by Andrew Smith
Jack is lying on that bed.
The top picture shows the kid from the chest up. No shirt.
The eyes are closed, but you can see glistening slits where they aren’t completely shut. His mouth is open. He looks like a dead kid.
The picture on the next page is taken from the foot of the bed. The kid is lying there on his back, one arm flopped out, dangling over the sides of the mattress, the other hand resting on his belly. And one of Jack’s feet is bent up inside his opposite knee, making a figure 4. Passed out. This was before Freddie put that cable around the kid’s ankle. There is nothing tying Jack down. He just looks dead.
It looks like a cheap amateur porn shot, maybe taken with a cell phone or a twenty-dollar webcam. Jack’s lying there naked.
I look at the cop, wonder if he’s getting some kind of kick watching me.
In that moment, everything is there. I can smell the inside of that room, the cigarettes Freddie smoked. I can feel the precise points on my skin where he pressed the stun gun, the cutting of the wire around my ankle, where his hands touched me, where the needle went into my thigh on that last night. And I remember how the shit he injected me with made my mouth dry and left a taste like nail polish.
It’s funny how you remember stuff sometimes.
The last page has two pictures on it. They are small, cropped, and blurry.
Two more dead-looking kids.
One of them is Ben Miller. The other is Griffin Goodrich.
I turn the page over. I can’t look at it.
This can’t be real.
This isn’t Glenbrook.
It isn’t them.
My mouth is dry; I try to swallow and I slide the papers back inside the envelope.
Bye, Jack.
* * *
“You know those kids?”
“Fuck you. Fuck this shit. It isn’t happening.”
I started hyperventilating. It felt like the entire Cadillac was inside some kind of trash compactor, closing in, pressing down on me. I tried grabbing for the handle of the door. I missed, closed my hand on empty air, like when I felt Griffin’s arm vanish in my grip.
I don’t know how long we sat there. It was so quiet, and I found myself staring at the glint of light reflected on the dashboard. Fake wood. This wasn’t real. That’s all there was to it.
I needed to get out of here, before it sucked me in forever.
I realized he smelled like booze. When I called him, he must have been drinking.
“I think I know those kids.”
“They were from here,” the cop said. “Did he show you pictures of them or something? Films?”
“I don’t know. I know them. Ben and Griffin.”
“Okay.”
“Where are they?”
Scott shrugged, like I shouldn’t have to ask these things. And he delivered his answer like a tired fry cook handing over some change and a greasy sack of fast food.
“They were found inside a barrel in Freddie Horvath’s garage. Their bodies were there for maybe four months.”
That’s a lie.
This can’t be real.
“You want to come with me, to my office?”
“Not tonight.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? You’re a cop and you’re just going to say ‘okay’? Okay, Jack. Everything’s fine with me. Okay, Jack, these kids you know are inside a fucking can. Okay, Jack, see you tomorrow. Fuck you, Jack.”
Jack doesn’t cry.
I could tell he was waiting, listening to my breathing so he’d know when the piece of shit kid was calmed down.
“What am I going to do? Arrest you?”
“Maybe.”
“For what?”
“How many other kids?”
“You were number eight, as far as we can tell. You three from Glenbrook. The others were back in Kansas City.”
“Okay.”
“How’d he get you?”
“I fucked up. My mistake.”
I started to open the door. The interior lights came on. Outside the Cadillac, everything was black.
Scott said, “Two things, Jack.”
I sat there with one foot dangling out the door. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to stand, anyway.
He said, “The date on the files, your pictures, was June twelfth. Not too long ago. They found the guy’s body on Nacimiento Road, I don’t know, three, four days after that.”
I swallowed.
“How’d you get away? Or did he let you go?”
I stood up, leaned against his door. I could make it, I thought. I could get away. I was not going to let him trap me inside that Cadillac again. But he wasn’t making any effort to stop me.
“Let me go home. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.
“All right. Do that. Why didn’t anyone call when you were missing, Jack?”
“You said you were only going to ask me two things.”
“I did. That was number two.”
He shifted in his seat. I could hear him leaning across, getting closer to where I stood. And he said, “Look at that. I guess they’re doing a missile launch or something at Vandenberg.”
I glanced back at him, then to the spot he was pointing at in the sky.
“You ever seen shit like that, Jack?”
“No.”
This isn’t happening.
There was a hole in the sky; the same green-gray slash I saw from the roof of Quinn Cahill’s fortress, raining glowing dust, a waterfall of dead light.
“That’s something,” he said. “I never saw it go off like that.”
My phone started buzzing in my pocket.
Or maybe it wasn’t buzzing, I thought.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the hole in the sky.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Avery Scott was staring at me.
“Fuck ’em,” I said.
I shut the door and walked away.
* * *
This is not real.
This is not real.
* * *
When I opened the door to my truck, the phone in my pocket began buzzing again, crawling around against my skin.
I have to get out of here.
I got in, slammed the door, locked it.
Conner was calling.
