by Andrew Smith
“Where?”
“The fire station.”
* * *
It’s the water that kills you in Marbury.
Without it, you give up, go crazy, make stupid choices, become a meal.
And the rain is poison; it brings the worms.
Fuck this place.
The boys knew their way. I tried pushing them to get to the station as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to have to deal with any more Hunters. I knew that if Jack stopped breathing again today nobody was going to be able to spit and slobber enough life down his fucking throat to bring him back.
Welcome home, Jack.
I fell down twice, tripping over broken cinder blocks. The knees of my jeans were torn through, dotted with stinging blood.
And each time I’d fallen, the boys would rush over to me, frightened, to help me back up. They knew I was in bad shape, too.
We never said a word.
We were so thirsty.
I don’t know how we kept going; why we didn’t simply sit down, give up, and rest.
When we passed the little schoolyard, I looked over at the playground, the rocket-ship jungle gym. There were more bodies there. Three little Odds. Fresh, stripped, gutted, headless, hanging upside down by their feet.
I saw Griffin looking at the display. Maybe he’d known one of them, played flag football against him in PE at another school in another Glenbrook where things like grass and drinking fountains were so commonplace they became invisible.
It was almost impossible to believe that there were any kids left alive here at all.
They came out searching for water.
“Don’t look at that, Griff. We’re almost there.”
Then I fell down again, got a mouthful of ash. It started to choke me, and I would have thrown up, but my stomach was like hardened concrete.
I stayed there on all fours, trying to spit my mouth clean, but nothing would come. My mouth felt like tree bark in a desert.
“Here.” Griffin sat down, Indian-style, in the dust beside me. He swung the pack around onto his lap and opened it. He pulled out a can of sliced beets.
Who eats those things, anyway? No wonder Quinn Cahill found them.
“Let me have your knife,” Griffin said. “We can drink the water out of this.”
I didn’t care anymore.
I handed Griffin my knife and watched while he pried two triangular holes into the top of the can. Then he handed it to me and I drank. I felt the ash in my mouth clot like a scab, but I swallowed anyway. When I spit down onto the ground, it looked like I was spitting out my own guts.
“Fuck.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm and passed the can to Griffin.
He grimaced when he swallowed. “This tastes like piss.”
Ben finished the liquid from the can of beets. “You want to eat this shit?”
I shook my head.
Ben dropped the can onto the street and we kept walking.
The rain came again.
When we got to Quinn’s firehouse, we were soaked, our pants plastered against our legs. We had taken off our shirts and wore them on our heads.
The water rose slowly here; the firehouse sat on a hill, so we were safe from the worms for the time being. It was the ash everywhere on the ground that prevented the water from soaking into anything, and as soon as the rain would stop, the Marbury heat sucked the temporary seas dry, back up into the ulcerous gray sky that delivered them.
Griffin kept watching his feet while he cupped one hand under his balls.
Ben said, “If he doesn’t open the door, we’re going to have to bust in.”
I saw Quinn’s canoe sitting on the side of the station beside a post office mailbox with its gut-door pried off. There was what looked like an arm bone inside. Nothing else.
“He’s got the place booby-trapped. It’s dangerous. We can figure something out.” I pounded my fist against the door. “Quinn! Cahill! It’s me, Jack!”
We waited.
It poured.
Ben kicked the door. It made a sound like explosions inside the cavernous firehouse. If Quinn was inside, he knew we were there.
Griffin pressed up against me when the first boom of thunder erupted over our heads. Here in Marbury, it came so loud, you could feel thunderclaps echoing in the center of your guts.
“We need to get out of the rain,” Griffin said.
The water inched its way toward us, higher up the slope of the hill. I could see the worms slithering at its edge, like they could smell us standing there. And for a moment, I couldn’t help but picture the image of all those millions of black worms sprouting like weeds through the skin of the anguished Hunters.
I pounded a second time. “Quinn Cahill! Please!”
