Nickie.
I managed to push up to my feet, steadying myself, leaning with my naked shoulder. They had me in some kind of storage car, one for baggage. There were very few seats inside; mostly open floor space with luggage racks that had already been stuffed with canvas duffel bags—the gear for the soldiers.
Six Rangers stood there, making a semicircle that pinned me against the wall. They all looked so dirty, hungry. Their eyes seemed to say they needed something. Maybe something from me. And every one of them was carrying at least one gun.
A bloodstain dried in a crusted line from my chin all the way down my belly to the button on my pants, and another handprint of mine was stamped in blood over a pattern of roses on the wall.
The train stood still, and I could hear people shouting, crying, through the open doorway that led to the other cars.
“Return to your seats,” I heard someone announcing, a Ranger.
“Return to your seats immediately. The train has been commandeered.”
My head began to clear.
Somewhere, a woman and a little kid were crying, terrified.
“There’s an army of Hunters ahead. Return to your seats now, or you will be shot.”
I needed to get to Nickie.
* * *
More Rangers begin filing into the baggage car.
Most of them seem disinterested in me. Half of them are my age, anyway. Maybe they remember being treated exactly like this on their conscription days, how they became men through abuse, the shit they had to go through before they got their issues—the uniforms they wore, the guns they carried.
Two of them are twin brothers. Just kids, maybe fourteen years old. They look like kids we’d take on in basketball at Steckel Park. The Rangers aren’t picky. They take what they want, even if they have to dress them in clothes that are far too big for them.
The kids’ last name is Strange.
This is real.
I remember who they are.
In another Marbury, Ben and Griffin wore those boys’ clothes. Everything those kids have on. In another Marbury, we stripped their corpses.
In another world.
I can’t look at them.
I push through the soldiers, toward the doorway. Barefoot, beaten, I’m walking like a drunk.
At the end of the car, there is a side door that is standing open. A Ranger balances outside on the rocky bed of the train tracks, pissing into the cornfield.
Maybe something happened to me.
What’s that in your pocket, Jack?
This is Marbury.
It is all so brilliant—the color of the sky, the huge stalks of the green plants that aren’t really corn, the diamondlike glint of light that shines through the arc of the soldier’s piss stream.
Ramirez appears at the doorway to the next car and blocks my path into the hallway.
“Where are you going, recruit?”
Fuck this place.
“I’m not a recruit. I’m going to get my…”
“Your what? Girlfriend? Underwear? Shoes? What? Your room’s emptied out, kid.” Then he puffs up his chest and adds, “Recruit.”
“Where’s the girl?”
Ramirez swallows. He looks out the open door, smirking. Outside, the soldier is buttoning up his pants. He wipes a smear of piss from his hands onto his leg and squints in the sunlight.
“Fuck her. Last I saw, she was out there. In the field.”
I feel the blood drain from my head. It is a sickening sensation, like being in a very fast elevator. My knees buckle, and I catch myself on the edge of the doorway.
“What?”
Ramirez pushes into me. He smells like sweat. He calls out to the men in the car, “Someone get this kid some clothes!”
I worm around the sergeant, squeeze into the hallway.
“Nickie!”
The sleeper is one car back. I stumble down the aisle between rows of seats. There are a few passengers in here. I don’t look at their faces, and they aren’t moving from their seats. I can tell they’re trying not to look, not to see.
Ramirez spins around, comes after me.
“Stop!”
My foot catches one of the rows of seats. I trip, just as Ramirez fires his rifle. I hear the bullet whiz over my head, the thunk it makes when it cuts a perfect hole into the wall at the end of the car.
This is real.
Nickie’s okay.
She has to be okay.
This is supposed to be my forever.
I squeeze between the seat rows, over to the side of the car. I can hear Ramirez stomping down the aisle toward me. There is another side door here. I pull the lever down and slide it open. I fall from the train, land hard on my back against the sharp and grimy rocks of the rail bed.
My head spins. It is so bright, and my eyes fill with water. I lie there for that brief second and gaze up into a blue I’d never seen before in Marbury. And I can clearly see the gaping, oozing maw of the hole in the sky.
This is not the world.
I know what they’ve done to her. I don’t need to see it.
I sit up. I hurt everywhere. Ridiculously enough, it bothers me that my fly is open. There is rustling in the field, and a group of Rangers, some of them shirtless, sweating, come wading through the green and perfectly lined stalks. They move tiredly toward the train, carrying guns.
One of them is wearing the T-shirt I’d discarded on the floor beside our bed.
I feel Ramirez standing behind me. I know he is standing there, that he is pointing his gun at me. I can tell by the way the Rangers in front of me stop and stare, wide-eyed, ready for the show. And I am certain he is just trying to decide how to kill me. The quick way, or maybe the fun way.
For a moment, I imagine lying beside the pool at Ben and Griffin’s house.
I look up at the sky.
I slip my hand inside my pocket.
I take out the lens.
twenty-one
At first, I believed Ramirez shot me in the head.
I thought, this is what it’s like to die.
The pain was blinding, deafening, when the red light poured across the horizon and stretched in every imaginable direction. I tried to grab my head, to cover up, but I couldn’t move my arms.
There must have been a wind.
But it wasn’t wind.
I couldn’t feel it.
And all the stalks in the field collapsed, blown toward me, to lie flattened against the perfect plain of the farmland. In the distance, the wire-frame structures of the windmills crumpled, too, disintegrating, sinking into nothing like ashes from the end of a cigarette.
“Holy shit!” The sergeant fell back inside the train. The door slammed shut behind him.
Then came the rain of arrows.
This is the center of the universe.
All arrows point to home.
All arrows point to Jack.
Beyond the outer edge of the fields, a massive black line had assembled: Hunters, tens of thousands of them. The ones at the back sat atop horses, and were covered with electrified, writhing coats of harvesters. I could hear their shells clicking, the buzzing of their wings. And then came a chorus, the tense snaps from the bowstrings, the whooshing flights of black-fletched arrows that flew in swarms as thick as locust plagues, collecting in a whirring and angry cloud against the sunlight.
Screams—the shuk shuk shuk of the arrows as they mowed down the Rangers in front of me, every one of them struck dozens of times. The stone arrowheads came down so hard, arcing so steeply, that several of the men’s skulls split open, halved like melons before their thrashing bodies descended to the ground.
The Rangers had no chance against the onslaught.
And not one of the arrows so much as fanned air onto me. It was like I wasn’t there at all. When the second wave came, pointless, the gruesome swarm of arrow shafts picketed the ground, reforesting the field in death, hacking apart the corpses of the Rangers who’d made their way in from the field where they’d discarded Nickie.