Passenger (17 page)

Sure we won’t, Conner.

“I think I know what you’re saying, Con.”

“I keep thinking how we need to put the pieces of the lens back together,” he said.

We sat there for a few minutes, not talking, until it was light enough to see.

The thing in the sky had faded to just a ripple in the dusty blue of morning.

Conner cleared his throat and shifted. “It’s really hot in here, Jack. Let’s put down the windows.”

I started the engine, lowered our windows, and turned on the air.

“We should go somewhere else to do this, Con. Let’s not do it on the street here.”

“I was thinking that, too.”

*   *   *

We drove south on the 101.

We headed for the two-lane pass that led out to the ocean, toward Cambria. Along the way, the side of the highway was clogged in some spots with cars and motor homes filled with people who’d brought out their telescopes or cameras to wonder at the thing in the sky.

Most of them had pale and weary expressions of panic on their faces, like they were witnessing the end of the world, or maybe an alien invasion.

When I thought about it, I supposed they were right on both counts.

Conner and I were not from here, and this world was never going to be seen again.

We passed a rest area that was completely filled with motorists. Some of the cars there looked like they’d been packed up with household belongings.

“Look at that shit,” Conner said. “What do you think they’re doing?”

“I don’t know, dude. Maybe they’re scared.”

“Of a fucking Christmas-tree light in the sky? I could show them some shit.”

“Yeah. We both could.”

*   *   *

I pull the truck off the highway and follow a lightning-bolt string of rusted barbed wire along a single-track path of wheel ruts cut into the drying summer grass.

The roof scrapes beneath the clawed fingers of low-hanging oak branches.

Another Jack would worry about scratching his paint.

At least there is shade here.

Conner doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.

We’ve done all this before, and it always feels the same: We are standing on a cliff, looking down into deep black water, daring each other to jump first, watching.

Watching while your best friend falls and falls.

I get out of the truck, leave my door open, and a bell keeps ringing to say that I’ve left my key in the ignition.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Conner gets out and we walk farther into the woods.

“I hope nobody ever finds us,” I say.

“This place doesn’t exist, anyway,” Conner answers.

Ding. Ding.

I have the glasses in my right hand.

It feels like being at the front of the line, waiting to get onto the next roller coaster car that stops.

“It exists. But we don’t belong here.”

“We fucked up worlds, Jack.”

I think about the thing in the sky, the jagged edge of the Marbury lens.

What can I say?

Conner grabs my shoulder and I stop. “How far do you plan on walking, dude?”

Ding. Ding. Ding.

“I don’t know.”

“Look. Let’s try to remember what I said, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I will find you, Jack.”

“Okay.”

“And, Jack? If something happens. I mean, if, let’s say, we end up with one of us in hell and one of us in the Bahamas…”

Conner smiles.

I say, “Fuck that.”

Then Conner hugs me and puts his face right up against my ear.

He backs off.

I raise the glasses.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

“Bye, Con.”

Part Three

THE UNDERWORLD

thirteen

How much time?

A second? A year?

There were neither clocks nor calendars in Marbury. They had gone away, disappeared along with certain words.

I lay on my side, curled up on the stained and bare mattress that tilted downward in the ruins of a bedroom that was mine in some other world.

It was mine here.

I watched the window. The rain stopped; there was no dampness beneath the sill, only dust. When I moved my hand, the glasses fell from my fingertips and onto the floor.

Clack.

This is real.

How much time?

I had things to do.

Get up, Jack.

I sat up, waited for the blood to stop swirling in my head, and took stock of what I was—this Jack.

The new and improved Jack Whitmore.

I turned my hand in front of my eyes, looked at my aching palm. Still bandaged, dry like parchment paper; the wound felt tight.

How long has it been?

