Ascending the Boneyard

by C. G. Watson

  Something that does not feel like tile.

  Before I can pull away, the protrusion scampers over the tips of my fingers, and I emit some sort of other-than-human sound that echoes perfectly through the catacomb. Haze spins around, shining his penlight on the wall, where he tracks the biggest fucking cockroach I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Haze says. “Did you see that? It was a tank!”

  “Yes, I saw it. Shut up and keep moving.”

  Haze busts a gut, not realizing what this cockroach sighting could actually mean.

  “Poor thing is probably running back to its little roach friends right now, going, Oh my God, I can’t get the human stank off me!” He makes some squeaky little noises, which I think are meant to emulate a cockroach.

  “It’s not funny,” I say.

  The phone kicks a text message into my pocket, but I’m too rattled by what just happened to pick up another picture of Turk. He would totally do that—send a minion scout into the catacomb and then chase it with a picture of himself to remind me who’s really in charge here.

  “How is that not funny?” Haze is saying, a chuckle still twinging his voice. “Why is it that nothing with an exoskeleton seems to garner much of a—”

  But before Haze can finish the thought, we stop in unison, let our gazes slide up the station walls. We’ve reached an atrium of sorts, an arachnidian juncture of subway tunnels that all seem to converge right here. The domed roof is actually a series of skylights, with neon and moonbeams pouring down on us through the panes. There’s enough ambient light coming in through the once-blackened windows that we can see traces of long-ago grandeur in the tunnels—gilded brickwork, glass tiles, brass chandeliers.

  “Holy mother of . . .”

  The UnderWorld looks nothing like this on the crappy screen of the Relic. Maybe this isn’t even the UnderWorld. There are no burning wall sconces, no armed guards patrolling. The world below will weep with blood. I look up. Nope. Not even that.

  I pocket my earbuds so I can listen for sounds of an impending incursion—soldiers, minion raiders, anything to indicate that we’re at least on the right track.

  I squint to see down one of the tunnel arms, but it’s too dark to see anything beyond the dome. I’ve never experienced the tunnels from this vantage point—I’m all turned around, no longer sure of the code sequence. All I know is, if I take the tunnels in the wrong order, we’ll be the ones running back out onto the highway in flames.

  I stop. Turn.

  It’s the on-ramp, Elan had said. You have to take the right on-ramp or you’re gonna end up crashing into—

  “I knew it,” I say, tasting the rank air is it rushes into my open mouth. “One of these tunnels is definitely the way in. We have to figure out the sequence from inside. Bastard has me all twisted around.”

  Haze is so busy gawking at all the history, he probably doesn’t even hear me.

  I let my gaze drag down the sides of the walls to the other arms that feed into the atrium. As my vision adjusts, it reveals even more skylights stretching down the tubes at regular intervals. This is Russian roulette. I already wiped this level once before, so spectacularly I almost got kicked out of the Boneyard for good because of it. I need mappers. And some dps wouldn’t hurt either. Something tells me I’m gonna want to wreck some shit pretty soon.

  I close my eyes, strain my ears to superhuman, hoping for any small clue, signal, direction.

  I walk toward one of the tunnel openings, face the undiluted darkness. The old arms of the tracks seem closed off and stuffier than under the dome, by a hefty factor. Sweat dribbles down the sides of my face, trickles into my ears, fogs up my goggles; I can’t even imagine what it’s like for Haze in that knit cap and painter’s mask. If ever there was a time he’d want to let that shit go, you’d think it’d be now.

  I squint into the void. Is this the one? Getting it wrong could be lethal.

  I made that mistake before. Split decision. Wrong choice. Devin. Max damage. I need to fix it. I need to know if this is the beginning of the end.

  Or the end of it.

  The answer comes as a low rumble at first. But as the noise and movement gain momentum, the dimness of the tunnel shrinks in proportion, and suddenly I realize that all that separates me and Haze from an oncoming subway car is a few measly inches of wall space.

