Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

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.

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.

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.