Passenger (23 page)

I don’t know if he was more stunned by what I was doing, or from all the noise coming up from the floor below. Griffin ran to the back of the room and scrambled up the ladder to take a look from the roof.

When I stopped punching Quinn, he fell to his knees.

He didn’t swing back one time; didn’t even try to defend himself against me, which made me feel even more disgusted by him. The fucker didn’t even know how to act like a real boy. His nose trickled blood over his lips and down to his chin. The kid was crying, trying to cover his wet and blood-streaked face with quaking hands.

If I had the time, I probably could have felt bad for him, for what I did, but Quinn Cahill had been working up to this for a long time. He had it coming.

The wrapping on my right hand was spotted with his blood.

“What the fuck was that about?” Ben seemed perfectly calm. Maybe he was just trying to keep his voice down because he was afraid of setting me off. But hearing him ask it made me madder.

I looked at Quinn, then at Ben.

I slid my knife out from its sheath and held it.

I grabbed a fistful of Quinn’s red hair in my left hand and lifted his head up, forcing the kid up on his toes so he’d stretch out his freckled ivory neck.

Quinn shut his eyes, sobbing, leaking snot and blood, unable to unchoke any words.

“Remember your fucking knife, Quinn? The one you left for me at the old man’s house?”

Quinn tried to turn his face, so I shook his head.

“Look at me, sonofabitch!”

Quinn opened his eyes. “I didn’t—”

Ben said, “Jack.”

Griffin came flying down the ladder. “Holy fuck! Holy fuck! We gotta get out of here!”

I pulled the knife back.

Quinn squealed faintly.

I plunged it forward, and missed the kid’s throat by a finger’s width. I slammed it into the door. It sounded like a gunshot.

“I’ll fucking kill you, Quinn! Next time, I’ll fucking kill you!”

I let go of his hair, pulled the knife out of the door.

Quinn curled up over his knees, heaving, pressing his face down against the floor.

seventeen

“It’s a fucking slaughterhouse out there.”

Griffin was frantic.

I slid my knife back into its sheath and hefted the pack over one arm.

“Are you going to tell us what that was about, Jack?” Ben said.

Griffin grabbed Ben’s arm and pulled him around. “Listen! There must be five thousand of them out there. Hunters. It’s a fucking massacre. There’s so many, the whole sky’s red from their marks.”

I looked at Griffin. It finally began sinking in; what was going on outside. For a moment, it was like the only thing that mattered in my entire universe was trying to make Quinn Cahill pay me back for what he did.

Quinn looked up from the floor. He was a mess.

For all the posing and strutting he’d done since I met him, what I saw now was a pathetic little boy, sobbing like someone stole his birthday present from him and pissed on his cake.

Ben held Quinn’s gun carefully, like he wasn’t sure whether or not he was supposed to give it back. I shook my head at him, and he understood.

“We’re going down the pole, to the garage,” I said. “There’s a way out.”

Quinn snorted, inhaling a big blob of snot and blood. He coughed and spit a red, puck-shaped wad of jelly onto the floor. “You have to take me with you.”

I started back toward the circle where the slide pole dropped down to the garage.

“Fuck you, Quinn,” I said.

Griffin picked up the pack and his brother’s rebar lance. Ben followed behind, holding Quinn’s speargun like he knew how to use it.

“Billy!” Quinn pleaded.

I had one hand on the slide pole.

“You boys’ll all die down there. Trust me on that. There’s things down there. You need me.”

I looked at the boys. We didn’t have time to take a vote. But I could see in their faces they were shocked at how bad I’d beaten the kid up. Maybe it was the realization of what was going on outside the firehouse that scared them.

And maybe,
I thought,
they felt sorry for the pathetic little bastard.

“This is the last time you’ll ever hear me say it, Quinn. Don’t fuck with me again.”

*   *   *

So there we were, down in the belly of Quinn’s garage with nothing more than a roll-up aluminum door between us and the bloodbath taking place just feet from where we stood. The shooting died down to just occasional bursts. But we heard grunting, moaning, the sick sound of fresh, living meat being torn apart.

Hunters and harvesters were eating.

And we gathered like hospital visitors around the open tail end of a dilapidated ambulance, staring down at a manhole cover that appeared to be coated in rust and shit.

