Passenger (27 page)

Griffin put his face down on his brother’s chest. I couldn’t tell whether he was resting, giving up, or trying to hear if Ben was still alive.

I looked at my hand.

My skin was white and puffy with moisture. I stunk. The black salt had soaked through the bandage. Was there any spot on my body not covered in some kind of filth?

The mark was a deeper color of pink now, zigzagged in the identical pattern to the thing we’d all seen in the sky. If I laid the Marbury lens in my palm, it would match like a puzzle piece. If I had Conner’s part of it, too, maybe we could put things back.

I shined my light on Griffin, and kneeled down on the opposite side of Ben’s chest.

That was exactly the moment Ben Miller stopped breathing.

“Stop fucking around!” Griffin yelled at his brother. He pushed his hands down against Ben’s unmoving sternum and pushed. “Don’t fucking do this to me!”

Griffin put his mouth over his brother’s and began blowing gasps of air into Ben’s lungs. And when I put the flat of my palm over Ben’s heart, I could immediately feel how cold and stiff the boy was.

I grabbed his hand, squeezed it.

His skin was like wax.

This can’t be happening.

I felt sick, choked. I wanted to scream, but everything locked up in my throat.

“Ben? Ben?”

Then Griffin pulled his head away from his brother’s and said, “Get the fuck away from us.”

I pulled my hand away from Ben.

I deserved this. Griffin had every right to say it.

Then we heard noises at the opening to the main tunnel.

It sounded like metal clicking against metal. I couldn’t see Quinn. He was gone again, and I thought maybe he’d taken the other flashlight, but it was here with us.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Getting louder.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Coming toward us.

I got up, scanned the floor for the speargun.

It was gone.

I flashed the light across the opening out to the main tunnel. Something moved in front of the circle of black.

I grabbed my knife and walked toward the noise.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Quinn? Are you there?”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Ssshhhhh …

Another flash of movement, at the edge of the light’s beam. Something gray.

When I shined the light on it, the form became unclear. I was looking directly through it, could see the wall of the pipe on the other side of it.

Seth Mansfield stood there, watching me from the edge of the drainpipe.

Seth.

Griffin wailed and coughed behind me.

His brother was dead.

It was the worst sound I think I’d ever heard in my life. Out of all the places I’d ever been, all the not-worlds, here was the darkest.

“Seth!” I said. “What can I do? What can you tell me to do? You came back, Seth!”

Seth looked tired and small. I could see his ribs straining the skin above his belly. He wiped his eyes and looked at me. “I never left you.”

“Please. I need you to do something, Seth.”

“I know. But he’s afraid of me. That one named Ben is. He might fight it anyway, Jack.”

“Will you try?”

Seth turned his hands up. “You need to put things back before too much more time goes by, Jack.”

“I’m trying.”

“You might not ever get out.”

“I don’t care about me. I need to get those boys home. Please help me do that.”

Seth turned gray, flattening out into a snaking pale mist that flowed over the floor past my feet and scattered like ash on a wind in the direction of the boys.

Ben jerked.

His chin went down onto his chest and his eyes finally closed, then he threw his hands out in front of him and began coughing.

Griffin screamed. “Jack!”

Ben shook and gagged. He rolled onto his side, wracked in spasms. It hurt. I knew how much it hurt. Griffin tried to hold him still, but Ben was too big, too strong. He kicked and thrashed with his arms, catching Griffin in the mouth, splitting the smaller boy’s lip open.

I stood back and watched, afraid of getting too close to them again.

That’s when I heard Quinn running out of the tunnel, clattering noisily away from us.

The idiot didn’t even have a light with him.

I ran.

I jumped down from the side tunnel, out into the expanse of the first underground channel we’d followed all the way from Quinn’s firehouse. Fifty feet from where I landed, Quinn stood, square, with his legs slightly parted.

He held the speargun pointed directly at my chest.

“You don’t play nice, Billy,” Quinn said.

“Just go away and leave us alone, Quinn.”

I slid my hand back along my thigh, shining the light at Quinn’s face so he wouldn’t see I was feeling for the knife.

