Passenger (6 page)

“You want to wash that shit off, Odd?” Quinn pointed an index finger at his hair, and I could feel how mine had congealed, scabbed flat against my head.

I shook my head.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s more I want you to see. And I told you I’d get you a shirt, too, Billy.”

I just wanted food.

Odd.

Billy.

I thought the kid was just trying to piss me off or something.

Fuck with me because he thinks I’m stupid.

I decided not to say anything about it, though.

There were two beds in there, like Quinn had been expecting me or something. They were cots—the kind you’d see in any barracks or jail—narrow and low, neatly made up with clean blankets, and white sheets and pillows.

Quinn pointed to each of the beds. “Yours. Mine. You hungry, Billy?”

I nodded.

“I could cook you something. Something good. I bet you never had food as good as what I can make.”

He talked too much.

“Just let me show you a couple more things. So you don’t do nothing dumb. So we can be safe here. You don’t want to fuck things up, now, do you?”

You don’t know me, kid.

I shook my head.

Quinn pulled me out into the main room.

He had a stove. He had everything. An entire room that had been filled with boxes and cans—more food than the kid could eat in five years.

“I’m good at finding food,” Quinn said. “I’m the best. I know where to look where none of the Odds have looked. And mostly the Rangers are dumb. They just wait for it to come to them. I guess that works, as long as you have guns.”

Quinn poured some water into a pot. He placed it on the stove and then flipped a switch on the generator. It made a buzzing noise. Like insects.

“First thing: There is no generator at night,” he said. “We can’t make any noise. They’ll hear us. This place has to look dead. Dark. You got that, Odd?”

“Okay.”

“Second thing: blackout curtains.”

There were no windows. Like so many of the buildings that had been left even partially standing, the windows in the firehouse had been boarded over with anything that could cover them. But Quinn had gone a step further. He’d brought in sets of those drapes they have in hotel rooms—the ones with heavy plastic backing—to cover any stray light that might seep out through an unnoticed crack.

“Last thing.” Quinn opened a footlocker that was sitting beside the bolted doorway onto the staircase.

“Juicy death,” he said. He slapped my bare back. It stung, and I wanted so bad to punch the kid. “Ha-ha-ha! These babies took the longest time to gather up and then get them to work right. Take a look, Odd. Here’s how I turn them on, in case you ever have to do it.”

Inside the trunk was a small brass-colored telegraph switch and eight automotive batteries—the big kind, like you’d see in a truck or an ambulance. They were all wired together, and then the wires fed into some kind of transformer box and more wires leading out from the bottom of the chest. It was an electric fence, Quinn said, that protected all the possible ways into the firehouse. He wasn’t sure if it would kill someone; he was still waiting to find out, but he was certain his invention would buy enough time to get out of there if he ever really needed to.

“Why are you doing all this?” I said.

“Because I want to live,” Quinn said. “It’s winning, Odd. We all want to win, don’t we?”

“I mean, why did you bother with me? You didn’t have to save my life. You didn’t have to bring me here.”

For a second, Quinn looked flustered, like he couldn’t answer, or he was embarrassed.

“I trust you, Billy. Don’t you trust me?”

I hated being cornered like that. I’ve had that question aimed at me enough times in my life, and every time it had been someone trying to fuck with me.

Fuck you, Quinn.

So I said, “I really need to take a piss.”

“Ha-ha!” Quinn laughed. “That’s good for us, Billy. Good for the planet! Ha-ha-ha!”

And he slapped my shoulder again when I walked past him, saying, “I’ll tell you what. You can take a shower if you want, so you can wash that Hunter shit off you and clean yourself up. You smell like death, Odd. Ha-ha! And I’ll go find you some clothes and cook us some grub. Let’s eat, Odd. I think we should have a special dinner in honor of us finding each other.”

Finding me.

I couldn’t help but wonder if he really had been following me, like he said.

*   *   *

But the clean water felt so good, and as I stood under the cooling flow, examining the small round marks those black things had left on my legs, I couldn’t help but smell the food Quinn was cooking.

