Passenger (26 page)

I glanced back at Ben. Still not moving; just staring.

“Griff! Listen to me. Just stay there. I’m going to get Ben. Please.”

Griffin barked, “Get off of me, you fucking pervert.”

I turned my light away from them. I needed to get Ben out of there. Griffin and Quinn were still fighting. I could clearly hear punches landing.

It was going to happen sooner or later, anyway. I had to ignore them.

I whispered, “Just don’t fucking kill each other.”

I waited a moment for the smoky rain of black salt to settle down. Then I slid my way farther in, beneath the hanging strands of mold.

Ben gasped and started breathing again, fast and hard. It was almost as though he’d forgotten how to inhale and then suddenly woke up. But he wasn’t awake. The muscles on his face and chest all seemed to clench, and he didn’t move his eyes or even blink. He couldn’t see me crawling my way along the floor of the drainpipe toward his feet.

“Ben! Ben! Look at me!”

One of the spider things dropped down on the floor of the pipe, between me and Ben. I could see it clearly in the flashlight’s beam. Its body was gray and hairy, striped across with black, bigger than both my hands put together. And the sets of legs on either side were incredibly long. Folded in half, they were still more than a foot in length, which explained how fast the ones I’d seen had been able to run away from us. The spider had a long rope of a tail that curled and flicked at the end of its butt, but the most alarming thing about it were the two ivory white fangs that looked like curved swords, clicking together just a few inches from my face.

I held my breath. I laid the flashlight down so I could see the thing, and slid my hand down onto the hilt of my knife. When the thing came at me, I stabbed down, directly into its abdomen, but the knife made no mark at all on it. The spider just flattened out and thrashed its tapping legs. It was almost as though the thing were made of metal. The blade of the knife did nothing to the spider. It just kept biting at the air, clicking its legs and whipping its tail.

I scraped the knife forward until the point found its way into the segmented joint between the spider’s head and body. A weak spot.

I breathed a gasp of relief. I didn’t think spiders slept, and I would have been there pinning the thing down with my knife for a long time before one of us got tired. But its head came off under the edge of my knife, and the rest of it ran off somewhere on the other side of the tunnel where Ben was standing.

I swatted the head out of my way and crawled the rest of the distance to where Ben was.

Ben stared straight ahead, oblivious to everything: the dark; the boys, who were thrashing each other not ten yards from where we were; me, crouched around his feet, trying to get him to pay attention. I grabbed on to his shin and pulled on the leg of his trousers. They were completely soaked with his piss. And I realized I was sitting in a warm puddle of it.

Something else Quinn knew about.

Fuck this place.

Ben didn’t react, so I pulled him harder. His hand jerked, and he dropped the speargun down into the urine.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I picked up the weapon, grimaced in disgust, and slung the dripping strap on the gun’s stock around my neck. Then I reached up and pried the flashlight from Ben’s fingers. He was stiff. He stunk. He felt like a dead body, but his breathing was so fast and strained. The skin on his chest and belly dripped black tears of perspiration mixed with the fungus that coated him.

Finally, frustrated, I hooked my fingers into the waist of Ben’s jeans and pulled so hard that he fell on top of me. I rolled over on my backpack and caught him, but his knee came up squarely beneath my balls, and I felt my guts twist and knot their way slowly through my chest, snailing their way toward my neck.

I couldn’t do anything. I had to lie there like that for a minute with Ben on top of me. His mouth hung open, panting, and he drooled onto the side of my face. All sweaty and piss soaked, Ben’s eyes were frozen open as if he were transfixed by the best show he’d ever seen, and so didn’t want to sacrifice an eye blink.

I grunted and rolled onto my side. It was all I could do to avoid getting the granules of mold that had fallen on the floor around us into my mouth. I turned Ben faceup.

When my head cleared, I realized there was no way I could pull a kid as big as Ben out of there if I had to crawl away and keep us both down beneath the hanging mold. So I slid my hand into the backpack and felt around blindly until my fingers closed on the coil of nylon rope we’d taken from the firehouse.

