by C. G. Watson
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.
I palm the side of my head to knock the thought out of it, to kill the noise. I pop in an earbud, quick scroll through my music files, fire up a little Bunny Puke, and bump up the volume as high as I can stand it.
Halfway down the block, I toss the skateboard onto the ground and hop on. It isn’t long before I remember what an incompetent skater I am and what a gigantic dickweed I must look like, thrash-spasming just to stay upright. But I elbow my deflating ego to the side just for the moment because I need to find that bird. Somehow I’m supposed to save it—the message said so.
Not that it matters about my lack of boarding skills since there’s no one out here to impress. Not a soul on the streets. No cars, no pedestrians. I might as well be skating down an abandoned highway in the Boneyard.
My heart is moshing against my ribs as I whiffle into the parking lot of Goofy Golf and stumble off the skateboard.
A mind-boggling number of news vans have lined up end-to-end along the frontage to the park. Some of the vans are from Ohio stations, but most of them sport out-of-state call letters painted on the sides, and all of them have satellite erections springing out of some unseen orifice in the vehicles’ roofs. The parking lot is littered with talking heads and cameras and microphones, and in the middle of it all, one lone, bright yellow truck that looks suspiciously like Stan’s bug-mobile, right down to the oversized cockroach on top. The sight of it trips a hate-wire inside me, but I can’t let myself stumble over that—not now.
I hop off Devin’s deck, pocket my earbuds and phone, and take a view of my surroundings. I’m grateful to be on solid ground, but I can’t deny the severe muscle throb from the shock of physical activity as I make my way unnoticed through the maze of cars and cables and journalists.
I struggle to orient myself in the midst of all the chaos. The spin in my head, the ring in my ears . . . the overwhel
ming sense of being knocked off-balance. I force myself to focus, to remember that the reporter had been standing down in the go-kart pit. So I need to shake it off, because my first order of business is to find that discarded drink cup with the bird next to it.
If I didn’t know this place so well, I’d have to start randomly walking around looking for it. But that won’t be necessary. Because just a few feet from the reporter was a skid mark up on the wall at a sharp curve on the track, and the discarded drink cup was on the ground below it. I know that part of the track all too well.
Me and Haze were the ones who made that skid mark.
I spit the thought out onto the sidewalk and look around through the yellow-tinged goggles.
No wonder the streets of Sandusky are empty—the park is mobbed with people. I’m getting a definite preraid Boneyard vibe here.
Unfortunately, with crowds like these, I stand a pretty slim chance that anyone’s going to let me down onto the track.
If I’d have thought this through for even one second, I would have realized that I needed a more elaborate plan than stealing my brother’s Virgin Mary skateboard and rolling up to an amusement park full of people who aren’t going to want me here, then trying to find a skid mark and a cup so I can save a dying little bird on the advice of some mystery texter who may or may not be an UpperWorld operative trying to save me from the infestation of Turk’s army that started in my room this morning.
But I didn’t think it through for more than one second, so that’s all I’ve got.
For a few seconds I contemplate what Roundhouse would do.
In a moment such as this, when TV’s Chuck Norris–inspired Roundhouse finds himself in an impossible situation and has to figure his way out with nothing but brains, brawn, and his own saliva, I have reason to believe that he would create a distraction of some kind. He would do so by pulling a Chinese firecracker out of his ass, or fashioning his own hair into a smoke bomb, and as the crowd swarmed to see if they were under terrorist attack or something, Roundhouse would dash in, do his business, and get out before anyone knew he’d been there.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fashion a smoke bomb out of my own hair.
I need to come up with a plan B.
I survey the amusement-park grounds, the castle that’s the hallmark of the mini-golf course, not to mention the place where Logan Ward claims to have lost his virginity to Sabrina Jones last summer. Past that, there’s the serpentine pit of the go-kart track, the bumper-boat pond filled with dead birds and disembodied black feathers floating around in it, plus the inevitability of infectious diseases and the budding stench of death. I’m not exaggerating; just check out the way the entire place is swarming with people in hazmat suits.
Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute. That’s it.
Plan B involves Caleb Tosh in a hazmat suit.
How legit is that?
3.5
So far, there are no signs of UnderWorld infiltration.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
4
The question is, what kind of dumb-ass hazmat team leaves the back doors of their van open?
Doesn’t matter, because here I stand at the back of the van, and there, just inside the open doors, is a stack of white, disposable Tyvek coveralls. Another quick check reveals a box of disposable face masks just behind the suits. This stroke of luck has me a little freaked out, since I don’t have the most stellar reputation for being lucky.
But I’ll take it.
I’ve never moved faster in my life to accomplish any goal than I move now, gearing up in that Tyvek suit. Once I’m dressed, I make my way toward the park, only to realize I have one more little snag: Devin’s skateboard. Hazmat dudes generally don’t carry their skateboards with them.
I hear a faint tick-tick-ticking in my head, like if I don’t find that bird and save it fast, this whole level will wipe again and I’ll lose everything. I quick stash the deck inside the back of that yellow truck parked nearby, only because it’ll be easier to find in the sea of white vans when I’m done here. Besides, I know it’s not Stan’s truck. Stan’s truck didn’t have any equipment in the back the last time I saw it.