Another explosion of thunder. I could feel both of them—Griffin and Ben—jump at the sound.
And then, from above: “Billy? Is that you?”
The three of us looked up at the same time to see a scrawny redhead kid smiling down at us from his rooftop deck.
Quinn Cahill.
“You been a bad friend, Billy. You took from me. That just ain’t right. You should have did what I told you.”
Why was it that I always found myself wanting to punch him? At least the adrenaline rush of Quinn Cahill’s constant pissing me off had a weird rejuvenating effect on my sorry state.
And Ben whispered, “‘Billy’? Who the fuck is Billy?”
“He just fucks with people,” I said. “Constantly. He’s a little fucking prick.”
Then I raised my voice so he would hear me. “I apologize for that, Quinn. I was afraid of the Rangers, so I ran. Please help us. We’re kind of in a jam.”
Quinn’s head disappeared and then popped back over the edge of the building. He swung his arms into sight and pointed the bright red speargun directly at us. “What do I want with some useless Odds, Billy? You can all get on back to wherever you came from. Well, them two can. I’ll allow you to stay, Billy. Just you. I like you, Billy. But them other two need to get.”
I looked down, whispered, “He’s fucking insane.”
Griffin pressed his body flat against the door. Quinn was just posturing. There was no way he could shoot one of us from where he stood. And I didn’t think he was honestly crazy enough to actually kill another kid—an Odd—anyway, but I wasn’t willing to test my theory about that either.
“I can’t leave them,” I said. “I’ve known them forever.”
“Okay. Well, good-bye then, Odd.”
And Quinn Cahill disappeared behind the wall of cinderblock above us.
I kicked the door. “Fucking sonofabitch.”
“Is he joking?” Ben seemed unable to grasp Quinn’s cut-and-dry outlook on things.
Griffin stomped his foot down. I looked. With the heel of his shoe, he’d cut one of the black worms in half. “We need to get out of here.”
I raised my hand to pound again, but I gave up. It was no use. To Quinn, everything was about winning, and knowing that should have made me wonder why he was always so eager and willing to keep me around. What was the gain?
“I fucking hate that guy.”
What could we do? The water was rising fast. We’d all be struggling against the worms in a minute. And that was a fight we’d end up losing. Our only chance was taking Quinn’s canoe—stealing from him again.
I sighed. “Fuck.” Then I bent over and began untying my bootlaces. Someone was going to have to wade out after the canoe, and I couldn’t expect Ben or Griffin to do it; not after all the shit I’d already put them through.
By the time I’d gotten my socks pulled off and managed to roll my pantlegs up over my calves, I already had one of those black things worming across the top of my foot, slithering up from between my toes. I pinched it, flicked it away, and daubed at the bead of watery blood left behind by its circular bite.
“Anyone else want to come with me?”
Ben and Griffin just stared at me like I was a lunatic. “Th
is is going to be fucking fun.”
I took a deep breath, and was just about to step out into the water when the firehouse door opened and the redhead stuck his face out. And he was still pointing that speargun of his, directly at the center of my back.
“I’ll shoot anyone who touches my boat, Billy. That’s just how it’s going to be.”
I spun around, my hand clenched in a fist, ready to unload on him. “What the fuck do you want me to do, Quinn? You want to fucking stand there and watch while we get eaten alive?”
Griffin and Ben moved away from me, as near as they could get to the edge of the water. I couldn’t blame them for stepping back. It was a rock and a hard place, and I’d never expect them to take a shot that I deserved. After all, it was my idea to come to the fucker’s house in the first place.
Everything was my idea.
Quinn waited in the doorway and stared at me for a while. He had a hurt look on his face, like a kid who nobody wanted to play with; who got picked last for a team.
“Okay, Billy. No need using foul words. I was just seeing how you’d stand. Who you’d stick up for in the game. You know … yourself or your partners there. You are partners, right?”