As I moved Ben so I could wind the rope beneath his armpits, I saw the bite marks left in his back by that spider creature. They were angry and red, about two inches apart, and looked like small parallel slices into the flesh over Ben’s ribs. Clear, glistening fluid, venom, oozed out from both wounds. I wiped it away with my thumb and squeezed the area around the bite, causing an eruption of poison from the holes in Ben’s back.

Squeeze. Wipe. Again.

The fucking Nature Channel: Every unimaginable beast can be found here in the Under.

Once I’d gotten a loop knotted around Ben’s chest and put him on his back, the boy seemed to start loosening up, but his breathing continued to pulse in gasping pants.

Then he spoke.

“What are you doing?”

It sounded like Ben was talking in his sleep, anesthetized, like he didn’t really
care
what I was doing to him, he just wanted me to tell him about it.

“Getting you out of here.”

“Why?”

“This isn’t a good place. You’ll be okay.”

“It’s a good place. I feel fine. Leave me alone.”

I sighed. “Don’t move.”

I began crawling back toward Griffin and Quinn, holding one end of the rope in my hand, and Ben said, “I’m not going to move.”

“Glad to hear it, dude.”

I slid and squirmed along the bottom of the pipe. I realized I was just as black as Ben—coated in the granular dust of the mold growths, made even worse because I was soaked with Ben’s piss. With each stretch forward, my mind raced all over the place—maybe I was falling under the effects of the drug, too.

Ben will be okay.

He has to be okay.

Fuck this place.

I’m going to fucking beat the shit out of Quinn if he hurts Griffin.

I am never going to feel clean again.

Ben has to be okay.

Keep crawling, Jack.

You fucked up everything.

Fuck you, Jack.

The fight between Griffin and Quinn was over by the time I bellied out from under the black jungle. Both boys were seated, faced in opposite directions, nursing their wounds.

At least they were both still alive.

Griffin held a bloodstained hand to his face, pinching his nostrils shut, and Quinn, worse for wear, slumped his head down over his bent knees. It looked like every wound on his body had opened up again and started bleeding.

Quinn was obviously crying.

He just had no clue about how to get along with other human beings.

Odds.

“You guys are stupid,” I said. I stood up and pulled the rope tight, shining my light back at Ben, who was still lying on his back, staring up at nothing, watching the show. “I could use some fucking help.”

I handed Griffin the flashlight I’d taken from his brother.

He was about to say something, too. And I knew what it was. I could tell. He was about to call Quinn a cocksucker or a faggot or whatever boys Griffin’s age call other boys when they get into fights, but I didn’t want to hear it.

I held up my hand. “Don’t start any more shit, Griff. The fight’s over. Let’s get your brother out of there.”

Griffin sniffed and wiped at his bloody nose. He looked like hell. I looked worse. Griffin said as much. “You look like you crawled through a shithole, Jack.”

He grabbed the rope behind me and we pulled together, slowly.

Griffin sniffed again. “And you smell like piss.”

My stomach turned. “Fuck.” I shook my head.

With each pull, I could hear Ben grunting, “Unh. Unh.”

Then Quinn got hold of the rope behind Griffin, and we kept tugging until Ben was clear of the mold. I lifted up his shoulders.

The three of us dragged him all the way back to the junction just before the main tunnel.

*   *   *

Griffin leaned over his brother. He wiped his hand across Ben’s face and hair while I poured water on him.

We tried to get him to drink, but Ben choked and gagged, spitting the water all over both of us.

“He’s a fucking mess,” Griffin said. He patted Ben’s cheek. “Ben? Hey? Can you hear me?”

Quinn hadn’t said a word since I came back out of the mold, he just hovered over us, watching, pouting, sniffling. And Ben stared at us while we tried washing him, but we could tell he wasn’t actually seeing us. He’d just murmur things that didn’t make any sense.

“Wow. It’s okay. It’s moving. It’s opening up. I can see forever. Jack. It’s you and Griffin. Jack. The hole in the sky is the way through for everyone. I know who you are. Jumping Man. I can see you. I love you, Griff.”

Griffin chewed at his lip, and kept his hand in Ben’s hair.

He was scared and I could see it.

“Ben never says shit like that.”

“He got bit, Griff,” I said. “One of those things got on his back and bit him. It was like the hand you found, only it was some kind of spider.”