  “Run!” I scream. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, if you think about it. No one should ever have to tell you to run if a train is barreling down on you.

  Haze and I sprint our asses off as the sound and the heat and the shaking get louder, hotter, nearer. I have never run this hard or this fast in my life; in fact, I’ve never had to run for my life. Now would be the worst possible moment for a text to buzz through.

  I refuse to answer it. It’s either Turk, trying to distract me so I get flattened, or the commandos—and if it’s them, well, screw their lousy timing and their better-late-than-never—

  Hold up.

  I got a message earlier that I never looked at. What if that one was something like, Watch out for the subway car! and there it is, sitting unread in my back pocket as I get smashed on the abandoned tracks under City Hall?

  A sprint or two later, we’re back in the atrium and safely on the platform, where I yank the phone out of my back pocket and slide it open.

  The world beneath will weep blood.

  I look up. The atrium has gotten hot. Melt-my-bones hot.

  Sweet Jesus. I’m sweating, Haze is sweating; even the walls are sweating.

  The walls. Are sweating.

  Not water.

  Not condensation.

  Blood.

  10

  The deep blast of a honking subway train nearly shoots me out of my own skin. I haven’t even had time to process the dark red ooze dripping down the walls of the catacombs, but Haze and I spin around, and there, not ten feet away, is a shrunken-down version of a subway car.

  And it’s waiting. For us.

  “What the hell is this?” Haze says. “It said on your app they haven’t run trains on these tracks in over a hundred—”

  “Just get in.” I push him through the open door of the car and scramble in behind him.

  So it wasn’t the tunnels—it was never meant to be the tunnels. It was the actual subway: this is our on-ramp. The mission hasn’t even started yet.

  Within seconds, we’re moving, our pint-sized train car negotiating through the tight-cornered tracks like an amusement-park ride. Ages-old brass chandeliers flicker as we pass by, eerily illuminating the tunnel walls until they’re just how I remember the Boneyard to look.

  “Yo, Tosh.”

  I follow the trajectory of Haze’s shaky finger.

  The thick humidity that’s strong-armed its way into the subway car by now is still dripping in bloodred rivulets down the tiled walls of the station tunnels.

  “That’s dire, man,” he says, and I feel a stab of guilt. He can’t even begin to conceptualize what we’re sitting in the middle of.

  The air around us is dense, heavy with the smell of wet cement and garbage. A metallic tang leeches off the walls of the subway car, burns my lungs every time I inhale.

  My vision goes into soft focus, drifts mothlike through the car. I shouldn’t be too pissed at the commandos for not keeping in better communication. Chat windows won’t be secure. Texting is the only method they can use, and it’s not very convenient. Still, I have to remember, they’re getting me where I need to go. I just have to remain vigilant. Turk and his army are clearly lying in wait. Watching. Listening.

  Outside the window, the shimmering skyline blinks in and out of view. A cast-off glow of neon-yellow streetlights illuminates my reflection in the glass and then too easily disappears. I feel the void in the center of my chest, the ache of being there one second and gone the next. If I don’t fix things, everything I know could blink out of view that way. For good this time.

  The train takes a sharp dip, dragging my stomach
down with it, and suddenly we’re underground again. With sweat-slick fingers, I pop in an earbud so I don’t have to hear the screech of the subway tracks. Still, I keep a close eye out the window, hoping for some hint of where we’re headed, since no one seems too keen on telling me.

  “Tosh?” I hear Haze whisper.

  He’s pressed so flat against the window it’s almost funny—until I turn to see what he’s on about.

  The bricks of the tunnel zip by us faster and faster, like a scene out of one of those sci-fi movies where the spaceship hits warp speed and the stars turn into blurred lines that shoot out behind it.

  “What the—” But before he can finish the thought, he drops off the grid again. Narcoleptic Haze, succumbing to blissful slumber.