I was dressed in the splitting dungarees, the prison uniform I’d had on when I woke up on Ben and Griffin’s garage floor. My boots were the same fraying things that showed open windows onto my filthy socks, and I wore the loose, rusty T-shirt I’d taken from Quinn Cahill. On my belt, I had my knife—Quinn’s knife.

It was stupid, but I suddenly felt so lonely and isolated. I almost wished the kid was there with me.

I shook my head, put my feet down onto the floor.

I nearly stepped on a finger-scrawled
SETH
written in the dust on the floor between me and my broken mirror.

“Seth?”

I listened. Nothing.

I bent down and picked up my glasses. The third lens—the smaller green one—was still flipped over the large blue eyepiece. Things moved and swirled in the glass. I had to shut my eyes and feel with my thumb until I could pivot the lens away, out of place, and jam the glasses back inside their sock.

“Con?”

Nothing.

I pictured him standing there in the shade of the oak forest, listening to another Jack’s truck go
ding ding ding
because the key had been left in the ignition, on another world where people had been lining up on the edges of the highway to witness some unexplainable apocalypse.

“Con?”

I had to believe he made it here, too; that he had things to do, and that everything was going to be okay now.

I had to believe that.

When I stood, I noticed two things that had changed.

Things keep changing because you fucked everything up.

The door that had smashed open when I first came into my room was now closed. The upper hinge was completely disconnected, and half the brass screw plate stuck out like a busted lip.

And Seth Mansfield was standing in the corner, watching me.

I said, “Seth.”

That was all. We just stared at each other. And of all the things slightly changed, moved just a bit, between there and here—the Glenbrooks that weren’t Glenbrooks and Marbury, fucking Marbury—Seth looked exactly the same: pale and scrawny, barefoot, without a shirt, his torn pants held up by some kind of braided cord, his dirty yellow hair that hung down into his eyes.

I realized how much Seth looked like me, but I knew why that was, too.

Seth Mansfield was the great-grandfather of Wynn, my own grandfather. Seth was close enough in resemblance to me that we could pass for twin brothers.

I could almost smell him. I wished I could touch him, grab his hand, make him stay here with me because I was scared and alone.

I saw the wall through him. Seth was gray, like a bad television picture, and I could see the cracks in the drywall, how the corner of my room was separating like the house was coming apart right behind him.

He took a little step toward me.

“Look at your hand, Jack.”

I turned my bandaged palm upward. “I know.”

Seth faded, disappeared entirely, and instantly he was right there in front of me. He put his face down, barely an inch above the cut that had been wrapped up by Quinn Cahill. I could feel him.

“You have to put things back, Jack.”

“I know.”

Seth looked directly at me. “You can’t bring everyone with you, Jack. You can’t just build your world the way you want it to be all the time. Things don’t work out like that, you know? It has to be only you, Jack.”

I swallowed. I figured Seth was telling me something I didn’t want to hear or think about, and it made me angry. Things never worked out the way I fucking wanted them to.

“Okay.”

“Be careful.”

Then Seth put his hands around mine and vanished. I could feel something like cool water flowing into the cut on my hand, and it made me not so scared. It felt good. I closed my hand tightly, then opened it.

I unwrapped the bandage and dropped it onto the floor.

The line on my palm matched the edge of the broken lens, the rent in the sky.

“Seth?” I called out. “Seth?”

I heard something rolling down the staircase, tapping every plank on the way to the bottom landing. That was how the kid did things. Seth was gone.

It was time for me to leave, too.

I fished the broken lens out from my pocket, and then dropped it down inside the sock with the other glasses. For just a moment, I wondered what might happen if I held the Marbury lens up to the sky, if I would see the red light that Conner had described.

Jack was afraid.

I wound the sock tightly and tucked it down inside the waist of my pants.

The food and water were still sitting, wrapped in the blanket on the floor near the front door. My hand felt better, stronger.

I slung my bundle over one shoulder and left the house.

*   *   *

I should have stolen that kid’s speargun.

