Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

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.”

“Sure thing, Quinn.”

But I kept staring at him, so he’d know that I wanted to hear the truth about what he sold me out to the Rangers for. He took a deep breath. “They offered me a gun. Or…”

“Or what?”

“If I took a gun, I was sure they’d end up shooting me, Billy. You know how they are about Odds with guns. So, one of the captains … she … you know…”

I couldn’t imagine. Well, I didn’t want to. I looked at Quinn’s face, and the kid really wasn’t lying this time.

“She let you have sex with her?” I said.

I could almost feel the embarrassed heat coming from Quinn’s pale skin. He looked down and pulled nervously at his dick.

“Fucking pervert liar. Bull. Shit.” Griffin laughed.

“I’m sorry, Billy. It’s just. I haven’t never—”

“Shut the fuck up.” I didn’t know whether to laugh at Quinn—at whatever captain allowed a horny kid who looked more like a cave salamander to slime his way onto her—or punch him again. “And stop fucking calling me Billy.”

“Sometimes I can’t help myself, Bill—I’m sorry. Truly I am.” Quinn sounded like he was going to start crying again. “It’s just … you know … an Odd’s rig calls the shots when it gets … well … desperate, and mine’s been thinking powerful thoughts on its own lately. So I figured if they were going to shoot me anyway, I may just as well allow my pecker to—”

“He said shut up, Red.” Ben started walking off, into the dark. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”

And when Ben had disappeared into the black, he yelled, “Dumb. Fucking. Idiot!” so loud that it echoed and rippled its way in every direction along the ribbed steel guts of the Under.

But that was Quinn Cahill.

He was definitely no more than I expected him to be, and I can’t honestly say I was ever surprised by anything he ever did anyway.

*   *   *

We walked through the dark, following Ben.

It was reasonable for him to be in the front, and not just because he was frustrated by our situation and pissed off at Quinn. He had the weapon. There was no way Quinn would be getting the speargun back, or even asking for it, anytime soon.

Griffin stayed close on my right. Even though he carried Ben’s spear, I could tell the kid was scared. Who wasn’t?

Quinn paced himself, walking like a prisoner halfway between Ben and us.

I never knew there was such darkness anywhere in Marbury. It seemed that every step we took, as we got farther away from the hole to the firehouse, distances distorted, became greater, and time—if it even existed here in the Under—slowed down.

At least on the surface, there was some bland recognition of the passing of a colorless day into a washed-out night, but here in the Under, there was only the cool black and absolute quiet.

I’d seen films of what it looks like in the deepest trenches beneath the ocean, but this was perhaps even lonelier, and scarier, too.

We walked.

Occasionally, we would kick things embedded in the dry dirt beneath our feet: bones; several shoes—I wondered why shoes seemed to last longer than anything else—corroded soft drink cans; and an entire television set, the kind with a glass picture tube—an antique in anyone’s world. Griffin uncovered a blue vinyl pouch, the type you’d use to organize roadmaps kept under the driver’s seat in a car.

None of us were paying attention to his discovery. I think we were all nearly blind by concentrating our eyesight on the narrow and dim beams cast forward from our flashlights.

“Fucking sick,” he said.

I stopped, shined my light on him. “What?”

“There’s a dried-up kid’s hand inside this thing. Look.” Griffin turned the pouch over and something that looked like a large gray spider fell out onto the ground at his feet.

My stomach turned.

“But I think this is a map, Jack.” He carefully pulled out a yellowed clump of folded paper, pinching it between two fingers like it was poisonous.

“Let’s see that.”

Ben and Quinn stopped, maybe fifty feet down the tunnel ahead of us. When Quinn swung his light around in our direction, the thing that had fallen from the plastic pouch—the hand—took off, skittering across the top of Griffin’s foot, away into the darkness. I tried keeping my light on it—whatever it was—but it was too fast.

Griffin screamed and kicked wildly at the air. “Fuck! Shit!”

He looked like he was dancing, and the paper he’d been holding fluttered away into the nothingness.

“I don’t think that was a hand, Griff.”

“What the fuck was that?”

I could see Ben’s silhouette in the light cast by Quinn’s torch. He was walking back toward me and Griffin. “You guys okay?” he called.

“Griff picked up something that was alive. It ran off.”

“What was it?”

“Shit!” Griffin said, backing away from his spot. “It was fucking disgusting, Ben.”

Ben looked at me. “Harvester?”

I shook my head. “We thought it was a kid’s hand. It looked like a hand. I don’t know what it was.”

“Welcome to the fucking Nature Channel,” Ben said. “Hope whatever it was doesn’t eat boy meat.”

He had to say it. I was certain at that moment we all were thinking about that kid’s skull hanging on the hook we passed.

“But there was a map or something in there, too,” I said. “Griff flung it over there. Help me look for it.”

