Griffin nodded.
Ben said, “Let’s do this. Let’s get the fuck out of here, Jack.”
So I dove into the river, as far out from the edge as I could jump.
The swim was much farther and more difficult than I thought it would be. Before I got to the other side, I felt my legs begin to drag below me. I was out of breath, and started drifting toward the falls.
If I had been doing it alone, I probably wouldn’t have made it across. But I just couldn’t stand the thought of letting Griffin and Ben down again.
When I finally did pull myself from the river, the flashlights on the other side looked like tiny specks—fireflies—and my muscles burned so bad that I couldn’t stand up.
I heard the boys shouting to me.
I blew long strands of snot from my nose and yelled back to them.
“Ben! Wait! I’m not ready yet!”
I wanted to get directly across from the flashlights, so I could make the rope shorter, tighter for him. When I was in place, I gave Ben the signal to come, and told Griffin to get down onto the ground.
I’d underestimated the force of the current on Ben. The rope tore into his palms, blistering his flesh, and the tighter I tried to pull it, the deeper down the water seemed to drag his light body.
Ben nearly drowned.
I couldn’t believe how long that kid could hold his breath.
The pull of Ben’s body in the water dragged Griffin through the dirt. I watched the glint of his flashlight as it scooted downstream and closer to the edge, but there was nothing any of us could do now.
When Ben finally got over to my side of the river, his pants were pulled completely off, inside out, twisted around his ankles so bad that he had to flop up onto the shore like a beached dolphin.
It took him several awkward minutes to free his feet from the tangle of his dungarees.
“Fuck that,” Ben said. He spit and held his hands out like they’d been burned.
“Hang on, Griff! I’ll tell you when!”
I took up all the slack in our rope. Ben pulled his pants up. I could tell how much his hands hurt, but Ben would never say anything about stuff like that. So I wrapped a double loop around his waist and said, “Don’t grab it, dude. Your hands are fucked up. Let’s pull him over with our legs, by walking that way.”
I pointed back toward where the gray light seeped down into the Under.
Ben nodded. “Okay.”
Then I yelled for Griffin to jump, and Ben and I nearly ran as we pulled the kid over to our side as fast as we could.
When he came up, Griffin gagged and coughed up big mouthfuls of river water. The weight of the packs had pulled him under. We had no way of knowing the kid was submerged for his entire trip across the river.
But at least the three of us made it over, alive.
So far.
But the fucking flashlights had been destroyed by the water.
So we had to guess at which boots belonged on whose feet. We were certain we’d all gotten it wrong, too, but we had to move quickly in the dark.
None of us wanted to spend another minute in the Under.
“At least we have something to aim for,” I said.
So we ran toward the light.
twenty-four
None of us had any idea how long we’d been in the Under.
But when we made it to the source of the light, I saw that it was daytime on the outside; could smell that it had just finished raining.
Great.
Hunters, spiders, worms, and some lost boys from California who didn’t belong here.
The food chain.
And it was impossible to tell exactly where we had arrived in Glenbrook, or not-Glenbrook.
Our way out was obstructed by a wall of junk: enormous broken boulders of concrete, an overturned fire engine, the remains of a crumpled mobile home, and what looked like about three-fourths of the tar-papered and shingled roof from a gas station. The gaps we found in the barrier weren’t big enough for Ben and me to squeeze through. When we tried to, we ended up scraping gashes on our bellies and backs, so we abandoned attempts to get out in several places before Griffin finally managed to wriggle through an opening that was just wide enough for us to follow him.
Once we crawled out, the three of us sat there on a chunk of cement, dazed, raked with scrapes that looked like claw marks across our chests. We stared down at a concrete flood basin that widened out and dipped away from the piles of wreckage blocking the way back into the Under.
“I’d rather fucking die than go back down there,” Ben said.
“I have a feeling whoever piled all this shit up here was thinking the same thing,” I said. “Or they just wanted to keep what’s in there from ever getting out.”
“Any idea where we are?” Griffin said.
I looked around.
Nothing.
I shook my head.
So we sat there and waited while the rainwater receded. None of us was too eager to get to his feet and commit to a new direction.
I opened the backpack and took out one of our water bottles. I felt for the glasses.
A habit.
I always felt for the glasses.
We had one can of stewed tomatoes and a can of something called hominy, which I’d never heard of before in my life. Still, it was food, and after I opened the cans, we passed them around and dipped our fingers into them, scooping out what we could.
And when the cans were empty, I wedged them down into a crack between the chunks of concrete.
Griffin nodded his head. “That was good. Thanks.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The water eventually disappeared. The ground dried. For some reason it was incapable of absorbing anything; so it returned to its usual ash and dust. To get out, we needed to climb the walls of the channel. It was the only way for us to get some idea of where we were, to see if there was anything I could use as a landmark to direct us toward the old ag school, where we might find horses.
The sides of the ditch were slanted concrete. They were steeper and higher than they looked from where we’d been sitting. Our boots couldn’t grip at such an angle, and we ended up having to pull ourselves to the top by crawling on our raw bellies.
When we got up, and could finally see beyond the concrete walls of the channel, all I could guess was that we had somehow ended up far outside of what used to be Glenbrook.
There was nothing at all that looked familiar to me here.
I could see the lost expressions on the other boys’ faces, too.
On the opposite side of the canal, there was what looked like an auto salvage yard. Of course I knew it wasn’t actually a salvage place. Maybe it had been a commuter parking lot at one time. It was filled with cars, trucks, even a few school and transit buses. Maybe half of the vehicles had been turned completely over, or were resting on their sides.
Ben nodded his chin at one of the buses. “Skulls.”
Even as far across the wide channel as we were, we knew they were skulls. Skulls had a certain shape; a color that you never saw on anything else.
Everyone in Marbury knew what skulls looked like.
And we knew what they smelled like, too.
A row of them—one above each broken window—adorned the rusting roof of a school bus that sat crookedly on its axles next to the bent supporting galvanized poles that at one time held a chain-link fence in place.
Hunters liked to decorate with their castoffs.
We saw a few harvesters crawling around on the outside of the bus, too. Their presence meant that some of the dead in the yard were recent kills.
I looked back over the vacant terrain on our side. There was nothing to see except for the dead skeleton of an old oak tree and the remains of two homes: a crumbling chimney column that marked one of them, and an empty frame for a garage door on the other.
That was it.
“We’ve got to get as far away as we can. I don’t think there’s any of us left at all around here.”
And Griffin said, “Fucking Odds.”
* * *
So we set off in a direction I could only assume was east.
Once we’d passed beyond the wreckage of the homes, the ground rose in gentle undulations.