“I don’t know.”
Quinn scratched his crotch. “Glenbrook. It’s called Glenbrook.”
“You ever hear of a place called New Mexico?”
“Shit. What’s that?”
“New Mexico?”
“Never.”
“Billy the Kid came from New Mexico.”
“You’re making that up, Odd.”
Quinn started walking again, tugging me forward.
“Fuck this place, Quinn.”
Fuck you, Jack.
Maybe I should just take the kid’s red speargun and end it right here. Maybe, afterwards, Jack will wake up and he’ll be in that piss-foul garage, sweating like a junkie, back in a different Glenbrook.
The same Glenbrook.
And Ben and Griffin, Conner, will still be here.
You are a coward and a failure, and you deserve this for what you’ve done to them.
I know this is not real. None of this has been real since the night of Conner’s party at the end of school. Jack is just fucked up, is all. It’s his brain. He has to wake up sooner or later.
Nickie.
God, Nickie.
* * *
“We can put the boat down right up there, see? See that old firehouse, Odd? That’s where we live.”
I knew the place.
“We?”
“You and me, Odd. You and me.”
“I told you my name.”
“That you did. But I believe you didn’t want to do it, and you never did tell me where you come from.”
“If you’ve been following me, then I shouldn’t need to.”
“Ha-ha-ha! You’re a careful one, Odd. That’s okay. I figure you’ve got some good ones to tell. All I need to do is get them out of you.”
“I’m sure you’ve got some, too, Quinn.”
Quinn turned back and glanced at me.
It looked like he was smiling.
It always looked like that kid was smiling.
four
Quinn Cahill was a survivor; I had to hand him that.
I imagined he pictured himself as some kind of king, ruling what he could from his palace in that dead old firehouse. And I was amazed at what that kid was capable of doing there, too.
Somehow, he’d managed to save the solar panels on the firehouse and hook them into a wiring system that ran through the old cinderblock building. It was mostly dark in Marbury, he explained, so the panels didn’t do much more than power some flashlight-dim bulbs he’d installed. But Quinn had salvaged two science-lab steam engines from the schoolhouse, and these he’d hooked into a full-scale electric generator and an actual still he’d constructed from some old metal container drums that were left in the fire station. And Quinn used the still to make drinking water by recycling his own piss and the toxic rainwater he’d collect from the roof.
He’d even strung up one of those campsite portable shower systems over the rusty tiled shower stall at the end of the firemen’s bathroom.
Quinn Cahill’s annoyance factor was equally matched by his incredible talent for staying alive.
And he had food. Lots of it.
I must have drank a gallon of water, without stopping, from a yellowed plastic milk jug. I didn’t even think twice about how Quinn produced that water; I was too busy thinking that it was the best water I’d ever tasted in my life.
“Don’t drink that whole thing, Odd. You’ll puke.” Quinn put his palm on the top of the milk jug to slow me down. “Come on, let me show you what I got here.”
Quinn lived in the upstairs half of the firehouse. A slide pole descended through a hole in the floor, down to the garage. Quinn showed me how to use it if we ever had to get out that way.
There was hardly enough space in the garage to walk between the mounds of piled-up junk, even though I got the feeling that Quinn had inventoried every last item that was down there, knew where everything was. In the center of it all slumped the picked-over ruins of an old ambulance. It sat on its wheel hubs. Just about the only thing left attached to it was the windshield; no doors, no seats, not even floorboards below it.
The garage itself was impenetrable. The old roll-up metal door had been bolted shut and piled high with the rotting husks of furniture from upstairs—rusting cot frames, file cabinets, metal desks—whatever couldn’t be used as fuel for Quinn’s steam engines.
The floor near the slope that cut down at the roll-up door was wet from the rain. I stepped on a dead sucker there and it popped. I felt the water in my belly come up a little when I did that.
“I don’t like it down here, Billy,” Quinn said. “But if we ever need to get out this way, here’s where we go.”
Inside the doorless rear of the ambulance, on an exposed area of concrete that showed through a vacant hole in the old vehicle’s rear compartment, Quinn pointed out a corroded manhole cover.
“Where’s that go?” I said.
“I’m not really sure,” Quinn answered. “I been down there a couple times. Got too scared to look around. I call it my last-chance bomb shelter.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced that Quinn got scared down there, or anywhere, but I wasn’t going to push it.
* * *
“Here’s where you pee,” Quinn said. He’d taken me upstairs, to the old bathroom. Its useless white porcelain sinks and cracked mirrors hung from loose screws in the concrete block walls. Anchored to a side wall was a long, steel-trough urinal with a collector beneath it. That was for Quinn’s still. He just looked at me with that dumb and eager look on his face like he was waiting for me to pee so he could show me how brilliant he was. And even though I kind of needed to piss, I ignored him.
The kid just gave me the creeps, like he was trying too hard.
“I know it’s not the sweetest thing to think about, but you’ll get over it. There’s Odds out there who’ll kill you for drinking water. I bet you seen that plenty, too.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“And this is my shower.” Quinn tapped my shoulder and nodded at his work.
Set back into the rear corner of the bathroom where the firemen used to take showers was a chest-high divider of painted yellow cinderblock. Hanging from the roof behind it Quinn pointed to a black plastic half-barrel that fed into a six-inch length of garden hose attached to a dangling spreader nozzle. I walked around the divider wall and looked. Naturally, in the bottom of the stall, the drain had been obviously rerouted back into Quinn’s still.
“You want to wash that shit off, Odd?” Quinn pointed an index finger at his hair, and I could feel how mine had congealed, scabbed flat against my head.
I shook my head.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s more I want you to see. And I told you I’d get you a shirt, too, Billy.”
I just wanted food.
Odd.
Billy.
I thought the kid was just trying to piss me off or something.
Fuck with me because he thinks I’m stupid.
I decided not to say anything about it, though.
There were two beds in there, like Quinn had been expecting me or something. They were cots—the kind you’d see in any barracks or jail—narrow and low, neatly made up with clean blankets, and white sheets and pillows.
Quinn pointed to each of the beds. “Yours. Mine. You hungry, Billy?”
I nodded.
“I could cook you something. Something good. I bet you never had food as good as what I can make.”
He talked too much.
“Just let me show you a couple more things. So you don’t do nothing dumb. So we can be safe here. You don’t want to fuck things up, now, do you?”
You don’t know me, kid.
I shook my head.
Quinn pulled me out into the main room.
He had a stove. He had everything. An entire room that had been filled with boxes and cans—more food than the kid could eat in five years.
“I’m good at finding food,” Quinn said. “I’m the best. I know where to look where none of the Odds have looked. And mostly the Rangers are dumb. They just wait for it to come to them. I guess that works, as long as you have guns.”