“Con.”
“Where are you?”
He sounded sick.
“In my truck. What’s up?”
“I’m here. I think I’m in my room. I’m fucking sick again.”
I waited.
“What do you mean?”
Then Conner said, “Marbury.”
“We fucked up.”
“Big time.”
I could hear him coughing, like he held the phone away from his face. Conner was throwing up.
“Did you see the sky?”
“Huh?”
“Go look at the sky.”
On the other end, I could hear movement, the sound of Conner getting to his feet, a door opening, taking steps, then another door. And Conner said, “That’s the same shit that was in the sky in Marbury.”
“I saw it.”
“I don’t think we’re going to get out, Jack.”
“I know.”
Neither did I.
ten
He was waiting for me in the dark, in front of his house.
I knew it was Conner as soon as I saw his eyes.
We hugged, and he slapped the back of my head, and I swear I thought I could almost feel him starting to cry. Maybe he was laughing. Conner would never cry over … what? Being lost?
He’d been in Marbury for more than a week, he said, but the rest of us weren’t “there” yet, and he’d popped back here once, too, but this wasn’t Glenbrook.
And it was so hard to get out.
It’s what I figured.
I wondered if Ben and Griffin could be safe, wherever they were.
They’re in a fucking garbage can.
Time to fill things in, replay the pict
ures I never thought had been taken.
* * *
Conner and I sat in my truck. Through the windshield, we watched the little light show in the sky, a pulsing ghost of a stab wound that tore through our universe.
So I went first.
I told him everything I could remember since swinging that hammer at our lens—about waking up in the garage and Ben throwing me out, the rainstorm, finding the dead people in the house where Conner had written messages for me on the wall. I told him about the black slugs, too, and all the while he nodded his head. Finally, I told him about Quinn Cahill and how I’d stolen food from him and escaped at night when the Rangers showed up—that I was intending to bring it to Ben and Griffin, but I went home first, and next thing I knew, I was here, in another Glenbrook that wasn’t Glenbrook.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell about Ben and Griffin, what Freddie had done to them.
We were not going to stay here. Not in this world. I’d already made my mind up about that, and I was pretty sure Conner had been thinking the same thing, too.
He didn’t need to know about the cop.
“But I just don’t get how I can wake up in that garage and you were already there for like a week or something. And Ben and Griffin haven’t landed yet. Or, if they did, they’re not in Marbury with us,” I said. “And they aren’t here, either.”
“I never figured out any of this shit. One day, one second, one month.” Then he said, “So, how’d you get here?”
I pulled the glasses out from under my seat, and Conner stared at them, his mouth hanging open.
“Damn. Those look like the same lenses from Seth.”
“This little green one is what does it. When you flip it over the bigger one there, that’s what brought me here.” Then I thought of something. I looked at my friend. “How did you get here?”
Conner pressed his lips into something that wasn’t a smile. I could see how he was biting the inside of his cheek. “You remember how Seth left those other lenses? Two blue…” He pointed at the eyepieces on the glasses in my hand.
“Yeah?”
He shifted in his seat and looked away from me. “I didn’t tell you. I took one of them from your room. A long time ago.”
At first, I felt myself getting mad at him. He wasn’t supposed to take one. That wasn’t how we did things.
And, as if he understood what I was thinking, Conner said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to get messed up again, Jack. I had it in my pocket, the day we were in the guys’ garage. It must have disappeared or something when I went through. But I had that one broken piece. That’s what did it. But it never worked right, and everything’s been getting crazy fucked up. Maybe that’s why Seth brought you to these glasses.”
The light in the sky faded, then pulsed bright green again.
“It’s like you can see stuff falling through that hole,” I said.
“I don’t know what that is,” Conner said. “But I’m pretty sure we had something to do with it.”
And I kept replaying in my head all those times Quinn Cahill tried telling me I’d fallen out of the sky.
“Everything’s different. Before … when we went to Marbury, the lenses never came through. It was only us. Did you think about that, Con? Now, the broken lens is in that other Marbury, and these other lenses are here, coming through with me.”
Conner shrugged and shook his head.
I said, “It makes me wonder. Maybe we’re trapped. Maybe wherever the lenses are is the real world now.”
Conner looked ahead. His fingers nervously tapped the armrest beside him. “I think it’s all Marbury. I think this is Marbury, too.”
“We have to get the kids out, Con. We have to get out of the hole.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Okay, Con. Then you tell me. What’s going on there, and what do I need to do when we go back?”
“What if we can’t get back?”
“I’m not going to think about that. But we’re not staying here. We can’t.”
“I know.”
So, maybe he did know what was going on with me, the cop, Ben and Griffin. Maybe he found his own fucked-up little rearrangements, too, and he didn’t have the balls to tell me about it. And maybe my friend just didn’t want to say the words, that we just might have been trapped for good this time.
CONNER’S STORY [1]
I woke up sitting on a horse in the middle of a rainstorm.
It was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.
