Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

twenty-five

They knew it was long past time to leave.

What remained of the city was completely overrun with Hunters. There were no more people here.

No more Odds.

No more Glenbrook.

Ben pleaded with Henry to take us along. In the end, he didn’t really have a choice.

They gave us horses.

We rode with Henry and his Odds.

It was what we were supposed to do, and I knew it. It was the only way for me to find Conner. And Conner, the rest of the lens, was our only chance to get out of here.

*   *   *

Henry barely said anything else to me after our first meeting in the Knolls. Maybe he was waiting for me to do something, but I didn’t know what it could be. I got the feeling he was saving something up, planning. I knew he was scared about telling the other Odds about where he came from; that they might somehow turn against him if they knew the truth about Henry and me, and the other two boys who didn’t act quite like Odds.

It rained once more before the first evening came. We stayed on the horses, but in the foothills there was no flooding like we’d see drowning the old streets. That probably meant none of those black suckers, but I wasn’t going to get down on the ground just so I could find out.

And it turned out to be the last rain we would ever see in Marbury, too.

When it stopped that night, the hole in the sky seemed bigger, more intense. It spread open directly above us, and showered cascades of what looked like burning-hot embers downward, shards of stars that disappeared and died in the Marbury sky. The hole began to resemble a gaping mouth, its upper lip a sneering mirror image to the wound on my hand: hungry, drooling, yawning open, wide enough to swallow the world.

It was coming.

By mid-morning on the third day, we had crossed into the desert, heading on a path toward the settlement called Bass-Hove. Our direction was decided for us by a plastic toy compass Henry kept in his pocket. It looked like something a kid might have dug out from a box of breakfast cereal at some other time, in some other world.

Nobody knew if the compass meant anything at all. Its needle seemed to be made from tinfoil, half of it painted blue, and every time Henry consulted it, he would have to carefully pile a loose hill of ash on the ground as a support to tilt the thing at a steady angle so the indicator could find a balance point and not stop up against its red plastic case.

Seventeen kids rode with Henry. We made twenty. And nearly all of them, from what I could tell, were fourteen or fifteen years old. It made sense. Younger kids had been easy prey. They got taken first. And older Odds were always conscripted into the army, or something worse.

It was natural and every other kind of selection.

So, next to Henry, I was the oldest in the group, which gave everyone enough reason to be suspicious of me.

It was almost as though that prisoner number—373—had been plainly tattooed across my chest, and they all could see it.

Some of the other Odds flatly refused to talk to me at all. To them, I seemed nothing more than a non-paying passenger. But for the most part they seemed to accept Ben and Griffin easily. They were younger, the right age to be part of the group.

I’d heard the riders talking about the boys—how some of them recalled stories about the two Odds on Forest Trail Lane who lived in a bunker beneath a house and killed a Ranger in their garage.

They gave us clothes that had been taken from the dead, so at least we were covered against the desiccating heat of the desert, even if our uniforms were hole pocked and bloodstained. The band of Odds carried water and food that they carefully rationed, stored in bundles of blankets and drapes that were lashed to the pack horses with anything that could bind—electric cords, networking cables, even a rotting garden hose.

In the group, there was a loose and unstated hierarchy. Everyone followed Henry. And a tall, black-haired Odd named Frankie, who was missing the little finger on his right hand and had a wispy tuft of fuzz sprouting beneath his chin, seemed to enforce rations and turn taking when it came time for jobs or sleep.

But they were all boys. Naturally, there were episodes of conflict and cussing, sometimes fighting, and even nastier stuff than that.

Boys.

I don’t think any of them had the intent to stay within their association once our group made it to the settlement.

On the fourth day, Frankie showed the others how we could use two plastic tarps and a collector can to distill drinking water from our piss, so we wouldn’t have to open the precious bottles we carried. He explained we’d have to save them until they meant the difference between living and dying. That day, we stayed camped in the middle of a formation of melted lava rocks—maybe they were giant meteorites—where we rested the animals.

The boys never gave us any weapons.

The other Odds were scarcely armed themselves. A few of the boys carried bows they’d taken from dead Hunters, with a supply of arrows that had been pulled from carcasses of their friends, of people they’d known.

There were some Odds with knives, and many of them carried spears made from all sorts of metal debris.