Quinn’s last-chance bomb shelter.

When we spoke, it was only whispers.

Hunters hear.

They smell, too.

Quinn sounded as though he wasn’t finished crying. His voice shook; his breath was spastic.

“I want my speargun back.”

Ben didn’t even look at the kid. “You’re not getting it, Red.”

That was good,
I thought. Now Ben was fucking with the kid by making up a name for him, too. We’d see how Quinn liked playing our game now that we were in charge.

“Then fuck you guys. You can figure the way out on your own.”

Ben eyed the kid squarely. Without a sign that he’d think twice, Ben pushed the point of the speargun snugly between Quinn’s legs.

Quinn backed away until he was up on his tiptoes, pinned between Ben and the rusting body of the ambulance.

Ben said, “You just pull this trigger. Right?”

Quinn’s eyes got as big as the drain on the floor of his shower.

He swallowed. “I have some flashlights in the ambulance. You just shake them if they start running low, and it charges them.”

Ben pulled the gun away. “Okay. We’re waiting. Red.”

Quinn reached an arm down below one of the front seats and pulled out two torches. He kept one and handed the other to me. He nodded at the roll-up door. “Don’t turn your light on till we’re in the Under.”

The Under.

The kid had a name for that, too.

Quinn, apologetic and hurt, looked at me as though he were waiting for me to say something.

Fuck him.

Griffin had already climbed inside the back of the ambulance and was squatting, froglike, hooking two fingers through the pry hole on the heavy lid.

He grunted and strained, but the cover wouldn’t move.

“That’s not how you do it,” Quinn said. “Move out of the way.”

And I thought,
The kid knows a lot more than he’s letting on.

Quinn got down onto his knees. He pointed at the rebar spear Griffin leaned against the fender. “Give me that, not-Ben.”

Griffin looked at me and then Ben, trying to see if it was okay.

He handed the bar over to the redhead.

Ben kept his eyes locked on Quinn. We all knew how easily you could kill a kid with a weapon like Ben’s spear. Ben had done it himself at least twice that I knew of.

And Griffin put his face next to my ear and whispered, “Thanks for beating the shit out of that pervert, Jack.”

Quinn slipped the end of the bar into the hole on the cover and levered it against the ambulance’s rear gate hinge.

In a few seconds, the way down was open.

I said, “Give back my friend’s rebar, Quinn.”

Quinn didn’t hesitate. He handed the weapon over to Griffin.

All we could see was a black hole, about two feet in diameter. The dark below it was so complete that it almost gave off a kind of glow in the lightless garage, like it was sucking in whatever faint light was there, inhaling whatever it could from the world above. At the lip of the mouth was a crusted-over handle, the first rung of something that led down into a deep and silent nowhere.

“How far down to the bottom?” I said.

Quinn shrugged. “Far. Don’t slip, Odd. It’ll kill you if you fall.”

“I’ll go first. Then Griffin, Quinn, and Ben’s going last.”

Quinn said, “We need to slide the cover shut once we get in. So nothing follows.”

I looked at Ben; he nodded. “I can do it, Jack.”

“Okay.”

I held on to my flashlight and climbed—two feet feeling their way onto each downward rung—one hand at a time, slowly, watching while the gray circle above me diminished into nothing when Griffin came down the ladder after me.

I don’t know why, but I half expected it to be wet down there, but when my feet finally planted on a solid base, I could smell the dry dust kicked up into the air by my weight.

“I’m down,” I said. I turned the flashlight on and swung it around, casting distorted and rare shadows out across the Marbury underworld. I thought I saw movement in the tunnel ahead of me, a flash of yellow; something cat-like and fast. Then it was gone. It must have been just a distortion from the flashlight’s beam.

I was definitely too tense.

I squeezed shut my eyes and opened them again. Maybe I imagined it.

I was dizzy, breathing too hard, and it stunk down here.

Get a grip, Jack.

Something dropped, clattering next to me, striking into my shoulder.

I jumped, fumbled with the flashlight, watching dumbly as it fell into the dirt.

“Sorry, Jack. You okay?”

Griffin dropped his spear.

“Fuck, Griff! You could have killed me.”

