was music, so faint. And then it stopped.

“I heard it, too,” I said. “It woke me up. It’s the Rangers coming.”

I couldn’t sit up. I spilled more water onto my bed than I got into my mouth. Griffin kept one hand on the base of the jug to steady it.

Ben moved away from the window. He looked tense, ready for a fight.

“Next time, you’re going to fucking kill yourself.”

What could I say?

It wasn’t my fault.

Wrong, Jack. Everything was my fault.

“You mad at me, Ben?”

He exhaled and got down on the floor next to Griffin.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded. “I’ll be okay. What happened?”

And I noticed that the hand I’d been using to tilt the jug of water had been wrapped up in what looked like a sock. Medical tape wound tightly around my palm and knuckles.

“What’s this?”

The boys looked at each other, like they were both trying to figure out which of them had the better explanation.

Griffin took a drink and recapped the jug. “You’ve been knocked out since last night. I don’t even need to tell you, but we thought you were dead for good this time. You remember going up on the roof?”

I kind of did. Not really.

“There was shit coming out of your hand, Jack,” Ben said.

“What kind of shit?”

Griffin shrugged, shaking his head, as though he didn’t know what to say.

Then I thought of something, lifted my head. It made me dizzy.

“Where’s Quinn?”

“Fuck,” Ben said. “There were ghosts, Jack. Hundreds of them. You know how I feel about those fucking things. They were all coming out of you, like you were setting free a swarm of bees or something, like bats from a cave, going everywhere. It freaked the shit out of that kid.”

I remembered.

“Did you see that boy? The kid named Seth?”

Ben shook his head, but Griffin said, “I saw him, Jack.”

“I didn’t watch them. I can’t,” Ben said. “That fucking Quinn started screaming. Like he was looking straight into the worst nightmare you could ever have. And, next thing, he tried to jump off the fucking roof. I pulled him back and then he tried to do it again. So I punched him. I’m sorry, Jack, but I had it with that fucking kid after he put his goddamned hands on Griff, and so I beat his fucking face.”

I guess I saw that coming from the beginning.

Ben swallowed, like he was trying to gather his thoughts. “Then Quinn just jumps down the ladder. That was right when you collapsed, Jack, and the ghosts were scattering everywhere. The noise was insane. And then that fucker just ran away. I looked over the side of the roof for him. I saw him come out the door and go running down the street, carrying his speargun and yelping like a fucking dog.”

I took a deep breath. I thought about asking the boys to help me up, but I didn’t want them to think they’d be carrying me, watching out for me like I was going to be some kind of cripple. So I gathered every bit of will I had and pushed myself up into a sitting position. I put my feet down on the floor.

My head spun so bad I was sure that I was going to pass out. Ben and Griffin were still talking to me, telling me something, but I couldn’t hear anything they said over the rushing tide in my ears.

Don’t fall down. Don’t fall down.

I stood up, holding on to the waist of my shorts and slurring my speech like a drunkard. “The lens. Glasses. He didn’t take them, did he?”

“The pack’s under your bed,” Griffin said.

I aimed myself for the block divider in front of the shower and took wide steps until I could catch myself on it.

It was like walking across the deck of a boat in a storm.

I heard Ben, behind me. “Jack?”

But I ignored him. I didn’t want any goddamned help.

I turned the shower on and got under it. It felt so cold.

Then I was suddenly looking at the backs of my hands, how they were holding me up on either side of Quinn’s floor drain, a black metal grate the size of a baseball. It looked like a planet floating between my dirty, bandaged hand and outspread fingers.

Nice.

The fucking universe.

I heard the boys come up behind me.

“I’m okay. I’m okay. Just get away from me. I’m okay.”

I don’t know how long I stayed there like that, on my hands and knees with the water raining down on me. Probably too long. The shower stopped by itself. The upper tank had run dry.

I shook my head.

Better.

I got up and made it back around the wall without falling down. Dripping water everywhere, I sat on the edge of my cot and began putting on my clothes. My prison clothes.

“We need to get out of here. The Rangers are coming. It’s a guy named Preacher, and a girl, the captain, named Anamore Fent. They’re hunting for me.”

“A girl?” Griffin said.

“Get dressed. We need to go.”

Ben said, “We shouldn’t go out at night, Jack.”

“I think I know what to do. Get your boots on. Now.”

We hurried. I ran down to make sure Ben had thought to bolt the main door shut, then I locked the second door at the top of the staircase.

I told the boys to drink as much water as they could hold, to gather together as much as they thought we could carry on our backs. We found an empty canvas pack hanging from a peg on the wall by Quinn’s stove. I tossed it across the room to Ben. Fuck Quinn Cahill. He took off, left us here; so we were going to claim whatever we wanted.

In ten minutes, we were ready.

Griffin carried the extra pack. We took as much as we could from Quinn’s store of rations, along with most of the contents from his first aid kit, and all this we stuffed inside the backpacks. And I made certain the lenses were safe.

