by Andrew Smith
Not-Glenbrook.
Ben could see it, too.
“I found a book when I came here the first time. A dictionary. I looked shit up in it.”
Ben just stared at me like I was stupid or something, like he was saying, Why the fuck would you want to expand your vocabulary when you’re in a fucking trap like this shithole?
“They didn’t have the word earth in it. No California, either.”
“You’re making shit up again, Billy,” Quinn murmured, his eyes shut, still pressed up against Griffin.
But I could tell by the look on his face that certain things began registering with Ben.
“You know what the book said about Marbury? That it’s the third planet from the sun, that this is where humans come from, and that it has no moon.”
“Jack. You’ve seen the same shit we all have. Do you think this is home? Do you think it’s supposed to be the way you expect in your head?”
“You guys are all fucking nuts,” Quinn said. “If you think I’m going to believe you came from somewhere else, and you ain’t Odds just like me, you’re all full of black salt and shit.”
And Ben said, “You ever hear of California, Red?”
Quinn pushed his face down lower into Griffin’s shoulder. “Leave me alone. I’m going to sleep.”
“If Jack wasn’t here, I’d fucking kill you.”
Ben looked up at the ceiling, then drew a circle around our spot in the dirt with his light. “Sorry, Jack.”
“It’s okay, Ben.” I leaned closer to the map, and Ben looked, too. “I promise I’ll get us home. I swear to God I will.”
“I trust you, Jack.”
There was an obvious coastline on the map. Lines that could have been highways—maybe before the war, maybe a long time ago when Marbury was some other place—connected the twisted veins of not-Glenbrook to a sea that had the word ENDLESS written in dark blue print that stretched toward the old edge of the map. Near the top of the paper, positioned on the coast, another knot of roadways clumped together at a place called Grove. It was the city where the four of us—Ben, Griffin, me, and Conner—found safety the first time I’d stumbled into Marbury.
I put my finger on it.
“You remember that place, Ben?”
“Things are different now.”
I glanced over at Quinn. He seemed to be asleep, too.
I whispered, “This is how we got here. I’m pretty sure we’ve gone back in time, somehow. But we also moved things around.”
“I don’t think this is Marbury, dude.”
“I saw it in the book.”
“Fuck the book.”
I sighed. “Look.” My finger traced a path toward the lower right corner of the map. “Bass-Hove. Do you remember the battle there?”
“Honestly?”
I nodded.
“No. I don’t remember anything anymore.”
“Do you remember a guy named Henry Hewitt? He was the guy who took you and Griff across the desert, and everyone in our crew except us three got slaughtered there. Remember?”
Ben looked down at the fragments of map and shook his head.
I sighed, pointed again. “This is where Conner’s going. Maybe he’s already there, waiting for us.”
“He knows we’re coming?”
“I promised to meet him. It’s the way we can fix the lens. I’m sure of it. We get things back—the way they were, the way they’re supposed to work out—and we can go home.”
Ben flashed his light around again. It felt colder now.
“What makes you so sure?”
I shook my head.
I didn’t know.
“There are people there, Ben. Regular people. Not Odds and Rangers. I just know it.”
“Okay, Jack. If you say so. All I care about right now is getting the fuck out of this goddamned cave.”
I sat down and scattered the leaves of the map away from me.
“Me too.”
* * *
Sitting, waiting, made me shiver from the cold.
Ben started to nod off, but I could tell he felt guilty about it, so fought the urge to lie down and sleep.
“I don’t care if you sleep,” I said.
“I don’t care if you do.”
“I smell too bad to sleep.”
“I’d throw up in my dreams.”
Ben smiled.
“We came far enough this way,” I said. I looked at the options: the main tunnel stretching ahead of us, and the narrower one that bisected it, leading away on both sides. “I think it should be pretty light outside by now. At least, that’s what I’d estimate. So, if there was a way out that wasn’t too far from where we’re sitting, maybe we’d see a little light down one of these tunnel branches.”
“I was thinking that,” Ben said.
“Let’s get them up and stick our noses down there and see if there’s anything that shows up.”
“Like the fucking Nature Channel?”
“Fuck that shit, dude.”
I pushed myself onto my feet and held out my hand to hoist up Ben.
He kicked his brother’s feet. “Time to go, Griff. Red, get up.”
“My name ain’t Red.”
“Shit if it’s not,” Ben said.
* * *
We thought to first explore the tunnel that branched off to our right. If it happened to lead to a way out, I calculated that this would be the right direction to put us somewhere closer to the horses at the ag school.
But calculations based on time and place in Marbury were as pointless as dogs solving arithmetic in dreams.
I think we were all prepared to potentially fall into a different world with every footstep we planted ahead of us; with the possible exception of Quinn. I was convinced he was still keeping secrets; that he knew far more than he’d let on, as though knowing what might lie ahead of us gave him some likely edge to victory, winning whatever game he believed he was still playing.
Even as scuffed and banged up as he was, Quinn was next to impossible to figure out. Or trust.
