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I hold my hand up, arm bent at the elbow, and the bleeding paints a black pudding skin of blood in rounded streaks down my forearm.
Drip.
Drip.
I marvel at how white my body has become.
All down the street, infinite in every direction, the rows of buildings stack tightly one after another, each of them twisting, sighing as though inhaling, exhaling. Sleeping. And they are all decorated, adorned with spattered corpses: men, women, children, every one of them unclothed, bloodstained, pi
And above it all, the hole in the sky tears and gapes open like a hungry mouth, Jack’s mouth, Jack’s hand, and it is the same hole that Seth had made through the wall of the apartment building, grinding and spitting fragments of stone, brick, the teeth of the universe, opening outward and exposing another gray street that is equally strewn with bodies, floating endlessly over our heads as far as I can see.
And Seth is ru
Henry repeats, “What the fuck—”
“What do you think? What do you think it is?” I ask, disgusted.
I have no time for this.
A brick tumbles past my feet.
One droplet of blood splatters, a perfect circle, in the center of its upturned face.
Rolling dice.
The snake’s eye.
I have to follow Seth.
I know this place.
And I know I will die here if I don’t follow.
Henry knows this place.
It is all too fast. I ca
“We have to follow him.”
Henry wipes spit from his mouth and I continue after Seth.
There is something blocking the confined footpath between the buildings.
I know what it is.
Of course I know.
Perfect, flawless, a comforting shade of blue—it is the color of toys and swimming pools. A fifty-five-gallon plastic barrel.
Seth stops at the end of the alleyway, but he doesn’t look back at me.
Everything is so loud: Henry’s gasping pants, the crumbling stone, clicking. Harvesters coming, following us. And from where I am standing, I can see that there is no top on the barrel.
I know there are dark things inside it, crowded, folded together within the cramped space of the drum.
Seth turns down the street and I can’t see him anymore.
I need to go.
Above me, a window explodes outward from its buckling frame, showering crystals of glass that stick in my hair.
Henry yells, “What are you doing?”
But I won’t answer.
I walk toward the barrel.
Do not look inside, Jack.
How can you keep yourself from looking?
Fuck you, Jack.
I scream it, “Fuck you, Jack! Fuck you!”
I put my hands on the perfect rim of the drum and push my hips around it. I smear my blood across the raised lip of the barrel as it presses, cool and smooth, like naked skin against me. I can feel my balls tightening up inside me.
Don’t look.
I can’t stop it.
And inside the barrel, I see the boys.
Ben and Griffin.
They look so small and pale, naked, like unborn twins. Unconcerned by the confinement of their plastic womb, their arms fold, spiderlike, entwined. One of Ben’s knees presses up between Griffin’s shoulder blades, angular and rigid. Their heads lie so comfortably, slumbering, jaw to jaw, perfectly unmoving, brothers before and after everything.
I turn away.
I make it to the end of the alley.
Henry struggles past the barrel behind me, and as I emerge onto the next street, I see Seth just as he vanishes into the black square doorway to a Tube station.
Green Park.
This is it.
Of course this is it.
Seth waits for me inside.
* * *
The Green Park Underground was dark and empty, its floors strewn with trash: discarded papers, plastic bottles, wax-paper cups. It smelled like an old movie theatre, or maybe a library—musty and ancient in abandonment.
You never see Tube stations deserted like this.
But this was Marbury.
I felt as empty as the hall, lightheaded, floating unco
I dripped blood everywhere, and I was now too weak to hold my arm up. It ached.
On the other side of the turnstiles, I saw Seth vanish down the escalator. They were still moving, up one side, down the other; the place was lit up, but we were the only ones inside.
I had to follow him. I knew if he didn’t get me out of here that I was going to die.
Tickets.
There were two tickets inside my pocket.
Drip.
Drip.
I handed one of the tickets to Henry.
“Come on.” My voice was a garbled slur.
This is real.
I slipped my shirt over my head, and began winding it around my hand. Tight. Tighter. Dumbly, I thought about laundering it before giving the T-shirt back to Nickie’s brother.
Henry followed me through the electric gates at the turnstile. They opened like mouths when we fed the tickets into the slots.
I staggered toward the top of the long escalator that went down into the belly of the Tube station. Henry shifted his weight from foot to foot, as though he felt like ru
I leaned against the black rubber handrail and put my head down on the back of my forearm. Nothing I did slowed the flow of blood from the wound on my hand. The escalator shook, the hallway creaked and rumbled, and below us, I heard the whoosh of an arriving train.
Even the trains are ru
Everything was falling apart around us. A glass-framed advertisement shattered and dropped from the wall as the porcelain tiles behind it gave away and scattered like bones down onto the moving steps of the escalator.
Going down.
Then the phone inside my pocket buzzed.
My old Glenbrook ringtone, a song that I didn’t think was especially cool, but had been too lazy to change. The escalator seemed to take forever to go all the way down to the dimness of the lower platform tu
Victoria Line.
Piccadilly Line.
Not-lines.
I reached across my waist with my left hand. My phone vibrated like an insect trapped inside my pocket.
Someone is calling me.
I didn’t look. My thumb smeared a swath of blood across the screen. I pushed a button and held the phone to my ear.
“Billy?”
“Huh?”
I felt sick; I nearly dropped the phone.
He said it again. “Billy?”
Qui
Of course.
“What?”
“It’s me. Qui
“Where are you?”
“Turn around, Billy. I’m right behind you.”
I looked back at Henry. He seemed to be watching the ceiling, as though the force of his stare was sufficient to keep everything from collapsing around us. And standing near the top of the escalator, following us down, all grins and red hair, was Qui
Qui
My cell phone dropped from my hand. It slid the rest of the way down to the bottom, along the cool slide of stainless steel between the rubber handrail and the wall, smearing a trail of blood.