  I close my eyes too, wishing I could lean my head back against the window and grab a quick nap. Not a good idea, unless I’m willing to sustain a third-degree concussion as the subway car caroms through the winding tunnels.

  Sometimes she’d take me with her on her drive-offs. We wouldn’t talk. I’d just lay my head against the window and let the vibration of the car soothe me. She liked having the company, I could tell, even though she never said it. I guess by then she was too used to keeping all her thoughts to herself.

  I dig into my pocket, fish out the blackbird feather, flip it between my fingers. I left today without knowing where Devin was. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter; it matters. But when I finally reach Turk’s lair, when I kill that hostage-taking sonofabitch, it’ll undo all the mistakes I made, and Devin won’t need me to protect him like that anymore. He’ll go back to being the emo skateboarding, arm-punching, cheesy-snack-stealing punk he always was, and everything will be exactly the way it should be.

  When I close my eyes again, I see the blood schussing through my veins like this subway car, fueled by anger and no small dose of fear.

  They told me to save it. They’re giving me another chance. I have to get it right this time, even if it kills me.

  I pull out my phone just to give my nervous hands something to do, realize I can’t check anything—my apps are going haywire, random-flashing the icons on my wall screen. Doesn’t that just figure. Nothing’s fixed right now; nothing is static. Even time is meaningless now that I’m in the Boneyard; never mind that I can still hear it tick-tick-ticking right through my headphones.

  The end is near.

  The words flash bright neon green above my head.

  An unexpected vibration cuts straight through the jarring chaos of the subway. Shocked, I quick pull up the message.

  Time means nothing.

  “Well, that’s helpful,” I say.

  Time unused melts into pools of regret.

  Swell.

  “What ever happened to The world beneath will weep blood?” I say out loud. Weep blood, my ass. I guess if you want to get technical, the walls of the station were kind of “bleeding,” but that was just a screen trick, if you ask me. Any moron could see it was condensation making some centuries-old funk run down the tiles. Not blood at all—just vaguely bloodlike.

  Haze has been sound asleep all this time, but the piercing wail of metal on metal rips through the car as we careen to a stop, and he sputters back into consciousness.

  He pulls the face mask down under his chin.

  “Where are we?”

  “Cinderella’s castle,” I say, throwing my bag over my shoulder.

  The car spasms to a stop and the door wheezes open. I follow Haze outside just as the first dim light of morning bleaches the horizon.

  The truth is, I don’t know where we are. But I do know without even looking that the subway car is already gone.

  I fully expect Haze to fire an Uzi round of questions at me, but he doesn’t. We just start walking down the narrow, deserted street, lined with half-dead trees and decrepit, abandoned buildings whose busted-out windows lie shattered under our feet. The crunch of debris against concrete is the only sound we hear as we kick our way through piles of twisted window frames, chunks of Sheetrock and plywood, two-by-fours sprouting rusted nails, a decaying bird carcass lying in the gutter.

  Time unused melts into pools of regret.

  “I’d kill for a Mountain Dew,” I blurt out.

  “Coffee. Same here.”

  Even so, we pass several convenience stores and diners without ever stopping to go in. Most of the places don’t even look open.

  I’m starting to second-guess the decision to come down here without the smallest brigade. I’m not talking about Haze. Haze is my man. He’s my shit-caller. I mean, the guy calls me out on my shit at every single turn. But he can’t crush a tank on my behalf, or take out a roach mob or cause max damage when the time comes. Haze doesn’t know the rules of engagement here.

  The road widens and the negative space around us begins to fill in—run-down cars, more empty buildings, brown-gray daylight.

  Around a corner, Haze and I stop short in unison, let our gaze slide up the length of the concrete facade of an unfamiliar building. A dozen or so stories of rust-colored brick rise to meet the sharp-angled patina roof as rows and rows of paneless windows gape back at us like a blank stare.

  Vacant eyes. Boarded-up mouth. No way in. Devin. A wave of sickness shoots through me.