I wanted to howl, to kick him in the teeth.
“Yes. We’re partners, Quinn. That’s how it is.”
Then Quinn pointed the spear tip down at my foot. “Uh. You want to watch that, Odd.”
Two more of the worms were on my right ankle, coming up. A third was already disappearing inside the left leg of my pants. I pulled it out through the hole in my knee, ripped it apart between my fingers. Then the other two. Both of my legs and hands were covered in blood.
I held my palms out, open to Quinn.
“What the fuck, Quinn? Come on.”
Quinn lowered the speargun and swung his door open. He stood back to let us inside. Even though he was giving in to me, Quinn Cahill made it clear that he was the winner.
“I was just measuring you up, Billy. You’re okay. You two partners got a good friend there. A real good friend!”
And Quinn patted Ben and Griffin warmly on their wet backs as they went through the door to his firehouse. I bent down and picked up my socks and boots.
Quinn said, “Now don’t be tracking in any of them suckers with you, Billy! Ha-ha-ha…”
But as I passed him in the doorway, he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered, “It would be better if it was just you and me, Odd. You’ll see. We don’t need them two, Billy. Okay?”
As he led me up the stairway to his living floor, Quinn kept squeezing me tight, like how you’d hold on to someone you’d been missing for years, patting me until I finally broke down and said what he wanted to hear.
“Thank you, Quinn. You’re a good friend.”
And I knew then that if I ever had to kill Quinn Cahill to protect the boys, or to make certain we’d be able to get home again, I’d give it about as much thought as plucking one of those fucking worms off my nuts.
Quinn slapped my shoulder.
“I told you we’d be friends, Billy. Told you.”
* * *
First he had to give my “partners” a grand tour of his palace.
Quinn pointed out the two beds, explained how the one with no sheets was “Billy’s,” and told Ben and Griffin his story about the ungrateful Odd who made a rope with sheets and ran away when Anamore Fent’s team came by, hunting for him.
“But you two Odds can sleep down on the floor. Don’t worry, I got plenty more bedding, which I intend is not going to be put to use for anything other than you two fellas sleeping on.”
Griffin glanced at me and shrugged, and I tried to give him a look that said to just go along with the idiot.
“And what’s your names, anyhow?” Quinn said. “If you got any names, that is.”
Some Odds didn’t have names, or didn’t need to remember them.
“Ben.”
And before Griffin could say a word, Quinn snapped, “Ben’s a easy name to remember. Okay. Good enough. Ben and not-Ben.”
He smiled his toothy, freckled, redhead smile at Griffin, who was now going to have to endure Quinn’s permanently calling him not-Ben.
“My name is Griffin Goodrich.”
“That’s fine, not-Ben. You just hang on to that memory. You never know when you might have to tell it to someone who cares.”
Now, I was sure, at least two of us wanted to punch him.
Then, naturally, Quinn showed the boys where to pee, and how he had his big urinal trough hooked up to a collector so he could make drinking water from piss.
“Heh-heh … we’re going to have plenty of new drinking water, ain’t we?”
And Quinn rapped his knuckles against the lower lip of his steel urinal, so it made a ringing sound like a church bell.
“Turning our pee into water. You’re just like Jesus in reverse,” Griffin said.
Quinn’s smile vanished. His face went blank. “Who?”
“Jesus,” Griffin said.
“I don’t know what that is. No one never showed me nothing about making water out of my pee. I figured it out on my own. From intellectual reasoning, not-Ben.”
Griffin said, “Oh. Okay, Quinn.”
* * *
I think it rained harder that night than any time I could remember here.
I slipped into the shorts Quinn had given me; everything else I owned was wet or falling apart. Quinn didn’t offer any dry clothes to the “partner boys,” but he did provide plenty to eat and lots of drinking water.
