by Andrew Smith
I practically dragged you over the stairs at the front of the station. Sorry, Jack. Halfway down, you stumbled, but I squeezed your armpit so hard you kept on your feet. You kind of yelped a little, too. It hurt. But you still didn’t say a single word.
Pittman kept one step behind us.
“What did you do to end up here, Three-Seven-Three?” I said.
“Deserter,” you said. “I deserted.”
It was your voice.
Jack.
You lunged forward over the last two steps. Pittman gouged your lower back with the barrel of his rifle.
“Get off him, Pittman. I’ll shove that gun down your fucking throat.”
Pittman eased off.
I needed to get as far away from the station as possible, but the morning hadn’t come yet. There would be Hunters out.
Pittman knew it; I thought he seemed a little bit scared. Maybe he was suspicious about me leading you both so far out.
Fuck him.
I kept a tight grip on your arm, but it wasn’t like you were trying to get away. You just stumbled along, Jack, and we walked through the already-drying dust, kicking up chalky clouds with our feet.
I shook you, like I was mad at you. And I was. Why the fuck did you get me into this shit? Sorry, Jack. I just wanted you to snap out of it and show something on your face that meant you knew me, you remembered how close we were.
“Do you know who I am?”
You looked at me. You had a purple bruise under your left eye and a grape-sized bump on your cheekbone. Both of your nostrils were crusted around with dried black blood.
“Am I supposed to?”
“Mind the gap, Jack.”
Your brows twitched. For just a second, you seemed to register something.
“Isn’t this far enough?” Pittman said.
We stopped in front of an ancient strip of shops. Every one of them had been smashed open, with no glass at all remaining in the blackened storefronts. The roof had caved in.
I kicked one of those old swirled-glass Pepsi bottles. A vending machine lay on its side, with thick black power cables trailing like a bruised umbilical cord back toward one of the shattered storefronts.
The thing in the sky hadn’t changed. It hovered overhead like a rip in a sail. It almost fluttered as the dripping flow of light dusted down from the gash through the sky.
You started breathing hard.
I thought you knew you were about to die.
It made me feel like shit, Jack, because you weren’t going anywhere without me.
“Sit here,” I said. I put you down on the side of the vending machine.
You were shaking pretty bad. I wanted to hug you and tell you it was going to be okay.
Pittman stood away, holding his rifle across his waist.
I glanced back at him. It was the only time I’d looked at that asshole since I led you out of the station. Seeing him with his string of penises around his neck made me feel better about my decision to kill him.
“Don’t move,” I told you. Then, keeping my back to Jay Pittman so he wouldn’t see my mouth, I whispered, “Keep your eyes on me, Jack. Remember this: My name is Conner Kirk. If this doesn’t work, there is an old man who lives in a house on Tamarind Street who helps Odds. Tamarind Street. Remember that. Look at me, Jack.”
Then I backed away from you until I was standing just behind Pittman. I imagined blowing a hole in his guts big enough to play basketball. I pictured Jay Pittman, covered with writhing, clicking harvesters. I could almost hear the sound they’d make chewing into his flesh. I dreamed he might be alive while it happened, so I could hear how he would wail and cry.
I put my hand down inside my pocket and found the Marbury lens.
There were only two plans I had in my head: First, I hoped that the lens might get you and me out of this. If it did, then I could only imagine that it wouldn’t matter what Pittman did to us, because you and I would be somewhere else, and no place in the universe could possibly be worse than the spot we were in. If that didn’t work, then Pittman was going to die, and the Rangers would have to hunt me down.
And I knew what they did to Rangers who killed our own.
But nothing worked out the way I thought it would. That’s how it goes in Marbury, anyway.
Pittman said, “What the hell are you waiting for, Kirk?”
I kept my eyes on yours. “Look at me!”
I pulled the broken lens from my pocket and raised it between us.
The shit that happened next made everything else in Marbury seem like a birthday party with balloon animals.
I went blind. It seemed like as soon as I’d lifted the lens to the height of my chest, there was a flash of deep red light that burned a negative impression of everything around me into my eyes. Then my hand went higher, like some magnetic pull tugged the lens upward.
I could faintly hear Jay Pittman, as he stood in front of me.
