Ascending the Boneyard (9 page)

His head is tipped back at a weird angle against the window.

“Oh God . . .”
I rip the gas mask off his face, slap his cheek as hard as I can. I don't know what that's supposed to accomplish, but they do it on TV all the time.

Haze doesn't react.

Instead of being concerned that he might have a broken neck or some other potentially paralyzing injury, I do what any clear-thinking person would do in a moment of crisis. I slap him again.

Because I should have . . . with Devin . . . I just couldn't move.

This can't happen again. I
need
Haze. I can't let him—

“What the hell?” he sputters.

He's all green. I got him back just in time.

“You passed out during the accident,” I say.

“What accident?”

The question echoes dull and flat in the too-still air.

We both sit up, look around in a daze.

I wonder why we don't hear sirens yet.

As the smoke starts to clear, I peek in the rearview mirror, expecting a squadron of cop cars and ambulances to roll up behind us any second. But all I see is the cockroach, dislodged, lying on its back, several yards behind us. Good. The best kind of UnderWorld mob is a dead one.

Plenty more where that came from, though. I can't allow the confusion of the moment to distract me from the very real need to brace myself for the coming battle.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Haze asks.

The question pushes the little hairs at the back of my neck into their full upright position. I don't know what happens now. I look down at my phone, hoping the commandos will dial in any second with further instructions.

Haze's breath wheezes through those filtered chambers so hard I feel my own lungs starting to burn.

“Tosh?”

“Grab your things,” I say.

“What things?”

“There's an overpass up ahead.”

The highways in the Boneyard are full of overpasses, but you have to be careful; they're prime hideaways for minion soldiers. They can also lead UnderGround, but that's dicey too. A lot of those tunnels are traps.

I pull my messenger bag out from behind the seat and open the driver's side door, which immediately sags off its now-broken hinges. Haze just sits there, staring at me openmouthed while I head down the shoulder of the highway.

He breaks the brittle silence by launching into a rant about how dangerous this joyride is and how reckless I am, his words chasing me down from all the way back at the truck. He keeps on ranting as he slides off the seat, as he slams the door behind him, as he marches down the shoulder and around the curve in the road. Phrases like “completely lost your mind” and “undeniably insane” collide in midair with the jagged puffs of smoke drifting in our direction.

Haze manages to catch up with me, but that's because for the last minute or so I've been on lockdown, my feet bolted in shock to a single spot on the cracked pavement.

He wanders into the middle of the freeway to meet me, where we stand in complete silence and just . . . stare.

“How'd we miss
this
?” he finally whispers, leaning in to me like he's afraid someone might overhear. Which we can now clearly see is impossible.

“It just . . . popped up,” I say. “Totally out of nowhere.”

Wisps of smoke drag my words away from me, and I follow their tracks to the wreckage up ahead.

“How many cars?” I ask.

“Fifty,” he says. “A hundred. Hard to tell.”

“Where do you think everyone went?”

“No idea.” Haze adjusts his gas mask, and for the first time ever, I covet that thing, wish I had one of my own. The reek of burnt rubber and axle grease and barbecued engine parts hangs heavy in the air.

But the fear . . . the fear of what this could all mean pulls at me like triple gravity.

I try to ignore the brewing sickness in my stomach as we pick our way through the tangle of twisted bumpers, stray hubcaps, curls of tire tread, and corrugated chassis. I half expect, half dread the sound of dying moans from people trapped underneath it all. But the only sound we hear is hissing radiator steam. Beyond that, it's eerie silence.

That is, until the frantic screech of tires heads our way. Haze and I stop dead in our tracks, turn in unison toward the sound. It doesn't help that we're walking right down the middle of the highway; and as the shriek of faulty brakes gets closer, we press ourselves up against an abandoned frozen-foods delivery truck that's tipped at a dicey angle.

The car stops within a few feet of us, and Haze and I brace ourselves for the hail of machine-gun fire that's bound to come spraying out of its blacked-out windows. I wince in anticipation.

But instead the window rolls down, and when it does, my fear starts to melt, then slide, down the side of the frozen-foods delivery truck. Haze pulls his mask under his chin, his mouth hinged open.

“What the hell is happening?” he whispers to me.

I would have asked him the same thing if he hadn't beaten me to it.