“You stole from me, Billy.”

Quinn swallowed.

“I’ll give everything back,” I said.

Quinn shook his head.

“I am King of Marbury,” he said. “You know that, Billy?”

“I know that.”

“I want you to show me where you boys really come from.”

I looked back into the tunnel where I’d left Griffin.

“You’re standing in the center of it,” I said.

I dropped the flashlight, startling Quinn.

I dove to my right, and Quinn fired the speargun. I watched the arrow, ghostlike in the dusty dark of the Under, buzzing like a wasp through the haze of the flashlight’s beam.

The arrow sailed over me and clattered invisibly against the steel wall of the channel, lost forever in the hungry darkness that swallowed everything here.

Quinn threw the empty gun down into the dirt and bolted off, farther into the Under, his milk white skin fading like a sick glow down in the depths of the tunnel.

This was how Quinn used to play with his friends down here.

Fun game, Quinn.

I picked up the flashlight and went back for Griffin and Ben.

*   *   *

Griffin heard me coming. He never looked away from Ben as I approached.

“He started breathing.” Griffin wiped a hand across the bottom of his nose, then glanced up at me. “You look like hell, Jack.”

I didn’t say anything. I picked up my pack and slung my arms through the straps. Then I stepped over to Ben’s side so I could take a look at him. He blinked. I could see that he recognized me.

I kneeled down beside him and put my hand over his heart. It amazed me how the last time I’d touched him, I knew I was touching the skin of a dead kid, and now Ben was warm and I could feel the life in him.

“You and I both need to stop dropping out on our own.” I patted his chest.

Ben swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple bounce up and down. “What happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let me see your back.”

I lifted Ben’s shoulder. He winced and rolled onto his side. The marks where the whip spider had bitten into him were gone, completely healed. And Griffin had managed to bathe away most of the black salt from Ben’s skin.

Ben closed his eyes. The kid was wiped out. He wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

I told Griffin, “Keep your eyes open and wait for me.”

“What are you doing?” Griffin said.

“Hang on to your spear.”

I stood and turned away from the boys.

“What are you doing, Jack?” Griffin’s voice was angry, sharp.

I shined my light out into the main tunnel.

“I’m going to look for a way out.”

“You can’t fucking go by yourself.”

I answered him by jumping down into the larger channel. Griffin yelled and cursed, but I knew he wouldn’t leave Ben alone.

Griffin didn’t need or want me around right now, anyway. Maybe never.

I could do this.

I had to.

Fuck you, Jack.

*   *   *

I’d gone a few hundred yards before Griffin finally quit cussing and screaming for me to come back. I moved fast, in part because it scared me to imagine the kinds of monsters that might catch me if I didn’t, and also because I was so exhausted that I believed I might drop off to sleep while still on my feet.

And I knew Quinn was out there, watching me, waiting for something.

I tripped over a rotting car battery, landed hard on my chest, spitting and choking on a mouthful of dirt. I fought the urge to stay down, to sleep.

I walked.

An hour later, I found Quinn Cahill in the Under.

At first, I thought the kid was sleeping, or dead. My light fell across the paleness of Quinn’s body as he curled on his side in the dirt twenty feet in front of me.

He was hurt.

“Quinn?”

He saw the light, but he did not lift his head or look back at me.

“Go away, Billy. Go away. I give up. You won.”

I took a slow step forward, my knife held point outward. It was Quinn, after all. It had to be another trick.

“What happened?”

I stood back, ready to drop the light if I had to, muscles tensed, so I could spring on him if he did anything. I wanted him to do something.

“I busted my foot up.”

When I shined my light on Quinn, I saw that he had run himself out of one of his boots. His bare foot had a bloody gash along its outer edge. He must have stepped on a jagged piece of metal, maybe glass or bone.

The kid was crusted in filth and blood.

I could only imagine how messed up I must have looked, too.

Quinn had nothing on but one black-stained boot, and hardly more than a rag for trousers. Small trickles of blood ran down his chest from beneath the cut on his face.

