The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

voice to a whisper. “We’re all that’s left. Just us three.”
    Ben looked toward where Griffin was standing. “What are we going to do now, Jack? I’m scared. We don’t have no place else to go.”
    “Fuck!” Griffin shouted. Then I heard the jarring sound of a heavy rock pounding against another.
    Ben stood up quickly.
    “The harvesters are coming,” Griffin said. “I knew it. There’s something dead in the cave back there. We should have looked better. They fucking know we’re here now.”
    He lifted the rock he’d used and smashed it down again, crushing the large black bug that had crawled into our hiding place.
    I knew that soon the bugs would come by the thousands. Millions. And I knew what would be following after them, too.
    Ben said, “You’re gonna have to ride, Jack. Get the horses, Griff.”
    Griffin slipped out from where he stood and disappeared into the white.
    “Help me stand up.”
    I held my hand out for Ben.
    “Stay there. Let me get your shoes, first.”
    They were work boots, splitting and mismatched; and Ben slipped them onto my bare feet and held each one straight between his knees while he laced them tight.
    “Are you gonna be okay, Jack? I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
    I propped myself into a sitting position.
    It hurt.
    “I think so.”
    Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.
    That sound.
    Ben still had my foot wedged between his legs, but he turned around when he heard it, too.
    Then I saw, standing at the back of the cave on the other side of Ben Miller, a pale and barefoot boy with sunken, dark eyes who looked like he couldn’t have been any older than me.
    And Ben said, “Goddamned ghost. That’s all we need. No wonder that harvester found us so easy.”
    The boy sat down and hugged his knees in toward his chest. He looked scared.
    I thought he might have been crying, but he sat there watching me; and I understood that he knew me, too, had been following me, waiting for something.
    I could see right through him, the cracks in the stone wall behind him. Then he got lighter and just spilled out into a kind of fog that blanketed over the ground where he’d been sitting.
    Ben looked at me. “I never did this before. I heard it works. Hewitt told us how he’d done it, remember?”
    “No.”
    I couldn’t remember things very well anymore.
    And Ben turned his face to the back of the cave where that grayish fog sat low upon the hot ground and said, “Well if you can help him, then do it, boy. I figure you’re the one what got us into this by being here in the first place, so it’s the least you could do. The harvesters are gonna get you anyway if you don’t.”
    The fog rolled up, like a blanket, and the boy was there again, now standing.
    Roll. Tap.
    He was barefoot and skinny, starved even, with neither shirt nor hat, wearing tattered pants held up onto his pale, naked waist with a fraying rope of some sort. He looked dirty and uncared for. His jagged and light-colored hair hung down past his eyebrows.
    “Well?” Ben said with an edge of impatience. “Why the fuck were you following us to begin with if you’re not going to help?”
    The boy faded again, fogged over the ground once more. The cloud snaked along toward me, and the next thing I knew, it was slipping through the stitches in my side like wire-thin fingers, and getting inside me.
    It was warm, and I could feel him like he was crawling into every part of my body. I knew who he was.
    And I heard him say his name again.
    “Seth.”

Twenty-Three
    My hand jerked to my side, rubbed.
    No stitches.
    The glasses lay open on the pillow beside me; the bed drenched in my sweat.
    I needed to throw up, struggled to get my legs off the bed and onto the floor. I stumbled, saw the notes I’d taped to the door.
    What the fuck is happening to me?
    Gagging, I made it to the toilet just in time.
    When I finished, I washed my face with cold water and went back to the bed.
    I looked at the clock.
    12:37
    Not even one minute had