Read Online Passenger by Andrew Smith - Free Book Online

There’s girls, too. They still have some power there. Trains. Locomotives that take people out, to another city. A fortress behind big walls, named Grove. Did you ever know anything about those places? That’s where the Rangers are going.”
    I had seen it all before. I had been to those places, could still feel the gritty, windless heat of the air at the Bass-Hove Settlement, could picture the sheer walls of the fortified city at Grove, where Conner and I took the other boys after we’d crossed the mountains.
    “You’re making that shit up, Billy.”
    I heard him roll over onto his side and exhale a tired breath of air.
    And I was certain he knew exactly what I was talking about.
    *   *   *
    The Rangers came that night.
    I was hard asleep, and at first I felt Quinn’s hot breath against my ear when he whispered, “Billy. Billy, wake up.”
    He shook my chest gently, and I thought it had to be a weird dream.
    I dreamed of being on the water again.
    “Psst! Billy!”
    Then I heard the music, louder now, the squeal of the concertina wheezing in and out, in and out.
    It sounded as if it were right outside the firehouse door.
    “Huh?” I shot up in my bed, disoriented, everything swirling and smearing like a watercolor painting that had been left out in a summer storm—Glenbrook, here, there, Marbury, my friends, the Odds, Quinn Cahill.
    “Shhhhh … Quiet now, Odd.”
    Quinn’s mouth was so close to my ear I could feel his lips moving. “Remember what I said. Get up the ladder now. Come on, get humping, Odd. They probably just want some water. I got to go down and talk to them.”
    I stood, shaky and weak.
    Quinn lit a lamp. The kid lifted the lid on the footlocker. I heard him flip the switch inside it—his electric fence. Then he nodded at the ladder and went out the door and downstairs to the entryway.
    This was it, I thought.
    I started toward the ladder, holding my shorts up as I walked. Then, I’m not sure why I did it, but I looked back at the room. And I thought, If they come up here and see two beds have been slept in, they’ll know somebody else is here. Quinn can’t be that stupid.
    He’s fucking with you, Jack.
    So I went back and pulled the blanket and sheet from my bed.
    The music outside stopped.
    I tossed my pillow across to Quinn’s cot and I grabbed my pants and boots from the floor where I’d hidden them under my bed. I even slipped my hand inside to make sure the broken lens was still tucked into my pocket.
    Same old Jack, no matter where he is.
    And as I bundled my things in the bedsheet, I got the idea that I should leave. I glanced at the door, strained to hear anything, but it was all so quiet. I jumped across to Quinn’s closet and slipped inside. I didn’t bother to look, I grabbed as much as I thought I could carry—cans, mostly—and one plastic water jug.
    My hand ached, but I got everything up that ladder and onto the roof.
    Then I shut the hatch behind me.
    I stripped out of the shorts and got back into my pants. I hooked up my belt, could feel the weight of that knife, as it slapped against my thigh when I laced up the boots.
    Sure you used to have a knife like this one, Quinn. That’s because you left it at that old man’s house, didn’t you?
    I put the shorts he’d given me, and everything I stole from him, inside the blanket. Then I tied the corners into a tight bundle that I slipped over one arm. I knotted my sheets together and thought about how stupid I was, because this stuff never worked in real life, did it?
    Yeah. This is real life.
    I secured one end of my sheet-rope to the bar on the outside of the hatch and then threw the end that was probably going to break my leg in the best case, or kill me in the worst, over the side of the firehouse.
    And even if I made it to the very end, I estimated I’d still have to drop ten feet—and that would be from a full-out stretch. So I clenched and re-clenched my injured right hand, wondering if I could hold my