Passenger

The Under.

It was at least twenty degrees cooler than up in Marbury. Cool enough that you might actually feel cold here if you spent too much time. And the tu

At one time, in a normal world, this may have been some immense flood-control cha

It was like being swallowed by a whale. And one look at the corrugated steel walls surrounding us proved that we were not the first people to ever think to hide, or maybe to get trapped, down here.

A few yards to the side of the ladder, a rounded hook had been welded to the steel wall. It was the kind of thing that was intended to be used as a guide for cables or telephone fibers. A skull was impaled on the hook, so that the dull end of it came out through the hole of the nasal cavity. A patch of scalp and some short blond hair spiked out from the left side of the skull. A few large scattered bones littered the dirt below the hook.

I wondered if any of the others were thinking what I was: What kind of thing could possibly have been tall enough to hang a body from its head, more than ten feet off the ground?

The skull couldn’t be reached from the ladder, and as far as I could tell, there was no other way to get up to that hook. It was like something you’d do to save food from scavengers. Maybe it was a sign.

Nice decoration.

I lowered the light beam away from it.

I turned to Qui

Qui

I shined the light on the kids’ faces. “We vote. Which way, Ben?”

“Let me see your flashlight.”

Ben aimed the light down the tu

“The ag school would be in that direction. If there’s a way out, that’s the way to go,” I said. “What do you think, Griff?”

“I’m with you guys.”

I looked at Qui

Ben sounded agitated. “You go

“If he’s going to come with us, he’s going to own what he does.”

“Then one thing,” Ben said. “I want to know what all that was about upstairs. When you nearly killed the fucker.”

I shined the light straight at the center of Qui

“He made a deal,” I said. “Qui

Qui

Qui

“What’d they trade?” I said.

Qui

He cleared his throat—stammered. “Well, Billy. They’s only two things Rangers could give me that I wanted.”

“What was it?” Griffin said.

Qui

“Sure thing, Qui

But I kept staring at him, so he’d know that I wanted to hear the truth about what he sold me out to the Rangers for. He took a deep breath. “They offered me a gun. Or…”

“Or what?”

“If I took a gun, I was sure they’d end up shooting me, Billy. You know how they are about Odds with guns. So, one of the captains … she … you know…”

I couldn’t imagine. Well, I didn’t want to. I looked at Qui

“She let you have sex with her?” I said.

I could almost feel the embarrassed heat coming from Qui

“Fucking pervert liar. Bull. Shit.” Griffin laughed.

“I’m sorry, Billy. It’s just. I haven’t never—”

“Shut the fuck up.” I didn’t know whether to laugh at Qui

“Sometimes I can’t help myself, Bill—I’m sorry. Truly I am.” Qui

“He said shut up, Red.” Ben started walking off, into the dark. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”

And when Ben had disappeared into the black, he yelled, “Dumb. Fucking. Idiot!” so loud that it echoed and rippled its way in every direction along the ribbed steel guts of the Under.

But that was Qui

He was definitely no more than I expected him to be, and I can’t honestly say I was ever surprised by anything he ever did anyway.

*   *   *

We walked through the dark, following Ben.

It was reasonable for him to be in the front, and not just because he was frustrated by our situation and pissed off at Qui

Griffin stayed close on my right. Even though he carried Ben’s spear, I could tell the kid was scared. Who wasn’t?

Qui

I never knew there was such darkness anywhere in Marbury. It seemed that every step we took, as we got farther away from the hole to the firehouse, distances distorted, became greater, and time—if it even existed here in the Under—slowed down.

At least on the surface, there was some bland recognition of the passing of a colorless day into a washed-out night, but here in the Under, there was only the cool black and absolute quiet.

I’d seen films of what it looks like in the deepest trenches beneath the ocean, but this was perhaps even lonelier, and scarier, too.

We walked.

Occasionally, we would kick things embedded in the dry dirt beneath our feet: bones; several shoes—I wondered why shoes seemed to last longer than anything else—corroded soft drink cans; and an entire television set, the kind with a glass picture tube—an antique in anyone’s world. Griffin uncovered a blue vinyl pouch, the type you’d use to organize roadmaps kept under the driver’s seat in a car.

None of us were paying attention to his discovery. I think we were all nearly blind by concentrating our eyesight on the narrow and dim beams cast forward from our flashlights.