I was definitely too tense.
I squeezed shut my eyes and opened them again. Maybe I imagined it.
I was dizzy, breathing too hard, and it stunk down here.
Get a grip, Jack.
Something dropped, clattering next to me, striking into my shoulder.
I jumped, fumbled with the flashlight, watching dumbly as it fell into the dirt.
“Sorry, Jack. You okay?”
Griffin dropped his spear.
“Fuck, Griff! You could have killed me.”
One of us was going to die down here. I knew it.
Maybe all of us.
At least Ben was able to make it down and still manage to hold on to the speargun without any more accidents, and when we were all standing together at the base of the ladder, the lights Quinn and I pointed showed every one of us a new, undiscovered hell that lived inside Marbury.
The Under.
It was at least twenty degrees cooler than up in Marbury. Cool enough that you might actually feel cold here if you spent too much time. And the tunnel was massive. You could pave a freeway down the center of it and have room for houses on either side. The manhole we’d climbed through was invisible now, at least sixty feet above my head, and wherever I’d look, the beam of my flashlight faded to nothing in the lightless void of the tunnel.
At one time, in a normal world, this may have been some immense flood-control channel leading to a sea. Now, here, in Marbury, Quinn’s Under was a world of its own.
It was like being swallowed by a whale. And one look at the corrugated steel walls surrounding us proved that we were not the first people to ever think to hide, or maybe to get trapped, down here.
A few yards to the side of the ladder, a rounded hook had been welded to the steel wall. It was the kind of thing that was intended to be used as a guide for cables or telephone fibers. A skull was impaled on the hook, so that the dull end of it came out through the hole of the nasal cavity. A patch of scalp and some short blond hair spiked out from the left side of the skull. A few large scattered bones littered the dirt below the hook.
I wondered if any of the others were thinking what I was: What kind of thing could possibly have been tall enough to hang a body from its head, more than ten feet off the ground?
The skull couldn’t be reached from the ladder, and as far as I could tell, there was no other way to get up to that hook. It was like something you’d do to save food from scavengers. Maybe it was a sign.
Nice decoration.
I lowered the light beam away from it.
I turned to Quinn. “Which way now?”
Quinn shook his head. “I told you I didn’t like it down here, Billy. I never been no farther than you could throw a marble. Your guess is as good as anyone’s.”
I shined the light on the kids’ faces. “We vote. Which way, Ben?”
“Let me see your flashlight.”
Ben aimed the light down the tunnel in the direction of our only two choices, then up at the kid’s skull that hung from the metal hook. “I say that way.” Ben pointed. “The side with the hair on it.”
“The ag school would be in that direction. If there’s a way out, that’s the way to go,” I said. “What do you think, Griff?”
“I’m with you guys.”
I looked at Quinn, then again at the other boys. “You good with that way, Quinn?”
Ben sounded agitated. “You gonna let him vote, Jack?”
“If he’s going to come with us, he’s going to own what he does.”
“Then one thing,” Ben said. “I want to know what all that was about upstairs. When you nearly killed the fucker.”
I shined the light straight at the center of Quinn’s chest. I wanted to see his face, and I wanted to be sure that Ben and Griffin saw him, too. Quinn’s T-shirt had a shark-mouth rip beneath one arm from when I’d grabbed it and thrown him against the firehouse door. His ghastly, alabaster skin looked unnatural, like it caught the light and glowed; his nipple was an orange moon hovering in a whiteout.
“He made a deal,” I said. “Quinn traded me off to the Rangers. That’s why they were there; what all the shooting was about. They came to kill us, Ben. Well, they came to kill me. I guess they weren’t expecting a surprise.”
Quinn’s eyes darted back and forth, between each of our faces. “I’m sorry, Billy. I didn’t know they wanted to do you harm. I swear it. All I knew was they were looking for you. I’m sorry I told them I knew you.”
Quinn was lying. He had to be. He knew gamesmanship better than anyone. He wouldn’t do anything unless there was some object to gain. That’s why he’d been tracking prisoner 373, following me; why he’d left his knife behind so I’d find it at the dead man’s house, and been so prepared for his new “good friend” at the firehouse when we first paddled his fucking canoe across town.
“What’d they trade?” I said.
Quinn’s eyes kept flickering. I found it hard to believe the kid could possibly be embarrassed or even put on the spot, but his face turned visibly red when I pressed him about it.
He cleared his throat—stammered. “Well, Billy. They’s only two things Rangers could give me that I wanted.”
“What was it?” Griffin said.
Quinn looked pleadingly at me. “Don’t be mad, Billy. I swear to you I didn’t know they wanted to hurt you.”
“Sure thing, Quinn.”
But I kept staring at him, so he’d know that I wanted to hear the truth about what he sold me out to the Rangers for. He took a deep breath. “They offered me a gun. Or…”
“Or what?”
“If I took a gun, I was sure they’d end up shooting me, Billy. You know how they are about Odds with guns. So, one of the captains … she … you know…”
I couldn’t imagine. Well, I didn’t want to. I looked at Quinn’s face, and the kid really wasn’t lying this time.
“She let you have sex with her?” I said.
I could almost feel the embarrassed heat coming from Quinn’s pale skin. He looked down and pulled nervously at his dick.
“Fucking pervert liar. Bull. Shit.” Griffin laughed.
“I’m sorry, Billy. It’s just. I haven’t never—”
“Shut the fuck up.” I didn’t know whether to laugh at Quinn—at whatever captain allowed a horny kid who looked more like a cave salamander to slime his way onto her—or punch him again. “And stop fucking calling me Billy.”
“Sometimes I can’t help myself, Bill—I’m sorry. Truly I am.” Quinn sounded like he was going to start crying again. “It’s just … you know … an Odd’s rig calls the shots when it gets … well … desperate, and mine’s been thinking powerful thoughts on its own lately. So I figured if they were going to shoot me anyway, I may just as well allow my pecker to—”
“He said shut up, Red.” Ben started walking off, into the dark. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”
And when Ben had disappeared into the black, he yelled, “Dumb. Fucking. Idiot!” so loud that it echoed and rippled its way in every direction along the ribbed steel guts of the Under.
But that was Quinn Cahill.
He was definitely no more than I expected him to be, and I can’t honestly say I was ever surprised by anything he ever did anyway.
* * *
We walked through the dark, following Ben.
It was reasonable for him to be in the front, and not just because he was frustrated by our situation and pissed off at Quinn. He had the weapon. There was no way Quinn would be getting the speargun back, or even asking for it, anytime soon.
Griffin stayed close on my right. Even though he carried Ben’s spear, I could tell the kid was scared. Who wasn’t?
Quinn paced himself, walking like a prisoner halfway between Ben and us.
I never knew there was such darkness anywhere in Marbury. It seemed that every step we took, as we got farther away from the hole to the firehouse, distances distorted, became greater, and time—if it even existed here in the Under—slowed down.
At least on the surface, there was some bland recognition of the passing of a colorless day into a washed-out night, but here in the Under, there was only the cool black and absolute quiet.