“We have to hurry up, Odd,” Quinn called out from his post at the stove across the room. “The sun’s going down soon.”

I shut off the valve to the nozzle and stood there, dripping, leaning against the brick divider wall.

The kid even had towels. Quinn brought one out for me and slung it over the wall.

“Thanks.”

“That’s the first time you said that all day, Billy.”

He was right, but it still pissed me off that he had to point it out to me.

“Is that all you’re looking for? Okay, then. Thanks, Quinn. Thank you very much.”

The kid shrugged.

I felt bad for what I said.

“Sorry.” I looked down, pretended to dry my feet. “I’m an asshole. Sorry, kid.”

I put the towel over my head, wiped my face.

“Don’t sweat it, Billy. We all have bad days. More than not, I guess. But this is going to be our good night together. Right?”

My pants and socks were lying crumpled on the floor. Quinn nudged them with his toe, the way you’d prod something dead in the road. “You ain’t going to put those things back on, are you?”

I wrapped the towel around my waist and stepped around the wall. “It’s all I got.”

“You know. I used to have a knife exactly like this one here,” Quinn said.

I looked at him. “What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said.

Sure you don’t, Quinn.

The kid bent over and picked up my pants, the belt with the knife I’d found attached to it. And I remembered the broken lens was still in the pocket. I didn’t want Quinn to see it, but I could tell that his fingers had already felt it out.

“What’s this you got?” Quinn said.

“Don’t. Please.”

I snatched my pants from Quinn’s hand.

The kid looked at me. He was too smart, and I hated that. Because he didn’t need to say one word for me to know that he was already thinking up a way that he’d find out what I was hiding in my pocket.

Quinn grabbed my wrist. Yeah, he was strong, and my hand was sore and swollen. “What happened there, Odd?”

He turned my palm over, lightly touched the cut that gapped my flesh open from the base of my thumb to the arc of Jack’s lifeline.

“I cut myself.”

“Come here. Sit down.” And Quinn led me across the cool concrete floor while I dripped water and held on to my dirty pants and the towel I was wrapped in with one hand. He pulled me along by my wrist like he was helping a little kid at a street corner.

Quinn sat me in a chair at a small square table pushed up against the wall. He pulled my arm across the surface so he could look at the cut on my hand. His face was so close to me that I felt the tickle of the air he exhaled from his nostrils.

He didn’t say a word, got up from the seat beside me, and returned with some bandages and antibiotic.

“Does it hurt?” Quinn smeared medicine into the cut with his index finger.

I thought about the messages that had been painted on the wall in that house.

“Yes,” I said.

Then he wrapped my hand up with clean white gauze and medical tape.

“You gotta watch that, Billy. Things can get in you here. Don’t you know that?” Quinn smiled and winked at me.

“I was too busy watching all the other stuff.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” Quinn laughed. “It’s been too long since I talked to any Odd with a sense of humor!”

I felt embarrassed. Quinn patted the underside of my forearm softly when he finished with the bandaging.

“Hang on, Odd. I’ll get you something to wear.”

So I rolled my pants tightly and wrapped my belt around them, making sure the lens was wadded up deep in the center.

Quinn came back from his closet and handed me a pair of green mesh gym shorts.
G.H.S.X.C.
was stenciled in gold on the right leg. Glenbrook High School Cross Country. They were the same ones Conner and I wore when we trained.

And I thought,
This is bullshit. The kid has to be fucking with me.

This whole place is fucking with me.

“These are good for sleeping in,” Quinn said.

That’s what was bothering me about Quinn: He was too hovering, like Stella had been, always watching me, standing a little too close, breathing on me, watching, always watching. It made me feel like a prisoner, like I was under glass. So I fumbled at getting those shorts pulled up without standing up or taking off my towel, because it bugged me how this kid was just sitting there taking in the Jack show like he’d been standing in line all his life just to bug the shit out of me from his front-row seat.

When I slipped them on, the shorts hung down past my knees, and I had to hold on to them with one hand just to keep them from sliding off my hips. At least they’d never actually been mine or Conner’s.

Then he gave me a rust-colored T-shirt that was about two sizes too big.