It was no trick. The kid was giving up. It was not a good place to lie down and quit.

“Can you get up?” I said.

“Leave me alone, Billy.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

I shined the light farther ahead.

Nothing.

Quinn said, “Okay, Billy. I know there’s a river down that way. And it’s good water. We … I used to have to come down here to get drinking water. Before I made the still.”

I stood over him. I shined the light onto the kid’s face. His orange hair was dark with filth, plastered down to his scalp with the mud of dust and sweat and blood.

“Is it a way out?”

“That’s all I know,” he said. “I ain’t never been no further than the river. And I stopped coming down here once I was left on my own.”

“Left?” I said. “You knew that other boy. The one up on the hook.”

Quinn said nothing.

I nudged him with my foot. “Well? You did that to the kid, didn’t you, Quinn? Hung his head on that hook?”

“Fair enough, Billy. Fair enough,” Quinn said. “I’ll tell the truth. I stuck that little faggot with my knife. Yep, Billy, you were right all along. That
is
my knife you picked up at the dead man’s house. The same one I used on that little kid up there.”

Okay,
I thought,
so everything I ever guessed about this fucker turned out to be true.
So how come it still felt like he’d just kicked me in the balls?

I swallowed. “I appreciate you finally being straight with me.”

And Quinn got a mean, hard look on his face that seemed to age him right before my eyes. “The river ain’t too far, Billy. Good luck gettin’ out.”

It was going to be like this now. No more games between me and Quinn. The first time I ever saw the kid, as I flailed around, drowning in the rainwater, when I took off my clothes and pulled those fucking black worms away from my nutsack, Quinn looked so clean and innocent, like he was maybe thirteen years old and belonged in the soprano section of an all-boys church choir.

Now I realized I was wrong about so many things.

“Get up,” I said. “You’re coming, too.”

“Leave me here.”

“If I leave you here, Quinn, it’s only going to be after I stick this knife down your fucking throat. Get up. I’m tired of your bullshit.”

We walked.

Quinn whimpered with every step, but we said nothing as we kept a steady pace farther into the belly of Marbury’s Under.

In the quiet now, no running, no panting breaths, I could hear the low roar of rushing water.

At first, I jumped when the flashlight’s beam ricocheted off the surface of the river. It almost looked like a glistening snake out there, sliding toward us. I stopped and watched, hoping Quinn would say something, maybe tell me what to expect, but the kid stayed quiet and waited beside me.

“Please tell me there aren’t any monsters in that water.”

“If there are, I don’t know about ’em, Billy.”

“No worms?”

Quinn shook his head and pointed a finger above us, into the darkness. “They only live up there.”

It was a hundred feet wide, deep and fast.

The river cut across the main channel of the Under, roiling in frothy, churning currents through an enormous grated opening to my right, and spilling down the opposite side in a torrent of falls over the concrete spillway lip to a gaping and lightless abyss.

It had to flow out somewhere,
I thought,
maybe into the Endless, but there was no way of following it down the impossible cascade.

I could smell the water, feel the dampness rising in warm humid billows through the fetid air of the Under. And I realized how parched I was, how desperately I wanted to tear myself out of my pants and boots and plunge my filthy body into it.

But I was afraid.

I flashed the light on Quinn’s chest. “You say it’s okay to drink?”

“It’s good, Billy. Trust me.”

Yeah. Right.

“Get in.”

Quinn’s white skin drained to an even paler hue. He shook his head. “I’ll drink it, Billy. But I ain’t getting in it. I can’t swim.”

“Strip down and get in the water. Or I’ll fucking throw you in.”

Quinn closed his mouth, straight, tight. The muscles in his jaw clenched, and he stared at me for several unblinking seconds. Then he reached down and slipped off his one boot and unbuckled his pants.

“Don’t look at me,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t look at me, Billy. I don’t like it. It’s embarrassing.”

I rolled my eyes. Like Quinn would ever be embarrassed about anything.

Quinn slipped his bony legs out of his pants and tiptoed to the edge of the river. Of course I watched him do it. I’d never trust that kid, and he had to know it.