Nice.
The fucking universe.
I heard the boys come up behind me.
“I’m okay. I’m okay. Just get away from me. I’m okay.”
I don’t know how long I stayed there like that, on my hands and knees with the water raining down on me. Probably too long. The shower stopped by itself. The upper tank had run dry.
I shook my head.
Better.
I got up and made it back around the wall without falling down. Dripping water everywhere, I sat on the edge of my cot and began putting on my clothes. My prison clothes.
“We need to get out of here. The Rangers are coming. It’s a guy named Preacher, and a girl, the captain, named Anamore Fent. They’re hunting for me.”
“A girl?” Griffin said.
“Get dressed. We need to go.”
Ben said, “We shouldn’t go out at night, Jack.”
“I think I know what to do. Get your boots on. Now.”
We hurried. I ran down to make sure Ben had thought to bolt the main door shut, then I locked the second door at the top of the staircase.
I told the boys to drink as much water as they could hold, to gather together as much as they thought we could carry on our backs. We found an empty canvas pack hanging from a peg on the wall by Quinn’s stove. I tossed it across the room to Ben. Fuck Quinn Cahill. He took off, left us here; so we were going to claim whatever we wanted.
In ten minutes, we were ready.
Griffin carried the extra pack. We took as much as we could from Quinn’s store of rations, along with most of the contents from his first aid kit, and all this we stuffed inside the backpacks. And I made certain the lenses were safe.
Jack and his habits.
In ten minutes, we were ready.
But it was already too late.
They were here.
Quinn showed me what to do when he first brought me to his firehouse. So I opened the footlocker beside the doorway and flipped the switch gates to his electric fence—what he’d called “juicy death.”
Now there would be only one way out.
Down.
Into the garage by the fire pole. Then down again, into Marbury’s underworld.
As soon as I flipped the switches, we heard pounding and kicking at the lower door.
Griffin’s eyes went wide. “What do we do?”
“It’s okay. I know a way out.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, then?” Ben was rightfully impatient.
Pounding again.
“Fuck them,” I said. “They’ll have a surprise if they come up the stairs.”
Of course, I didn’t have any idea how—or if—Quinn’s trap would work. But I knew we’d have enough time to get down, and I was scared of the idea of getting out that way.
Once we did that, there would be no turning back, and I remembered how Quinn told me he was afraid of going down below.
“Billy! Billy, open the goddamned door! It’s me, Quinn Cahill!”
I closed my eyes and exhaled.
It was like getting punched in the stomach.
Fuck this place.
“What are you going to do?” Ben said.
Griffin pulled on my arm, snapping me out of my confusion and disgust. “Fuck him, Jack. Don’t let him in. What if he’s fucking with us?”
It was Quinn. Of course he was going to fuck with us.
More urgent kicking on the door.
“Billy! Don’t leave me out here, you fucking ingrate!”
Fuck you, Jack.
I shook my head. I wished someone would slap me.
I sighed. “I can’t leave him outside. He didn’t do it to us when he could have.”
“Fuck him,” Griffin repeated.
But I opened the trunk, turned off Quinn’s electric fence, and unbolted the door to the stairway.
If I had turned the booby trap off three seconds sooner, the Rangers outside would have killed me, and I wouldn’t have known anything about it. When I was halfway down the metal stairs, there came a blast of automatic gunfire. The outer door splintered into shards and swung crookedly open as if pushed by a ghost.
There was no smoke, no smell, just the tinny sound of shell casings raining down on the concrete pathway in front of the station house and the peppering of wood fragments dusting a cloud of debris across the lower stairs.
I started to turn back, and I saw Quinn push his way in past the shattered door. He carried his red speargun, and when he saw me standing on the stairway, he had to have figured out that the path up to the firehouse was safe.
He sold me out.
I knew it as soon as I saw him. He brought the Rangers here to hand me over to them. I looked at him as he hesitated at the base of the stairs below me. I could see the guilt in his stupid fucking eyes. He didn’t need the Rangers to make it back home. He owned this place. Quinn Cahill was the king of the Odds, but the Rangers must have promised him something special for turning me in.
That’s what was behind his act. Following me. Promising how we’d be such good friends. It was always, only, about winning the game for Quinn Cahill.
I wondered what they gave him.
Fuck you, Quinn.
I spun around. Ben was waiting at the upper door.
Below me, the man they called Preacher appeared in the door frame behind Quinn. He carried a small shotgun in one hand, and his hat was tilted back so I could clearly see his face.
I knew everything about him. In another world, at another time, he was the man Seth Mansfield killed in a hayloft.
Quinn said something like, “That’s him there.”
First there was a rainlike noise that sounded like insects—a swarm of locusts hurling themselves at the doorway, clicking their shelled bodies by the thousands against the walls of the firehouse. Arrows.
The Hunters had followed.
We were trapped, and trapped again.
By the time I’d made it back to the upper floor, Quinn was two steps behind me.
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Preacher stagger backwards into the wall. He’d been shot in the face with an arrow. It entered below his cheekbone and came out through the ear on the same side. He grunted and snapped the shaft, pulling it out through the back of his head. His blood flecked the wall behind him, but the man seemed unfazed by his wound. He pointed his gun out the door and began firing wildly.
“Get up, Billy! It’s an ambush!”
Quinn panted, so close to me I could feel the heat from his body.
I went through the door, and Quinn followed me, slamming it shut as the firefight in the street erupted into full warfare.
I didn’t even acknowledge Ben and Griffin. They stood there, waiting to see what I’d tell them to do. We were fucked, and now we were trapped inside the firehouse with the sonofabitch who dealt me over to the Rangers.
I slapped the speargun from Quinn’s grasp. He seemed to have no idea what was going on, and as soon as his gun hit the floor, I kicked it away. The gun scooted and spun along the concrete floor toward Ben. Then I grabbed the redhead by his T-shirt, ripping it in my grasp as I lifted him above my own head and slammed the kid over and over into the door.
“What the fuck, Quinn? What did you fucking do?”
I couldn’t stop myself. I started punching him.
It felt good.
Ben didn’t say anything. He just picked up Quinn’s stupid speargun and watched.
I don’t know if he was more stunned by what I was doing, or from all the noise coming up from the floor below. Griffin ran to the back of the room and scrambled up the ladder to take a look from the roof.
When I stopped punching Quinn, he fell to his knees.
He didn’t swing back one time; didn’t even try to defend himself against me, which made me feel even more disgusted by him. The fucker didn’t even know how to act like a real boy. His nose trickled blood over his lips and down to his chin. The kid was crying, trying to cover his wet and blood-streaked face with quaking hands.
If I had the time, I probably could have felt bad for him, for what I did, but Quinn Cahill had been working up to this for a long time. He had it coming.
The wrapping on my right hand was spotted with his blood.
“What the fuck was that about?” Ben seemed perfectly calm. Maybe he was just trying to keep his voice down because he was afraid of setting me off. But hearing him ask it made me madder.