Ben and Griffin insisted that I drink first, and they watched my face to see if I’d show any sign that it tasted like anything other than what Quinn promised it to be. Griffin must have drank more than a gallon on his own. He said he was trying to make himself pee, because he wanted to see how Quinn’s still worked.
Eventually, everything had to be turned off in the night with the exception of one dim oil lamp, so we lay there, all of us just staring up at the ceiling, listening to the incessant roar of the storm against the concrete of the firehouse.
When Quinn finally lowered the mantle on the lamp and everything went black, I could tell that none of us had fallen to sleep. You know how you can hear guys breathing, moving around, flipping over, so you know they’re thinking; and the thinking is what kills sleep every time.
So I said, “Do you remember anything, Quinn?”
“What are you talking about, Billy? I remember saving your hide when you were two feet underwater with a big buck Hunter straddling you like he was going to make you his special boy, ha-ha!”
What a prick.
I sighed. “I meant, do you remember anything from before? From the beginning of the war.”
“Don’t you, Billy?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, what about your partner boys?”
“None of us do,” Ben said.
I heard Quinn roll over in his bed, could feel how he was looking straight across the room at me. I wondered if the little freak could maybe somehow see in the absolute dark of the firehouse.
“I remember being about half the size of not-Ben, without even the first strand of hair on my nutsack, and how we all were living inside a basketball gymnasium with wood floors. That is, to be honest, the first thing in my life I remember. Nothing else. I don’t remember having a mommy or daddy, or nothing about no brothers or sisters. Just us Odds.”
“How long was it like that?” Griffin said.
“Shit.” Quinn laughed. “Did you all three fall out of the sky?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Well, not-Ben, it’s been like that forever. For-fucking-ever. But then there were a lot more of us Odds. Thousands, in places like that all over the city, too. Then, most of us started getting sick. We didn’t know what it was at first, but it was the bug. The Rangers came, took the sick ones. You know, just got rid of them. Who needs more Hunters, anyway? They took all the girls, too. That was … Shit, that
was so long ago.”
“Yeah. Before you had hair on your nuts,” Griffin said.
“You fucking with me, not-Ben?”
“Well, it was, wasn’t it?”
I realized that Griffin Goodrich had a much more stylized way of fucking with people than Quinn Cahill did.
“I suppose it was,” Quinn said. I could hear how he lay back down in his bed, and his voice sounded relaxed, like he just assumed that Griffin, not-Ben, was a stupid little kid.
“How did you end up here?” Ben said.
“Well,” Quinn began. He sounded like he was an actor onstage, and he had waited all his life to have an audience for the incredible epic that was his story, even if his only listeners were stupid, lost kids. “Things got bad. They ran out of food, and the Rangers stopped bringing it around, since we were only boys left in the Orphan Detention Dormitories. Did you know that’s where Odd come from? Just boys. Odds. So, one day, this old Ranger come and he tells us to all get out and go, or else they were going to come kill us all. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not, because he got killed not two days after that. And so four of us came here to the firehouse, and we fixed the place up like this.”
“What happened to the others?” Griffin said.
“Shit.”
I could tell it was probably the only time Quinn Cahill didn’t have that annoying smirk on his face.
“How long have you been alone?” I said.
And Griffin blurted out, “Since he had hair on his balls. Oh, wait … he still doesn’t. Never mind.”
I heard Quinn’s feet slap down onto the floor, the relaxing of his cot springs as he got out of his bed.
“You fucking with me, not-Ben? You want to fuck with me? Let’s see who’s got balls, little shit.”
Something happened. I heard Griffin grunt.
“Get the fuck off me!”
Then Ben must have gotten up. From the sound of it, he threw himself onto Quinn, and in less than a second, both boys came sliding across the floor until Quinn’s head ended up banging into my knee.
“Don’t you fucking touch him!” Ben said.
I slid my arm down between the boys and pushed myself off the bed, taking Ben down onto the floor. Ben would have killed Quinn in a fight. No two ways about that.