We had to step up a good three feet in order to get inside the narrower side tunnels. Quinn complained that he couldn’t take the climb, that his balls hurt too bad, so Griffin gave him a boost by letting Quinn use the kid’s knee as a foothold, and I pulled him in by his hand.
Ben and I decided we’d give it five hundred feet, just to get a feel for what may be down that way, before turning back and exploring the tunnel that led in the opposite direction.
The narrowness of the passage kept us packed in a tighter group. There was no dirt covering the floor, only the ribbed steel of the drainpipe construction that made it seem as though we’d been swallowed and were passing through an enormous intestine.
Occasionally, we’d step over bones: pelvises, arms, and legs, mostly. The smaller things like teeth or fingers went mostly unnoticed. I found a skull with a hole in the back of it big enough to poke three of my fingers through. And everywhere there were shoes and belts—things made from leather or plastic that never seemed to go away or wear down into dust.
I picked up a wallet and thumbed through its contents. There were bank cards, receipts, a corner of a sheet of notebook paper with a girl’s name on it—Julie—and a phone number. No bills, but there were three undistinguishable coins that jingled inside a snap pouch. I took them out and put them into my pocket. I wanted to look at them more closely when—if—I got the time. And then I found an ID card from Glenbrook High School. There was some grime obscuring the lamination, and when I wiped it away with my thumb I could read Glenbrook High School 2011–2012.
Fuck this place.
The photo was of a leering sophomore boy named Chris Baker. I recognized him. He was the same kid who’d handed me a can of beer from his back pocket when we took a piss on the side of Conner’s house at his end-of-school-year party. That would have been—what?—maybe nine weeks ago.
In another world.
Fuck you, Jack.
And I stood there, trying to decide if I should hang on to the kid’s wallet or just leave it behind, entombed in the spot where Chris Baker was surely a meal for something once hungry in Marbury.
Ben kept walking. He was about twenty feet ahead of me, shining his light upward in front of us. “What’s that shit?”
I tossed the kid’s wallet away.
Sorry, Chris. Or not-Chris.
I looked over to where Ben pointed his flashlight. Up in the tunnel, great torn sheets of what looked like black rags hung down from the top of the pipe.
“Don’t touch that,” Quinn said.
We stood just behind Ben, who was close enough to the hanging drapes of black that he could reach out and grab them.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a kind of fungus. It gets you stoned, Billy. The Rangers call it black salt. It fucks you up good. You snort it up, or get it in your eyes or mouth, and you’ll piss yourself.”
“You do that shit?” Griffin said.
Quinn looked down, shaking his head. “Fuck. Why would I tell you, not-Ben?”
Ben shined his light through the forest of hanging moss, trying to see if there was any pathway through.
“But I never seen it growing so thick,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to imagine what some of them boys would trade you for just a handful of this.”
“Maybe another blowjob for you, huh, Quinn?” Griffin said.
“If that’s what I wanted, not-Ben, I could surely have it.”
Ben squatted down, duckwalking beneath the strands of mold that dangled like inverted seaweed, holding the speargun out with one hand and his flashlight in the other.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Quinn said.
Ben paused, looked back at us.
I got nervous when Quinn warned Ben. The fucker knew things about the Under.
“Ben,” I whispered. “Get out of there. Let’s go back the other way.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It doesn’t look like there’s any chance of us getting through here.”
And just as he started to pivot his body around, something small, the color of charcoal ash, slipped down from one of the black strands above him and fell onto Ben’s back, hitting him with a soft thud right between his shoulders.
“Fuck!”
Ben jerked and thrashed, swatting at whatever it was that landed on him. When he spun again, I could see that it was some sort of spider, soft and fuzzy, as big as a hand. It was the same kind of creature that had been curled up inside the map pouch Griffin found.
But this one was biting Ben.
Ben wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could see the thing digging its fangs right into the flesh below his right shoulder blade.
“Don’t move!” I dropped down and began crawling toward Ben beneath the drapes of fungus. But it was too late. Ben yelped and backhanded the spider with his knuckles. When the thing let go of him and scooted away, farther down into the tunnel, Ben jolted to his feet. He stood up directly into the fans of black mold.
The fungus crumbled, turned to crystalline grains that rained down on Ben, covering him in black glitter everywhere. He looked burned, like he had crawled out from the soot in the bottom of a potbelly stove.
Ben coughed twice, and after that, he just stood there, staring at me with his mouth locked open in a yawn as I made my way toward him.
“Don’t get that shit in your mouth, Billy!” Quinn called. “Just let him come out of there on his own.”
I stopped.
Ben didn’t even blink. He could have been a statue carved from black glass, standing so still with the speargun pointed down at his feet and a flashlight held against his thigh.
“Ben?” I said. “Are you okay, man?”
His face was blank. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.
“Ben!” Griffin yelled from somewhere behind me.
I heard sounds of a struggle. Quinn and Griffin started fighting. When I turned around, I saw that Quinn had tackled Griffin and was straddling the smaller boy’s chest, pinning him down.
“You can’t go in there, not-Ben!” Quinn’s voice was choked with the pain of having to wrestle the kid down despite his injuries.
I glanced back at Ben. Still not moving; just staring.
