by Andrew Smith
I pulled my knees up. “What did you see, Con?”
“Are you going to show whatever that thing is you got in your hand to me, or what?”
“Tell me what you saw, first.”
Conner looked at me. The colorless rectangle of the window reflected in his eyes. He didn’t blink. “It was a flash of something. Like a whole movie condensed into half a second, burning through two holes. Like eyes. It was white. I could see a bunch of people who looked like cavemen running around. And me. We were all practically naked. And we were eating by a fire, and it was like I was right there. I could taste it and feel it. It felt like being totally wild. And the next thing I saw were all these nasty-looking bugs. It was fucking intense. Did you see it, Jack? Did you see that same shit? Was that some kind of a fucking dream?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
I was terrified.
Please stay away from there, Con.
Don’t do it.
“It’s a mistake.” I sighed. “Look. I’m going to ask you to do something for me, and I want you to make a promise you’ll do it because we’re friends. And we’re not going to fight about it, okay? Will you promise?”
“I promise, Jack. You know I’d do anything for you. You don’t have to ask. I’d never fight with you. You know that.”
“Promise not to ever look at this again.”
Then I pulled the glasses out from under the cover and I folded them shut. I held them in my palm and Conner just stared down at them. Into them. I knew he could see something. I watched him. I had my eyes right on his.
Neither one of us blinked.
“Look at me, Con.”
He raised his eyes.
“What is that shit, Jack?”
“I don’t know. But it’s bad, and I’m going to get rid of it.”
I slipped the glasses back inside my sock.
“Remember what you promised me, Conner.”
Then I put my hand out to shake, and Conner took it, but he had an unsure look in his eyes. I’d known him too long for him to fool me about it.
I slid my hand back under the damp pillow and left the glasses there. I watched Conner while I did it. I saw his eyes follow the movement of my hand.
“Is this for real?” he asked. He just stared at the pillow.
“If you saw it, then that makes it real.” I lay down and stared up at the ceiling. I folded my hands behind my head. “I thought I was crazy, but you saw it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I need to get rid of them,” I said. “You don’t understand. I need to get rid of them. I think I know what I need to do.”
“Let me look at them again, Jack,” he said. “Just for a second. Come on.”
He tried to slide his hand under my pillow. I grabbed his shoulders and started to push him away, but I held him there and said, “You promised, Conner. You have to trust me. I don’t want to fight you.”
I loosened my grip on his shoulders. I don’t know what I was thinking, because if he and I ever really fought, Conner would kill me. But he loosened up, too, and slid back over to the far side of the bed.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“What is that shit?”
“I think it might be hell. It fucks with you, Con.”
“Is that what’s wrong with you, Jack?”
“I think so,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s going to fuck with me, do you?”
I thought, maybe, Conner sounded scared.
“No.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“I don’t know. The guy I beat up the other night. He left them for me.” I was burning up. Sweat beaded on my chest. “I need to get rid of them.”
“Could I take one look?”
“You have to trust me.”
“Can I?”
“No.”
And when Conner went to sleep, I lost control.
Fuck you, Jack.
I eased out of bed so slowly, carefully, not making the slightest sound, the faintest ripple of movement. I carried the glasses into the bathroom.
My stomach was shaking, giddy, like being five years old and waking up in the dark before Christmas when you still believe that there is nothing anywhere that isn’t good, and you need it all.
I was soaked in my own sweat. I folded the seat of the toilet down and sat there, trembling—and I was getting shocked again by Freddie Horvath, pale, damp in my underwear like some sick and palsied addict.
“Bring me back, Seth. Soon. Before he wakes up.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Just for one second.
Just a peek.
I put them on.
Somewhere, I heard Conner, faintly knocking.
“Jack! Open the fucking door!”
Tap.
“Jack!”
Tap.
Thirty-Five
Tap.
The only captives they’d ever take were kept for food, or for worse things than that.
They were coming, close enough that I could hear the hooves when they slipped on fragments of rock, the grunts of riders, a cough. Griffin’s dog cowered, shaking beneath a broken catalpa bough. We had picked our spots, stocked them with ammunition. It was time to separate.
“Let’s be good, boys,” I said. I stood between Griffin and Ben, and we put our arms around each other’s shoulders and leaned in until our heads touched.
“Let’s fuck them up,” Griffin said.
And Ben squeezed hard and said, “They won’t even know what hit ’em. And when we’re finished, we’ll have some more candy.”
The kid flashed a smile.
“And whiskey,” I said.
“What makes you think I took the whiskey?” Ben asked.
“I’ll ride back if you didn’t.” And when Ben smiled, I said, “Shit, I’d walk back to that train for some whiskey if we make it out of this one.”
And Ben said, “We’re getting out, and you’re not walking nowhere.”
Griffin’s position was at the point of our ambush line, perched on a granite ledge where he could belly out and see almost all the way down to the field of crosses below us. Ben and I flanked him, higher up but more exposed, about thirty yards off to each side of the boy.
“Make sure you just don’t fucking shoot me,” he’d told us before we left him.
