by Andrew Smith
So we followed Fent through what was left of Glenbrook. I knew we were going to the old train station. We passed the drive-in theatre that used to sit beside the 101. The white covering had all been peeled away from the giant screen, so it looked like a big patchwork of girders and crossbars. The Hunters had come through the night before and caught some of the Odds. I think there were about fifteen boys’ bodies up on those beams. Most of them were tied there, stripped, upside down. None of them had a head. Most of them were missing arms or legs, had been gutted and castrated.
Hunters liked to eat those parts: livers, kidneys, balls.
I couldn’t believe there were any Odds left at all. And the framing of the big screen vibrated and buzzed with feeding insects—harvesters so thick you’d think their combined weight could bring the entire structure down in pieces.
Jay Pittman was the first on our team to start taking trophies. He considered it psychological warfare, but he was just a sick asshole. Hunters didn’t have any soul you could fuck with. Pittman tried arguing that it was magic, too. Who could say for sure? We never lost a single member of our team, even during the really bad times. Fent didn’t like what he did, but Jay’s collection of dried penises he cut from the Hunters unlucky enough to run into him wasn’t one of the things she’d choose to fight over. So he kept them on a cord that hung from his saddle horn. Thirty-five of them, he bragged, counting the two he’d added that morning.
Charlie Teague liked the horns. They were harder than shit to break off, but he had enough of them on his string that, times it wasn’t raining, they’d make a musical sound like wind chimes when we rode.
The army had broken up, at least, as far as we could tell. All that was left of it were these independent fireteams of Rangers, competing, sometimes cooperating, just so we’d stay the most important humans still standing.
That’s how it was in Marbury. We had the guns.
But we were losing anyway. Every day there were fewer and fewer people, and the Odds were as good as invisible. It was a rare day when any of us would even see one of them. They didn’t trust us, besides, and the ones who were still alive were pretty good at hiding and scrounging for their survival. Except for that one crazy redhead kid who kept to himself in the firehouse. I believe there were Rangers who were afraid of that kid. I didn’t fuck with him, but I know that Fent made deals with him from time to time.
There were only five teams of Rangers left in this entire area, and we organized and made agreements or trades between the teams every day or so when we’d gather in the train station.
Politics.
Also, after the weather started changing, with the rains and the suckers, the main hall of the station stayed dry, elevated as it was, and it was big enough for all the fireteams to have sleeping space, and room for the other stuff we did.
Four of the fireteams were organized around women, girls really, because not one of us was past twenty years old, except for Preacher. The fifth team, their captain was taken a week earlier by the Hunters. Unlucky guys in that crew. No sex. Well, not with any girl, at least. So now there were four females left, maybe in the entire world. It didn’t matter anyway. Whenever one of the captains got pregnant, she’d just bleed out.
Nothing took hold in Marbury, except for the Hunters and the bugs.
And the captains, Preacher was mostly responsible, were fooling themselves if they thought we’d be able to last much longer. Every day, more and more of us were taken, eaten, or got sick from the bugs.
That’s why all the Rangers were getting ready to leave, give up this region and drop back to somewhere we’d only heard rumors of. But they were nice stories, I guess.
I’ll get to that.
* * *
Anamore Fent didn’t say anything to me until we reached the steps at the front of the station. There was another team coming in at the same time. With the rain how it was, the place looked almost like pictures of Venice, the way the water came right up to the landing.
Maybe Venice during the plague.
I think she noticed how I watched her while we were getting dressed. I didn’t care. I wasn’t embarrassed, and here was this half-naked young girl standing just inches away from me. But when she did have all her clothes on, she looked almost like a boy because her hair was cut so short.
Except I remembered she was pregnant, and her belly did show that.
Nobody expected that to go much longer.
A lot of the females died that way. The rest got taken by Hunters.
She told me to get one of the privates from the other team—that was the one that was only men—to take our horses around to the platform. She told me to get this little kid named Strange to do it, and I thought that was the same name Ben and Griffin had on the shirts they wore when I first met them in Marbury, so I was hoping it was one of the guys. But it turned out he wasn’t. I didn’t know the kid. He had a twin brother, though, and they looked like they were maybe fourteen years old, a bit young, even for Rangers.
So while we got dressed on the landing, I actually looked at what I was wearing. There were three stripes on each of my sleeves, and my last name, KIRK, was stenciled on my left chest.
And when I buckled up my pants, that’s when I could tell that I was holding half the broken lens in my right front pocket. The Marbury lens, from the kids’ garage in Glenbrook. Crazy shit.
I wasn’t about to take it out and screw around with it in front of this crew.
Who knew what kind of shit might happen?
That’s when everything started to sink in, too, and I started to get more than just a little scared, wondering where everyone else ended up.
Because I figured that something big had changed. It never rained and thundered like this in Marbury before, So maybe, I thought, this wasn’t Marbury at all. And maybe my friends had all ended up somewhere else, too.
So part of me wanted to bust that lens out of my pocket and see if I could find anything in it, but I was also afraid of all these other people, and just how bad we might have fucked everything up beyond our ever getting back.
