by C. G. Watson
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.
I start fake keying the words “save it” over and over again on my phone, but when I look down at the screen, the low-battery icon is flashing in the corner. I shut down all the apps, pop out the earbud, and lean forward in the seat.
“Can I charge up?”
“Anything you want, potato chip.”
Haze reaches back, takes the phone and charger from me, plugs it all in. I almost can’t believe the cigarette l
ighter still works in this crap car.
Only now my hands are twitchy. No keypad, no music, no Snipe page, no way to check messages. And five hundred miles to go.
I close my eyes. Why the hell wasn’t the old man at Goofy Golf with Devin? How could he just disappear like that, not even leave a note? Wouldn’t he know? Wouldn’t he know that would trip my shit in the worst possible way? After my mom and Stan . . . You don’t just up and leave without—
I replay the conversation with the commandos over and over in my mind. What did I miss? Were there secret plans, messages, hints I should have taken note of? We think you can be of help to us. If that’s the case, where are they?
My head jerks against the tattered seat back. I sit up, look around, scratch a rogue itch.
“Hey,” I say to no one in particular. “Hand me my phone.”
Elan is the one who pops it out, charger and all, and I immediately check the wall screen, where the Day-Glo numbers pulse neon green at me.
Sweat starts sheeting down my back.
Midnight.
It’s already midnight.
That can’t be. When I handed my phone to Haze, it said ten to four. No way that was eight hours ago.
I bolt upright in the seat, pivot toward the window, then each of the other windows, but no matter where I look, it’s all the same darkness.
“Haze!” I call out.
His head wobbles off the back of the seat. “Wha—?”
I recant. Everything’s not right with the world. In fact, it would be accurate to say that something here is very, very wrong.
“Where are we?” I ask.
Elan’s smile reflects back at me through the rearview mirror, her teeth glowing in the light of a massive full moon.
“You mean, are we there yet?”
“Are we where yet?” I’m testing her. I know it. She knows it. Haze . . . whatever. Waking up is not his forte.
Elan hasn’t answered my question, so I press against the window, squint to get a look at the full-frontal urban assault: honking horns, sirens, traffic. The night spasms to life around us, puking up neon and humanity everywhere I look.
“Are we here yet,” she corrects me. “And the answer is, yes.”
I don’t know how Haze and I both sawed enough z’s to get from Ohio to New York, assuming we are, in fact, in New York, without even noticing the extensive passage of time. That alone is enough to roll me, especially since Haze is a natural-born conspiracy theorist and I already know he doesn’t trust this girl.
My own mistrust increases exponentially as the city presses its grimy face against the windows of the car.
“This is where I drop you boys off,” she says, winding her way through a tangle of crowded streets.
I kick another glance out the window, absorb the sheer volume of bodies and machinery and high-rises and steam and neon and rebar and asphalt.
The commandos had better chime in here soon.
“Off you go,” she says. “The universe abhors a vacuum, you know. Once you leave home, you have to turn up somewhere.”
Haze and I stagger out of her decrepit little car, and as we step onto the curb, I remember about the UnderGround, the City Hall Station.
I turn, call out, “Wait, where’s the—”
But the Big Apple has already taken a bite out of the night, and just like that, both the girl and the car are gone.
7.5
I’m not sure why the commandos would send an UnderWorld hostage to me and then have her drive off without being saved.
So, fine, this isn’t a salvation mission. But why have Elan show up just in the nick of time and take us exactly where we needed to go, and then, just before I could think of how to help her, poof?
Gone.
8
Haze’s mirror-eyed rage bears down on me with an intensity I am not expecting.
“It’s really no sweat,” I say, wiping beads of perspiration off my upper lip. “We just need to find the—”
“It took us fifteen minutes to get from Ohio to New York,” he cuts in. “How is that no sweat?”
“No, it didn’t.” I flip up the bottoms of the yellow goggles to let them defog. “It only seems like it because we were sleeping.”
“Exactly. Sleeping. Both of us. For nine hours.”
“You have narcolepsy, Haze.” It’s true. He does. Haze has some kind of stress-induced narcolepsy. Why I stayed asleep for the better part of five hundred miles is still pretty sketch.
“I don’t think narcolepsy explains a nine-hour nap,” he says.
“You don’t think what we’ve been through today qualifies as an ordeal?”
Something knocks against my shoe as we walk, derailing my train of thought.
I sidestep it to see what it is, and the city floods my head, bending light and sound into unrecognizable shards and fractals.
