It seemed like my voice actually startled the kid who nothing else seemed to bother.

“What things?”

“Those fucking black worm things.”

“What? Did you fall out of the sky or something?”

I didn’t answer.

“Suckers, Odd. Suckers. They carry the bug, too.”

“Oh. The bug.”

Quinn Cahill looked at me like I was stupid or something. He pointed at his eyes. “Black eye. White eye. The bug. That’s the only way of getting it if you’re immune like us Odds. But it don’t matter, anyway. They crawl up inside your rig and you’re a goner in a week, anyhow. You grow spikes. You run around naked and start eating folks. That’s what the suckers do to Odds like us. Nice.”

I sat there in the canoe while the redheaded kid pushed us across this borderless black lake using what looked like a bridge cue for playing pool. And I felt myself clenching my knees together.

“Ha-ha! That one on you almost hit pay dirt, didn’t it, Odd? Ha-ha-ha!”

And he held up two fingers, showing a gap of about an inch and a half, to signify how close that thing was to my “rig.”

Quinn Cahill was unbearably annoying.

“Stop calling me that.”

“Well, if you’re not going to tell me your name, what else am I going to do? I think I’ll just call you Billy.”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s not my name.”

“Well, it suits you. Kind of. Like Billy the Kid. Except I don’t think you’re a murderer, even if Fent’s after you to settle it up for that one Ranger.”

“Nobody’s after me.”

Quinn scooped his pool cue up from the muck on the bottom and held it out for me. “Here. You push for a while, Billy.”

“I don’t know where we’re going.”

Quinn slapped his thigh. It made me jump. “Ha-ha-ha! Neither do I. I was just making all that shit up about having food and a shirt for you, Billy!”

He was fucking with me.

I wanted to punch him again. I looked him in the eye. Thirteen, maybe, I thought. Quinn Cahill was probably only thirteen years old. Pale, white, orange-headed, and freckled, with white baby peach fuzz on his lip and cheeks, and eyes that I just could not figure out. And he was really entertaining himself with me, too.

I put out my hand to him.

“Jack,” I said. “My name’s Jack Whitmore. I’m sixteen. And I’m not lying.”

Then Quinn smiled like it was Christmas morning, spit in his palm, and grabbed my hand, saying, “My brother. My brother Jack the knife boy! See? That wasn’t hard, now, was it, Jack? Oh yeah. We’re going to be real good friends, my man. Now let’s go get you that food and a nice new shirt to put on. Well … kind of new. Ha-ha!”

And Quinn bent back to his task of pushing his boat home.

*   *   *

Canoes are fucking heavy.

The water disappeared—just vanished—in less than an hour, leaving a pasty white salt, ash, and me and Quinn at opposite ends of his fucking canoe. In the constant desiccated heat of Marbury, our clothes had completely dried even before the water was gone. Quinn led us in the direction of the Highlands, an area that would have been west of the freeway in Glenbrook.

But it wasn’t Glenbrook.

It’s funny how naked everything looked. There wasn’t a single tree standing anywhere. It was like pictures I’d seen of the dusty gray erasures of places and things randomly dissolved in a nuclear explosion.

There would be mountains, the rolling foothills in between here and the ocean. But in Marbury, everything in the distance vanished in a colorless steaming fog like we were constantly at the end of the world.

Quinn had pushed us down the entire length of the business district, right past Steckel Park—and I only recognized it because three of the light stanchions over the Little League field were still there, bent like vandalized car antennas. When Conner and I were twelve, we climbed up one of them and painted the letters J and C in white—and nobody in Glenbrook ever complained because most of the people thought it was some kind of Christian sentiment about our town’s values, so they liked it. And our initials were still there, somehow.

But this was not home.

Java and Jazz, the coffee place where Conner and I would sometimes hang out, was just the bombed-out brick husk of what it used to be. No roof, no windows, only the last two Zs on the sign above the door, like it was saying, Don’t bother me, I’m sleeping.

I grunted. “How would you have gotten this thing back without me?”

“I wouldn’t have come alone in the first place. I told you I was following you, Billy.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“You cuss a lot.”

“So do you.”

Quinn laughed. “Shit.”

I tried to, but couldn’t think of a single quality about Quinn Cahill that didn’t annoy me. Probably food, I thought. I was starving. I could put up with the kid for food.

“What happens to those things when the water goes away?” I said.

“The suckers? You really did fall out of the sky, didn’t you, Odd?” Quinn wiped his nose. “They only live one day. Unless they get up inside you. Ha-ha-ha!”

And we walked right across the 101 freeway lugging that canoe. My arm and shoulder ached like death, but Quinn Cahill kept his end up like he was used to the effort. He was a lot stronger than I estimated.

We passed by what was left of a school building.

I didn’t want to look. Quinn was in front of me, carrying himself like he was walking home from the toy store. On the playground, there was a tall rocket ship made of steel jungle-gym pipes with a ladder inside that twisted up through the middle of three separate floors.

There were bodies hanging from each of the floors—arms, legs, torsos that looked like the pieces of plastic dolls lashed to the outside of the ship. The feeding harvesters, the rat-sized bugs, cleaners of death, that were everywhere in Marbury, sounded like static electricity.

This was Marbury. One of the corpses hung by its ankle. It had been a man, and it dangled from the outside of the uppermost deck on the spaceship, tied to the pipes by his own inside-out Levis that trapped his foot there. His body had been opened from crotch to chin, and the open maw of his rib cage shuddered with black insects the size of my feet.

This was Marbury.

“Aren’t you scared the Hunters are around?” I said.

“They only come out in town when it’s raining, or at night. Usually. They’ve been getting more aggressive, though. Cocky.” Quinn sighed. The first time I ever thought he might be getting frustrated at how stupid I seemed.

“Maybe I did.”

“What?”

“Fall out of the sky.”

“Shit, Odd. I told you that. Ha-ha! Well, something did, anyhow. Exactly seven days ago, too. Maybe probably was you.”

“Shit.”

“You’ll see.”

West of the school, we walked between piles of rubble: bricks, doors, the jumbled and splintered beams and joists of what used to be houses and strip malls. I was sweating and tired. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with the kid much longer.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“You have permission to ask me something, Odd.”

“What’s the name of this town?”

Quinn stopped walking. It tripped me up for a moment, and I nearly dropped my end of the canoe. He ran his fingers through his hair and wiped the sweat on his butt. “Where are you from, Odd?”

“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.