“Okay, I’ll take care of the horses,” I said.
“Then eyes out for Preacher and Pittman inside. They’re getting the food tonight,” Fent said.
“Okay.”
I turned to leave and she grabbed my arm and pulled me around.
“Is something wrong with you?”
“Uh. No,” I said.
Anamore Fent studied my eyes, like she could see something inside there. It scared me a little.
She said, “You don’t look right.”
“Nothing’s wrong, sweets.”
I could never get away with calling her that if any of the team was around. She’d have kicked me in the balls so hard, I’d sprout a nutsack from my throat. And she was a lot of things, but definitely not sweet, even if she did have an occasional preference for me over her other options. What can I say?
This wasn’t Glenbrook, Jack.
She let go of my arm, and that was that.
* * *
Duties rotated among the groups for guard posting, but the fireteams remained segregated during meals and sleeping.
Some of us were much better off than others; and that’s just how it was. Social classes are always going to exist, as long as you have at least two people on the same fucked-up planet.
Competition.
Afterwards, Rangers would mix in the big churchlike main hall of the station, playing games, gambling, sometimes for food or equipment, guns, they’d even play for sex.
It’s just how things were, and unless I was really drunk and brave, or stupid, I kept my distance from the game players. We, none of us, had had any alcohol for … how long? It doesn’t matter, anyway. Some guys knew ways to get high by snorting a kind of black salt they could find after the rains. It wasn’t actually salt, though, and I’d never put shit like that up my nose. It was actually a kind of mold, I think. I’d see guys fry their brains on that shit.
That first night was difficult, because all these memories started filling in like scrambled pictures and random snippets of sound.
I didn’t say anything, I just hovered around the team, keeping a slight distance, and when the hall finally started to quiet down a little, and most of the game debts were being paid, we took our boots and shirts off and stretched out with our guns on the pew benches we’d walled into our own small areas—like five states—so we could listen to Preacher play his little accordion.
Sometimes, I thought I’d catch a glimpse of her and some of the others whispering about me. She knew I was different, but how could she tell? What could she possibly know about us? That she’s just a fragment of something that might not even be real, that happens to be stuck on a wire we impaled ourselves on, like fish on a gill string?
That is, unless I am totally alone.
But I didn’t even want to think about that.
eleven
CONNER’S STORY [2]
Preacher played. It sounded sweet.
The old man was high. He snorted that shit all the time, and it made him tell the craziest stories. I don’t know if the crew believed him or not, but they usually did shut up and listen to the fucker.
Brian Fields was out somewhere in the darkness of the hall settling a debt, and Fent put Charlie on watch. Even when it wasn’t our turn on duty, she usually kept one of us guarding. We all preferred it that way. In the past, especially after the breakup of the army, Rangers suffered more attacks from our own than from the monsters.
Now that there were fewer than forty Rangers left, disputes over ownership weren’t so likely to flare up, but with just four females to all these guys, we all watched one another with suspicion.
Jay Pittman lay on a pew across from me, and Fent took the one bridging our gap. I tried to keep my eyes away from hers and pretend I was falling asleep to Preacher’s music, but she was too smart to be fooled. That’s why she was still alive.
When he’d stop playing, he told his stories, ones he’d either memorized from his Bible or just made up on the spot. Nobody knew how to read. I’d maybe only seen a few books, trash, in my entire memory with the team.
Preacher coughed. He was just trying to see if we were still awake. When he unhooked the accordion from his hands, it made a dying sigh on its own as it folded down onto the floor.
He said, “God breathed demons out from his own mouth. He did this to entertain himself while the Jumping Man was up in the sky.”
Pittman carried his chain of bug pricks around everywhere he went, like it was a kind of warning to the other Rangers, or some type of statement about his own masculinity, even though he was the only one of our team besides Preacher who’d never had sex even one time with the captain, at least as far as any of us knew.
“How do you remember this shit, brother? You just make it up as you go, don’t you, Preacher?” Pittman said.
Preacher eyed him without answering. The bottom of his nose was black with salt and he didn’t seem to care about the clear strand of snot that stretched to his upper lip. Younger guys would fight over words like that, especially if they were jealous, or hadn’t screwed anything in a long time. The captain and I both knew it was just Pittman letting off steam, testing things, maybe trying to let her know he was man enough, and why didn’t she ever show any interest in him?
I could have answered that.
The guy carried a string of penises around with him.
Case closed. He was a complete dipshit.
Preacher said, “It entertained our God to watch the demons pursue the Jumping Man. Everything else had been accomplished.”
Somehow, that meant something to me.
I rolled over and looked at Preacher, and that’s when I saw the name that was stenciled on his shirt: MARKOE.
Preacher. Uncle Teddy.
Now I remembered the name that went with the face—from everything we’d seen through Seth’s eyes—his entire story about growing up in Pope Valley, and how he accidentally killed the Preacher when he caught Seth and Hannah making love.
Fucking Marbury.
What can you do about this shit?
