Ascending the Boneyard (22 page)

I show him the new message. At first he just stares at the phone for a long time, but then he turns to look at Mason and then me in the same slow, deliberate way he changes TV stations.

Mason cranes over. “What is it?” she asks.

“I—it's—our friend broke an all-time scoring record in this video game we play. It's stupid.”

She nods solemnly, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Haze doesn't take his eyes off me. “You were saying?” he asks Mason.

“My father's group, the New Infantry Militia—NIM . . . they're deconstructionists. Conspiracy theorists. End-timers. They're the guys with subterranean bunkers and years' worth of food, fuel, and ammunition. They're ready and waiting for battle.”

Subterranean bunkers? End-timers? Ready for battle?

The UnderGround.
The end is near.
Just like I thought. So why isn't she battling for UpRising?

In the minuscule beat of time that follows, I freeze-frame on Goofy Golf. On the old man videotaping my birthday party with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, on my mom looking shrink-wrapped in the corner, on the posse of sugar-buzzed boys wreaking havoc around the park.

Gone. All of it. In a flash. I shut my eyes against the blast wave of memory, feel the heat of it
sizzle-hiss
against my skin.

The end is near.

Only what if . . . ?

What if . . . ?

“So what are they after?” Haze asks her, the sound waves of his voice distorting the air around us.

“NIM has a plan in the works to reclaim sovereignty of the country. And I'm trying to figure out how to stop it. All I know is, they're prepared to fight to the very end to see this thing through. To the death.”

Her words come through in slow motion, hit my head from a thousand different angles. I need a Medic. Someone's gonna need to throw me some massive heals, because I'm fading, man. I'm fading, and Haze is fading, and Mason's fading, and even when I close my eyes, all I can see is the same chilling phrase wavering above our heads where we should be solid green.

The end is near.

“Yeah, but they can't just make an earthquake happen,” Haze says. “Can they?”

“You'd be shocked at what NIM can do.” Mason scans the mirrors again. “They've already launched a string of so-called natural disasters.”

“Like what?”

“A few minor earthquakes—practice drills, you could say. Forest fires. Wildlife die-offs.”

I'm drop-kicked back into the conversation. “Wait,
wildlife die-offs
?”

“Yeah. You know. Birds. Fish. That sort of thing.”

Birds . . .

I reach in my pocket, touch the feather I'd stashed there, wonder with a thousand-watt jolt of alarm if by having it, I'm somehow harboring the enemy.

“And the earthquake that's supposed to happen?” Haze presses.

The voice of the carny echo-twangs in my head.

Thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire.

Mason swerves around a fallen tree branch in the road. I scan the horizon. Not a tree in sight.

She doesn't seem fazed.

“NIM's ultimate goal,” she says, “is to implement a new order. It's all totally underground for now, which is why I need more info. But my guess is, once people hear about these quote-unquote natural disasters, they'll become terrified, seek help from a leadership that's strained and ineffective, at which point the movement sweeps in and—
bam
. It's the end of the world as we know it.”

I formulate my next question about three dozen different ways in my head before I finally blurt out, “So who are you working with?”

She goes white, then pink at the question.

“No one.”

Only something about her tone makes me veer toward not believing her.

“Is that why you're out here all alone?” I ask.

This time she throws me a look of borderline hostility.

“I'm alone because my father has no problem leaving his daughter to fend for herself while he goes off on some ridiculous salvage mission,” she says. The words ricochet through the cab of the Jeep like small explosions. “I guess that's just what happens when a father's idea of salvation isn't the same as his daughter's. It's easy to think you're saving a world that doesn't bear any resemblance to the world you left behind.”

I panic-dig in my bag for my earbuds, desperate for some Bunny Puke or Motor City, anything to drown out the mega-whir of chaos inside my head.

Bunny Puke proves effective. Until I spot the bright yellow dot barreling down the road toward us.

The three of us watch as it gets closer and closer, and suddenly my head glass shatters in a shred-of-metal, squeal-of-tires collision of denial versus reality.

The bug truck zips past us going double the speed limit in the other direction.

“Whoa,” Haze says. “Was that Termi-Pest?”

“I don't know,” I say.

The tang of panic rises in my throat.

Is it Stan? Is she with him?

I stare into the side-view mirror long after the yellow dot disappears.

“What are the odds of a Termi-Pest truck being all the way out here?” Haze says.

I lean backward over the seat. “Turn around,” I tell Mason.

She takes her eyes off the road long enough to look at me like I'm crazy.
“What?”

“Turn around! We need to follow that truck!”

“The hell,” she says. “I'm on a mission—you guys are just along for the ride. If you want to follow that truck, you can get out and—”

“Holy shit, Tosh,” Haze says, leaning forward to smack me on the shoulder. “Look!”

A second bug-mobile zips by less than a mile behind the first one. We're still watching it disappear in the rearview mirror when along comes another.

And another.

“Dude,” Haze says. “This is biblical.”