“Griff! Listen to me. Just stay there. I’m going to get Ben. Please.”
Griffin barked, “Get off of me, you fucking pervert.”
I turned my light away from them. I needed to get Ben out of there. Griffin and Quinn were still fighting. I could clearly hear punches landing.
It was going to happen sooner or later, anyway. I had to ignore them.
I whispered, “Just don’t fucking kill each other.”
I waited a moment for the smoky rain of black salt to settle down. Then I slid my way farther in, beneath the hanging strands of mold.
Ben gasped and started breathing again, fast and hard. It was almost as though he’d forgotten how to inhale and then suddenly woke up. But he wasn’t awake. The muscles on his face and chest all seemed to clench, and he didn’t move his eyes or even blink. He couldn’t see me crawling my way along the floor of the drainpipe toward his feet.
“Ben! Ben! Look at me!”
One of the spider things dropped down on the floor of the pipe, between me and Ben. I could see it clearly in the flashlight’s beam. Its body was gray and hairy, striped across with black, bigger than both my hands put together. And the sets of legs on either side were incredibly long. Folded in half, they were still more than a foot in length, which explained how fast the ones I’d seen had been able to run away from us. The spider had a long rope of a tail that curled and flicked at the end of its butt, but the most alarming thing about it were the two ivory white fangs that looked like curved swords, clicking together just a few inches from my face.
I held my breath. I laid the flashlight down so I could see the thing, and slid my hand down onto the hilt of my knife. When the thing came at me, I stabbed down, directly into its abdomen, but the knife made no mark at all on it. The spider just flattened out and thrashed its tapping legs. It was almost as though the thing were made of metal. The blade of the knife did nothing to the spider. It just kept biting at the air, clicking its legs and whipping its tail.
I scraped the knife forward until the point found its way into the segmented joint between the spider’s head and body. A weak spot.
I breathed a gasp of relief. I didn’t think spiders slept, and I would have been there pinning the thing down with my knife for a long time before one of us got tired. But its head came off under the edge of my knife, and the rest of it ran off somewhere on the other side of the tunnel where Ben was standing.
I swatted the head out of my way and crawled the rest of the distance to where Ben was.
Ben stared straight ahead, oblivious to everything: the dark; the boys, who were thrashing each other not ten yards from where we were; me, crouched around his feet, trying to get him to pay attention. I grabbed on to his shin and pulled on the leg of his trousers. They were completely soaked with his piss. And I realized I was sitting in a warm puddle of it.
Something else Quinn knew about.
Fuck this place.
Ben didn’t react, so I pulled him harder. His hand jerked, and he dropped the speargun down into the urine.
“Fuck,” I whispered. I picked up the weapon, grimaced in disgust, and slung the dripping strap on the gun’s stock around my neck. Then I reached up and pried the flashlight from Ben’s fingers. He was stiff. He stunk. He felt like a dead body, but his breathing was so fast and strained. The skin on his chest and belly dripped black tears of perspiration mixed with the fungus that coated him.
Finally, frustrated, I hooked my fingers into the waist of Ben’s jeans and pulled so hard that he fell on top of me. I rolled over on my backpack and caught him, but his knee came up squarely beneath my balls, and I felt my guts twist and knot their way slowly through my chest, snailing their way toward my neck.
I coul
dn’t do anything. I had to lie there like that for a minute with Ben on top of me. His mouth hung open, panting, and he drooled onto the side of my face. All sweaty and piss soaked, Ben’s eyes were frozen open as if he were transfixed by the best show he’d ever seen, and so didn’t want to sacrifice an eye blink.
I grunted and rolled onto my side. It was all I could do to avoid getting the granules of mold that had fallen on the floor around us into my mouth. I turned Ben faceup.
When my head cleared, I realized there was no way I could pull a kid as big as Ben out of there if I had to crawl away and keep us both down beneath the hanging mold. So I slid my hand into the backpack and felt around blindly until my fingers closed on the coil of nylon rope we’d taken from the firehouse.
As I moved Ben so I could wind the rope beneath his armpits, I saw the bite marks left in his back by that spider creature. They were angry and red, about two inches apart, and looked like small parallel slices into the flesh over Ben’s ribs. Clear, glistening fluid, venom, oozed out from both wounds. I wiped it away with my thumb and squeezed the area around the bite, causing an eruption of poison from the holes in Ben’s back.
Squeeze. Wipe. Again.
The fucking Nature Channel: Every unimaginable beast can be found here in the Under.
Once I’d gotten a loop knotted around Ben’s chest and put him on his back, the boy seemed to start loosening up, but his breathing continued to pulse in gasping pants.
Then he spoke.
“What are you doing?”
It sounded like Ben was talking in his sleep, anesthetized, like he didn’t really care what I was doing to him, he just wanted me to tell him about it.
“Getting you out of here.”
“Why?”
“This isn’t a good place. You’ll be okay.”
“It’s a good place. I feel fine. Leave me alone.”
I sighed. “Don’t move.”
I began crawling back toward Griffin and Quinn, holding one end of the rope in my hand, and Ben said, “I’m not going to move.”
“Glad to hear it, dude.”