by Andrew Smith
“You said it means I can’t go back because I’m not alive there.”
“It isn’t Glenbrook,” I argued.
Ben was scared. He slammed his palm down onto the table. Griffin jumped. “Then where the fuck is it, Jack? How the fuck do we get back?”
“I don’t know.”
fourteen
I dreamed of floating in the sky, being chased by demons.
Jack is putting on a big show.
I had no idea how they could tell it was morning. Being inside the box was like being trapped in a black hole.
I woke when the wooden post Ben used to bolt shut the hatch clattered down against the floor next to my bed.
He pushed the door open with the point of his spear, and I watched with groggy eyes while he and Griffin climbed out of the hole, black shadow puppets against the monochrome Marbury gray that came seeping in from the hallway above.
I followed them. I guess every morning went just about the same for Ben and Griffin. They half ran for the garage, to the side door, and then outside the house to pee in a spot where there used to be oleanders and a lawn. Now there were just broken things, dead things.
They were still angry about what was said the night before, I could tell. Everyone was.
None of us really blamed anyone for our situation, but that didn’t make us any less pissed off about the truths we aired over the kids’ broken-down dinner table. We all knew it would take awhile before we could talk to one another in a normal way.
That’s just how things were.
Ben didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to. He knew I was right behind him while he pissed out onto the ashes, splattering noisily onto an open paint can lying sideways on top of the white dial face of an Edison meter.
“You want to see that dead kid?”
I looked at the pool. There were harvesters, making their little mad tracks over the edge of the coping, out into the ashes, back into the pool, the clicking, the buzzing, eating.
Breakfast time.
“Do you want me to go look at him, Ben?”
Ben turned around and buttoned his pants. “Not really. I was just asking.”
But Griffin walked over to the pool’s edge and reported back, “Not too much left of him anymore.”
And that was all we said, the whole long morning.
* * *
We drank the last of my stolen water and ate some orange sections and beans for breakfast. I opened the cans with my knife. I think the boys knew what I was going to ask them, but I wasn’t about to be the one to initiate the talking. If they wanted to be quiet, it was okay with me.
Finally, I went out to the garage and shook out my socks and T-shirt and put them on. The boys followed, watching me.
I sat down on the stained concrete floor and slipped on my ragged boots.
“Are you going to leave?” Griffin asked.
“You can have everything that’s left of the food and stuff. Sorry I didn’t bring more water.”
Griffin nudged Ben, like he wanted the older boy to say something. “Where are you going?”
“I told you. I’m going to find Conner. He told me where I can get a horse to ride.” I tied my boots and cussed when one of the rawhide laces broke. It had already been knotted together in two other places. This was number three. I stood. “I can’t stay here. I have to find him.”
Griffin said, “You didn’t even ask us to come.”
“If I ask you to come, and things go wrong, then what are we going to say to each other? I told you both I’m sorry.”
Ben cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, too, Jack. None of this is on you.”
“It’s all on me, Ben.”
“I promise not to say anything,” Griffin said. “I promise not to ever say I want to go home again. Please just let us come with you, Jack.”
“It’s not up to me.”
And Ben said, “Come on. Let’s get that shit packed up and go.”
* * *
There once was a supermarket between the park and Cracktown. The kids in another Glenbrook saw it as a kind of border checkpoint where sweaty punks who looked homeless would sit and smoke cheap generic-brand cigarettes along the concrete wheelstops that marked off slotted parking spaces.
During wars, supermarkets are the first territories conquered.
I could imagine what it was like: survivors, at first in large numbers, gathering around the oasis of the store, competing with one another, fattening themselves up, being hunted, and then the water hole turning to dust.
This was real.
We walked, Ben carrying his spear, Griffin, who wore his shirt tied up on his head like we were crossing the Sahara, and me, with one of the kids’ school backpacks that held a few salvaged belongings from their home and the last of our food.
I think just the act of getting out of their house, out of the box, made us all feel a little better, like we had some purpose, something to do rather than just wait.
Maybe we weren’t mad at one another anymore.
But walking past the husk of that old supermarket was scary. The front wall had been entirely destroyed, and most of the ceiling hung down on wires and aluminum framing, uneven and jagged like some abandoned mine. It looked like something where monsters would live, in horror films or nightmares.
Or here.
The entire floor was covered in broken glass and other discarded containers. There were bones scattered everywhere—skulls, pelvises—so many of them you couldn’t tell the difference between the junk that used to be for sale and the junk that used to be a person.
I couldn’t help it. I imagined what it would be like to round up every kid, teacher, custodian, and security guard at our school and bring them to the market and kill them all. That’s what it looked like.
All along the roof’s edge, skulls had been lined up like beads on a string. Every one of them was jawless, dried; some were pale yellow, and others were an amber so rich in tone they almost looked like withered oranges. I saw the heads of children and adults, indiscriminately integrated—all fair and equal access on the roof’s edge. Some had hair on them, but most had been picked clean.
