But it didn’t end there. The rocks of the rail bed thundered and clattered, pulverized in the red sky until everything was blanketed in gray dust, salt. I could taste it. The powder covered me, coated my hair, clumped in the sweat under my arms and on my chest, clotted in my nostrils. I closed my eyes.

I squeezed my hand shut around the broken lens.

And everything stopped.

It was so still, so quiet.

This is Marbury.

It was me.

I did this.

*   *   *

I sat there for the longest time, waiting for something, but I didn’t know what.

Breathing, blinking, looking out at the desiccated blankness of Marbury. Everything was gone.

But Jack was used to losing things, being left alone.

In my mind, I tried to devise a way, calculate some mathematically precise method for finding my way back through the broken strings, inside those hours and minutes Nickie and I spent together on the train; looping them around, endlessly, forever.

I felt paste, salt mud, forming around my eyes.

I sat there crying.

This is what it’s like to be dead.

Fuck you, Jack.

Finally, I stood up.

For a moment, I thought about brushing myself off, but that was as pointless as worrying about my unbuttoned fly.

I looked like a ghost.

Everything, every spot on my body, was covered in salt. It looked as though I wore some perfect suit, even though the only article of clothing I had on was a pair of pants.

That, and a broken piece of lens, were all I owned in this entire universe.

I licked my lips and spit.

Welcome home, Jack.

Now this looks like good old Marbury.

Everything is nothing.

Everything is everywhere.

Flat, colorless, and dry—as far as I could see.

The sky that had been blue and perfect was now shrouded in the washed-out gray of Marbury. Maybe the hole in the sky closed. Who knew? I couldn’t see anything.

The Rangers were gone. Everything wiped away, or covered under salt and ash. No horizon. No fields. No Hunters.

No Nickie.

But when I turned around, the train was still there, sitting behind me, ominous, now buried above its wheels in fine dust that seemed to cough up small unsettled clouds where the last of it came to rest.

Maybe I was totally crazy, damaged, but it almost felt good to see Marbury again the way it was supposed to be, to stand there, completely alone and abandoned, just like I was the first time I fell into this place.

It smelled the same, tasted the way I remembered it.

I slipped the lens back inside my pocket.

Something moved in the train, inside the car where the Rangers had dumped me after dragging me down the hallway from the sleeper. I could hear it, but nothing showed through the windows. They were as obscured beneath dust as my own skin.

One of the side doors on the last car had been left open. I could clearly see the gap of the doorway, like the mouth of a cave facing out onto the storm that wiped everything away from the world.

Barefoot in the silt that covered the ground, I felt like I was walking on a perfectly clean beach as I made my way toward the open door.

I should have known not to go inside.

*   *   *

A second-class passenger car: just rows of seats, most of them point forward. Some are grouped together; they face each other over small tables.

There are fifteen people seated in this car.

I count.

Fifteen.

All of them are dead.

They look artificial, like clay models that have spent too long inside a kiln. But they are perfectly arranged, seated peacefully, frozen in the final eyeblink of the moment that swept them away.

I pass through each of the train’s cars, moving toward the last one, where the Rangers have gathered, the place where they’d dumped me facedown in some corner on the floor. In every compartment, more of the same. The people are all dead, hollow mummies that look as though they’ve been sitting on this train for centuries.

Maybe it has been centuries.

The dining car is perfectly clean, arranged for the afternoon meals. The three servers, immaculate in white, statues of saints, lie huddled against the far doorway. I have to step over their bodies to make my way through to the next car, and, from there, into the sleeper.

Ramirez wasn’t lying. I didn’t think he was, anyway. The compartment where Nickie and I had slept together is completely empty. All of my things have been taken. The bedclothes are freshly replaced, changed with cleanly pressed linens, and the other fold-down beds on the opposite wall have been lowered, as though the new passengers, the soldiers, intend on using them for their own rest.

I don’t think they’ll be sleeping here now.

I slide the door shut.

The way into the baggage car is blocked off behind a windowless double door. I wait there, holding my breath, listening. There are Rangers inside the car. I can hear them talking, arguing. I can’t make out the words, but I know they are scared.

Worse than scared, they sound terrified.

Panic.

I don’t care about them at all. I wonder only about those two boys, the twins; what will happen to them? They’re just little kids. I consider opening the doors, going inside, but—really—what will I say?

Hey, guys, want to go outside and play flashlight tag with Jack?

It’s really fun.

Wait till you see what I can do with the thing I have in my pocket.

I turn around, start walking back down the narrow hallway through the sleeper car.

Then I hear the first gunshot from inside the baggage car.

Of course. This is what happens.

I freeze, turn back to watch the door.

A second shot.

Then a burst of them.

It is like listening to a bag of popcorn while it cooks inside a microwave.

The last two gunshots come so much later.

Maybe a full minute.

Then it is done.

I don’t need to go inside the car. I know exactly what happens in there. I can draw a picture of the precise spot where some of those boys fall down after they shoot themselves in the head, where Sergeant Ramirez would be right now, at this precise moment. He is seated against the wall, sucking on the barrel of his rifle with its butt tucked down between his knees, his thumb jammed into the trigger guard, and his brains are painting the outline of a tornado up across the rose-patterned wallpaper, all the way onto the ceiling.

Jack has been here before.

Jack is here now.

And Jack never had any idea that the twenty-two kids inside that fucking baggage car blew their brains out because they were so scared of Jack and his little piece of broken glass.

Fun game.

This is Marbury.

I am King.

I take a two-liter bottle of water from the dining car.

That’s all.

And I close up every door on the train when I leave.

twenty-two

The train didn’t want to go away.

I walked for what felt like miles, hours, but every time I’d turn around I could still see it, as if the train were watching me, calling out, Come on, Jack. Come back and play some more.

Eventually, in the whiteout waste of Marbury, I found myself in the middle of a horizonless nothing. No more direction, no features to aim myself toward or away from, and just the slightest difference in shade between the colorless sky and the emptiness of the ground.

This was the center of the universe.

And I had three objects in my universe: a broken piece of glass, a warm bottle of water, and a pair of pants whose knees had ripped when I fell out of that train I’d been trying to get away from.

Nothing else.

I crossed the blasted salt flat of the Marbury desert barefoot, without a shirt.

Alone.