Passenger (7 page)

Quinn laughed. “Heh. Bad magic. Anamore Fent wants to kill you, Odd. Don’t you know that?”

I cleared my throat. “Why?”

“When someone tells me, I’ll let you know. How’s that sound?”

“Am I safe here?”

“Do you trust me?”

Fuck you, Jack.

Quinn stood up, and waved for me to follow him. “Here. I want to show you something, Odd.”

In the back corner of the firehouse, opposite the shower stall, a narrow black metal ladder rose up to a square hatch in the roof. Quinn climbed up and pushed the square door open. After he crawled out into the dimming evening, he stuck his face down inside and whispered, “Come on up here. Just be quiet. They’re going to be out soon.”

five

It was awkward climbing up that ladder.

The rungs hurt my bare feet and I could only work with one hand. My bandaged palm stayed hitched on the waistband of those goddamned shorts Quinn gave me. They ended up tangled around my ankles on top of the first step, and that redheaded bastard poked his face in the hatch and hissed a whispered laugh at me.

Balancing with my knees propped against one rung, I flipped him off, and Quinn laughed again.

“Come take a look at this, Odd. Tell me if you never seen it before.”

The roof of the firehouse was a flat deck of some sort, surrounded by a waist-high cinderblock wall that extended up from the perimeter of the station. At one time, I could imagine firemen enjoying a pleasant day up here. Maybe when the world was different.

I sat at the edge of the open hatch, and then brought my feet up onto the roof before trying to stand. The sky was just going to nighttime dark in Marbury, a milky gray, the color of a rotten tooth. Quinn stood back, and faced away from me with his chin tilted upward.

“See that?” he said.

I looked up.

And, in what dark the Marbury night made for us, standing there beside Quinn Cahill on the roof of an abandoned firehouse that had become his sanctuary in hell, I saw the hole in the sky.

Overhead in the east, above the business district where the kid had pushed us in a canoe past Java and Jazz, there was a gash—a knife wound through the gray. The thing bled vacant light that seemed to spill downward like a waterfall and blind out the foggy haze around it; a liquid constellation, some kind of fire that rained down from nowhere and everywhere.

“What do you think that is?” Quinn asked.

I just shook my head.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Odd. Like I said, when it happened things got worse. The Rangers been coming through trying to get anything they can take. Some of them’s even headed out now, just leaving here altogether. Seems like, to be honest, there’s more suckers, more Hunters, harvesters, and more of us dying. And I believe Fent’s crew is getting ready to go too, and leave us all—what’s left of us—to the Hunters. But those next few days after it happened, the Rangers rode through, roughing up all the Odds that were too young to conscript, and you know what some of them do to us who are older, don’t you? They were looking for you. Jack Whitmore. See? I knew your name before you even said it, Billy. And they were trying to find your friend, too. They said you did something to him. Why do you suppose that is? You weren’t just a prisoner, were you?”

When Quinn made his case, something started to connect in my head, but I couldn’t feel it coming together. It was like those times when I’d look back through images—photographs that Nickie had taken of me—riding on a river cruise, touring London, doing things with her while I was in Marbury, while I was here—but I couldn’t quite get the memory to surface.

I leaned my arms on the edge of the block wall and watched as the thing pulsed overhead in the sky. The kid knew things about me and Conner, and he was playing a game, they way you’d play with a hooked fish on a line.

Quinn knew more about Marbury than I ever did.

I had fallen into another pit inside my nightmare, a deeper layer, and nothing was finished yet. We all fell—me, Conner, Ben, and Griffin.

“You have to believe me, Quinn. I just can’t remember what happened.”

“All right, Odd.”

I heard music playing.

Crazy Jack dreams up all kinds of shit.

And sometimes it’s accompanied by music.

I held my breath.

I had to be out of my mind.

It sounded so far away, floating: a jangling, grinding, metallic sound, the wheezing strains of a high-pitched organ.

“Do you hear that?” Quinn said.

“I don’t know what it is,” I whispered. “It sounds like a circus.”

Musical monsters.

“It’s Fent.”

