Ascending the Boneyard

by C. G. Watson

  My eyebrows ricochet into my hairline as I search my memory for any brigade with that name. Nothing.

  “You’re who?” I ask.

  “The Prophets. Industrial-techno-folk-punk. Lemme guess . . .” He turns to Haze, sizing up his post-apocalyptic headgear. “Electronic-thrash-reggae?”

  A brigade with a backstory. Not sure how I feel about that.

  “Naw,” I say. “We’re just looking for a place to hang out.”

  “Oh.” He slides his gaze back and forth between us a few more times. “I get it. Yeah, that’s cool. Lots of rooms here. Very private.”

  I shoot a confused look at Haze as my brain absorbs the words “very private.”

  “Not, like, private,” I say. “We just need to lay low for a while.”

  “Oh yeah? What are you guys on the run from?” he asks.

  Another intriguing question. I stall, trying to think up an answer, and for a few seconds I wonder if we somehow ended up somewhere we didn’t intend to go. I don’t have a mapper, so it’s possible, I guess. But no . . . that’s not right. I know this map. I’ve been here before, tons of times.

  I decide to test them.

  “We stole a car,” I say. “So now we’re on the run.”

  “You stole a car,” Haze cuts in.

  “Right. I stole a car, so . . . anyway. We’re on the lam now.”

  “On the lam,” the guy says. “Cool.”

  The girl moves forward, and that’s when I notice they all have the same short-cropped, chopped-up, black-dyed hair. They look like mangled crows, to be honest. That’d be a great band name—way better than the Prophets.

  The girl’s kind of hot.

  “I’m Ravyn,” she says as I try really hard to hold eye contact with her and not let my eyes drift to her purple bra, which I can clearly see because it shows straight through the thin white fabric of the tank top she’s wearing.

  Ravyn is curvalicious.

  “Tosh,” I say. “That’s Haze.”

  Haze, still plastered against the wall, lifts one hand in greeting while holding on to his head with the other.

  The window dude comes forward with his arm stretched out. “Eek,” he says, giving me one of those multiplex handshakes. “It used to be Zeke, but I ditched the Z, man.”

  “Sweet,” I say.

  The other guy throws a peace sign from across the space. He’s eating a candy bar, but what I’m really tripping on is that his head almost touches the ceiling. I don’t think it’s because he’s especially tall, though. I just think this is a ridiculously short room.

  “I’m Bill,” he says.

  I nod, wondering what we’re supposed to do now that the formalities are over.

  “We usually crash in another part of the Castle. You guys coming?” Eek asks.

  The Castle?

  “Sure.” I swivel toward the windows. “Yo, Haze. You coming?”

  Haze finally looks up. “Why am I sitting next to a pile of bricks?”

  Eek points to an uneven circular hole in the wall between the two perfectly geometric ones. “Crashers,” he says. “Bastards have totally laid waste to the Castle. It’s a shame, really.”

  “Aren’t you crashers?” Haze asks. There’s an edge to his voice that makes me nervous.

  “Hell no,” Eek says. “We’re squatters. And actually, we don’t stay here. It’s just a really cheap rehearsal space.”

  “Any idea how much a practice studio costs in this goddamn place?” Bill asks, trying to fish a chunk of candy bar out from between his crooked teeth with a dirty fingernail. I narrow my eyes and study him. He’s too nervous. His eyes bulge out too far, his too-long, bony fingers twitch like antennae as they flail around in his mouth.

  I’m not sure what kind of mission these guys are on. Nothing like what we’re doing—that seems obvious. But I know one thing for absolute: he’s their platoon leader. He shouldn’t be since he’s a jackass, but he is, and there’s something about the guy I just don’t trust.

  “Any idea?” he asks again.

  “Not a clue,” I say.

  “An ass-load.” Bill holds up the offending nut, flicks it into the air.

  I wince in disgust.

  “Only problem is,” Eek adds, “we’re not the only ones. Lots of bands use this building. It’s perfect because of all the rooms and the great acoustics. But we have to leave by seven, because school starts at eight.”

  My eyes go rogue as I try to discreetly make sense of this last bit of info. They call themselves “bands,” not “platoons.” Plus they don’t give off any kind of studious vibe whatsoever.

  “You guys are still in school?”

  “Not us, Josh,” Bill says, and that’s when I decide it’s not so much that I dislike this guy as I actually kind of hate him. It’s Tosh. Tosh. Four letters—how hard can it be?

  Bill points to one of the windows. “That over there’s a school. If they hear us playing, they’ll call the oinks and that’ll be the end of the Prophets as we know it.”

