Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

We’d been closer than brothers, and I could recognize Conner Kirk from the angle of his shoulders, the motion of his hand when he wiped across his eyes. Even as tired and worn as he must have been after being hunted by the Rangers since helping me to escape, I knew I was looking at my friend.

“That’s him,” I said.

“Fuck this,” Frankie snapped. He started off down the path to the clearing. “I’ll show you who he is. We’ll fucking go kill him. I’ll bring back his fucking head.”

“You won’t get anywhere near him,” I said.

Frankie stopped. “I’m not afraid of guns. We’ve fucking killed Rangers before. There’s more of us than him.”

“Believe me, Frankie. You don’t want to fuck with him.”

Frankie’s eyes darted from me to Henry, then to each of the other boys who stood there on the lookout with us, as though he were searching for any gesture of support.

He spit a long, stringy blob down on the rocks between us. Frankie put his hands up to Henry, like he was expecting something. “We’re just going to let him go, then?”

Henry inhaled slowly and looked at the sky. “Nobody wants to go out there at night.”

“I’m going to go after him,” I said.

“Jack—” Ben started, but I cut him off.

“We’ll talk about it later, Ben.”

I already knew he was going to tell me I couldn’t go out there looking for Conner without taking him and Griffin. I tried not to think about leaving, about not coming back. This was Marbury, after all. Or not-Marbury. Who knew where the four of us would be tomorrow, and the next day after that?

So I stared at Conner until I couldn’t see him anymore. I tried to estimate the distance and direction where I might intercept his path, but calculations like those were meaningless in Marbury.

The dimness of the gray night fell over the silent Odds who stood on the ridge beside me.

We scanned the nothingness of the desert below until Frankie got tired of waiting for some affirmation from the other boys that he was right, that he was still in charge. When it never came, he started down the narrow path, half whispering that it was time to eat.

Frankie chose out the next shift of boys to keep guard on the watchposts. Nighttime meant Hunters would be out, and the Odds never slept. At least, they never all slept at the same time. It was perhaps the only reason they had survived to escape Glenbrook and attempt the crossing to the settlement in the first place.

So I half expected him to appoint me as a replacement for Ben or Griffin on the ridge, but the kid never asked me to do anything throughout the five days that I’d been with the Odds, and he continued to ignore me over the small rations of food that were distributed for our dinner.

We ate in segregated groups. The division was more than just the few feet of dirt that separated us from the other boys. The Odds were talking about me, about the three new kids and the bed wetter. No matter what happened to us tonight, I knew things would be different from now on.

Ben and Griffin sat with me while we ate. Henry stayed up on the ridge. I knew he wanted to talk to me, but he was just waiting for the situation between the Odds and me to calm down, I thought.

Ethan sat with us. There was nowhere else the kid could go. That was my fault, too. He never tried to fight back against the bullying of the other boys, and things would probably be calmer, easier, if I’d just let them get away with their shit.

But it was too late for that once Ethan had seen through the lens. He knew me. Another thread had been woven into this hopeless string, and I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how much I wished I could.

In the other group, Frankie stayed where he could watch us. He always watched us. But the three assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—sat as far away from us as they could, wounded and angry, backs turned, never so much as glancing toward me.

Griffin broke our mournful silence with one word.

“When?”

I shook my head. “Henry needs to make it okay. I need to ask him to let us go, so he can help us.”

Ben watched me, like he was waiting for me to say something more. Then he looked at Ethan.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Ethan said.

Ben spit in the dirt and turned away from the kid. “I guess putting up with all the shit those fuckers do to you makes you smart, then.”

Something like that would have been the first act in a fistfight with any one of the other boys. Not the English kid, though.

Ethan shrugged. “I know you’re not Odds. I know why you’re not like them.”

“Because you fit in so well, right?” Griffin said.

“Him, too,” I said. I lowered my voice and scooted in closer to the other boys. “He went through the lens today.”

I watched Ethan to see if what I said made any difference to him. But I just couldn’t figure out that kid at all.