Quinn nudged my shoulder and then went back toward the place where the hatch lay open. “Time for us to settle in, Billy.”

*   *   *

We sat on our beds, across from each other, and listened to the music as it got louder at times, and then drifted away like a wind.

I’d been scared plenty of times—in Marbury, and in other places—but there was something about that music and the thought of it being connected to someone who was looking for me and Conner that was more unnerving than anything else I could remember.

“Why do they do it?” I said.

“The music? Fent just wants us Odds to know they’re coming. Hunters, too. I guess it saves the Rangers on ammunition. Everyone runs from them.”

“Do they know about this place?”

“Of course they do, Odd.”

The music was clearer now. It sounded, ridiculously enough, like a single small accordion; the kind they call a concertina.

“It doesn’t scare you they know about you?”

“You really don’t know nothing, do you?” Quinn sighed. “Join or die, Billy. Join or die. They don’t fuck with the Odds till we turn sixteen. Well, except for the depraved ones, they don’t. Or till we look like we’re sixteen.”

Quinn shifted on his bed, leaning toward me, leering. “How old are you, anyway? Heh-heh.”

That explained some of it, I guess.

“How old do I look?”

“You? You look like you’ve been around for a really long time, Odd.”

He was fucking with me again.

I wanted to get out of there. If I didn’t get away from Quinn, as good as things might be at his firehouse, I was certain he was going to push me into doing something bad.

I lay down and stretched my legs across the cot. I was completely exhausted.

“What do you want me to do if they show up?”

Quinn got up from bed and lowered the mantle on the oil lamp.

It was as black as if I’d shut my eyes, but they were wide open. I could hear his bare feet padding across the floor, the squeak of his bedsprings as he sat down again on his cot.

“Don’t be scared, Odd. I’ll take care of you. I can handle Fent and the Rangers. If they show up tonight, you just get up on the roof. You’ll be safe there till I come get you. Okay?”

I gritted my teeth, forced the words from my constricted throat. “Thanks, Quinn.”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“Okay.”

I remembered something.

And I told him.

“There’s a settlement across a desert. They call it Bass-Hove. You ever hear of such a place? There are people in it. Real people who don’t call themselves Odds. There’s girls, too. They still have some power there. Trains. Locomotives that take people out, to another city. A fortress behind big walls, named Grove. Did you ever know anything about those places? That’s where the Rangers are going.”

I had seen it all before. I had been to those places, could still feel the gritty, windless heat of the air at the Bass-Hove Settlement, could picture the sheer walls of the fortified city at Grove, where Conner and I took the other boys after we’d crossed the mountains.

“You’re making that shit up, Billy.”

I heard him roll over onto his side and exhale a tired breath of air.

And I was certain he knew exactly what I was talking about.

*   *   *

The Rangers came that night.

I was hard asleep, and at first I felt Quinn’s hot breath against my ear when he whispered, “Billy. Billy, wake up.”

He shook my chest gently, and I thought it had to be a weird dream.

I dreamed of being on the water again.

“Psst! Billy!”

Then I heard the music, louder now, the squeal of the concertina wheezing in and out, in and out.

It sounded as if it were right outside the firehouse door.

“Huh?” I shot up in my bed, disoriented, everything swirling and smearing like a watercolor painting that had been left out in a summer storm—Glenbrook, here, there, Marbury, my friends, the Odds, Quinn Cahill.

“Shhhhh … Quiet now, Odd.”

Quinn’s mouth was so close to my ear I could feel his lips moving. “Remember what I said. Get up the ladder now. Come on, get humping, Odd. They probably just want some water. I got to go down and talk to them.”

I stood, shaky and weak.

Quinn lit a lamp. The kid lifted the lid on the footlocker. I heard him flip the switch inside it—his electric fence. Then he nodded at the ladder and went out the door and downstairs to the entryway.

This was it,
I thought.

I started toward the ladder, holding my shorts up as I walked. Then, I’m not sure why I did it, but I looked back at the room. And I thought,
If they come up here and see two beds have been slept in, they’ll know somebody else is here. Quinn can’t be that stupid.

