There were no calls between me and Henry.
But there was a call to Ander.
I never had Ander’s cell number.
I scrolled down and saw five calls in a row to Avery Scott.
The fucking cop.
And there were phone calls listed to the name Quinn Cahill.
No Conner.
No Ben or Griffin.
Another not-world.
Fuck you, Jack.
I had to sit down.
Drip.
I couldn’t stop the bleeding from my hand.
Henry poured beers, a fresh cigarette dangling like a white slash from his lips. I moved over and slid one of the wobbly wooden chairs out from his small kitchen table. I dropped my phone onto the floor.
Everything sounded so horribly noisy.
He put the beer down on the table and I stared at a spot on the floor between my feet.
Drip.
I didn’t bother picking up my cell phone.
Henry sat down, lifted his glass. “Cheers.”
I just looked at him while he drank. I don’t know why, but I wanted so bad to punch him at that moment. I was seething with anger and I needed to scream, to break something. Of course Henry could tell; how could he not notice something like that?
He took another long swallow. “Sorry about the place. Were you expecting something else? You’ve been here before, didn’t you say?”
I clenched my wounded hand into a fist. It stung.
I don’t know how I managed to sit there, to stop myself from leaping across the table and driving my fist into Henry’s face.
He laid on his soothing, condescending tone. “You should be happy. We’re finally home.”
I took a deep breath, filled up my lungs with the smell of Henry and his cigarette, the stale aquarium fog, his Chelsea flat.
“This isn’t the place. If it was the right place, you would know who I am.”
Henry didn’t react at all. I slapped the table. “Look at me! This is what I was wearing the last time I saw you! You don’t have a fucking clue who I am, do you?”
I sighed, looked down at my feet again. “We don’t belong here.”
I heard him take a long swallow. “I belong here.” Henry put down his glass and said, “What about you? Where do you belong, Jack?”
It was like he was telling me to get the fuck out of his house. He was done with me. I could leave.
I nodded. I drank the beer he’d poured for me. I stood.
I was horrendously drunk after two glasses of beer.
Stupid.
I almost felt like laughing.
“I’m going to get my shit and go,” I said.
My mouth felt numb. If he’d offered me another beer, I’d drink it, but then I’d want to fight for sure.
I kicked my cell phone toward the doorway, satisfied I’d made a goal into the bedroom with it.
I was drunk; and it was 5:44 in the morning.
As the sky grayed outside, the windows across the way didn’t appear so bright; the buildings paled to not-black.
Something was wrong.
“Where are you going to go?” Henry sat at the table in the kitchen.
I didn’t know where I was going.
“I have a hotel room.” I slurred the words. “Near Regent’s Park. Or my girlfriend’s house in Hampstead.”
I couldn’t know if any of that was true. I just said it.
I bent down, picked up the phone, and slid it into my back pocket. But when I tried scooping up Ander’s jacket, I lost my balance and ended up on all fours.
Jack is a fucked-up drunk.
Henry heard me, came in from the kitchen. The room was lighter now, all washed in gray, and I had my face pressed down into Ander’s jacket, trying to see if somehow it smelled like Nickie, like the house in Hampstead I remembered sleeping in.
There was a noise.
I knew it.
Roll.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I took a quick breath. Maybe I was just drunk.
I turned my face so I could look at Henry. He’d heard the sound, too, but I could tell he had no idea what it meant.
“Seth,” I whispered.
I pressed myself lower against the floor and peered beneath the bed.
I felt the vibrations of Henry’s steps as he got nearer to me. “What are you doing?”
It was totally dark under the bed, just black corpses of trash and cast-off clothing.
“Looking for something,” I said. “You’re going to know this isn’t it, Henry. You’ll find out. I don’t know how it’s going to hit you, but it will happen.”
Where are those fucking glasses?
I slid my hand under his bed, sweeping my fingers around through the debris, trying not to think about what I might be touching.
Then something tickled the hair in my armpit.
Whatever it was came out through my shirt and began crawling toward my hand.
I jerked my arm back from under the bed.
Stretching nearly the entire span from my elbow to wrist, a green-black harvester clung to my forearm, looking for the source of the blood it smelled, the cut on my hand.
Then the thing bit me, right over my middle knuckle, laying open a smiling, white-lipped gash in my skin. I was horrified and sick.
“Fuck!” I swatted my hand back at nothing, and the bug tumbled away, clicking its shell open and futilely buzzing the cellophane wings that could never support such weight. “It fucking bit me!”
Harvesters don’t eat living things.
The thing sailed past Henry and he moved aside nonchalantly, like he was stepping from the path of an errant tennis ball during a summer match in the park.
I sat up against the bed, squeezing my hand, watching the blood from the bite wound pool and run in a thick scarlet streak that dripped down onto Ander’s T-shirt and jeans, where it left button-sized stains on my crotch.
Henry looked amused, his cigarette dangling loosely. Barefoot, he stepped on the thing. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell by how Henry’s stomps encroached in succession toward the baseboard that it took several attempts for him to kill the harvester.
But by that time, two more had climbed up inside the back of my T-shirt and began eating me. I got up, pulling at my shirt, trying to swipe my arm behind myself and get the things off me. I could feel their jaws, slicing, biting, like tiny carving knives that cut into the skin on my back. I could hear them chewing.
“Henry!” I lifted my shirt and spun around, urgently assuming Henry would help. He hit me. I didn’t care. I wanted those fucking things off my back.
As soon as Henry swatted the second harvester from me—and it was sickening that I could feel how it dug into my skin and didn’t want to let go—a sea of bugs came spilling out from under the bed, washing toward our feet, like an oozing black flood of tar, like the entire apartment was sinking into a roiling ocean of the monsters, and someone had just pulled a drain plug from the floor.
Henry froze. I shoved him back into the living room and slammed the bedroom door shut. But the harvesters had already reached the doorway, and flattening themselves, the first ones began wriggling through the crack above the floor, frantically scratching with their clicking legs, jaws snapping, flexing, open, shut.
I crushed the first ones with the edge of my shoe as soon as they began to squeeze through. It sounded like I was stomping on lightbulbs, and a burbling mass of rust-colored snot erupted all over the floor, up the leg of my jeans, past my ankle, inside my shoes. Behind me, I heard things tipping over, breaking. Henry was pulling up a thick rug and upending the furniture.
Panting, his cigarette still pinched between his lips, Henry jammed the rug down into the crack beneath the door, and wedged it tightly with his fingers until the opening was sealed. But there were so many harvesters on the other side of the door that I could hear the rasping clatter of their shells and legs, the pincers of their jaws against the door in such great numbers that it sounded like we were deluged in a downpour of pea gravel.
My hands shook. I combed fingers through my hair, tried pulling my shirt away from the spots where my blood cemented it to my back.
And my hand kept bleeding.
“You still think this is home?”
Henry looked sick, gray.
He took another drag on his cigarette, then let the butt fall onto the rug. He stamped it out with his bare foot. Henry swallowed. I could tell he struggled with articulating words. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”