“He went through?” Griffin said.

He knew what it meant. Griffin and Ben couldn’t see anything in the glasses. Because you don’t see anything when you’re dead and inside a fucking trash can in some twisted and rearranged goddamned not-world. And the first lens, the broken lens, the one that caused it all, could only destroy things now.

Nobody went through the broken lens. It only let things out. Ben and Griffin saw what it did at the market when we were attacked by Hunters, and again on the roof deck at Quinn’s firehouse.

They knew what it meant.

“Where did you go?” Ben asked.

I watched the knobby Adam’s apple in Ethan’s neck twitch as he considered what he should say.

“Well?” I said. “You can tell us.”

“You were there, Jack. You had to have seen it,” Ethan said. “It was real.”

He glanced around nervously. It was like he was trying to gauge our expressions to see if we thought he was crazy, or stupid. And he looked carefully, too, across the way at the other Odds.

Ethan’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was morning. I think it was the most pleasant place I’ve ever seen. We were inside a room, our room. We lived there, and it was clean and felt cold beneath my feet, too. There was a window on a wall, between our two beds. Outside, it was raining, but I could see trees and the most fantastic colors I have ever seen.”

I knew where it was.

Of course I knew.

Ethan looked directly at me. “You were still lying in bed.” He looked down, embarrassed, and said, “I had just taken a piss. In a toilet. With water in it. And you asked me about some news. And I remembered we were leaving that morning, that we would be catching a train somewhere.”

“London,” I said.

“Yes. That was it. Do you remember, Jack?”

I shook my head.

Ben leaned in closer to us. “Fuck that. How come we couldn’t get through, then? Fuck that, Jack.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I messed it all up.”

“That’s why he talks like Henry,” Griffin said. “He’s English. That’s why, isn’t it?”

“He’s from my school,” I said. “St. Atticus.”

Ethan’s brow tightened. He was excited. “That’s it! That’s what it was called. St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. You remember!”

“No. I just know it. But it’s a good thing, Ben. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we are all home, where we belong. We just need to—”

And Griffin said, “What? We need to what, Jack?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Change the fucking channel or something.”

Ben stood up. “Fuck this place, Jack. So, where’d you leave the goddamned remote?”

Ben had every right to be as angry as he sounded.

Ethan cleared his throat, obviously confused. “How can I go back there?”

I kept my eyes on Ben. He started off, up the trail to the ridge.

I stood up. “You can’t go back, Ethan.”

Griffin got up, shaking his head. “Everything’s fucked out of shape, Jack.”

“Let’s get Ben,” I said. Then I figured there was nothing else I could do, and added, “Come on, Ethan.”

The Odds watched us with untrusting eyes as we crossed the clearing and followed Ben up to the ridge where Henry was waiting for me.

thirty

“We need to leave before something else happens,” I said.

When I saw Henry’s eyes, the slate haze of the Marbury night made him seem so old and tired.

And for just an instant, he looked like the old preacher, and it scared me.

I believed in that moment that Jack had jumped across again, landed on another string; and I realized this was how my brain worked now—that from now on I would always wonder, or doubt, what not-world I’d quietly fallen into.

“Something else always happens,” Henry said. “It’s the only thing we know for certain, isn’t it?”

The other boys stood away from us. They waited, shifting their feet impatiently at the top of the trail. I knew how bad Ben and Griffin wanted to leave, and Ethan, he was helplessly tied to us now.

Just another string in our knot.

“I’m afraid the Odds will fight us if we take horses. You can make it be okay.”

Henry took a deep breath. He thought about it, but I already knew he wouldn’t refuse. It had to happen.

He said, “One day soon, I expect to have another beer with you at The Prince of Wales.”

“I’ll buy.”

“Will we be real friends, I wonder?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose we’re always certain of that, too, aren’t we? The not-knowing, I mean.”

I nodded. “Will you come down with us?”

“You will be back. I’ll tell them that.”

“What if we don’t?”

