Free The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

stained to the shoulders.
    “Jack! Jack! We got to get the hell out of here! Now!”
    I turned. I recognized the voice. Someone named Miller. Ben. I had to think, wasn’t sure why I knew that name. I couldn’t see where he was calling from.
    A hiss, and three arrows with fletching the color of those monstrous bugs, glistening black, spattered into the wall just above me.
    “Jack! Here! Jack!”
    I turned over onto my hands and knees and crawled away from Hewitt’s body. I looked back one time at that wall. It was covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises.
    Where the fuck was this?
    Welcome home, Jack.
    You haven’t gotten away from anything.
    I scrabbled along the ground. More arrows whizzed over my head. I thought I was moving in the direction of Ben’s voice, but I couldn’t be certain. Everything here blended together: the white sky, the gray ground, no shadows, heat, fog, the smell, that back-and-forth rolling noise from under the bed.
    “Here! This way!”
    I lifted my head up, looked across the littered ground. There was the carcass of a horse, its belly split open and guts stretched across the pale ground. The lower body of a naked male had been stuffed up inside the rent in the dead horse, the obscene and final revelation of some gruesome vaudeville act.
    He had one shoe and sock on his left foot.
    Where was the rest of him?
    Ben Miller stood in a pale-gray dustcoat that had been splattered with flecks of blood, holding two worn horses with his hand wound tightly through their halters, behind a breech where a landslide of fractured boulders from the dry mountain above had crushed down upon the strewn remnants of corpses and bones; the stones piled shoulder-high against the wall of the settlement.
    I knew who he was, had a vague memory of where I was, too.
    How did I know him?
    I stood, began to run.
    The arrow came, silent. It tore through my right side, just beneath my rib cage.
    In.
    Out.
    And it buried its shaft in me up to the foul blackness of its feathers; and I watched my blood spit forward onto the colorless land like it was some kind of joke. But it hurt so bad. The stun gun in Freddie’s prodding hand, magnified a thousand times and more.
    You haven’t gotten
    I fell to my knees, tried to catch myself on my palms, but my face ended up in the dirt, sideways, watching one of those bugs coming toward me.
    “Jack! Jack!”
    The boy named Ben Miller was running toward me.

Nineteen
    I snapped my hands up, an electric jolt.
    And there I was, shirtless, dripping wet, sitting on the edge of my bed and looking out the open window at one of my T-shirts moving, ghostlike on a cool breeze where it hung from the window’s handle. I must have gone running. The shirt was soaked.
    It was night.
    My hand shook.
    I looked at my side, cupped my palm over the skin and rubbed at the spot.
    The purple glasses lay on the floor next to my foot. I braced my elbows against my knees and cradled my face. I was covered with sweat. It stung my eyes as I squeezed them shut.
    Okay.
    What the fuck was that, Jack?
    Inventory time: What happened couldn’t possibly have been real. Freddie Horvath did something to my brain.
    Freddie Horvath did something to my brain and I need to get help.
    I had to think. Put the pieces together.
    I was thirsty for a beer. That was good. Real. I went to the minibar and opened a bottle. Wynn and Stella would find out. Stella would be mad. That was good, too. Wynn and Stella. They were real. I drank. It was hard to swallow.
    Calm down, Jack.
    I turned on every light in the small room, reaching from one to the next.
    Here.
    I was here.
    This side: I was in England. It was nine o’clock in the evening. The last thing I remembered about being here was sitting down on the bed after breakfast, shaking out the curtains and looking for a bug.
    Bugs.
    That side: The worst things I’d ever seen in my life. Henry Hewitt’s head staked into a