Read Online Passenger by Andrew Smith - Free Book Online Page B

past the schoolhouse and crossed the dead darkness of what had at one time been a highway, I thought, Please, do not start raining on me now.
    Two ghosts ran out in front of me, a boy and a girl, holding hands, barefoot, trailing wisps of luminescent fog like the unexplainable thing in the sky. They vanished in three short steps, and I kept thinking about how bothered Ben used to get over the ghosts in Marbury; how much he hated them.
    Jack was going home.
    *   *   *
    I saw no other living thing that night as I passed through the ruins of the town, making my way toward the vacant miles of bare land that would have been vineyards at some other time.
    This was the right place—I knew it—but there were no roads, no markers. Here, it was just drifts of soft ash that had taken over the undulating hills where Wynn and Stella grew grapes.
    Occasionally, I’d see “things”—souvenirs of a past here: the lid from a galvanized-steel trash can, a mail delivery truck burned and tipped onto its side, half buried, twists of mangled wrought iron, and the strangest objects—bricks. There were bricks and cinderblocks scattered everywhere, randomly, patternless, as though anything that had been made of them just separated and flew in different directions.
    They could have fallen from the sky, too.
    But I wondered if maybe they were the remains of the walls that had surrounded Wynn’s property.
    And, just when the morning broke, pale and ulcerous, I saw the house.
    It wasn’t the house I noticed at first, but the huge oak tree in front of it—the one I used to park my truck under. But it wasn’t a tree anymore. It was nothing more than a hollow, black log that stuck straight up through the white ash, barely taller than I was and wide enough across that I could have laid down inside it.
    There was the house.
    It was my house, wasn’t it?
    I think I stood against the husk of that oak tree for ten minutes just looking at it, trying to decide whether or not Jack had the balls to go inside.
    It was coated in dust, the fine, sticky, annoying kind like you get from the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. At one time Wynn and Stella’s house had been a kind of peach color—all the houses in Glenbrook seemed to be painted that color—but now it had turned the same dull, rotten-meat shade of nothing that covered everything, everywhere.
    The windows had all been broken. None of them were boarded. I already had learned enough here to know it meant nobody was alive. Not ever, probably. Sections of the roof had sloughed away.
    But it was the same house where Jack was born on the floor in his grandparents’ perfect kitchen.
    You can’t shoot an arrow anywhere and not aim at the center of the universe.
    The boards were gone from the steps to the porch. I had to launch myself over the frame of the staircase from the bottom. I nearly dropped the satchel of food I was carrying, and I could hear the crotch ripping out of the jeans I wore.
    Just great, I thought. I don’t have any clothes and now my only pair of pants is coming apart, too.
    The house was closed up.
    Like the old man’s house, all the hardware had been removed from the doors, and the leaded windows were broken out. When I pushed in against the front doors, the milky plumes of dust that rose up from the floor made it look like films you’d see of divers entering a stateroom in some long-sunken liner at the bottom of a cold ocean.
    Welcome home, Jack.
    I know it was stupid, but I almost choked when I stopped myself from calling my grandparents’ names.
    “Hey!”
    Maybe there was a breeze raking over the jagged fangs of glass that jabbed out from the window frames upstairs, but I could hear a faint, hushed sigh—like someone was sleeping—breathing, whispering through the house.
    “Is anybody in here?”
    Down the hallway on the left side of the stairway—that was Wynn’s room, where he would sit and watch television—I could see trails in the dust on the floor.
    Things