Henry smiled. “It has to be, doesn’t it? You know what still has to happen, Jack.”

Then Henry touched my side, just above my hip, with the point of his index finger. “You know. This. In. Out.”

He raised his eyebrow as though asking if I remembered the arrow. The first time I’d set my feet down in Marbury.

I said, “It doesn’t have to happen, Henry. This isn’t the world. This is not the same place.”

Henry waved his arm across the air between us, like he was painting the scenery with the sweep of his fingers. “Then what is it, Jack? Of course this is the world.”

I shook my head. “This might be the only way for me and the boys to get back home.”

“You know, Jack, everything we do, no matter how ordinary and insignificant the action, continually reinvents our future.”

I thought about seeing Ben and Griffin in photographs, and inside a fucking barrel hidden in Freddie Horvath’s garage.

“Maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe I’ll never go anywhere that’s close to being home again. But I have to try. For them.” I pointed to Ben and Griffin. “And everything’s already been rearranged behind me, so it doesn’t much matter what you do now, Henry. Scratch your head, don’t scratch it, throw a rock off this wall, whatever. All things have been accomplished. That’s what the preacher always says, so it doesn’t matter. I saw … I saw…”

“What?” Henry said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Henry said, “I suppose I’ll see you again.”

“In a better place.”

Henry patted my shoulder and walked around me toward the waiting boys. “What could possibly be better than this?”

*   *   *

Five of us rode out from the encampment that night.

Ben, Griffin, Ethan, me, and Frankie.

Frankie refused to let us go without him, despite Henry’s assurance that we would come back before morning. Frankie considered the horses, like most of the things transported on the caravan, to be his property. He argued that it was he who’d orchestrated the theft of the horses from the Rangers’ holding pens, and he was the most capable rider of all the boys.

“I want to see for myself what that rider out there is trying to do,” Frankie said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him myself.”

And I told him, “I think we’re all going to die out there.”

That was all we said about it.

With or without us, Henry decided, the Odds would all be leaving in the morning. They had rested long enough, and he was certain the Hunters were coming soon.

Stubbornly, Frankie led the way, as though he’d already calculated exactly the course we’d have to follow to intercept Conner’s path. He’d chosen out the fittest horses and forced us to ride hard to keep up with him.

As we rode, I kept thinking about what Henry said to me before we left, how he seemed resigned to things that had already been determined, and from time to time I slipped my hand up inside my shirt so I could rub the spot near my belly where I’d been shot with a Hunter’s arrow in some other world, at some other time.

This had to work.

Conner was waiting for me.

I had to believe we would get home, that I would see Nickie again, that everything would be put in its place, made whole. And Ben and Griffin would not be harmed.

Earlier, when we’d seen Conner passing across the desert, it was obvious that he was in no particular hurry to get to the settlement. He moved so slowly, and even at such distance I could see by the slump to Conner’s shoulders and the angle of his downturned head that he was tired, possibly even asleep while his horse plodded forward.

Above us, the Marbury sky bled a constant shower of light. It looked like blazing powder that sprinkled like dusty embers in constant, undulating flows.

The hole had grown larger again.

Ben rode closest to me. “What are you going to do when we find him?”

I passed a hand over the one pocket I hadn’t cut out of my jeans so I could feel the contour of the broken lens in there. And I wondered if, unnoticed, it may have turned into something else, black and knotted.

I exhaled. “I don’t know, Ben.”

“Make sure that asshole Frankie doesn’t fuck things up.”

“You mean worse than Jack already did?”

“Wasn’t your fault. We all did it.”

*   *   *

It was Ethan who saw him first.

Frankie overestimated. He rode past Conner by a good quarter-mile, so if the St. Atticus kid hadn’t been paying attention, who knows how far off course Frankie might have taken us?

Ethan stopped his horse and turned to face the distant rider.

He pointed to the faint figure, hundreds of yards from us. “He’s over there.”

There was no way of knowing if Conner could see us or not. He rode with his head pillowed against the horse’s neck.

