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 terrifying 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.”
“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.