Passenger

by Andrew Smith

  “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?”

  Quinn laughed. “Heh. Bad magic. Anamore Fent wants to kill you, Odd. Don’t you know that?”

  I cleared my throat. “Why?”

  “When someone tells me, I’ll let you know. How’s that sound?”

  “Am I safe here?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  Fuck you, Jack.

  Quinn stood up, and waved for me to follow him. “Here. I want to show you something, Odd.”

  In the back corner of the firehouse, opposite the shower stall, a narrow black metal ladder rose up to a square hatch in the roof. Quinn climbed up and pushed the square door open. After he crawled out into the dimming evening, he stuck his face down inside and whispered, “Come on up here. Just be quiet. They’re going to be out soon.”

  five

  It was awkward climbing up that ladder.

  The rungs hurt my bare feet and I could only work with one hand. My bandaged palm stayed hitched on the waistband of those goddamned shorts Quinn gave me. They ended up tangled around my ankles on top of the first step, and that redheaded bastard poked his face in the hatch and hissed a whispered laugh at me.

  Balancing with my knees propped against one rung, I flipped him off, and Quinn laughed again.

  “Come take a look at this, Odd. Tell me if you never seen it before.”

  The roof of the firehouse was a flat deck of some sort, surrounded by a waist-high cinderblock wall that extended up from the perimeter of the station. At one time, I could imagine firemen enjoying a pleasant day up here. Maybe when the world was different.

  I sat at the edge of the open hatch, and then brought my feet up onto the roof before trying to stand. The sky was just going to nighttime dark in Marbury, a milky gray, the color of a rotten tooth. Quinn stood back, and faced away from me with his chin tilted upward.

  “See that?” he said.

  I looked up.

  And, in what dark the Marbury night made for us, standing there beside Quinn Cahill on the roof of an abandoned firehouse that had become his sanctuary in hell, I saw the hole in the sky.

  Overhead in the east, above the business district where the kid had pushed us in a canoe past Java and Jazz, there was a gash—a knife wound through the gray. The thing bled vacant light that seemed to spill downward like a waterfall and blind out the foggy haze around it; a liquid constellation, some kind of fire that rained down from nowhere and everywhere.

  “What do you think that is?” Quinn asked.

  I just shook my head.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Odd. Like I said, when it happened things got worse. The Rangers been coming through trying to get anything they can take. Some of them’s even headed out now, just leaving here altogether. Seems like, to be honest, there’s more suckers, more Hunters, harvesters, and more of us dying. And I believe Fent’s crew is getting ready to go too, and leave us all—what’s left of us—to the Hunters. But those next few days after it happened, the Rangers rode through, roughing up all the Odds that were too young to conscript, and you know what some of them do to us who are older, don’t you? They were looking for you. Jack Whitmore. See? I knew your name before you even said it, Billy. And they were trying to find your friend, too. They said you did something to him. Why do you suppose that is? You weren’t just a prisoner, were you?”

  When Quinn made his case, something started to connect in my head, but I couldn’t feel it coming together. It was like those times when I’d look back through images—photographs that Nickie had taken of me—riding on a river cruise, touring London, doing things with her while I was in Marbury, while I was here—but I couldn’t quite get the memory to surface.

  I leaned my arms on the edge of the block wall and watched as the thing pulsed overhead in the sky. The kid knew things about me and Conner, and he was playing a game, they way you’d play with a hooked fish on a line.

  Quinn knew more about Marbury than I ever did.

  I had fallen into another pit inside my nightmare, a deeper layer, and nothing was finished yet. We all fell—me, Conner, Ben, and Griffin.

  “You have to believe me, Quinn. I just can’t remember what happened.”

  “All right, Odd.”

  I heard music playing.

  Crazy Jack dreams up all kinds of shit.

  And sometimes it’s accompanied by music.

  I held my breath.

  I had to be out of my mind.

  It sounded so far away, floating: a jangling, grinding, metallic sound, the wheezing strains of a high-pitched organ.

  “Do you hear that?” Quinn said.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I whispered. “It sounds like a circus.”

  Musical monsters.

  “It’s Fent.”

  Quinn nudged my shoulder and then went back toward the place where the hatch l
ay open. “Time for us to settle in, Billy.”

  * * *

  We sat on our beds, across from each other, and listened to the music as it got louder at times, and then drifted away like a wind.

  I’d been scared plenty of times—in Marbury, and in other places—but there was something about that music and the thought of it being connected to someone who was looking for me and Conner that was more unnerving than anything else I could remember.

  “Why do they do it?” I said.

  “The music? Fent just wants us Odds to know they’re coming. Hunters, too. I guess it saves the Rangers on ammunition. Everyone runs from them.”

  “Do they know about this place?”

  “Of course they do, Odd.”

  The music was clearer now. It sounded, ridiculously enough, like a single small accordion; the kind they call a concertina.

  “It doesn’t scare you they know about you?”

  “You really don’t know nothing, do you?” Quinn sighed. “Join or die, Billy. Join or die. They don’t fuck with the Odds till we turn sixteen. Well, except for the depraved ones, they don’t. Or till we look like we’re sixteen.”

  Quinn shifted on his bed, leaning toward me, leering. “How old are you, anyway? Heh-heh.”

  That explained some of it, I guess.

  “How old do I look?”

  “You? You look like you’ve been around for a really long time, Odd.”

  He was fucking with me again.

  I wanted to get out of there. If I didn’t get away from Quinn, as good as things might be at his firehouse, I was certain he was going to push me into doing something bad.

  I lay down and stretched my legs across the cot. I was completely exhausted.

  “What do you want me to do if they show up?”

  Quinn got up from bed and lowered the mantle on the oil lamp.

  It was as black as if I’d shut my eyes, but they were wide open. I could hear his bare feet padding across the floor, the squeak of his bedsprings as he sat down again on his cot.

  “Don’t be scared, Odd. I’ll take care of you. I can handle Fent and the Rangers. If they show up tonight, you just get up on the roof. You’ll be safe there till I come get you. Okay?”