The platoon came up through steep ravines, natural pathways between fractured rocks and patches of scrub brush, riding or walking two across. Maybe forty of them, I estimated, with crude and gore-stained weapons made from wood, hide, stone, jagged pieces of metal, glass, and bone. No women or children among them. The world was like this.
Just below the cocking mechanism on my rifle was the switch that set it to automatic. I clicked it over.
You haven’t gotten away from anything.
Nearly every one of the men wore a codpiece of human hair, some were golden or white. A few of them were completely naked except for their own trophies and decorations: dried hands strung around their waists on cords of braided gut strand, useless car or house keys dangling from holes in their ears, anklets of teeth. Some grew spots along their sides, the older ones had hornlike spines of piss-colored bone jutting through calloused skin from their vertebrae and elbows, some tusklike, curled. And each of them had his own red brand that burned hot searing images into our eyes, even in the daytime, all different. I remembered seeing it on the morning of the day before: Conner’s, small, shaped like a fish or an incomplete side-tilted figure 8, four inches below his belly, among the first pale strands of his pubic hair. I looked for him among the Hunters, but couldn’t find him anywhere. I didn’t want to.
I worried about it; so I scanned each of them, knowing that even at a distance I would recognize the way Conner Kirk carried himself. And they came, all black and white eyes, nearly close enough for me to see reflections of what they were looking at, looking for; so near
to us that we all squeezed sweating fingers on the triggers of our guns, one in each of the boys’ hands, and me with the rifle, waiting.
Waiting.
I watched as Griffin rolled away from his promontory; they were that close. He would let them pass, and our plan was that when Ben and I began firing at them, Griffin Goodrich would not let the first one of them back down from the mountain.
This was our mountain, we’d said.
As they ignorantly passed him, I thought that if that dog came running out, I’d have to start shooting. So I held steady, kept the apex of the rifle’s pointed sight centered directly on the sternum of the rider at the front of the line.
I looked over at Ben. He was watching me, and nodded.
I shifted my eyes back onto the rifle sight.
The last of them, at the rear of the foot soldiers, a lone horseman who was missing an arm from just below his left elbow, passed Griffin’s position.
At that moment, I suddenly became dizzy and cold. I ached everywhere, and realized my last sleep was two nights before, when we were on the train filled with mummified corpses. It was suddenly almost as though I didn’t even have enough strength to hold up the weight of my rifle.
I turned my head, saw Ben waving at me. He motioned it was time.
I lowered my gun and Ben’s signaling became more frantic. I knew he was wondering what I was waiting for. I saw Seth squatting against the rocky face of the ledge behind me. He was leaving.
“Seth,” I whispered.
His voice was just a breath, out of sync with his mouth. “No, Jack. No. I have to leave.”
It was because of the harvesters, I knew that.
And he disappeared.
Our pursuers were almost even with me and Ben. I sighted the first three of them down the barrel of my rifle. The one at the point rode a spotted white horse that wore a collar of human jawbones. It looked like he had black chaps covering his legs, but it was dozens of harvesters, just clinging to his naked skin in anticipation of some kind of reward, clicking their shells, buzzing their pale wings. Licking their chops. He was so close, I could smell him, shaved bald, his scalp patterned with zigzagging scars, each cheek pierced with black barbs that looked like cat whiskers. He was relaxed, balancing a crossbow with black-feathered arrows against his forearm, pointing upward from his crotch.
I could see his face clearly, and couldn’t help but wonder if I knew him, had passed him, maybe, one day on a run in the park or eating breakfast at the pancake place Conner and I considered our hangout in Glenbrook.
When I pulled the trigger, the spray of bullets nearly cut him in two. It splashed warm crimson bits of him like pudding across the bare bellies of the next two riders in line. They didn’t even have time to express shock. I shot them both in their faces, continued firing until the rifle’s magazine clicked empty, and the horses at the front collapsed in wheezing and agonized cries, blocking the advance, rolling their eyes back and spouting mists of blood from their enraged nostrils as the column of unsuspecting demons froze in their tracks and stared, gape-jawed in terror as line after line of those in front fell in flailing and shocked heaps of gore.
Then I heard the heavier, more solid concussion of Ben’s handguns firing while he carefully picked away at the ranks of Followers from the opposite side.
Panic.
Screams.
They’d never seen shit like this.
We were gods.
I ejected the magazine, reloaded.
Arrows came hissing their wind wakes over my head. A thrown hammer of some kind smashed into the granite rock face with enough force that I saw sparks fly at its impact. I stayed down, below the ridge, looked over at Ben as he calmly fired into the platoon. Already, one of the devils had scrambled up around Ben’s position. He was smeared wet, had a loop of one of his comrade’s intestines wrapped around his neck and armpits. It trailed away behind him to some indistinguishable spot lower on the mountain. He grasped a narrow pike with a barbed blade lashed to the end, and calmly raised it, pointing it down at Ben.
More arrows.
I heard another gun being fired: Griffin’s. The survivors were trying to double back.