In the darkest depth of the building, a glint of red flame flickered and then dropped behind a pile of rubble the size of a bulldozer.
I stopped and watched, held up my hand so the boys wouldn’t move.
“What do you see?” Ben whispered.
I kept my eyes pinned on the interior of the market. “One of them. He’s back there.”
Ben and Griffin crouched slightly and strained to catch a glimpse of what I’d seen.
Griffin nudged my shoulder. “Where is he?”
I pointed. “Over that way. Against the back wall, I think.”
“Do you think there’s more?” Ben asked.
Hunters never came out alone. He knew that.
I sniffed. Sometimes you could smell them. They smelled like old piss.
“There has to be more.”
“We could maybe take two of them,” Ben said. “Any more than that, we should get the fuck out of here now, Jack.”
And go where? I had to think, calculate the distances to our options. The ag school was maybe two hours’ hike. I hadn’t planned on running into any Hunters out here during the day, but now an unexpected variable had been added to my math.
I sighed.
The firehouse was about fifteen minutes from here. At a dead run, we might make it in five or six. And what if Quinn wasn’t there? What if he wouldn’t let us in?
I pulled out my knife, held it low, next to my thigh. “If we wait here a couple more minutes, and they don’t show themselves, then we know they think they can’t take us. Look at us, we’re just kids.”
Odds.
Griffin moved up between me and Ben. “Do you think he saw us?”
“He knows we’re here,” I said.
Then Ben tapped my arm with the back of his fingers. “Holy shit, Jack.”
He was facing toward the we
st end of the building, and until he’d said anything, I didn’t even notice that there were ten or more of the things who’d come around in a line, watching us, drooling, licking their teeth.
This was a hunting party, out in the day, which meant they were winning; confidently taking over this other Glenbrook. They were all males, looking for food, for something to bring back to their mates, their offspring. Meat.
More of them started coming out, climbing over the hills of trash inside the supermarket, emerging one by one.
With nothing but a skinning knife and a steel rod, we had no chance against numbers like this.
But they were taking their time. They were going to enjoy doing whatever they wanted to do to us.
In the center of their ranks, the largest male stood at the point of their phalanx. He wore human scalps, molded into a codpiece that covered his nuts. One of the scalps trailed long white hair halfway to his knees, the other, black. The hair had been twisted together, not braided, but clotted with some unimaginable concoction of paste. He was covered in thick purple splotches, and his skin glistened like he’d just pissed on himself. Tusk horns curled around his jaw from the back of his skull, and completely hairless as he was, he looked like some kind of salamander. He was missing his fingers; both hands were twisted into long, hooking claws with talons that looked like they’d been carved from obsidian. In one of them, he held the stump of a club that had been spiked with glass and fragments of bone. Even at my distance, I could see a strand of saliva dripping from his chin, leaking onto the necklace of little pink fleshy souvenirs he wore. Jay Pittman in reverse. And, like all of them, he had one black eye, one white.
The other Hunters in his party stood in the open, uncovered, completely naked. Their scalp-taking had only just started, but some of the others had adorned themselves with decorations: strands of long-dead cell phones, teeth, dried tongues; one of them even had the entire head of a dog hanging in front of his belly, strung through its ear canals on a rope that was likely made from braided intestine. Another wore a pair of women’s glasses on a pearl strand around his neck. It looked like something you’d see on a matronly librarian. And every one of them carried a weapon of some kind. The flankers at either end of the line held bows, pulled tight, arrows angled inward at the three of us.
There was no perceivable way out.
We were dead.
But they all stood still, waiting for the slobbering Hunter at the center of the line to direct their game.
Time for fun.
I didn’t move. “Griff, listen to me. Unzip the backpack and take the sock out. The sock with the glasses in it.”
“Don’t leave us, Jack!” Griffin was beginning to panic.
I whispered, “I’m not. Just do what I said.”
The Hunters began creeping toward us, completely unconcerned, certain they were going to have exactly what they wanted. I could hear their mouths working, licking, teeth clattering, nearly choking on the flowing saliva of their anticipation.
I felt Griffin opening the pack.
Ben faltered. He was breathing so hard. He jerked around, turned as if to run.
There was no way we’d outrun them. Trying to run would only make them more excited, horny for us. It was pointless.
I grabbed Ben’s shirt and held him steady. “Don’t.”
Ben couldn’t catch his breath to answer. I thought he was going to pass out.
I squeezed the knife in one hand, then I let go of Ben and put my other hand out for Griffin. “Give me the lens.”
There was always a peculiar weight to the Marbury lens. It wasn’t from gravity; it came from something else altogether. And even though the lens was dead to me now, I could still feel the heaviness it contained when Griffin placed the fragment onto my open palm. And as soon as he did, the boy whispered a hushed “What the fuck, Jack?”
Then the world went red, as if I were looking at it through a glass of wine.
Ben turned and stared at me. His mouth hung open, and when I lifted my hand in front of us, everything began to change, dissolve before our eyes; like being back in that garage on the day I smashed the lens.