And then there were the rocks. Rocks for throwing—they were kept in whatever pockets were available—and every one of the boys had a favored rock for bashing, one that fit comfortably in his grip, some of which had been scabbed over with tarred blood. No one would carry the maces or cudgels of Hunters, though. Those were always made from sharpened human bones.

But out here, in the desert, there was no life.

Only ash and salt.

*   *   *

The days were monumentally boring, made worse by the fact that the Odds only stared at me; they never spoke.

Ben and Griffin felt guilty about the ease with which they fit in among the other boys, but I couldn’t hold a grudge against them for it. I put us here, after all.

So I sat beneath a craggy overhang on one of the boulders, watching, absentmindedly flipping the broken lens between my fingers inside my pocket, carefully tracing the sharpness of the edge that had cut my hand so bad. And I stayed there, tucked into my little hiding place with my pack jammed into the crevice behind me.

We’d been taking turns on the watch, seven or eight at a time, posted on top of the jagged boulders around our perimeter where we could look out in every direction.

Of course the Hunters would be following us, tracking game.

It was Ben’s and Griffin’s turn up on the watchposts.

Frankie stood in the center of our encampment, carefully shaking out the top sheet of plastic, filling his can with the dewy distillate. That day, the entire place reeked with a thick fog of piss, and every hour or so, Frankie would remove his can and dole out a portion of drinking water to whichever Odd came up on the mental list he managed.

I was always last in line.

But I kept myself occupied by watching him, observing the other Odds in their bored frustrations.

One of the boys, a wiry and frail-looking skeleton of a fourteen-year-old named Ethan, had an English accent like Henry’s. He rarely spoke. The boys teased him about how he’d peed himself when he slept every night the first week after they found him alone, hiding beneath the ruined grandstands at a soccer field.

A few of the other boys were relentless in picking on Ethan.

There are always small clusters of boys like that within larger groups. They congeal together like cold grease in water. The assholes. Three of them: a small, muscular tank with white hair named Alex, and his two followers—a slow-witted nose picker who everyone called Fee, and his brother, a towering pole of a kid named Rum, who never wore a shirt so he could show off the tattoo of a dragon that wrapped across his belly and around his back to the spindly knobs of his spine.

They were like pack animals, I thought, and the English kid was chosen to die first.

That’s just how things worked for kids like Ethan.

He must have been strong, or fast, or something the others underestimated, for him to have survived for as long as he had. And I thought if anyone was going to talk to me, maybe Ethan would. But then I realized trying to do that might just get him picked on even worse.

I was lonely, and I wanted to go home.

It scared me to think that home might not even exist at all anymore.

When it was my turn to drink, Frankie glanced in my direction and raised his dingy can. Then he called for Henry and I watched while the boy asked him to bring a drink share over to his friend, “the Ranger.”

I glared at him.

“Fuck you, kid.”

Frankie puffed up his chest and grabbed his basher from his back pocket. He came storming over to where I was sitting in the rocks. Henry just stood there, holding the water can, quietly watching us.

I hated being forced into doing the “guy thing,” but I couldn’t let Frankie start off this new day by labeling me as some kind of enemy outsider in front of the other boys, either.

That’s just how things were.

It meant there was going to be a fight, and neither one of us questioned or doubted the laws that dictated our nature.

So before he’d even taken three steps toward me, I launched myself up and ran straight for him. I wrapped my arms around his midsection and slammed him down into the ground.

Frankie managed to hit me one time on the back with his rock. It hurt. I could feel the point of the basher as it cut into the flesh above my shoulder blade. Then there was a general roar, and whatever kids weren’t on posts immediately formed a tight circle around us.

I kept wondering why someone didn’t do something. I was convinced that one of us was going to end up dead, but I wasn’t going to look around and plead for intervention, either.

I pinned Frankie’s hand beneath one of my knees. Hard. It felt like I was grinding dried chicken bones against a sidewalk, and I knew it had to hurt him. But Frankie refused to let go of his basher. I twisted my fingers into his greasy hair and pressed the back of his skull down into the gritty ash.

Frankie had his free hand up at my throat, clenching, trying to push me back, but he wasn’t really doing much. He squeezed, and I could feel his dirty fingernails cutting into my skin, but I didn’t even hit him or anything. And I knew I could have messed him up bad, but I just looked down at the kid and saw how his eyes started welling up with tears, and I realized right then how horribly foul Frankie smelled, so I was kind of disgusted. I loosened up on him.