Without aiming, I shot across the lancer standing above Ben, taking his legs out from under him. He tumbled down the jagged rocks, absurdly waving his scarf of entrails behind him and dropping his spear on the way. He landed beside Ben, spraying blood from his shattered legs. He rolled himself on top of the boy, clawed at Ben’s hair and back, slobbering with open mouth, trying to bite.
Ben grunted and rolled around beneath his attacker. He brought his .45 up into the thing’s armpit and fired twice. I could see the wheezing mist that spouted from the opposite side of him. Ben pushed the corpse away and turned back over onto his belly, shooting, as though nothing had so much as distracted him, into the panicked and decimated platoon.
I raised myself up and fired again, making wide sweeping paths across the soldiers as they attempted to turn back. Following a trail of retreat that gravity painted for them in flowing red, they ran headlong into Griffin’s ambush.
Standing now, Ben and I chased after the remaining devils.
Ben shot the last one in the back of the head, not ten feet from where the entire platoon had passed Griffin’s position just a few minutes before.
It fell, facedown.
Then silence.
We were completely unmarked, but Ben’s clothes were splattered all over with blood.
“They never seen shit like us,” Ben said. “Never.”
Griffin stood up, shoeless, his bare chest heaving in excitement, straining the fingers of his small ribs beneath his dusty skin, still holding guns in each of his hands, raised up above his head, and said, “Fuck yeah.”
A ribbon of glossy black began winding up the face of the mountains toward us from below.
The harvesters were already coming.
“We need to check them all,” I said. “There’s one I need to find.”
Conner.
Griffin and Ben holstered their guns.
“He has a mark on him like this.”
I crossed extended index fingers and overlapped my hooked thumbs.
“Small, almost looks like the shape of a fish. Right here.” I traced the mark just above my own crotch. “He’s the one that bit me yesterday. I need to find him if he’s here.”
Griffin eyed me skeptically. “He’s the one that you know his name.”
I bent forward and turned the last one Ben killed face up. “Yeah.”
“Okay, Jack. Okay,” Ben said, but I could hear his heavy sigh as I stepped away from them and began looking over the next of the dead. And he said, “Come on, Griffin. This won’t take more than a few minutes.”
Griffin sighed. “Fuck ’em.” Then he unbuttoned his fly, and started peeing on one of the bodies. Ben looked at the kid and shook his head, but Griffin argued, “Fuck ’em, Ben. This is for what they did to Henry, and all of us, too. Fuck ’em.” And his little dog came out from beneath the brush where he’d been hiding, sniffed at Griffin’s piss, and lifted a leg to celebrate on the same place.
“Good boy, Spot,” he said.
A gunshot.
I spun around and saw Griffin, his pants still hanging open, standing over one of the soldiers with his gun pointed down.
“This one was still alive,” he said. “And he’s not your boy, Jack.”
Thirty-Six
There were forty-two dead in all.
My friend was not among them.
Conner.
We checked every one of the corpses. Griffin’s dog sniffed them all, one by one, as we moved together through the field of slaughter. It was disgusting, a waste.
“Let’s get the horses, Jack,” Ben said.
“Yeah.”
Griffin finally holstered the gun he’d been carrying. He seemed to be hoping he’d get a chance to shoot another one. “I’m sore from riding,” he said. “How much farther do we have to go?”
“Till we find someone else, Griff,” I said. “Let’s just try to get to the top of these mountains today, so we can see which way we want to go.”
Every few minutes as we trudged up the slope to where Griffin had tied the horses, I’d stop and look back, trying to focus my eyes on anything that might show a sign that we were still being followed. It was stupid, though.
Of course they were still following us.
I could only hope that once the others came upon the massacre we’d left behind, they might decide to just leave these three boys alone.
The higher we climbed, the more the white air of Marbury cooled our skin. We even found a few large pools that had accumulated in the swayback basins of some large granite boulders. We let the horses drink from these, and Griffin laughed when the dog waded right out into the middle of them and tried to bite at his own reflection on the surface.
Ben and I went off to a clearing in the brush, where we stood and looked down along the path we’d followed. It was night, but there was still no sign that we were being hunted.
“You think we got some time?” Ben said.
“With these rocks like they are, I think maybe they won’t be able to track us up here.”
“You want to get going then?”
“Yeah. Let’s get the kid and get back on it, Ben.”
But when we got back to where the horses had been drinking, Griffin and his dog were gone.
I looked at Ben, then called out softly, “Griff? Griff?”
Ben said, “Maybe he’s just taking a piss or something.” He jerked. His hand went to his gun, and I saw something move beside me. I spun around and saw a tall man who looked back at us quickly and vanished into a haze.
A ghost.
“Fucking hate those things,” Ben said.
“Just don’t shoot me by mistake.”
“Where’s that skinny one of yours?”
“I don’t know. He’s gone,” I said.
“Griff?” Ben was nervous. He kept his hand on the top of his holster.
I walked around to the other side of the water, and I could see Griffin’s bare footprints, wet, heading away from us, along the ridge toward the east. There was a thin natural trail there, formed between the crooked spines of ponderosa trunks and branches, and I waved back at Ben. “I think he’s gone this way.”