He was saying, “What the fuck? What the fuck?”
But I could only make out his silhouette in the blaze of red; and his voice sounded so far away, like a freight train was passing between us.
And when my hand rose higher than my head, the broken edge of the lens lined up perfectly, matching like a puzzle piece with the gash in the sky.
Everything went black.
Jay Pittman began screaming. It was insane shit. He sounded like someone who’d been set on fire. His screaming went on and on, so loud and terrifying. I’d never heard anyone who sounded like that.
He began firing his rifle, and I felt certain he was going to shoot me. Round after round fired off. I could hear the bullets whizzing past me, inches from my face at times, and Pittman’s cries began to weaken.
I closed my hand around the lens.
The sky went pale gray again.
I could see.
The hole in the sky closed up, and then opened again, like a mouth, as soon as I tucked the broken lens back inside my pants.
“Fuck that shit.”
I rubbed my eyes, and tried to blink away the stain of red that made everything seem to blur and vanish.
It felt like all the air had been sucked from my lungs, and I gasped, struggling to clear my head and make sense of where I was.
You were gone.
Vanished.
The vending machine where you’d been sitting lay there in the dust.
The sky was getting lighter; morning was coming.
And, in front of my feet, Jay Pittman twitched and burbled small painful whimpers. He had shot himself through the side of his jaw. It looked like his head, from his nose down, was lying near the front of one of the strip-mall storefronts, ten feet away, and he had flung his rifle down behind us.
Jay Pittman was still breathing.
But he was black with the glossy shells of quivering harvesters.
They were eating him alive.
Just like I wished for.
Fucking Marbury.
twelve
I had the glasses in my lap. I didn’t realize how long I’d been sitting there, listening to Conner’s story. I was wet with sweat all over, and I never even once thought to put the windows down.
We had to find the others; had to fix things once and for all.
Fuck that cop.
Sitting with Conner in my truck, we stared at the rip in the sky.
The sun was coming up in the east; the night paled ahead of us.
“This isn’t Glenbrook,” I said.
Conner yawned and rubbed his face. “I don’t think it is, either, dude.”
“But that other place is a different Marbury.”
“I don’t think it’s different,” Conner said. “I think it’s maybe a different time.”
“What happened after I left?”
“To you? I have no idea. What you told me, about Ben kicking you out of his house, and you finding the old man’s place on Tamarind.”
“No,” I said. “What happened to you, Con?”
“You must have been
hiding out for a while,” he said. “I didn’t get to the old man’s for a couple days, and he was alive then, when I wrote that shit on his wall.”
“Did you see a little kid there?”
“The old man was always helping Odds, like I said. The Rangers didn’t bother him. They thought he was crazy, running around naked, all tatted up like he was, from here down.”
Conner held his hands flat, like he was showing the depth of a swimming pool, just below his rib cage. “But I didn’t know what to do. I was too scared to go back to the station after what happened—what I did—to Jay Pittman, even if he was a dick. I kept thinking about what he said about ‘bad magic,’ and how that Preacher—Uncle Teddy, I swear it—had been talking about this Jumping Man crap, and he seemed especially freaked out about all the stuff that started happening as soon as you showed up.”
“But you said it wasn’t me.”
“It wasn’t you, Jack. I could tell. But I don’t know. Somehow, the insane shit started tuning in when you and I showed up together. Things started getting all fucking crazy. So, after I sat there and watched Pittman die, I decided I wasn’t going to go back.”
“Where did you go?”
“You need to remember this, when we go back, Jack. It’s what needs to happen so we can put things back together.”
Conner was scaring me.
“Okay, Con. What do I need to do?”
“I know where you can get some horses. There’s lots of them being kept by the Rangers at the ag school, and there’s not enough of us to keep an eye on them. You’ll have to get some horses. You need to take Ben and Griffin and get out of there. Go southeast. Go before everything runs out and falls apart. Everyone’s going to die, Jack. There’s too many Hunters now. You know where you’re going. I don’t need to tell you. The settlement. I’m going there, too. We will find each other. We can put things back the way they’re supposed to be, and then maybe we’ll be done with this shit and we won’t fuck with it anymore.”
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 t
he 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.”