Can you imagine? Blink. You shut your eyes inside a garage, and when you open them, you’re dressed in some kind of uniform on top of a stinking horse, totally drenched, holding on to a shotgun, riding along with a group of guys no older than kids, all of us looking for something to screw, eat, or kill.
And I’m just wondering where the fuck I am, and where the fuck are you and the others?
That’s what it was like.
Eventually I learned if you’re going to pop into Marbury, you’re better off popping in as a Ranger, rather than an Odd or something worse.
But I don’t know how to tell time—what’s the point of minutes and hours in Marbury? So I think I just followed along with the rest of the team—there were six of us—for a pretty long time, just shutting my mouth and trying to remember who I was.
When the rain started building up, and our horses had to walk through streets that almost became rivers, the others all began taking off their boots and stripping out of their pants without getting down—riding bare assed. And I thought, Okay, fine, I guess we’re all going skinny-dipping or something, so I followed along.
What would you do?
Crazy shit.
In Marbury, you just have to kind of wing it so you don’t stick out and look like a total dickhead, or an Odd, which was worse, because who wants to pop in as some orphan kid with a target on his ass?
My strategy was to just keep my mouth shut and learn by doing. So, off with the pants and on with the new experience of my bare nutsack getting crushed into a very unpadded, old saddle that I couldn’t stand up in because my legs were now an inch shorter without the boots on my feet.
Fucking Marbury.
But I found out later the reason we stripped was so we could keep a watch on each other’s legs for those things that crawl up inside you from the water. Black worms as long as your lower arm. They called them suckers.
Those things were bad news, but they weren’t interested in the horses, and apparently they didn’t have a taste for Hunters, either. They only wanted human meat. Just like the Hunters.
We were always potentially on some asshole’s dinner menu in Marbury.
Charlie Teague caught one on Jay Pittman.
They rode just in front of me and I about gagged when I saw the black oily thing squirming its way up Pittman’s calf. But Charlie casually swung over and pinched the thing’s head between the nails of his thumb and index finger, and it wriggled and spit blood in his grasp before Charlie flung it over his shoulder like he was flicking a cigarette butt out the window of a passing car.
Don’t ask me how I knew the names of the Rangers on our fireteam. If I just looked at them and thought about it, the names instantly popped into my brain, like I’d known these guys all my life. Well, they weren’t all guys, obviously enough now that we were waist-down naked, but that wasn’t something I immediately remembered, either—who had a dick or not—especially because I was feeling so sick and scared and freaked out about what the fuck was going on.
Then I got one of the things on me. I couldn’t even feel it or anything, and so I was lucky the Rangers had this kind of rhythm about switching off so that every so often a different rider would take the last position. Except for the one up front. That was our captain, Anamore Fent. A woman.
But the rider behind me swooped up and pulled the thing right off the outside of my thigh. That’s when I leaned away and I really did throw up. Blood kept streaming down my leg in the rain. I guess those thi
ngs had some kind of anti-clotting shit in their bites, because they could pretty much suck you inside out before climbing into your dickhole and turning you into a bug. Screw anyone who tries telling me how beautiful nature is. Come to Marbury, Nature Boys.
So I wiped my face off and said, “Thanks, brother,” to the dude who saved me from turning into one of those Hunters, because the Rangers, the guys, had this way of calling ourselves brother all the time, and that’s when I saw he was Brian Fields, from our cross-country team in Glenbrook.
I was almost stupid enough to say something, like, “Dude. Brian. What the fuck are you doing here?” But I caught myself. I knew Brian wasn’t popping in and out of Marbury with us, and I’d been back and forth enough times to know that’s what happens—sometimes, you’ll run into people you know.
Sometimes, they’ll be monsters.
Sometimes, they’ll even be dead.
Fucking Marbury. What can I say?
But the fifth guy in our team was an old man who kept his gun slung on his back and played a little accordion while we rode. I would say it was weird, but words like weird don’t make any sense in a place like this. His music was constant and almost hypnotic. I didn’t mind it at all, because it sounded real, like home, like where I wanted to be if I could just find my way back—and find you, and Griffin and Ben, too. He played to let everyone and everything know we were coming, and like I said, us showing up meant if you were alive you only had three possible uses as far as the Rangers were concerned.
Except for the Odds.
Rangers don’t screw Odds—well, the decent ones don’t—and we definitely don’t eat them, and usually there wasn’t any reason for killing them.
But anything else, if it moved, well … it was a simple multiple-choice problem and all the answers were correct.
Everyone called him Preacher, but that wasn’t his name. I honestly don’t think I knew his name until he said that one certain thing that kind of rang in my head—All things have been accomplished—and then it all began to click about the guy with the accordion and who he was, because I definitely knew his face, so it wasn’t until I paid close enough attention to the name that was stenciled on his shirt that I began to put it together about him. He was the same guy, the preacher, Seth killed in Pope Valley maybe a hundred and fifty years ago.
Fucking Marbury.