Passenger

When I stopped shooting, I felt myself being swallowed up in an eternal silence.

My ears rang.

I breathed.

I whispered, “Ben? Griff? You guys okay?”

Nothing.

A black figure rose up, slowly, cautiously, from the flat of the ground.

Then others.

“Jack?” It was Griffin.

“Is anyone hurt?” I called back.

“Jack? Where are you?”

I could see the kid moving around, bent forward, as though he were sca

“We’re all okay,” Ben said.

I shut my eyes and exhaled.

“Stay there,” I said.

“Jack—” It was Frankie.

“Give me one minute,” I said. “Ben. Griff. Just one fucking minute, okay?”

And Griffin said, “It better be good, Jack.”

thirty-one

Co

“Co

I kicked the ground, sending a spray of salt and ash upward in a dusty gray cloud around my feet.

Maybe I’d gotten disoriented, I thought. Maybe he was still lying right where I’d left him. He had to be there.

I began moving back and forth, sweeping the ground with my eyes and feet.

“Con!”

“Jack!” Frankie shouted my name from the distant blank gray of the Marbury night.

I knew he’d be coming this way, too; I could feel it. There was no way to stop him. So I didn’t answer him, hoping Frankie and the others might not see where I was standing.

I whispered for Co

My foot twisted, caught up on something.

It was a shirt.

It had to be Co

“Co

I jerked my head around, strained to see if I could detect the shapes of the four boys out there, looking for me. And I could hear them moving, the crunch of their boots on the crust of the ground as they came closer and closer.

I picked up the shirt. It was damp from sweat, it stunk, and the collar was slick with snotty blood. Holding the rifle with one hand, I fed the fabric of the shirt back and forth between my fingers, feeling, feeling, trying to find that goddamned lens.

Then I came upon a boot, thirty feet away from where I found Co

I had to pick it up, had to look inside it, too.

Nothing.

Fuck this.

“Con. Please!”

Want to play a fucking game, Jack?

Getting warmer?

Colder?

Colder?

A trail of clothes led me out farther into the emptiness of the desert—another boot, empty, socks, wet with Co

But not Co

There.

Pants.

And ten feet away from the twisted pants he’d flung away from his burning body, I saw Co

“Con?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and slowly, cautiously, I lowered myself so I could scoop up his pants.

“Get away.” Co

“It’s me, Con—”

“I fucking know who you are! You think I fucking don’t know who you are? Get away from me!”

Slowly, steadily, I crept to where I could see him more clearly.

Co

It was Co

I watched him as I squatted down and laid the rifle to rest across my knees. Then, cautious and deliberate, I began going through each of the pockets in his discarded pants.

“We’re getting out of here, Con.”

He spoke through bared, gritted teeth. “I … We waited too long. I can’t stop this.…”

And behind me, Ethan’s voice, not twenty feet away from us. “There he is.”

Co

It could not be too late.

Then I found the lens.

He’d wrapped it up inside a scrap of torn cloth that looked like it had once been a sleeve on his T-shirt, wadded, just like Jack would do, tucked away in one of the buttoned outer pockets on the uniform fatigues of a Ranger.

He began to pant, grunting between breaths. I could hear him swallowing great gobs of drool.

“Get the fuck away from me, Jack Whitmore!” Co

Carefully, I placed the wrapped fragment of lens in my palm. Even then, as soon as I held it out beneath the hole that dripped fire from the sky, I could see how the thing burned within the stained cloth.

My hand felt heat, and through the sack in which I’d covered my scar, I saw the seep of blood that spread out across the dirty rag covering my palm.

“It’s going to be okay, Con. I promise.”

How the fuck could I promise that?

Blood ran, tickled the back of my wrist.

Drip.

Co

He looked like a bug.

White eye.

Black eye.

The fire brand.

Hands, muscles, twitching like over-tight springs.

He wheezed and drooled.

“A fucking bug!” Ethan shouted.

“No!” I said. “He isn’t! Stay back!”

I jammed my other hand into my pocket.

There it was, the Marbury lens. I could feel it tingle between my thumb and finger.

I pulled it out and placed it on my palm beside the piece wrapped in Co

Drip.

*   *   *

Jack is bleeding again.

The sky lights up, an instantaneous dawning of gray Marbury nothingness.

I flip Co

He slurs, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Co

As my fingers nervously grope the edges of the filthy cloth and begin to pull it free from the lens, I glance across and see the four boys standing, frozen, under the sudden blaze of the sky.

Only Frankie starts coming toward the place where I crouch in the ash.

And on my opposite side is Co

The lens tumbles from my bloody hand.

“Fuck!”

Frankie has a bow, captured from one of the dead Hunters. He notches an arrow, pulls it tight against the strain of the bowstring.

All arrows point to the center of the universe.

All arrows point to Jack.

I sweep my hand across the ground, let the other half of the lens fall there.

Co

Frankie raises, aims.

He shouts, “Don’t fucking move, Jack!”

Co

“Con!”

And I can’t breathe.

Blindly, my fingers find the pieces, lift the tattered rag away from the one I’d taken out of Co

Now I have them both.

Black dots begin to swallow everything I see, a closing aperture on a camera’s lens. I can’t say anything, and when I move my head I can feel Co

But I see Frankie as he releases the arrow.

This is how it always is.

Drip.

I push myself up. It takes all my strength; and I can feel the aching, the blood as it runs down my chest.