Ascending the Boneyard (4 page)

The chirr of trillions of roaches floods my ears, and I throw my arms over my head to block out the sound as I sink to the floor.

2.5

Militiababe wore
an odd kind of mask that covered the lower half of her face but not her eyes. You'd think that would make it easier to find her. Not in reality, of course. In reality, Militiababe could look like pretty much anything.

But I'm still hoping to come across her again in-game.

A girl in a half mask can't just disappear. Can she?

3

A shard of blistering sunlight
hits me straight through my closed eyelids.

I wake up groggy, all crust and confusion, with no memory of what happened last night. Did the old man put me to bed? I'm usually the one who takes care of
him
at night. That's the ritual: brush my teeth, put on my least-dirty T-shirt, scoop up the dozen or so empties from around the couch, and leave a light on in the kitchen so he doesn't break his fucking neck in case he decides at some point to get up and go to his room.

I roll over, still hazy, pick some of the junk out of my eyes, get them to focus just in time to see the cockroach scurry across my pillow.

I hit the wall in a flash.

My gaze ricochets uncontrollably around the room until I spot the computer on. The Boneyard's up and running even though I always make sure the Relic gets shut down at night. I squint at the screen, at the highway map teeming with UnderWorld mobs, turn back to the cockroach on my pillow that's waving its antennae at me like a middle finger.

I don't know how he found me, or how he got into my room from the Boneyard. But I have to kill him. I have to get him and kill him before he brings the rest of Turk's army back here and all hell breaks loose.

I scramble back to the bed, flick the little bastard onto the floor. Its hairy legs flail in the air for a second or two before it flips over and beelines up the wall. I quick grab a sneaker and start smashing the holy hell out of it for two full minutes. The crunching exoskeleton makes my stomach roil, but I ignore it. You have to go full tilt to kill a cockroach. They're virtually indestructible, and I want this one ten kinds of dead.

I grunt and swing and finally my arm falls limp at my sides while I stand there panting. The roach is nothing more than a splotch of brown pigment and yellow gut paint now, and I sink to my knees, fighting to catch my breath. I use a dirty sock off the floor to wipe sweat and tears and snot from my face.

My red-rimmed gaze drifts over to the door, and suddenly it hits me.

All that pounding.

All that smashing against the foam-board walls of this trailer . . . and the old man hasn't come in to yell at me for it.

•  •  •

I stumble out of my bedroom in a daze, down the hall, into the living room, where the TV's on but no one's watching it. I stop, blink in disbelief around the empty room, at the spot on the couch where the old man should be parked in front of the TV but isn't.

Waves of blue-gray light pulse at me from the mute screen, and I take one guarded step after another toward it, kneel gape-mouthed on the floor. The events unfolding on-screen slowly register in my head, and before I know it, the trailer feels like it's missing a wheel, like everything's slanting to one side.

I grab the remote off the TV table, unmute it, change the channel again and again, but every station it's the same thing. Even the sports and cooking shows have crawlers across the bottom.

MASSIVE BIRD DIE-OFF IN OHIO. EXPERTS BAFFLED.

I tumble backward, sink onto the floor, keep watching, listening.

“Scientists are baffled by a massive bird die-off discovered early this morning at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.” The anchorwoman smiles as she says it. There's something absolutely skeletal about her toothy grin.

The shot cuts over to video footage taken down at Goofy Golf. The mini-golf course, the go-kart track, even the bumper-boat pool, all littered with bird carcasses.

The remote trembles in my hand as the video switches to an interview with some world-renowned bird expert.

“We're looking into the possibility of an electrical storm that passed over Ohio last night as being a plausible source of the die-off,” the man says. “But frankly, at the moment, we're just not sure.”

The feed cuts back to the footage of the dead birds as the field reporter blathers on. But something catches my eye, and it catches the cameraman's eye, too, because he focuses right in on the bright green drink cup lying on the track in the middle of all that black carnage. The shot gets tighter and tighter until he's right on top of it, and I'm barely breathing as I listen to the anchorwoman declare that the birds all died in flight, that their dead bodies literally fell out of the sky.

But not this one. This one's still alive, just barely, but alive and struggling to flap its wings against the ground like it's begging for someone to notice it isn't dead.

The sky will fall and death will beat its wings against the ground.

