“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 Jay 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.
So I rolled him over.
And I stood over him, looking face-to-bloody-face with my best friend, Jack Whitmore.
You.
Fucking Marbury.
What could I say?
“Fuck. It’s … just a kid,” I stuttered, because I really didn’t know what I could possibly say to make anything better for you.
Who wasn’t just a kid, anyway?
We were all just kids.
So you opened your eyes, but I didn’t think you could see me. A bubble of bloody snot popped beneath one of your nostrils.
To be honest, I wanted to shake you and hug you. It was Jack. I finally found Jack. I felt like I should pick you up and carry you out of there. After all, it was you, right?