He’s fucking with you, Jack.

So I went back and pulled the blanket and sheet from my bed.

The music outside stopped.

I tossed my pillow across to Quinn’s cot and I grabbed my pants and boots from the floor where I’d hidden them under my bed. I even slipped my hand inside to make sure the broken lens was still tucked into my pocket.

Same old Jack, no matter where he is.

And as I bundled my things in the bedsheet, I got the idea that I should leave. I glanced at the door, strained to hear anything, but it was all so quiet. I jumped across to Quinn’s closet and slipped inside. I didn’t bother to look, I grabbed as much as I thought I could carry—cans, mostly—and one plastic water jug.

My hand ached, but I got everything up that ladder and onto the roof.

Then I shut the hatch behind me.

I stripped out of the shorts and got back into my pants. I hooked up my belt, could feel the weight of that knife, as it slapped against my thigh when I laced up the boots.

Sure you used to have a knife like this one, Quinn. That’s because you left it at that old man’s house, didn’t you?

I put the shorts he’d given me, and everything I stole from him, inside the blanket. Then I tied the corners into a tight bundle that I slipped over one arm. I knotted my sheets together and thought about how stupid I was, because this stuff never worked in real life, did it?

Yeah. This is real life.

I secured one end of my sheet-rope to the bar on the outside of the hatch and then threw the end that was probably going to break my leg in the best case, or kill me in the worst, over the side of the firehouse.

And even if I made it to the very end, I estimated I’d still have to drop ten feet—and that would be from a full-out stretch. So I clenched and re-clenched my injured right hand, wondering if I could hold my own weight; wondering what kind of shit was down there for Jack to land on.

But before I’d go over the edge, I had to see what was going on.

Just a peek.

You’re an idiot, Jack.

I went to the front of the deck and looked down.

I could see Quinn, standing awkward and scrawny, naked except for a pair of baggy gym shorts, so he looked like he was maybe twelve years old. And he was talking to a group of soldiers—six or seven of them at least—who were mounted on horses that nervously twitched and shifted, rolling their eyes and throwing their heads back like they knew if they stood still too long the Hunters would come. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Quinn was holding out his white arms, palms up, like he was imploring the riders to believe him. I wondered which one was Fent.

I found myself looking again, mesmerized by the pulsing slash of light where Quinn theorized something had fallen out of the sky. And something about that mark in the sky looked familiar to me—like I was supposed to remember it.

He said it happened seven days ago.

Maybe Conner came through first. Maybe he knew what was going on, only Marbury Jack hadn’t tuned in yet, like Ben and Griffin hadn’t.

Maybe they were still falling through, and that was why they didn’t know who I was when they found me in their garage.

Shit, maybe the boys were still at home in Glenbrook—the real Glenbrook—watching while stupid Jack takes a swing at the only glue holding the entire universe together.

Jack did it again.

I had tried to make things right, to help my friends by splitting the lens. And just like most of Jack’s other fixes, things only ended up broken worse than ever.

Seven days, seven years, it could all be an eyeblink here, a sneeze. So Conner left those messages for me at the old man’s house, knowing I was coming. Sooner or later.

And out in the blank tract of nothing between here and the dust-covered highway, I saw a blazing line of red coming west toward the Rangers and Quinn’s firehouse.

I saw the Hunters coming.

And that was enough for Jack.

I crossed the roof.

I do not pray. I have never prayed for anything. But when I grabbed on to the cord of sheeting and lifted my right leg over the edge, I shut my eyes tightly and silently repeated one name in my head: Nickie.

Then I went over the side.

And with each grasping hold, as I struggled to lower myself a foot at a time, pinching the sheets so desperately between my crossed ankles, I thought: Conner, Ben, Griffin, Seth.

I have to get back. I have to make things real again.

*   *   *

I tore open my hand when I climbed down from the firehouse roof.

The bandages and tape Quinn had so carefully wrapped around the cut soaked through with blood and pus that separated like light in a prism as the fluids migrated through the gauze and formed layers of colors—the broken-down spectrum of the stuff inside of Jack.