I reach down good and slow, clamp it between the tips of two fingers.
It’s the drink cup. Not a drink cup. The drink cup. From the go-kart track. The one I buried the bird in behind our trailer in Sandusky, Ohio. And yeah, I know there must be a trillion green and yellow drink cups in the Big Apple.
But how many of them still have a blackbird feather inside?
I stare into the mangled cup, gawk at its contents.
“That’s foul,” Haze says.
My heart beats out tribal drum chants as I pull it out, flip it between my fingers a couple of times.
learn to fly
fly away
As Haze scouts out our surroundings, I quick stash the feather before he notices. It’s definitely the strangest item on my Trade Screen, but there must be some reason to have it, or else why would it have been put there?
I turn the drink cup over, looking for the words I already know I’ll see.
Subway. City Hall Station.
Motor City pumps tinny and low into my left ear. The sharp riff of the guitar solo on their heavy-metal anthem pierces through my brain waves as a siren wails in the near distance, and it occurs to me: this isn’t an address. It’s an instruction.
I pull up SnipeSearch on my phone.
“What are you looking for?” Haze asks.
I show him the address on the cup, and he flinches in disgust.
“Throw that thing away, man.”
We stumble along, following the landmarks and reading the warnings that come up on the page about how the station is closed to the general public, how you have to make an appointment to tour the tunnels, and how it would be a massive breach of security to go down there unaccompanied by the proper authorities, since the station is situated right under City Hall.
And then, just off to one side, I spot the entrance.
Of course, it’s surrounded by a soaring chain-link fence and a gate that’s dead-bolted with several Magnum-grade padlocks.
Haze goes slack in front of the gate. “Well, this steams.”
“There’s gotta be a way in,” I say, mostly to myself.
“I just want to clarify that we’re not meant to go down there. You know that, right?”
I don’t blame him. He doesn’t understand how important any of this is, that going underground is mission critical. He doesn’t know how any of this works; he’s never technically been to the Boneyard before.
But I have. And I know there’s got to be a way in, an on-ramp, as Elan called it.
“Even if we do get in, we won’t be able to see anything down there, Tosh. Not even the rats running across our feet, and that’s saying something because New York rats weigh ten pounds apiece.”
Point taken.
I dig into my bag for a penlight I can’t find, my fingers brushing against the feather instead. A fat knot of exhaust fumes and urban funk sticks in my throat, refusing to be swallowed away. I have to get down there. No plan B, no alternative route. It’s UnderGround or mission failure. Period.
A text message buzzes at me, and I’m so sure it’s the commandos with instructions for how to break in t
hat I open the app without thinking.
The world below will weep blood, it says. There’s an attachment, of course. It’s the cockroach.
A low groan cuts loose from my gut. Turk seems to know my every move. I’m starting to wonder how it’ll ever matter if I crack the tunnel code; that bastard will always be able to stay ahead of me.
Clearly, I’m not getting an assist here. I’m sure the commandos brought me this far courtesy of Elan, but telling me about the world below isn’t much help. I’ll have to figure out how to go UnderGround myself.
I pace the length of the fence.
“Dead bolts,” Haze says. “Doesn’t that just figure.”
Roundhouse would have something in his bag he could use for bolt cutters. What do I have? Socks and underwear and a gum pack with a note inside.
I stop midpace, scan the length of the fence again, quicker this time.
sneak in
That’s what her note said.
I pull at the fence. It’s secured every few feet with wire ties, but I tug the length of it in the direction of the gate, and there, just at the end, it gives.
The corner isn’t secured.
Haze and I stare at each other in disbelief. Easy, I’m thinking. Way too easy. I’m this close to chickening out when the next message comes through.
The end is near.
And then one more:
Save it.
9
We slip through the opening in the fence, into the station entrance and down the stairs to the abandoned terminal.
“We shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Haze says, his voice bouncing back to us in echoes. I pull the penlights I was looking for out of my bag, knowing they’ll be no match against the expansive black of the UnderGround.
“Never mind,” I say. “Just hold the beam low and steady and keep moving.”
It’s wet in the tunnel, smells like ocean or moss one minute, urine and garbage the next, and so dark that the only thing we can rely on the penlights for is to make sure we’re not stepping on the ten-pound rats Haze talked about. I reach out my hand, run it along the brick wall as a guide. But pretty soon all I can focus on is the condensation and grime on the tiles, and the next thing I know, my finger hits something flat and hard and ovoid.