In Marbury, there was nowhere to hide for long, and now I had to watch out for two different sets of enemies: Rangers and Hunters. Maybe Quinn Cahill, too, if he was mad enough about Jack stealing things from him.

One time, as I walked down between ruined rows of buildings that marked where Main Street had been, I heard the sound of horses approaching, and so took cover beneath a flat sheet of roofing plywood that lay inside the burned-out shell of a hair salon. I stayed there and watched while a group of Rangers rode past, slow and nervous.

And they weren’t separated out into teams the way that Conner said, but at the front of the pack there were two girls—only two. One of them was pregnant. She was dressed mostly in black and her hair was shorter than mine.

I knew it had to be Anamore Fent, from the way Conner had described her to me, and I knew they were looking for me, too. Me and Conner.

Just behind the two captains rode the old man with his accordion. He started to play just as they passed in front of the building where I hid, and the preacher snapped his head from side to side like he sensed I was nearby.

Maybe I was just fooling myself because he scared me.

I counted as they passed me.

Twenty-eight Rangers behind the two girls at the lead.

It must have been all that remained of the five teams.

It looked like they’d packed everything they owned on their horses. They were leaving, and I knew where they would go. I hoped Conner was far enough in front of them that he would never see them again.

Maybe they would give up looking for me, too.

After they disappeared, I waited nearly an hour before crawling out from under the collapsed roof. It was getting late; I had to keep moving.

*   *   *

I made it back to Forest Trail Lane without running into anyone or anything else after that. At times, I’d turn around quickly, thinking that I might catch a glimpse of a Hunter sniffing the air after me, or maybe see that crazy redhead kid slinking along, smiling, aiming his speargun, waiting for me to make a stupid mistake.

In Marbury, there was nowhere to hide. If someone wanted me bad enough, I was dead meat.

*   *   *

First came the lightning in the late afternoon, and then the thick blobs of metallic rain that hit so hard it stung. Rainwater puddled almost immediately. I had no choice; I had to get inside.

I pounded on the small door at the side of the garage, hammering with the edge of my fist until it began to go numb.

“Ben! Griff! Please, let me in!”

In less than a minute, it was as though I’d been standing fully clothed in a shower. The gray water pooled along the side of the house, flowing into a small river that ran back beneath the wrought-iron fence and toward the pool full of junk.

A black worm snaked over the concrete slab at my feet.

I rolled the edge of my boot sole over it, cut the thing in half, and kicked it away.

I pounded on the door again.

“Ben Miller! It’s me, Jack!”

Then I heard something move on the other side of the door. Someone began clearing away the barricade they built when Ben and his brother kicked me out of the garage.

I looked down. The water came up to the edge of the slab.
If they didn’t let me in soon,
I thought,
I’d have to try climbing up the outside of the house.
I didn’t want to fuck with those black things again.

The door cracked open.

In the sash of blank light, I could see just one of Ben Miller’s eyes and the tip of the sharpened steel spear held in his grip.

He looked different. His eye was sunken in, like he’d been starving to death. It was terrible to see.

Ben seemed to be trying to focus on my face, then he looked down the length of my body.

“Jack? Is it you?”

I was torn between wanting to shove my way through the narrow crack of doorway he braced with his foot, so I could hug my friend—it really was Ben Miller; he was here now, with me in this fucked-up place—and worrying about the black worms that began writhing up through the building water.

“It’s me, Ben. I’ve been waiting for you. I have food.”

Ben swallowed and turned his face back. I could see someone move in the dimness of the garage. It was Griffin.

But he kept his spear pointed toward me. “Is it really you?”

I said, “Mind the gap, Ben. Remember? Mind the gap.”

He opened the door.

*   *   *

As miserable as Ben Miller and Griffin Goodrich looked when I first woke up here—lost, sharing the floor of their garage with a dead soldier—they looked that much worse, weaker and sick, now. They hadn’t been eating; I could tell. They didn’t have any water to drink.