One of us was going to die down here. I knew it.

Maybe all of us.

At least Ben was able to make it down and still manage to hold on to the speargun without any more accidents, and when we were all standing together at the base of the ladder, the lights Quinn and I pointed showed every one of us a new, undiscovered hell that lived inside Marbury.

The Under.

It was at least twenty degrees cooler than up in Marbury. Cool enough that you might actually feel
cold
here if you spent too much time. And the tunnel was massive. You could pave a freeway down the center of it and have room for houses on either side. The manhole we’d climbed through was invisible now, at least sixty feet above my head, and wherever I’d look, the beam of my flashlight faded to nothing in the lightless void of the tunnel.

At one time, in a normal world, this may have been some immense flood-control channel leading to a sea. Now, here, in Marbury, Quinn’s Under was a world of its own.

It was like being swallowed by a whale. And one look at the corrugated steel walls surrounding us proved that we were not the first people to ever think to hide, or maybe to get trapped, down here.

A few yards to the side of the ladder, a rounded hook had been welded to the steel wall. It was the kind of thing that was intended to be used as a guide for cables or telephone fibers. A skull was impaled on the hook, so that the dull end of it came out through the hole of the nasal cavity. A patch of scalp and some short blond hair spiked out from the left side of the skull. A few large scattered bones littered the dirt below the hook.

I wondered if any of the others were thinking what I was: What kind of thing could possibly have been tall enough to hang a body from its head, more than ten feet off the ground?

The skull couldn’t be reached from the ladder, and as far as I could tell, there was no other way to get up to that hook. It was like something you’d do to save food from scavengers. Maybe it was a sign.

Nice decoration.

I lowered the light beam away from it.

I turned to Quinn. “Which way now?”

Quinn shook his head. “I told you I didn’t like it down here, Billy. I never been no farther than you could throw a marble. Your guess is as good as anyone’s.”

I shined the light on the kids’ faces. “We vote. Which way, Ben?”

“Let me see your flashlight.”

Ben aimed the light down the tunnel in the direction of our only two choices, then up at the kid’s skull that hung from the metal hook. “I say that way.” Ben pointed. “The side with the hair on it.”

“The ag school would be in that direction. If there’s a way out, that’s the way to go,” I said. “What do you think, Griff?”

“I’m with you guys.”

I looked at Quinn, then again at the other boys. “You good with that way, Quinn?”

Ben sounded agitated. “You gonna let
him
vote, Jack?”

“If he’s going to come with us, he’s going to own what he does.”

“Then one thing,” Ben said. “I want to know what all that was about upstairs. When you nearly killed the fucker.”

I shined the light straight at the center of Quinn’s chest. I wanted to see his face, and I wanted to be sure that Ben and Griffin saw him, too. Quinn’s T-shirt had a shark-mouth rip beneath one arm from when I’d grabbed it and thrown him against the firehouse door. His ghastly, alabaster skin looked unnatural, like it caught the light and glowed; his nipple was an orange moon hovering in a whiteout.

“He made a deal,” I said. “Quinn traded me off to the Rangers. That’s why they were there; what all the shooting was about. They came to kill us, Ben. Well, they came to kill
me
. I guess they weren’t expecting a surprise.”

Quinn’s eyes darted back and forth, between each of our faces. “I’m sorry, Billy. I didn’t know they wanted to do you harm. I swear it. All I knew was they were looking for you. I’m sorry I told them I knew you.”

Quinn was lying. He had to be. He knew gamesmanship better than anyone. He wouldn’t do anything unless there was some object to gain. That’s why he’d been tracking prisoner 373, following me; why he’d left his knife behind so I’d find it at the dead man’s house, and been so prepared for his new “good friend” at the firehouse when we first paddled his fucking canoe across town.

“What’d they trade?” I said.

Quinn’s eyes kept flickering. I found it hard to believe the kid could possibly be embarrassed or even put on the spot, but his face turned visibly red when I pressed him about it.

He cleared his throat—stammered. “Well, Billy. They’s only two things Rangers could give me that I wanted.”

“What was it?” Griffin said.

Quinn looked pleadingly at me. “Don’t be mad, Billy. I swear to you I didn’t know they wanted to hurt you.”