I glanced back to get an idea of how far Frankie had gone, but I couldn’t even see the kid at all. Still, I knew I needed to hurry.

“The three of you wait here for me.”

Griffin argued, “You have to let us come, too.”

“What if he doesn’t remember you, Griff? What if it isn’t really Conner out there?”

Griffin bit his lower lip, didn’t say anything.

So I answered for him. “You’ll know in a minute what needs to happen. Just watch me. And keep an eye out for Frankie, too.”

Then I kicked my horse into a trot.

Of course it was him.

I knew it before I’d seen him. I knew Conner would be here before we ever left the camp that night; I could feel it.

And part of me knew, too, how when I found him, Conner would be sick.

It was supposed to happen, right?

All things accomplished.

So there I was, caught halfway between Ben and Griffin, the friends who I wished I might save, and Conner, the friend I hoped might save me.

And all I could do was worry, desperately, if this not-world was real, like Henry swore it was; if, maybe, there wouldn’t be any way out for us this time. At least, not all of us together, whole again, going home.

I stopped a hundred feet away from him.

He didn’t see me.

“Con?”

He moved his head, just a little, and the horse quivered.

“Con? I made it. Just like we said we would. You okay?”

I nudged my horse forward.

His horse spun around in a tight clockwise circle, and I saw that where Conner rested his face, all down the horse’s side had been smeared wet with blood.

Conner coughed, his body rattling like he was broken inside, then he spit a black blob that elongated in a glistening cord from his mouth. He lifted a rifle in the air with one hand, but I could tell he wasn’t nearly strong enough to hold it steady. He dropped it onto the ground beneath the horse.

Then he raised his eyes enough that he could see me.

“Jack?”

I jumped down and ran across the dusty ash to where my friend lay slumped on top of his horse.

“Jack?” he said again.

I grabbed the neck of Conner’s shirt and slid him from the horse’s back. He turned over in my arms, but I caught him. I couldn’t believe how light he felt, how empty. I helped him down onto the ground so I could lay him flat.

He kept his eyes on me the whole time, unblinking, as though he weren’t sure if it was all some kind of weird dream. His mouth hung open, crusted with dried blood.

One of his eyes was dark. It had turned almost entirely black, so I could barely see the circle of his pupil.

The bug.

I put the flat of my hand on his chest. “It’s time we get the hell out of here, Conner.”

This is how it was supposed to happen, right?

“How long we been here, Jack?”

I shook my head.

“Where is it?” I said.

“Huh?”

I pushed my hand into Conner’s pocket.

“The lens. Where’s the lens?”

The glove I had sacked around my palm snagged on his pocket and pulled Conner’s pants down past his hips. And there it was, the little burning mark, the red blaze of the crossed loop, the exact shape and place where I’d seen it on my friend before, the first time we’d found each other in Marbury.

Conner raised his hands, attempted to push me away. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I tried to jam my hand down into his pocket again.

It had to be there.

“It’s okay, Con.” I patted his chest. “It’s me. What did you do with the lens?”

Then there was shouting, curses, that came from across the empty desert where I’d left the boys.

I turned my head to look.

At the horizon, where the blank ground rose up and vanished seamlessly into the folding haze of the night, I made out the shapes of the boys and their horses. Frankie had returned, and behind them all hovered a flickering line of red embers.

Hunters were coming.

And at that moment I heard the whish from a volley of arrows as they cut through the sky, followed by the panicked cries of Ben and Griffin when they called my name.

“Fuck!”

I hesitated, tried to think of what to do.

“Hang on, Con,” I said. “I’m coming back.”

He coughed an answer.

I picked up Conner’s rifle. It felt heavy. I braced the butt against my hip and pulled back the cocking slide so I could see if it was loaded.

An unspent cartridge ejected from the breech.

So I leapt onto my horse and rode to where the boys were coming under attack, toward the winking line of red brands. The Hunters were a small group, a patrol team; maybe ten of them, looking for food.

Us.

“Get on the ground!” I screamed. “Get down now! I have a gun!”