Jack and his habits.

In ten minutes, we were ready.

But it was already too late.

They were here.

Quinn showed me what to do when he first brought me to his firehouse. So I opened the footlocker beside the doorway and flipped the switch gates to his electric fence—what he’d called “juicy death.”

Now there would be only one way out.

Down.

Into the garage by the fire pole. Then down again, into Marbury’s underworld.

As soon as I flipped the switches, we heard pounding and kicking at the lower door.

Griffin’s eyes went wide. “What do we do?”

“It’s okay. I know a way out.”

“Well, what are we waiting for, then?” Ben was rightfully impatient.

Pounding again.

“Fuck them,” I said. “They’ll have a surprise if they come up the stairs.”

Of course, I didn’t have any idea how—or if—Quinn’s trap would work. But I knew we’d have enough time to get down, and I was scared of the idea of getting out that way.

Once we did that, there would be no turning back, and I remembered how Quinn told me he was afraid of going down below.

“Billy! Billy, open the goddamned door! It’s me, Quinn Cahill!”

I closed my eyes and exhaled.

It was like getting punched in the stomach.

Fuck this place.

“What are you going to do?” Ben said.

Griffin pulled on my arm, snapping me out of my confusion and disgust. “Fuck him, Jack. Don’t let him in. What if he’s fucking with us?”

It was Quinn. Of course he was going to fuck with us.

More urgent kicking on the door.

“Billy! Don’t leave me out here, you fucking ingrate!”

Fuck you, Jack.

I shook my head. I wished someone would slap me.

I sighed. “I can’t leave him outside. He didn’t do it to us when he could have.”

“Fuck him,” Griffin repeated.

But I opened the trunk, turned off Quinn’s electric fence, and unbolted the door to the stairway.

If I had turned the booby trap off three seconds sooner, the Rangers outside would have killed me, and I wouldn’t have known anything about it. When I was halfway down the metal stairs, there came a blast of automatic gunfire. The outer door splintered into shards and swung crookedly open as if pushed by a ghost.

There was no smoke, no smell, just the tinny sound of shell casings raining down on the concrete pathway in front of the station house and the peppering of wood fragments dusting a cloud of debris across the lower stairs.

I started to turn back, and I saw Quinn push his way in past the shattered door. He carried his red speargun, and when he saw me standing on the stairway, he had to have figured out that the path up to the firehouse was safe.

He sold me out.

I knew it as soon as I saw him. He brought the Rangers here to hand me over to them. I looked at him as he hesitated at the base of the stairs below me. I could see the guilt in his stupid fucking eyes. He didn’t need the Rangers to make it back home. He owned this place. Quinn Cahill was the king of the Odds, but the Rangers must have promised him something special for turning me in.

That’s what was behind his act. Following me. Promising how we’d be such good friends. It was always, only, about winning the game for Quinn Cahill.

I wondered what they gave him.

Fuck you, Quinn.

I spun around. Ben was waiting at the upper door.

Below me, the man they called Preacher appeared in the door frame behind Quinn. He carried a small shotgun in one hand, and his hat was tilted back so I could clearly see his face.

I knew everything about him. In another world, at another time, he was the man Seth Mansfield killed in a hayloft.

Quinn said something like, “That’s him there.”

First there was a rainlike noise that sounded like insects—a swarm of locusts hurling themselves at the doorway, clicking their shelled bodies by the thousands against the walls of the firehouse. Arrows.

The Hunters had followed.

We were trapped, and trapped again.

By the time I’d made it back to the upper floor, Quinn was two steps behind me.

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Preacher stagger backwards into the wall. He’d been shot in the face with an arrow. It entered below his cheekbone and came out through the ear on the same side. He grunted and snapped the shaft, pulling it out through the back of his head. His blood flecked the wall behind him, but the man seemed unfazed by his wound. He pointed his gun out the door and began firing wildly.

“Get up, Billy! It’s an ambush!”

Quinn panted, so close to me I could feel the heat from his body.

I went through the door, and Quinn followed me, slamming it shut as the firefight in the street erupted into full warfare.

I didn’t even acknowledge Ben and Griffin. They stood there, waiting to see what I’d tell them to do. We were fucked, and now we were trapped inside the firehouse with the sonofabitch who dealt me over to the Rangers.

I slapped the speargun from Quinn’s grasp. He seemed to have no idea what was going on, and as soon as his gun hit the floor, I kicked it away. The gun scooted and spun along the concrete floor toward Ben. Then I grabbed the redhead by his T-shirt, ripping it in my grasp as I lifted him above my own head and slammed the kid over and over into the door.

“What the fuck, Quinn? What did you fucking do?”

I couldn’t stop myself. I started punching him.

It felt good.

Ben didn’t say anything. He just picked up Quinn’s stupid speargun and watched.