“Where’d he bite him?” Quinn’s voice, cracked and strained from the fight with Griffin, from crying, surprised us.

“On his back,” I said.

I turned Ben onto his side and Quinn cautiously stepped toward us to look. Ben’s arm flopped limply across his chest; slick drool ran down the side of his cheek.

“Did it unfold its legs?” Quinn asked. “Did it have really long legs that were folded up, and then he was maybe bigger across than the kid?”

I looked at Quinn and nodded. “What is that thing?”

“A whip spider.”

Just the way he said it—the tone in his voice—told me it was something bad, and Quinn knew what it was, too.

Griffin leaned in and put his face right up to the marks on Ben’s back. They seemed bigger now, and there was a spreading red mass that seemed to be growing across Ben’s skin. It looked like it was snaking in both directions along the boy’s spine.

Griffin put his hands flat on either side of the bite. “It feels like he’s on fire.”

I shined my light on Quinn’s face. His cheeks were streaked with mud. “How bad is this thing?”

Quinn didn’t flinch. He frowned and shook his head.

I put my hand on the side of Ben’s head and then looked at Griffin. He knew what Quinn meant.

I dropped the flashlight and stood up. I got right up against Quinn, so our chests touched. He felt soft and small, afraid. “What the fuck, Quinn? What the fuck?”

Quinn started backing away. He was scared, and I’ll admit a big part of me wanted to punch him again, but I felt sorry for him, too. And I was so tired of the kid at the same time. But I couldn’t help thinking about Ben Miller’s bones inside a fucking trash barrel with Griffin’s, secreted away in Freddie Horvath’s garage, and how that fucked-up version of the world couldn’t be real; and now here we were and this redheaded fucker was telling us how Ben was going to lie down in a fucking sewer and die right in front of us while we watched him go.

And this couldn’t be real, either.

But we couldn’t escape.

I couldn’t get Ben and Griffin home.

And it was my fault.

I put my hands on Quinn’s shoulders, not hard, not threatening, just like I wanted to hold the kid down, to make things okay. It took all the will in the world to keep my voice restrained, to not claw my fingers into his pasty white flesh, to not shake the living shit out of him.

Deep breath, Jack.

“I’m not going to hit you, Quinn.”

I could feel the kid begin to relax, loosen up, under my touch.

“What do you know about those spiders?”

He shook his head, tried to look away from me. “He ain’t gonna make it, Billy.”

nineteen

“What do you mean?” I said. I shook the kid angrily. “What the fuck do you mean?”

But I knew what he meant.

Quinn didn’t have to say it.

I probably would have hit him if he did. He stood there sniffling, looking like he was getting ready to cry again.

“You’re full of shit,” Griffin said. “You’ve always been full of shit, you fucking prick. I should have said yes. I should have told Ben we needed to kill you.”

Griffin poured water across Ben’s chest, washing his brother, wiping his skin with a shaking hand.

The muscles in Ben’s neck had tightened, so his head tilted back, and his mouth stretched open even wider now. Except for the movement of his ribs when he inhaled, he already looked dead.

“I don’t know what to do, Griff.” I sounded pathetic, like every fucked-up thing I’d ever done to them had all clotted in my mouth and was choking me.

Griffin wouldn’t look at me. I knew what he was thinking.

He kept trying to clean Ben’s skin.

I slipped the noose on the speargun away from my neck, let the weapon rest on the floor beside my wet and black-stained boots. I dropped the pack next to it.

Then I began unwrapping the bandage from around my hand. But even as I did it, I had an understanding that nothing would happen—I needed to be outside, under the hole in the sky. And if we were outside, what could I expect? To drive everyone to madness? To send Quinn running off in terror, looking for a hook where he might hang himself? Or maybe I’d deliver Ben and Griffin back to the cramped prison of a plastic waste barrel inside a killer’s garage in a Glenbrook that is not Glenbrook?

Bad magic.

Everything came through Jack.

I was the arrow through every fucked-up layer in this universe, and when I broke the lens, the shaft of the arrow splintered everything. That’s what I did. Ben knew it, too. The hole in the sky was the fracture of the lens was the cut in my hand was the doorway to every not-world I never wanted to see.