I was afraid I might shoot one of the boys, so I probably waited too long before I pulled off the first burst of fire.

My horse suddenly reared back. He’d been hit by an arrow above the right foreleg. I toppled down from the animal and hit my face hard into the ground as the horse snorted, terrified, and circled away from me.

The other four horses, riderless, thundered past.

One of them had an arrow in his head.

I spit. My mouth was full of ash and blood, and an open gash burned above my eye. I raised my head, stinging, then stood up and began shooting into the line.

More arrows came. They all fell short, dying impotently in the crust of salt ash.

One by one, the red brands of the Hunters collapsed and fell, too.

The rain of arrows stopped.

One of the attackers tried to run back to where he’d come from, but I could see him and kept firing until he finally collapsed, crumpling into the flat of the desert.

When I stopped shooting, I felt myself being swallowed up in an eternal silence.

My ears rang.

I breathed.

I whispered, “Ben? Griff? You guys okay?”

Nothing.

A black figure rose up, slowly, cautiously, from the flat of the ground.

Then others.

“Jack?” It was Griffin.

“Is anyone hurt?” I called back.

“Jack? Where are you?”

I could see the kid moving around, bent forward, as though he were scanning the ground around him.

“We’re all okay,” Ben said.

I shut my eyes and exhaled.

“Stay there,” I said.

“Jack—” It was Frankie.

“Give me one minute,” I said. “Ben. Griff. Just one fucking minute, okay?”

And Griffin said, “It better be good, Jack.”

thirty-one

Conner was gone.

“Conner!”

I kicked the ground, sending a spray of salt and ash upward in a dusty gray cloud around my feet.

Maybe I’d gotten disoriented, I thought. Maybe he was still lying right where I’d left him. He had to be there.

I began moving back and forth, sweeping the ground with my eyes and feet.

“Con!”

“Jack!” Frankie shouted my name from the distant blank gray of the Marbury night.

I knew he’d be coming this way, too; I could feel it. There was no way to stop him. So I didn’t answer him, hoping Frankie and the others might not see where I was standing.

I whispered for Conner, more frantic now as I began jogging around the empty area where I was certain I’d left him.

My foot twisted, caught up on something.

It was a shirt.

It had to be Conner’s.

“Conner!” I whispered again, but there was no answer.

I jerked my head around, strained to see if I could detect the shapes of the four boys out there, looking for me. And I could hear them moving, the crunch of their boots on the crust of the ground as they came closer and closer.

I picked up the shirt. It was damp from sweat, it stunk, and the collar was slick with snotty blood. Holding the rifle with one hand, I fed the fabric of the shirt back and forth between my fingers, feeling, feeling, trying to find that goddamned lens.

Then I came upon a boot, thirty feet away from where I found Conner’s shirt. It was lying on its side, laces wildly pulled out from eyes, the tongue lolling into the ash like the victim of a strangling.

I had to pick it up, had to look inside it, too.

Nothing.

Fuck this.

“Con. Please!”

Want to play a fucking game, Jack?

Getting warmer?

Colder?

Colder?

A trail of clothes led me out farther into the emptiness of the desert—another boot, empty, socks, wet with Conner’s sweat. Jack liked keeping his lens inside his socks.

But not Conner.

There.

Pants.

And ten feet away from the twisted pants he’d flung away from his burning body, I saw Conner there, like an emaciated insect, naked, skeletal, squatting in the dust and watching me with a dark, empty stare.

“Con?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and slowly, cautiously, I lowered myself so I could scoop up his pants.

“Get away.” Conner’s voice was a garbled, raspy hiss.

“It’s me, Con—”

“I fucking know who you are! You think I fucking don’t know who you are? Get away from me!”

Slowly, steadily, I crept to where I could see him more clearly.

Conner jammed his fingers down into the crusty surface of the salt flat, digging. His hands gripped so tightly into the ground, like he was trying to hold himself down, or as though he were strong enough to keep the world from spinning away beneath our feet. It seemed that every muscle on his body was tensed to the point of bursting, exploding; his face contorted in anger, the tendons in his neck strained taut, like cables.