6.5

The driver
is a ginger supreme. She has this huge smile, and hair the color of a rusted fender bouncing around her like a shampoo commercial, and long, slender fingers wrapped around the gearshift of the most ghetto car I've ever seen with a savory girl behind the wheel. I mean, the car's a real Frankenstein. But the girl . . . the girl is undeniably hot. And she's here.

Here.

The only other soul in this miles-wide radius of wreckage.

Why is that?

7

“It took me about
five passes,” she says, panting yet smiling in satisfaction. “But I finally figured out how to get onto the highway without ending up in the bone pile.”

Haze and I bank a quick glance off each other, then switch back over to the girl.

“It's the on-ramp,” she says. “You have to take the right on-ramp or you're gonna end up crashing into all that.” She lifts her arm and points to the massive pileup, as if there might be some confusion as to what she means by “all that.”

“We weren't entering the highway when we crashed,” I tell her. “We were already on it.”

Her face washes over pink, then red. “Oh, was that your truck back there?”

“Yeah. It just started rolling all of a sudden.”

Haze fake coughs. “There was nothing all-of-a-sudden about it, Tosh. You took your eyes off the road.” I jump in, try to explain about the car icon and avoiding the tolls, but he's hell-bent on splitting hairs here. “You took your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road.”

“That's a no-no,” she says.

I narrow my gaze at her. “Who are you?” I ask.

“Oh, I'm sorry.” She extends her long, slender hand through the open window. “I'm Elan. Of course, that's not my given name. It's my taken name.”

“He's got a taken name too.” I jab my thumb at Haze, who knocks it out of the way.

“And who are the two of you?”

“Caleb Tosh. Nathan Hayes.”

“Just Haze,” he says, and I can tell by his voice that he's irritable.

There couldn't be a more inappropriate time to verify how hot this girl is. Like UnderWorld-hostage babe kind of hot.

Wait a second . . .

Did they send her?
Did the commandos send this girl to me? Could she be a hostage? I can't tell if I'm supposed to save her, or if she's part of my platoon.

Do not question the mission.

“Well?” she says. “Are you getting in or aren't you?”

I answer with a nod and the gut feeling that everything is suddenly, inexplicably right in the world.

“Yeah. We're all in, sure.”

Haze edges me aside. “Don't you think we should find out something about her before we get in her car? Something minuscule, like where she's going?”

“I told you,” I whisper back. “We're going to New York.”

“
She
could be going anywhere,” he says, but I push him around to the passenger's side of the car and through the open door.

I let him sit up front with Elan so I can stare at her without being too obvious about it. She looks familiar, but I can't place her. I may have rescued her before, but in her civvies, it would be hard to tell.

Elan gives Haze the once-over. I can see it through the rearview mirror.

“So what's with the gas mask, potato chip?” she finally asks.

“Just in case.”

She nods as if this makes perfect sense to her.

“And where do you all hail from?”

Haze and I answer in unison, only I blurt out “Sandusky” and he mumbles “Cincinnati,” and as I shove the butt of my hand against the back of his ski-knit head, Elan goes, “You boys are gonna have to get your story straight.”

“No kidding,” I mumble.

She adjusts the mirror, locks sights on me.

“Big city?” she asks.

Our eyes connect in the mirror, and I start to sweat from a surge of heat blasting in from nowhere.

Her smile is 100 percent evaporated.

There's no way she could know about that note in the gum pack buried in my messenger bag. The list. My mom's list. She'd scrawled those exact words: “big city.”

I blink the sting of sweat out of my eyes.

“Where are
you
going?” I ask.

She flips her hair over her shoulders. “Or should I say, Big Apple?”

Haze's head pivots in slow motion over his shoulder. Even through his shades, I can tell he's staring at me, and all I can do is avoid staring back. If he wants to know how she knew that, I don't have a way to answer him.

I take out my phone, nervously switch playlists, check and recheck my home screen. There's got to be another message coming, more info, any little scrap of assistance from the commandos, since it's their fault we got thrown off course here in the first place, thanks to their little “avoid the toll” debacle.

Unless this is all part of the mission I'm not supposed to question.

Still, I can't shake the preraid sensation of static electricity snap-crackling through my body. Can't get my foot to stop nervous-bouncing against the floorboard of Elan's car, which is decomposing to the point that I worry I might bounce a hole straight through the bottom of it.