I check the phone, but there's nothing about a plague of cockroach trucks from the commandos or anyone else.

The next message does come through, though. Loud and clear.

Fear will shake the world to its foundation.

Just as I'm reading the message, it starts.

The ground beneath us lurches, and the road begins to buckle and roll, and all Mason has time to do is slam on the brakes before the entire road rips completely in two, right down the dotted yellow line.

19

The shaking
goes on forever.

Seems like it, anyway. But eventually the tremor stops, and once it does, once the dust and debris settle, reality takes its grim shape in a panoramic arc around us.

The earth has unzipped.

The highway has split completely in two, and now the right side of the road is a half story down from the left side.

We are stalled out on the lower deck.

“Everyone okay?” Mason asks.

“Fine,” Haze says from the back.

“Mghunh,”
I groan.

We manage to scramble out of the Jeep and stagger into the middle of the highway. Or what has become the middle of the highway, seeing as how the old middle is now an escalator ride up. The newly formed fissure surfs an asphalt wave as far as the eye can see in either direction as the three of us stand and survey the damage: puffs of black smoke off in the distance, pockets of flames burning through freshly ripped holes in the earth, toppled utility poles.

“It can't be,” she whispers.

“What?” I ask.

“This can't be happening.” Her voice sounds unimaginably soft compared to the hard, angry edges that have cracked open all around us. Quiet tears slide down her face as she takes it all in. “This can't be real. I thought it was just him, ranting like he always does. I thought if I followed him, caught him in his lies, I could . . . I just never thought anything like this would ever really happen.”

The sadness in her eyes freeze-hardens, then cracks, as she zeros in on me close and tight. I was right about her. Mason Barshaw is no Supergirl. She's not like Elan, or Ravyn, or Starla Manley. Those girls weren't in trouble, and they didn't need to be rescued. But Mason Barshaw? I know just by looking, by listening, that Mason and I are both hostages to the same captor.

She wraps her fingers around my arm, tugs at me. “Now that it's starting, we'll be surrounded by NIM before we know it. And because of who I am, because of what I've done—” Her words break off, but the fear graffiti-paints itself across her face.

“They'll kill us,” Haze says.

I turn away, spit onto the asphalt. I need to get my thoughts together, need to stay clearheaded.
I can map this one,
I tell myself. She doesn't need the extra worry.

But I can't pretend I'm not worried. I'm scared as all hell, in fact. I look over at Haze for guidance. Instead, he says:

“You just
had
to take that bug truck, didn't you?”

“Aw, Jesus, man, would you get off the bug truck for one second?”

“I told you not to do it, Tosh.”

“You tell me not to do a lot of shit, Haze. If I listened to every single thing—”

“You guys!” Mason lifts her hand, points into the distance. “It doesn't matter. They're coming.”

I look up, expecting to see a couple of Jeeps, maybe a four-wheel-drive pickup truck or two, and there are some of those, yes. But there's also a fleet of Humvees coming up from the south, and not the yuppie kind, either, but the military kind. As I squint to get a better look, I see . . . Yes, it is. It's a tank with a turret perched on top, and it's aimed in our direction.

“Do you think they'd really fire on us?” I ask.

“Let's not stick around to find out.”

We clamber back into the Jeep, and I go limp with relief when the engine starts right up. Mason spins a wide brodie onto the shoulder before heading back up the highway the direction we came, sending us the wrong way on what is now a one-way road.

I wish
we
had a tank. Nothing wrong with a Jeep, but a tank would roll right over the top of anything in our way and absorb the hit from ammunition rounds a hell of a lot better than these plastic-wrap windows.

“Can you go any faster?” I ask.

“I'm doing ninety,” she says. “How much faster do you want me to go?”

“A hundred would be good.”

Mason drops her foot, and my body presses against the seat back from the jump in speed.

It's unearthly silent in the car.

Somewhere down the highway, once the seismic fissure veers into the grass and heads west, I notice a turnoff with just enough time to catch a fleeting glimpse of a road sign before Mason takes the ramp and follows the curve in a sharp arc. I grip the roll bar as we exit the highway going way faster than we should, and just like that, we're on a totally different highway, headed in a completely new direction.

She suddenly perks up. “Hey. You said your phone has GPS?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“There's this place out West that's supposed to be mega-spiritual.”

A heavy thud hits the inside of my chest.
Somewhere spiritual.
It's on the list. My mom's list.

“Why do you want to go there?” I ask, fighting not to stumble over the words.

She glances into the rearview mirror, watching for signs of NIM, I'm sure.

“They say it's a healing place. Miracles, restoration, the whole chimichanga.” She gives her lips a nervous lick. “If we make it that far,” she adds.

A healing place.

I should have brought Devin.

I should have let him in my go-kart, should have brought him with me on this mission. Instead the old man carted him off somewhere, only he doesn't want to take care of him the right way, and now they're gone and I don't know where they are and don't even know if I can throw my brother a heal if he's not actually here.