I fake stride across the entrance to the park, very authoritative and official-like, still mystified that no one so much as does a double take in my direction.
I take that back. A girl in black Chuck Taylors and a SUPERGIRL T-shirt leans over the chain-link fence. There’s nothing noteworthy about her, except that she’s the only one who seems to be tracking my entrance. I hop down the stairs two at a time, head to the go-kart pit, pick up the pace until I’m around the first bend, and only then do I break into a jog-walk toward the discarded cup near the skid mark, which I know is somewhere around the third turn. The ground is littered with festering bird carcasses. It’s a grotesque enough sight by itself, but I have to dodge them as I go, like some creepy, morbid version of Frogger.
My hyperventilating breath pools inside the toxic-smelling mask until I start to feel claustrophobic, and the more I focus on the claustrophobia, the more I start to panic, which makes me totally question the whole point of coming here; and just as I’m about to give up, to ditch the hazmat suit and the mask, retrieve the skateboard from where I stashed it in the bug truck, and thrash-spasm my way back home, there it is.
The skid mark.
The cup.
And the bird. Still alive, still trying to flap its little wings against the pavement.
Alive. But barely.
I squat down, look into its little black BB of an eyeball, hoping it’ll offer me some kind of insight of greater meaning. It doesn’t. It just stares back, pleading.
I pull the toxic paper mask down over my chin, suck in a couple lungfuls of fresh air over my shoulder, blink tears off the surface of my eyes. Save it, the message said.
I’m trying, I swear.
I run my hands over the front of the hazmat suit, find a pocket with a pair of latex gloves tucked inside. I put them on, lean over, pick up the green drink cup, and scoop the bird inside even though it takes me a couple of passes because I can’t get my hands to stop shaking like crazy. I’m careful to put the little guy in feet first so it can breathe and not feel claustrophobic, the way I felt a moment ago inside this paper mask.
I hold the cup up to eye level, stare into the bird’s unblinking little face, and smile for the first time in weeks.
We did it, I convey telepathically. You made it—I saved you. Looks like I’ll get to level after all.
I keep looking, though, keep looking as if the bird is going to open its beak and thank me or something. But it doesn’t. Within seconds, it stops pulsing its exhausted wings against the insides of the cup, and I hold my breath, waiting for it to restart. But it never does.
It’s dead.
The bird is dead.
The go-kart track starts to bend and stretch around me and I’m sure I’m going to black out, only my phone starts buzzing in my back pocket just then. I reach to answer it, but it’s buried under a layer of Tyvek so super-constructed that there’s no way to rip through it. I have to unzip, reach around, fish it out with one hand while holding a dead, probably disease-infested bird in a used drink cup with the other.
I finally get the phone out.
It’s the cockroach. Grotesquely cracked and fragmented in my broken screen.
What the fuck, man?
The cockroach found me.
My arm drops as I spin one way, then the other, looking for signs of an onslaught I know must be coming. But there’s nothing. No one. Not even backup to keep my sorry ass out of hot water. I’m alone, all alone on the go-kart track at Goofy Golf with a dead bird in one hand and a dead phone in the other.
Helicopter blades pulse through the air somewhere off in the distance, and the mantel clock Stan threw in the back of his truck tick-tick-ticks from an unseen place behind me, followed by the synchronized cadence of marching feet, which can mean only one thing.
Jesus. I
had one job: save the bird and collect the Ascent Credits so I could become Worthy. Well, I blew it. And now I probably just wiped. Again.
I’m seriously gonna need some backup if I have any hope of getting out of here. My fingers mash the buttons on the phone, frantically dialing numbers—first Cam, who doesn’t answer, then Napoleon Burger since Haze doesn’t have a cell phone.
“Come on,” I urge, bouncing with nerves inside my hazmat suit. “Come on, answer!”
The mechanical click-and-report behind me sends echoes of terror through my entire body.
My hand falls slowly away from the side of my head as I lift my gaze equally slowly up the sides of the go-kart pit.
Holy mother of—
I’m half expecting to see news cameras stationed around the perimeter of the track because of all the vans out front. Instead I find myself surrounded by a wall of weps—I don’t know whose, but there must be dozens of them, staked out along both sides of the pit, aimed straight at me.
I lift my hands skyward—I’ve run through maps like this enough times to know how it works.
“Drop the cup!” one of the soldiers yells from behind me.
I do. I let it fall from my fingers, consumed by a sickness I can’t reconcile as the carcass of that recently deceased bird bounces partway out onto the concrete track. I’m sorry, I whisper to the bird, but it sends nothing back.
“Now the phone!” the voice behind me shouts.
My alarms go off. No way am I dropping my phone onto the concrete track on purpose. It won’t survive another violent mishap.
“Drop the phone!”
I crouch down, place it gently on the ground next to the cup. My eye catches the sight of the bird’s little wing draped lightly over the rim, and I swallow against the slow burn in my throat. Damn bird. I was supposed to save it. I made it here in time and everything. Why’d it have to wait till I showed up to go and die?
“Turn around nice and slow,” the voice behind me orders.
I rotate a hundred and eighty degrees, only to find myself staring down the barrel of at least a dozen different kinds of weapons, and it hits me.