I straightened up, so I could sit with my knees pulled in to my chest, and watched Preacher as he kept his eyes locked on Jay Pittman. Then Fent snubbed him even deeper when she got up and sat beside me on my bench.
She wasn’t fooling around, either.
She cupped her hand right up between my legs and squeezed. It actually hurt, but I didn’t pull away. I grunted, and she nodded her chin at a darker corner of the hall near the front entryways, where there used to be a small shop with a roll-down metal door. At one time, maybe they sold newspapers or tobacco there, but was now just a little hole Rangers used when they wanted to go have sex.
She said, “Let’s go over there.”
That’s just how things worked.
The baby she carried was either mine or Charlie’s. Preacher was the preacher, and Pittman, who joined the Rangers when he was fourteen and still looked like a little kid, carried around a string of dicks. And Brian Fields, well, he preferred guys anyway, which explained why he was off with the gamers.
Marbury. This is how things were.
No jealousy. No love. Who could care about anything that wasn’t trapped right there in that very second? But you know that.
To be honest, I was curious to see if it would feel different—you know, the sex—in Marbury.
So I said, “Okay,” and put my bare feet down in the dust on the cool floor. And just when I was about to stand up, a scuffle broke out behind us on one of the platforms.
Then a single gunshot blasted. It echoed so loud between the stone floor and domed ceiling of the big hall. I crouched down and grabbed my shotgun. You never know what could happen at times like this, so I kept my head below the level of the bench backs.
It could have just been two guys fighting over some game debt, but then the shouting started.
Someone screamed, “It’s Charlie. He killed Charlie!”
Fent stayed back on my bench, and I thought, Well, maybe next time. Pittman and I ran toward the tunnel that fed off onto the old platforms.
Crazy shit like this always meant you were more likely to get shot in the head by one of your own guys. I doubted most of those were accidents, too, which is one of the reasons I didn’t give Pittman shit about how he never got laid and how he was the biggest dried-up dick in Marbury.
Because he was just the kind of guy who would shoot someone on his own crew if he weren’t so concerned about shit like “bad magic.”
But if it was true that Charlie got killed, then that would be our fireteam’s first hit, and Pittman would take it as a really bad sign for all of us.
It was like I could count on the little prick making something bad happen.
When I got out onto the platform where the horses were kept, a dozen or so Rangers blocked the way in front of me. It looked like four of them were holding down a thrashing and wild Odd boy while two or three others punched and kicked him.
One of them said, “Charlie caught him stealing horses. This little cocksucker shot Charlie!”
And all I could make out from the angry mass of pumping arms and kicks was some scrawny kid in the middle of it, moaning and trying to cover up his face and head under the steady rain of whack! whack! whack!
Charlie was lying on his side near where the horses had been tied down. The fingers of one of his hands were twisted around the barrel of his rifle, which had somehow been turned with its muzzle pressed against his face. There was a curled river of blood running outward from his forehead and a big spray of what looked like pink peanut butter spouting from the back of his head. His eyes were fixed open, dead.
Pittman carried an automatic with a collapsible stock. He looked down at Charlie Teague’s body and said, “Fuck that shit,” and then he swung his rifle around and pushed toward the guys who were beating on the kid.
Personally, I didn’t care what Ja
y Pittman or anyone else wanted to do to the kid, but it was going to be Captain Fent’s call, and I knew it would piss her off if she was somewhere back on the platform watching me stand there doing nothing while the rest of these kids made decisions for themselves.
“Hang on, brother.”
I put my hand on Jay Pittman’s chest, not pushing him, just steadying him so he’d calm down and stand back.
He did.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
The guys who were pinning down the kid didn’t ease up. The others kept punching and kicking him.
He was probably dead now anyway, I thought. But I did let off one shotgun blast straight up into the sky. And that’s when a few of the craziest things happened right in front of my eyes, all in the span of a few seconds.
But what’s a second on Marbury, anyway?
The platform went instantly quiet. Rangers didn’t fuck with me. Everyone out there was a private or two-stripe, anyway, so they knew better than to push it. But when I looked up in the direction of my gunblast, that was the first time I saw that thing—it looked like a tear right through the pale night sky, like it was bleeding dust and light down on us.
And, you know how when one guy’s looking up at the sky, all dumbfaced with his mouth open, everyone else is going to look up there too? Well, the other Rangers loosened up, they saw the hole in the sky, and it pretty much shut up every thought that could have been in those dickheads’ dime-sized brains.
They let go of the kid.
He wasn’t moving, anyway.
But I saw he wasn’t an Odd at all. He was wearing the striped shirt of a military prisoner. He had been one of us at one time, probably left out to die during the confusion of the battalion’s breakup. Good chance he had the bug, the disease that turns you into one of those horned Hunters, anyway, like most prisoners.
But no matter what, he had to have done some pretty serious shit for him to end up in prison at his age, because he couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or so.
I pushed through the guys so I could see whether or not the prisoner was still alive. He was facedown with his arms wrapped around his head on either side. I don’t know if that strategy did him any good, though, because there was a gash in his scalp and a puddle of blood oozing out into the dust beneath his face.