Something pulled me up, by my hand, like it was on a string.
Ben and Griffin, the Hunters, the wreckage in front of us, the endless scorched nothingness of Marbury, all of it began smearing together in the red light, melting, liquefying.
I could hear Ben repeating Holy shit! Holy shit! but it was almost as though my eyes had been pulled out from my head and were floating in the stagnant air above, because I clearly remember that I was looking down on the three of us, seeing us as we stood there and watched the Hunters moving in, surrounding their kill.
From above I watched, and everything became so intensely bright and clear—Marbury, but in color, like a cartoon rendering of hell.
Then came the shrieking; the pained, hissing cries of the Hunters. Some of them began circling; just standing in place, but circling around as if they were completely surrounded by the worst things they could imagine. The one with the dog’s head hanging on his chest began clubbing the Hunter next to him, wildly smashing his skull, pounding and pounding even after the Hunter was clearly dead, until there was nothing recognizable left from the shoulders up.
And the archers on the flanks turned toward their own, releasing a volley of arrows. More screams and wails. Reloading, and more arrows. I could hear the sound made by their whisking fletches, by the impact of each arrowhead popping through strained flesh like an overripe plum.
In the center of the mass, the big one, their leader, began wildly clawing into his own eyes. It looked like he was suddenly growing hair, and I noticed that all the standing Hunters started tearing at one another with their hooked hands. The dark hairs got thicker, squirming, wriggling, and I could see clearly how it was the worms, the suckers, bursting out from their skulls, erupting from the taut, naked hides, from every surface of their splotched skins, until each Hunter that was still alive became a writhing and frantic clot of black maggots.
The sound was sickening—like thousands of toothless babies suckling hungrily—until every one of the Hunters fell in wriggling heaps of gore.
I closed my hand.
Everything went dark.
I don’t remember hitting the ground.
fifteen
“Jack?”
I am looking up.
The sky is infected, gray, rotting. It’s always like that.
“Come on, bud.”
Ben is floating in the air over me, his face so close to mine I can feel the tickling exhalations from his nostrils. His hand is on the side of my head, rubbing my hair, patting me.
“Are you here? Do you know where we are?”
I say, “Fuck.”
“You stopped breathing.” Ben tries to smile. He looks pale, scared.
“Was I dead or something?”
“I don’t know.”
My voice is a distant croak. “Did you see that shit, Ben?”
“Yeah.”
It’s like a camera, panning back. Now I see Griffin kneeling there beside my head. His face is wet. Griffin never cries about anything. He’s been crying now.
I look at him. “Don’t say you want to go home, Griff, or I’ll get up right now and fuck you up.”
I know the kid wants to go home.
He wipes a trail of snot along the back of his wrist. “What the fuck was that, Jack?”
I cough. “Fuck.”
And Griffin says, “Well, unfuck it, Jack.”
* * *
I honestly can’t say what happened to me.
It was pure nothingness.
Ben and Griffin told me that I’d stopped breathing and they both exhausted themselves trying to resuscitate me. They were going to give up. More than an hour had passed between the time when Griffin placed the broken lens into my palm and my eyes opened to look up at Ben, floating in the gray sky above me.
If that was what dying was like, it wasn’t as terrifyin
g as I’d convinced myself it would be.
It was complete.
My entire body felt so rested, like every joint had separated, every fiber in me unraveled entirely.
“Help me up.”
They each grabbed beneath my shoulders and I sat. I drew my knees in and looked across the dirty dust at the gaping grimace of the supermarket façade.
There was blood everywhere. Strands of innards snaked through the dust in the gobs of mucus excreted by the worms.
Ben took a long, deep breath. He swallowed. “We thought you were dead.”
“I didn’t think anything.” I braced my hands on the ground beside my hips. “Let me see if I can stand up.”
It was real, all of it.
I guessed there were maybe thirty Hunters who’d come after us. They were scattered everywhere between where I stood and the front of the market. And the sound of the eating harvesters that had already swarmed over the corpses, as they picked between the leathery and dying worms, tearing, pulling, grinding, was like the crackling of a bonfire.
The smell was horrendous.
I turned away, looked at the sky. It was already getting late.
Griffin wore the book bag. One look at him was enough to say everything. The shit we saw scared them. Bad.
“The lens?” I said.
Griffin patted the pack’s shoulder strap with one hand. “It’s in here.”
“Okay.”
And when I started walking again, past the supermarket, my knees buckled and I nearly fell face forward. But the boys must have known I wasn’t all there, so they caught me before I went down.
“Take it easy, Jack,” Ben said.
“We need to get out of here.”
I’d never seen Griffin look so scared and lost. His face was streaked with the ashy Marbury filth that muddied his tears. He said, “Maybe we should go back to the box. So you can rest. We can try again in the morning.”
“We’re just going to keep getting trapped there, Griff.”
Ben sighed, frustrated. “What do we do? Tell us what to do.”
“We’re going to get horses tomorrow. The ag school might be too far for me right now. I know where we can go.”