It was Conner, but it wasn’t Conner.

I watched him as I squatted down and laid the rifle to rest across my knees. Then, cautious and deliberate, I began going through each of the pockets in his discarded pants.

“We’re getting out of here, Con.”

He spoke through bared, gritted teeth. “I … We waited too long. I can’t stop this.…”

And behind me, Ethan’s voice, not twenty feet away from us. “There he is.”

Conner began whimpering. He covered his eyes with twisted, shaking hands. The mark above his groin blazed so fierce.

It could not be too late.

Then I found the lens.

He’d wrapped it up inside a scrap of torn cloth that looked like it had once been a sleeve on his T-shirt, wadded, just like Jack would do, tucked away in one of the buttoned outer pockets on the uniform fatigues of a Ranger.

He began to pant, grunting between breaths. I could hear him swallowing great gobs of drool.

“Get the fuck away from me, Jack Whitmore!” Conner growled. It sounded like it hurt him to free words from his constricted throat. He slammed his fist down into the ground.

Carefully, I placed the wrapped fragment of lens in my palm. Even then, as soon as I held it out beneath the hole that dripped fire from the sky, I could see how the thing burned within the stained cloth.

My hand felt heat, and through the sack in which I’d covered my scar, I saw the seep of blood that spread out across the dirty rag covering my palm.

“It’s going to be okay, Con. I promise.”

How the fuck could I promise that?

Blood ran, tickled the back of my wrist.

Drip.

Conner stood up.

He looked like a bug.

White eye.

Black eye.

The fire brand.

Hands, muscles, twitching like over-tight springs.

He wheezed and drooled.

“A fucking bug!” Ethan shouted.

“No!” I said. “He isn’t! Stay back!”

I jammed my other hand into my pocket.

There it was, the Marbury lens. I could feel it tingle between my thumb and finger.

I pulled it out and placed it on my palm beside the piece wrapped in Conner’s shirtsleeve.

Drip.

*   *   *

Jack is bleeding again.

The sky lights up, an instantaneous dawning of gray Marbury nothingness.

I flip Conner’s lens around, try to unwind its cover.

He slurs, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Conner limps toward me, moving as though he’s fighting himself, giving up.

As my fingers nervously grope the edges of the filthy cloth and begin to pull it free from the lens, I glance across and see the four boys standing, frozen, under the sudden blaze of the sky.

Only Frankie starts coming toward the place where I crouch in the ash.

And on my opposite side is Conner.

The lens tumbles from my bloody hand.

“Fuck!”

Frankie has a bow, captured from one of the dead Hunters. He notches an arrow, pulls it tight against the strain of the bowstring.

All arrows point to the center of the universe.

All arrows point to Jack.

I sweep my hand across the ground, let the other half of the lens fall there.

Conner growls like an animal. He is so close to me now I can feel the heat from his skin.

Frankie raises, aims.

He shouts, “Don’t fucking move, Jack!”

Conner twists his fingers into my hair, grabbing, jerks my head so my chin notches upward. I look at him, but he can’t see me anymore. He clenches his other hand into my throat.

“Con!”

And I can’t breathe.

Blindly, my fingers find the pieces, lift the tattered rag away from the one I’d taken out of Conner’s pocket.

Now I have them both.

Black dots begin to swallow everything I see, a closing aperture on a camera’s lens. I can’t say anything, and when I move my head I can feel Conner’s fingers tear into the flesh on my neck.

But I see Frankie as he releases the arrow.

This is how it always is.

Drip.

I push myself up. It takes all my strength; and I can feel the aching, the blood as it runs down my chest.

The swimming shapes come back, rise up from the ground below us.

This is how it always is.

Drip.

I am standing in front of Conner as he slobbers and tears at my throat.

Everything is everywhere.

The arrow comes.

The aim is precise.

I cannot move.

Drip.

And in my hand, the lens is made whole again.