I began scanning the ground with my light.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

Quinn came back, shaking his flashlight to recharge it.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Ben eyed the kid. He had a button-pushing, fuck-with-you look on his face. I’d been through enough with Ben that I could see what was coming, and I dreaded it.

The last thing we needed down in the Under was for all of us to start getting on each other’s backs.

And Ben said, “You shake that thing pretty good, Red. I bet you practice a lot, don’t you?”

“Huh?” Quinn was reasonably clueless.

Griffin laughed and spit. “Fucking grab my balls, pervert.”

Quinn took one wide step over to Griffin and shoved the smaller boy’s shoulder, spinning him around. “You want to start fucking with me again, not-Ben?”

“Hey!” I spun around and aimed my light directly into Quinn’s face.

He stopped cold. Done.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

“Oooh … Ahhh … Rrredddd…,” Ben moaned.

I felt myself getting hot. “Cool it, Ben. Please.”

Quinn forced a laugh. “Heh-heh-heh … That’s a good one, Ben. I get it! And damned if I’m not pretty good at it!”

Quinn angled the flashlight up, pointing out from his crotch.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Griffin whispered, “What a fucking dork.”

I ignored them. I scanned the ground behind Griffin. “There it is.”

I bent down and picked up the folded paper. It could have been a hundred years old; it was so faded and clumped together. But it was a map. I glanced back to where Quinn was playing jerk-off with his flashlight, and my eyes followed his beam across the expanse of the tunnel.

Where the light hit the ridges of the steel wall, I saw writing.

“Holy shit.” I dropped onto one knee and aimed my flashlight at the words.

Quinn was oblivious; his light epileptically darted all over the place, clicking and clicking.

Griffin caught on first.

“What the fuck is that, Jack?”

I could only shake my head and stare.

Quinn froze.

“Don’t mind that, Billy. We sometimes used to come down here to play, is all.”

“He’s a fucking liar.” Ben started across the dirt floor toward the smears of graffiti.

I said, “What’s it mean, Quinn?”

The kid dropped the beam of his flashlight down onto his feet.

Quinn said, “Nothing. I told you we used to play down here, Billy. When I used to have other friends.”

And on the wall, scrawled in thick rusty letters that advertised a kind of urgent warning:

I WILL KILL YOU IF I CATCH YOU DOWN HERE AGAIN, QUINN

Below it, in another hand, a response. Some of the letters were backwards, a jumble of lowercase and capitals:

We all saw it.

I shined my light directly at Quinn’s pale and expressionless face.

“That was a game, Quinn?” I said.

“I told you it was,” Quinn said. “We used to play like that down here.”

“You and someone named Billy?”

Quinn’s voice was low and unsteady. “I was just messin’ with you. Uh. Jack.”

Ben stormed toward us. Even in the starved light cast forward by the torches I could see the great clouds of dust he kicked up with his feet.

“He’s a fucking liar, Jack.”

“We shouldn’t have brought him,” Griffin said.

Quinn dropped his flashlight into the dirt and took off running, back in the direction of the ladder up to the firehouse. Maybe it was the darkness, but the kid seemed to almost fly.

Griffin grabbed the collar of Quinn’s T-shirt, and the entire thing ripped from Quinn’s bony and luminescent body as he struggled to get away. Ben launched himself at Quinn, wrapping both arms around his knees.

Quinn tried to kick free from Ben’s tackle, and his pants split right up the middle. He lost a shoe before Ben finally took the kid down.

Then Ben was all over Quinn, punching, pulling his hair, slapping him with such force it sounded like a toy cap gun from another time when kids played games that didn’t involve hanging their enemies’ heads from spikes on the wall.

“You fuckin’ kill that kid, you piece of shit, Red?” Ben panted and swung. “You fuckin’ kill your friend?”

Ben brought his knee up, again and again into Quinn’s balls.

“Get off him, Ben,” I said.

I didn’t care what Ben did to Quinn Cahill. I just didn’t want Ben to hurt himself.

“Ben?” I said.

Ben Miller shoved himself away from Quinn.

His arms were streaked with Quinn’s blood. Ben was a filthy, muddy mess. His eyes shone crazily like twin white stars in the dim light.

He said, “I think we should kill him, Jack. I’ll fucking kill him if you think we should.”

This is what Marbury does to boys like Ben.

I looked at Griffin. I was taking a vote, and Griff knew it.

Ben said, “We’d be better off if we just do it quick.”

Griffin shook his head.

“I don’t think we should kill him,” Griffin said.

I stood over Quinn. His eyes were shut. There was a cut along the swollen ridge of his left cheekbone. Ben had knocked the kid out.

I nudged Quinn with my foot.

“Get up, Quinn,” I said.

Ben walked out into the dark and threw up.

This is what Marbury does to boys like Ben.

I shined my light on Quinn.

The kid was a mess.

He lay on his side on the ground, curled up with both hands inside the rip in his jeans, holding his nuts.

“Get up,” I repeated.