  Should have at least brought a Medic.

  “I bet you’re going to tell me you want to go in,” Haze says.

  “Yep.”

  I have no idea what this place is, only that if I don’t go inside, I’ll have left something undone.

  “Notice how the doors and windows on the bottom floor are all bricked up?” he says.

  “Yeah, but look right above it.” I point to the two arched windows that flank the entrance of the building. The windows are bricked in, true, but the holes above them aren’t.

  “Someone’s gotten in here who wasn’t supposed to,” I tell Haze. “The question is, how?”

  “That’s the question, Tosh? Not, why do you want to commit breaking and entering, or what we’re even doing here in the first place?”

  sneak in

  I’m here to sneak in. That’s what her note said.

  But I can’t make the words come out.

  Haze shakes his head. “Elan was right, man. One of us needs to get his story straight.”

  Elan . . .

  I tip my head back, fix my gaze on the busted window openings for a long, wondering moment.

  “Hey!” I yell at last. “Hey, up there!”

  Haze turns eleven shades of white. “Man, what are you doing? This is an abandoned—”

  Three scraggly heads of black hair pop out of the windows before he gets to the end of the sentence. None of them is Elan, though, so there goes that theory.

  “What’s with the yelling?” one of the guys shouts down to us.

  “We need a place to squat,” I call back. No idea where that came from.

  The heads disappear, and for a moment Haze and I just stand there like a couple of jackasses, cutting our stupefied gazes between the building and each other. But then the one guy tosses something out the window, and it only takes me a second to realize it’s a rope ladder.

  He wants us to climb up.

  “That doesn’t look very sturdy,” Haze says, and even though I’m thinking the same thing, I don’t let on.

  I hoist my messenger bag over my shoulder and grab on to both sides of the ladder. The swaying does nothing to reassure me; if anything, it makes the rope feel even flimsier in my hands than it looked flopping out the window.

  “Dude—”

  “Haze, shut up,” I say. “If you make one rational argument about why I shouldn’t climb up, I’ll totally chicken out, and I can’t chicken out now—got it?”

  I wait out the split second of festering silence before he says the one thing I need to hear him say more than anything else in the universe.

  “Sure, Tosh. Whatever you need to do.”

  I start to climb, forced to acknowledge something I should have considere
d before sticking my foot through the first rung. I have z-e-r-o upper-body strength. Sad fact: there’s nothing remotely like a defined muscle group anywhere on Caleb Tosh’s body.

  “You’d better hurry,” the dude in the window says. “They can’t bust you once you’re in here, but they can bust you while you’re climbing.”

  “Go!” Haze says.

  I roll my eyes as the hellish memories of gym class parade before them. No amount of creative visualization can block out the thought that Haze has a backside view of my frayed, one-size-too-big jeans as I climb. Not to mention the dude in the window gets to watch me nearly stroke out while I struggle for the opening.

  The dude inside sticks his arm out. “Here, grab me,” he says.

  I clasp him around the wrist and he does the same, and before I know it, he’s managed to pull me all the way inside. I lay panting on the ground, cushioned in a thick layer of dust and reeling from the shock of physical exertion.

  I can hear the guy working to get Haze up the ladder, a feat that probably requires a lot less effort for him than it did for me. But I’m not even watching. My eyes are squeezed shut as I fight to catch my breath.

  From the sound of things, Haze has just toppled unceremoniously into the room.

  “Tosh.” His voice spins through the filters of his mask. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I sit up, open my eyes, look around.

  Sure enough, there’s Haze leaning up against the wall under the window, with his hands plastered against his knit cap like he’s trying to keep his head from popping off.

  I turn and survey the now up-close faces of the threesome: two guys and a girl, all covered in a thin layer of dust that matches the thicker layer of dust covering every other square inch of this low-ceilinged space.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “No problem,” the guy from the window says. “We’re the Prophets.”