Synapses start firing and misfiring in my brain; incoherent thoughts, truths, half-truths, and flat-out lies, all going at it simultaneously.

This can't be the same bird that dive-bombed me and Haze on my twelfth birthday. . . .

That bird is dead. We killed it. We didn't mean to. It just happened.

So why is it still alive? I mean, here it is on the TV screen, next to the green cup Haze threw onto the track that day, and it's alive, and it's begging to be saved.

I spin my gaze around the trailer again, chill bumps running up my arms. Where the hell's the old man, seriously? He should be sitting here right now, scratching his well-developed pony keg through the decaying fabric of his shirt, spewing conspiracy theories at the TV.

I fall forward again, crawl toward the screen for a better view, only my cell phone slips off my lap and vibrates a text alert at me.

I do the slow-motion-reach thing, pick it up off the floor, tap it open.

It's the cockroach. The goddamn cockroach, the one I just killed in my room. That motherfucker is tracking me.

The end is near
,
it says.

I panic, ratchet my arm back, hurl the phone against the wall, hear the sickening crack of plastic and glass against wall board.

“Text me now, you bastard!”
I yell, only I know Turk can't hear me—for one thing, because I think I just busted the shit out of my phone, and for another, if I'd actually ever found Commandant Turk, I would have Ascended by now.

My heart sinks straight through the bottom of the trailer.

The end is near.

Jesus, that's what it said on the map during the raid that day. All those platoons, fleeing the tunnels in flames, every one of them tagged with the same line of words where it should've been nothing but green.

I panic-scan the room.

Where are they?

I scramble to my feet, fly down the hallway, kick open Devin's bedroom door.

Empty.

The old man's, too.

The car's not in the drive.

Ragged breath shreds through my lungs. It's not like that coward to just go off, especially not with Devin. He never takes Devin.

Unless there was some kind of emergency.

I clamp my eyes shut against the far-distant sound of sirens, the cries for help, the helicopter blades that airlifted Devin off the track at Goofy Golf that day.

The end is near.
Shit. Who would send a message like that?

I retrieve my phone, carefully slide the cover back to reveal a massively cracked screen. The way I threw it, I'm shocked it's not dead. But it isn't—it even buzzes in my hand as I reread that last text through the cracked screen.

I quick open the new message, terrified it's the old man about to lay some kind of gut-wrenching, nut-filled turd on me.

It's not.

It's a text. I don't know from who, exactly, only that the two-word message hits my brain like a mortar round.

Save it.

•  •  •

I stagger back down the hall toward the living room, hoping to see the old man sitting there, hoping against hope that my brother's with him, that they're watching
Roundhouse
, or even
Promzillas
, and drinking beer and eating the bag of snack mix I hid in the back of the cupboard for safekeeping.

Anything but knowing he went off and left me here alone in this roach-infested trailer.

I catch a glimpse of Devin's skateboard in the entryway and stop short. Take a sharp turn, pick it up, run my fingers across the sandpaper finish, over the Mexican Virgin Mary painted on the bottom. I never asked him why he picked a deck that had a religious symbol on it; I mean, we're not even Mexican, let alone Catholic. Now, thanks to that bird, I'll never know.

The low sound of the news broadcast drifts through the trailer like dust particles, and I angle my face toward the TV.

They're still sucking every ounce of lifeblood out of the dead-bird story.

For the umpteenth time, they replay the clip with the green drink cup and the barely alive bird next to it, and it hits me.

I bet that's where the old man went.

I bet in his twisted logic, he figured he'd take my brother down there to see the birds, not thinking that the last time any of us went to Goofy Golf was the day I practically killed Devin. Besides, the old man has no idea that me and Haze committed birdicide that day, but I do. And somewhere, buried deep in his mostly abandoned head, Devin knows it too.

Save it.

The bird. I wonder if I'd get Ascent Credits for saving that bird, for getting that one thing right this time.

Adrenaline speeds through me as I toggle my gaze between the TV and the skateboard, and before I can give it a rational dose of thought, I throw the front door open, deck in hand.
I'll bring it right back,
I silently promise Devin.

But as my foot hits the top step, the echo of Stan's work boot ripples the thick air around me. I glance up, half expecting his Termi-Pest truck to be backed into the driveway, even though I know it's impossible. That truck, Stan, my mom, they're long gone.