I asked him, “How long have you been here?”
Henry looked at each of us, thinking. “I started keeping track of the days. I tried to, at first. I was sixteen years old.”
His voice was a whispered rasp. “I was sixteen years old when I got the glasses. Sixteen! It’s been ten years in this hell. I can’t be certain.”
He grabbed me again, shook me. “Tell me how I can get out of here.”
twenty-five
They knew it was long past time to leave.
What remained of the city was completely overrun with Hunters. There were no more people here.
No more Odds.
No more Glenbrook.
Ben pleaded with Henry to take us along. In the end, he didn’t really have a choice.
They gave us horses.
We rode with Henry and his Odds.
It was what we were supposed to do, and I knew it. It was the only way for me to find Conner. And Conner, the rest of the lens, was our only chance to get out of here.
* * *
Henry barely said anything else to me after our first meeting in the Knolls. Maybe he was waiting for me to do something, but I didn’t know what it could be. I got the feeling he was saving something up, planning. I knew he was scared about telling the other Odds about where he came from; that they might somehow turn against him if they knew the truth about Henry and me, and the other two boys who didn’t act quite like Odds.
It rained once more before the first evening came. We stayed on the horses, but in the foothills there was no flooding like we’d see drowning the old streets. That probably meant none of those black suckers, but I wasn’t going to get down on the ground just so I could find out.
And it turned out to be the last rain we would ever see in Marbury, too.
When it stopped that night, the hole in the sky seemed bigger, more intense. It spread open directly above us, and showered cascades of what looked like burning-hot embers downward, shards of stars that disappeared and died in the Marbury sky. The hole began to resemble a gaping mouth, its upper lip a sneering mirror image to the wound on my hand: hungry, drooling, yawning open, wide enough to swallow the world.
It was coming.
By mid-morning on the third day, we had crossed into the desert, heading on a path toward the settlement called Bass-Hove. Our direction was decided for us by a plastic toy compass Henry kept in his pocket. It looked like something a kid might have dug out from a box of breakfast cereal at some other time, in some other world.
Nobody knew if the compass meant anything at all. Its needle seemed to be made from tinfoil, half of it painted blue, and every time Henry consulted it, he would have to carefully pile a loose hill of ash on the ground as a support to tilt the thing at a steady angle so the indicator could find a balance point and not stop up against its red plastic case.
Seventeen kids rode with Henry. We made twenty. And nearly all of them, from what I could tell, were fourteen or fifteen years old. It made sense. Younger kids had been easy prey. They got taken first. And older Odds were always conscripted into the army, or something worse.
It was natural and every other kind of selection.
So, next to Henry, I was the oldest in the group, which gave everyone enough reason to be suspicious of me.
It was almost as though that prisoner number—373—had been plainly tattooed across my chest, and they all could see it.
Some of the other Odds flatly refused to talk to me at all. To them, I seemed nothing more than a non-paying passenger. But for the most part they seemed to accept Ben and Griffin easily. They were younger, the right age to be part of the group.
I’d heard the riders talking about the boys—how some of them recalled stories about the two Odds on Forest Trail Lane who lived in a bunker beneath a house and killed a Ranger in their garage.
They gave us clothes that had been taken from the dead, so at least we were covered against the desiccating heat of the desert, even if our uniforms were hole pocked and bloodstained. The band of Odds carried water and food that they carefully rationed, stored in bundles of blankets and drapes that were lashed to the pack horses with anything that could bind—electric cords, networking cables, even a rotting garden hose.
In the group, there was a loose and unstated hierarchy. Everyone followed Henry. And a tall, black-haired Odd named Frankie, who was missing the little finger on his right hand and had a wispy tuft of fuzz sprouting beneath his chin, seemed to enforce rations and turn taking when it came time for jobs or sleep.
But they were all boys. Naturally, there were episodes of conflict and cussing, sometimes fighting, and even nastier stuff than that.
Boys.
I don’t think any of them had the intent to stay within their association once our group made it to the settlement.
On the fourth day, Frankie showed the others how we could use two plastic tarps and a collector can to distill drinking water from our piss, so we wouldn’t have to open the precious bottles we carried. He explained we’d have to save them until they meant the difference between living and dying. That day, we stayed camped in the middle of a formation of melted lava rocks—maybe they were giant meteorites—where we rested the animals.
The boys never gave us any weapons.
The other Odds were scarcely armed themselves. A few of the boys carried bows they’d taken from dead Hunters, with a supply of arrows that had been pulled from carcasses of their friends, of people they’d known.
There were some Odds with knives, and many of them carried spears made from all sorts of metal debris.
And then there were the rocks. Rocks for throwing—they were kept in whatever pockets were available—and every one of the boys had a favored rock for bashing, one that fit comfortably in his grip, some of which had been scabbed over with tarred blood. No one would carry the maces or cudgels of Hunters, though. Those were always made from sharpened human bones.
But out here, in the desert, there was no life.
Only ash and salt.
* * *
The days were monumentally boring, made worse by the fact that the Odds only stared at me; they never spoke.
Ben and Griffin felt guilty about the ease with which they fit in among the other boys, but I couldn’t hold a grudge against them for it. I put us here, after all.
So I sat beneath a craggy overhang on one of the boulders, watching, absentmindedly flipping the broken lens between my fingers inside my pocket, carefully tracing the sharpness of the edge that had cut my hand so bad. And I stayed there, tucked into my little hiding place with my pack jammed into the crevice behind me.
We’d been taking turns on the watch, seven or eight at a time, posted on top of the jagged boulders around our perimeter where we could look out in every direction.
Of course the Hunters would be following us, tracking game.
It was Ben’s and Griffin’s turn up on the watchposts.
Frankie stood in the center of our encampment, carefully shaking out the top sheet of plastic, filling his can with the dewy distillate. That day, the entire place reeked with a thick fog of piss, and every hour or so, Frankie would remove his can and dole out a portion of drinking water to whichever Odd came up on the mental list he managed.
I was always last in line.
But I kept myself occupied by watching him, observing the other Odds in their bored frustrations.
One of the boys, a wiry and frail-looking skeleton of a fourteen-year-old named Ethan, had an English accent like Henry’s. He rarely spoke. The boys teased him about how he’d peed himself when he slept every night the first week after they found him alone, hiding beneath the ruined grandstands at a soccer field.
A few of the other boys were relentless in picking on Ethan.
There are always small clusters of boys like that within larger groups. They congeal together like cold grease in water. The assholes. Three of them: a small, muscular tank with white hair named Alex, and his two followers—a slow-witted nose picker who everyone called Fee, and his brother, a towering pole of a kid named Rum, who never wore a shirt so he could show off the tattoo of a dragon that wrapped across his belly and around his back to the spindly knobs of his spine.