The kid was crusted in filth and blood.
I could only imagine how messed up I must have looked, too.
Quinn had nothing on but one black-stained boot, and hardly more than a rag for trousers. Small trickles of blood ran down his chest from beneath the cut on his face.
It was no trick. The kid was giving up. It was not a good place to lie down and quit.
“Can you get up?” I said.
“Leave me alone, Billy.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I shined the light farther ahead.
Nothing.
Quinn said, “Okay, Billy. I know there’s a river down that way. And it’s good water. We … I used to have to come down here to get drinking water. Before I made the still.”
I stood over him. I shined the light onto the kid’s face. His orange hair was dark with filth, plastered down to his scalp with the mud of dust and sweat and blood.
“Is it a way out?”
“That’s all I know,” he said. “I ain’t never been no further than the river. And I stopped coming down here once I was left on my own.”
“Left?” I said. “You knew that other boy. The one up on the hook.”
Quinn said nothing.
I nudged him with my foot. “Well? You did that to the kid, didn’t you, Quinn? Hung his head on that hook?”
“Fair enough, Billy. Fair enough,” Quinn said. “I’ll tell the truth. I stuck that little faggot with my knife. Yep, Billy, you were right all along. That is my knife you picked up at the dead man’s house. The same one I used on that little kid up there.”
Okay, I thought, so everything I ever guessed about this fucker turned out to be true. So how come it still felt like he’d just kicked me in the balls?
I swallowed. “I appreciate you finally being straight with me.”
And Quinn got a mean, hard look on his face that seemed to age him right before my eyes. “The river ain’t too far, Billy. Good luck gettin’ out.”
It was going to be like this now. No more games between me and Quinn. The first time I ever saw the kid, as I flailed around, drowning in the rainwater, when I took off my clothes and pulled those fucking black worms away from my nutsack, Quinn looked so clean and innocent, like he was maybe thirteen years old and belonged in the soprano section of an all-boys church choir.
Now I realized I was wrong about so many things.
“Get up,” I said. “You’re coming, too.”
“Leave me here.”
“If I leave you here, Quinn, it’s only going to be after I stick this knife down your fucking throat. Get up. I’m tired of your bullshit.”
We walked.
Quinn whimpered with every step, but we said nothing as we kept a steady pace farther into the belly of Marbury’s Under.
In the quiet now, no running, no panting breaths, I could hear the low roar of rushing water.
At first, I jumped when the flashlight’s beam ricocheted off the surface of the river. It almost looked like a glistening snake out there, sliding toward us. I stopped and watched, hoping Quinn would say something, maybe tell me what to expect, but the kid stayed quiet and waited beside me.
“Please tell me there aren’t any monsters in that water.”
“If there are, I don’t know about ’em, Billy.”
“No worms?”
Quinn shook his head and pointed a finger above us, into the darkness. “They only live up there.”
It was a hundred feet wide, deep and fast.
The river cut across the main channel of the Under, roiling in frothy, churning currents through an enormous grated opening to my right, and spilling down the opposite side in a torrent of falls over the concrete spillway lip to a gaping and lightless abyss.
It had to flow out somewhere, I thought, maybe into the Endless, but there was no way of following it down the impossible cascade.
I could smell the water, feel the dampness rising in warm humid billows through the fetid air of the Under. And I realized how parched I was, how desperately I wanted to tear myself out of my pants and boots and plunge my filthy body into it.
But I was afraid.
I flashed the light on Quinn’s chest. “You say it’s okay to drink?”
“It’s good, Billy. Trust me.”
Yeah. Right.
“Get in.”
Quinn’s white skin drained to an even paler hue. He shook his head. “I’ll drink it, Billy. But I ain’t getting in it. I can’t swim.”
“Strip down and get in the water. Or I’ll fucking throw you in.”
Quinn closed his mouth, straight, tight. The muscles in his jaw clenched, and he stared at me for several unblinking seconds. Then he reached down and slipped off his one boot and unbuckled his pants.
“Don’t look at me,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t look at me, Billy. I don’t like it. It’s embarrassing.”
I rolled my eyes. Like Quinn would ever be embarrassed about anything.
Quinn slipped his bony legs out of his pants and tiptoed to the edge of the river. Of course I watched him do it. I’d never trust that kid, and he had to know it.
His naked body glowed luminescent white in the darkness of the Under. He gave me a dirty look, limping bad while keeping his hands fanned in front of his dick and what few pubic hairs he had.
“Don’t look.” Quinn had a rare edge of agitation in his voice.
The grown-up, self-conscious, angry Quinn Cahill.
“Fuck you, Quinn. Just get in the water.”
He turned away from me and awkwardly dropped into the river.
The edge plunged straight down. The river flowed through a square-walled concrete channel, so there was no telling how deep it was. But it was obvious that the volume and weight of the rushing water were massive.
Quinn’s head vanished beneath the churning river, and when his pale, ghostly hands thrashed above the surface, the current had already pulled him fifteen feet down the bank, toward the falls. He grasped the edge and held tight, spitting and wheezing.
“There. You happy now, Billy?”
I nodded. “I guess I am.”
I dropped the flashlight and backpack. As quickly as I could, I stripped out of my boots and pants, and holding on to my knife, I jumped into the river after him. For a moment, I didn’t care what kind of horrid monsters might be swimming around below the surface, because I believed that I’d never felt anything as good in my entire life as that rushing, powerful flow against my exhausted body.
I drank, I swam, scrubbed the flakes of filth and blood from everywhere on me, out of my hair; and I was finally clean, reborn. But the current was so strong that it was a struggle for me to swim back to the safety of the edge. I understood how someone like Quinn, unable to swim, would be so fearful of the river. But the water was incredible. It was as warm as a heated swimming pool, and as much as I’d try, I couldn’t get myself anywhere near to feeling anything at all on the bottom.
And with my eyes just above the surface of the river, I could see the dimmest trace of a gray line—light—far away, down the tunnel on the opposite side.
There was a way out.
“Quinn!”
No answer.
I called him again. “Quinn! I see a way out of here!”
Nothing.
I realized that I’d drifted far from the spot where I left my flashlight and clothes lying at the edge of the river. I’d intended to wash out my piss-soaked pants and scrub the black mold from those filthy boots.
Out in the darkness, a good fifty yards from the fading glow of our dying flashlight, I pulled myself from the river and started back to where I’d discarded my things.
That’s when I saw it.
A red slash floating in the blackness of the cave.
I rubbed my eyes. The red glow—I recognized it instantly—meant only one thing. Hunters. But it hovered above the exact spot where I’d dropped my clothes, a hooked slash of fire like a shepherd’s crook, a thin, beckoning finger in the dark that dipped and jerked nervously.
I froze, waited.
It was on Quinn Cahill.
No wonder he didn’t want me to see him naked, tried to cover his body in front of me. He wasn’t embarrassed; he was sick.