“I guess the size doesn’t matter,” I said.

Because the kid himself looked like he’d been dressed in stuff that could be used as fumigation tents.

“You know,” he said. “When the bug hit real bad, at the start of the war, there was just young people who didn’t get it—us Odds and what was left of the Rangers. All the clothes is gone, Billy. Unless you want girl stuff. Heck, I don’t even recall if I ever saw a girl since I was a kid.”

Quinn kind of looked—sad, I guess, when he said that.

The kid pulled his shirttails out from his pants and began unbuttoning.

“There’s really no girls?”

“Shit, Odd. What’s wrong with you? The only ones that’s left is with the Rangers. Ha-ha-ha! Or they’re Hunters. You ever seen a girl, Odd?”

I didn’t know what to say.

I missed Nickie so bad it hurt. I kept thinking that this time I’d never find a way out of this world and get back home.

Quinn slithered out of his shirt and hopped around while he pried away at his boots and socks. “After I clean up, we’ll have some good food, Odd. You’ll see. This is going to be a great night.”

The redhead went around behind the divider wall and turned on his shower nozzle. “And we got lots to talk about, Billy. Lots and lots.”

*   *   *

Quinn Cahill cooked macaroni and cheese from a cardboard box. He used canned milk and put some tuna and peas in it, too.

I felt bad for Ben and Griffin, thinking about how they were probably hungry, starving, and I decided, sitting there in those baggy PE clothes at Quinn’s small dinner table, that I was going to have to do something about that. And I felt a little bit guilty, too, for acting like such an asshole to the kid all day long. He saved my life. Quinn took care of me, even if I didn’t really care about where Jack would have ended up if the kid never showed in the first place.

I cleared my throat. “This is the best food I’ve ever had in my life, Quinn.”

He looked at me, and I was certain he could tell I was serious. So I stuck my bandaged hand out across the table of food and said, “Thank you. And I apologize. And please don’t spit in your hand before we shake.”

Quinn beamed. He chewed with his mouth open, too. But he took my hand.

“You don’t need to apologize, Odd. No big deal.”

We ate in silence until everything Quinn made had been wiped clean. He washed the dishes in a plastic tub he kept inside the sink, and then he strained the dishwater through a wire screen and poured it back into his still.

I sat there watching. I could tell he didn’t want me to help, like he was trying to teach me some kind of routine or something, show me how he was in control of everything—and it was all perfect. I realized that all day long Quinn and I had been locked in some kind of contest to decide who was really in charge, and though it may not have been determined yet, I was convinced that redhead kid didn’t know anything else but winning, like he’d told me.

So I knew he was plotting out his cross-examination of me while he quietly packed away his kitchen.

When it got dark inside the firehouse, Quinn took out two oil lamps and double-checked his blackout blinds.

“Well, for someone who said we have lots to talk about, you haven’t said a thing, Quinn. So I may as well start by telling you that everything I said to you today is the truth. I really don’t know where I came from.”

“What about that shirt you took off?” he said. “What about that stuff written on the wall at the old man’s house? Do you think I’m stupid, Billy?”

I gulped. Had to think.

The kid really did know things about me.

And he’d found the shirt. He must have known every detail about the stuff inside that house.

Then Quinn added, “Number three-seven-three?”

I felt the blood rushing out of my head. I looked down at Quinn’s spotless table and shook my head slowly from side to side.

“I’m telling the truth, Quinn. I figured I’m in some kind of trouble. I remember waking up inside a garage yesterday. But I don’t know how I got there, and I don’t know why I had that shirt on. But I guessed it had something to do with this Fent person. And I didn’t know anything about the old man’s house. That stuff on the wall was written by a friend of mine, but I don’t know where he is, either. So I was scared and I thought I could just ditch the shirt and be nobody.”

“Your friend’s named Conner Kirk?”

I studied Quinn’s eyes. They were still smiling, but he had a look like a cat that was about to pounce on something, too.

“Do you know anything about Conner?”

Quinn looked away. “Not much. They’re looking for him, too.”

“What about Fent?”