I said, “Don’t fuck with me, kid. We all want the same thing here.”

And then I looked up at the circle of Odds who were watching us, right at the faces of the assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—and I let go of Frankie without so much as punching him even one time.

I stood up and wiped my hands on my legs.

That kid stunk like rotten meat.

Then Alex said, “You should have made him kiss your nutsack, kid,” and his followers shoved each other’s shoulders and laughed.

Frankie got up, stinging.

I wasn’t sure if he was going to come back at me again, so I watched him. He was wet with sweat, and gray ash like bone dust coated the back of his head. He still gripped the basher.

I took the water can from Henry and swallowed just one gulp. Then I handed it over to Frankie.

“Here. Fighting against each other in this heat is a sorry waste of our energy.”

Frankie tucked his rock back in his pocket and nodded. He looked at Henry, then at me, and he took the can from my outstretched hand. He drank.

Frankie licked his lips. He was thirsty, and I didn’t realize he’d been making everyone else drink first, even me.

*   *   *

“It may be some time before you get another sip of water.”

Henry sat down next to the place where I was trying to sleep beneath the crag of the rock. I’d been using my backpack as a pillow. It was dumb, though. It was just as hot beneath the rock as if I’d been staked down like a martyr in the middle of the ash field.

“I’ll last,” I said.

“I came to ask you about things,” Henry said.

“The last few days, I didn’t think anyone was talking to me. Even my friends.”

Henry shook his head and sighed. “I need to hear it. How did you get here?”

I scooted out from beneath the rock, attempted to brush the salt and ash away from my sweaty body, and sat next to Henry.

We leaned our backs against the rough surface of the boulder. From where we sat, I could see Ben and Griffin standing at the top of the ridge on the lookout post above the opposite side of the clearing the Odds had camped in.

“It was you,” I said. “You sent me here.”

So for more than an hour, Henry and I shared each other’s stories. In some ways, it was like meeting for the first time. But in other ways, it was like we’d known each other for our entire lives, too.

Henry had been there for ten years; since he was a kid. He told me that he’d lived in the settlement, next to my house when I was only five or six years old.

Of course.

That was always meant to be.

Henry and I know each other everywhere, don’t we?

All these strings keep connecting, over and over, knotted together—things inside of things inside of still bigger things—me, Henry, London, Glenbrook, Marbury.

Not-Marbury.

I am the worm and I am the hole.

It was why I’d run into the same people and places again and again; even if, now, everything was slightly off, altered. Tilting. The knots were all unwinding.

And all arrows point to the center.

Here and there blur into one.

And the gap is gone.

Henry told me he’d “been back home” a few times, and that he always swore to fight the urge to return to Marbury, but, in the end, it was entirely out of his control.

Just like Jack.

This last time, he said, he’d been here so long that he began to believe that there was no other world than this; that everything else had been a dream, or some kind of psychosis; maybe something all kids imagine when they pass through adolescence.

He believed it until Jack and his friends showed up five days ago, after we crawled out from the Under.

“You know what?” I pulled at the threads unraveling from the tear on my right knee.

He looked at me and I said, “I broke the lens.”

Henry didn’t say anything, didn’t react at all.

“I shattered it with a hammer. Then we ended up here. But something’s wrong. Everything’s off. Every time I turn around, there’s something that’s changed, like it’s broken, too. And every time I try to get out of here, I end up somewhere worse. It’s always the same: It starts out looking like things are fixed, like it’s going to be okay or, possibly, even better than before, and suddenly everything gets fucked.”

I shifted uncomfortably.

My back ached where Frankie hit me with the rock. Across the clearing, where the string of horses had been tied, I could see the boy with the missing finger.

He was watching us.

Frankie had to know something was up, that Henry and I shared some connection that went beyond just trying to get across the desert, to escape the Hunters pursuing us. I could tell just by looking at the kid’s eyes that Frankie was smarter than most.

My hands were sweating. I wiped my palms on my jeans and rested my arms across my bent knees. I slipped my hand out of the filthy and stinking pocket I’d been wearing as a glove for nearly a week and raised my right hand, like I was holding something for Henry to read, directly in front of him.

“The lens cut me,” I said.

Henry stared at the mark in my flesh. Then he looked up at the sky. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew he saw the connection.

More tangled strings.

“I want you to show me,” Henry whispered, like we were keeping some desperate and poisonous secret from the other boys.

I thought about it.

Here I was in this complete reversal of roles, finally capable of fucking with Henry Hewitt the way he fucked with me when I was just a paranoid and unsuspecting kid wandering around London alone. It would be easy enough, I thought: Just open up the backpack, unroll the filthy sock, and

flip!

Good-bye, Henry.

Good-bye, Jack.

Fuck us both.

“I’m scared to do it. I messed shit up and now everything is coming apart. I have to believe things will fix themselves, Henry. I think we will see each other in London, just like we did, like we’re supposed to. But I have to do one thing first.”

Henry wasn’t looking at me. I thought maybe he was mad, like I was holding back a present and he wanted it bad enough to do something desperate. Or maybe he was thinking of some way to take it from me.

After all, that’s what Jack would do.

I didn’t so much as glance at my pack. I didn’t want to tip off Henry that there was anything inside it that might interest him.

But he had to know.

He was dying to find out.

And it was almost like I could hear those fucking glasses whispering my name, as though they had a heart and it was beating, pumping, and I knew it was going to make me open the pack.

Don’t do it, Jack.

Do it.

Come home, Jack.

I tried to breathe, inhaled deeply.

“There’s one more of us here,” I said. “A boy named Conner Kirk. He’s…”

And I thought, He’s what, Jack? The only person who cares about you? You love him? You love him and you know you fucked up his life forever? He’s what, Jack?

“I know he’s heading for Bass-Hove, too. He has the other part of the lens. I think we need to put them back together.”

“Is that what you think?” Henry said.

He wasn’t even trying to disguise the sarcastic tone in his voice.

“Yes,” I said. “That is what I think, Henry. What do you think?”

I heard him take a deep breath. He nodded his chin out toward the circle of clearing between the boulders. “Me? I think it doesn’t matter. This is always the world. Home. We may be the last people remaining, but this is what we do.”

He shrugged. “We cross deserts looking for others who may be left behind, too.”

Henry sounded just like he did when he tried to explain about Marbury to me; the night when I was so sick, after I’d lost the lens in Blackpool and we sat together at The Prince of Wales.

“You told me that you weren’t sure whether this was the beginning of the world or the end of it.”

He looked directly at me. “Let me see the lens, Jack.”

My hands shook.

“Jack.”

I began to sweat. I could feel droplets as they rolled down my skin, tickling, insects.

And I was so thirsty.

Across from us, there was movement along the top of the boulders where the Odds had been posted on lookout. They raised their arms and pointed off, across the desert in the direction Henry’s little toy compass told us was the way out.

“Show me.”

I couldn’t stop myself.

My hand shook so bad. I dragged my fingers through the ash.

I tried telling myself that maybe this was the key.

Maybe being with Henry could make things right.

I didn’t look.

My hand found the backpack and I dragged it out and placed it between my legs.

Don’t do it, Jack.

“Not the lens,” I said. “It kills things now. There’s something else. Another way.”

Henry grabbed for the backpack. He was acting like a drug addict, desperate to get his fix.

“Don’t!” I grabbed his hand to stop him from opening the pack. “Listen to me. Wait.”

Henry tried to wrestle the pack open.

I twisted his wrist.

The kids on the rim began shouting.

They saw something in the desert.

Henry was sweating, panting.

“Listen to me! It’s something else. It doesn’t even work for Ben and Griffin.”

Because they’re dead and inside a fucking trash barrel.

I said, “It might not be anything for you.”

“Let me see it.”

*   *   *

I can’t stop myself.

On the rim, Alex, or maybe it is one of the other assholes, shouts Henry’s name.

“Henry! Come look!”

It is always thrilling. My chest heaves. It’s a nervous rush, like having sex.

I am excited and terrified at the same time, and I know Henry feels it, too.

Zip.

My fingers fumble through the folds in my sock.

Fuck you, Jack.

I keep my nervous hands working inside the pack. I have to hide what I am doing from the other Odds. I unravel the dirty sock. I flash on a thought, but it is gone before I know it: Should I feel sorry for what happened to Quinn Cahill?

I can see a glint of the blue glass, the small eye of the outer green lens that is flipped away.

“A rider!”

Someone calls from the lookout.

“Henry! There’s a rider!”

Henry sits beside me, so close we lean against each other. I can feel his body quaking.

I say, “Look.”

Then I flip the lens into place.