  Eek gives me a knowing nod. “But only in the sense that we’d have to find a new rehearsal space,” he says.

  “Which is hard,” Bill adds, his pointless breath fouling up the air around us, “because, as I said, cheap space is impossible to find.”

  I nod like I get it even though I’m massive confused, and that’s when Ravyn finally breaks her silence. She struts past me, reaching out with one long finger and running it across my chest as she passes.

  “There are lots of abandoned buildings in this town,” she says, only the way she says it sounds like a total come-on. I swing my messenger bag around in front of me.

  Ravyn is halfway out of the room by then. She throws her chin over her shoulder, looks back in my direction.

  “Coming?” she says.

  Holy shit.

  I double step it until I’m at her side. Three sets of muted footsteps fall in behind us.

  As we duck under a length of low-hanging metal pipe, one of the guys asks Haze, “So, what’s with the gas mask, sport?”

  “It’s for all the fucking asbestos in here,” Haze says, and that’s when it hits me. It’s eight a.m. and Haze is still uncaffeinated.

  Oh yeah. Shit’s about to get real.

  10.5

  Ravyn is as sexy as any UnderWorld hostage I’ve ever seen. Taller than me by a good four inches, with dangerous curves and a slender waistline. And while one of the mission objectives of UpRising is to free as many hostage babes as possible, if this girl’s supposed to be helpless, she sure doesn’t seem like it. I’ve never seen any hostage in the Boneyard who’s this fearless, this in control of herself.

  Plus she’s with a brigade.

  Even so. I’d pretty much do anything for this girl.

  11

  We make our way through the eerie hallways of the hotel, lit only at the far ends by daylight coming in through broken windows. The ceiling is a mosaic of molded tiles, and even in the dimness, I can tell that the entire length of the corridor is covered in peeling paint and/or wallpaper.

  “This is Peacock Alley,” Ravyn tells me with a wicked smile that shoots my pulse into orbit.

  “Why’s it called that?” I ask. I have to say something, otherwise that word is just going to echo down the hallway for all of eternity with no resolution.

  “It’s because of the ceiling. It used to be colorful, like a—”

  “Here,” Bill cuts in. “Let’s take ’em in here.”

  I want to drop max damage on Bill, and not just because he interrupted Ravyn before she could say “peacock” again. Bill’s one of those douchey guys, like Psychobatter, who gets a little power and thinks he’s a leet when he’s really a total fail.

  I watch the way Bill’s mangled-feather hair bobs down the hallway, turns, passes through the doorway, and my core temp drops to absolute zero. Flashes of Goofy Golf flicker in my mind as everything around me skitters into slo-mo, and I can see it all: the go-kart track, Haze’s drink cup, the blackb
ird dive-bombing our buggy. Whoever sent that bird into the game, it was the catalyst for everything. Bill’s mangled-crow hair sends the shiver of thought through me that maybe we’ve made a tactical mistake by coming here. Maybe we’ve been lured into some kind of UnderWorld trap—I’ve seen it happen a billion times in the Boneyard.

  We pass through a pair of double doors in which Castle-crashers have surprisingly left some glass intact, and swing into a room unlike any I’ve ever seen.

  It’s not so much a room as a hall, really—a huge, whitewashed hall. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, the overturned piano lying on its side at the far end, all shrouded in decades-old layers of white dust. Everything except for the decorative molding, accent lines of dark wood that look like someone has outlined every possible point of entry. Or exit.

  “This is our favorite rehearsal space,” Ravyn says, the words floating in my direction like dust motes. “It’s got good musical chi.”

  I want this girl so bad, it’s not even funny.

  “Chi?” Haze shreds the word.

  “C-H-I,” Bill says, and I’ve never wanted to hurt a guy so badly in my entire life since Stan. I want to take my shoe and smash Bill with it till he’s nothing but yellow gut paint on the wall.

  Apparently, Haze feels the same way.

  “I know what you said,” he hisses. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Chi energy is like the breath of the universe,” Ravyn murmurs from right behind me, her words brushing against my ear like she’s telling me a secret.

  I watch her, awed by the way she swirls around me like fog, how she rolls toward the windows, how she floats into a turn, bolts her smoky gaze onto mine, fans her fingers through her hair, smiles with every part of her face except her mouth.

  Yeah. I could legitimately be in love with this girl.

  And then she starts singing, and her voice carries into the open space of the room, and in spite of all the broken windows and debris, or maybe because of it, the acoustics are immaculate. Eek joins in and his harmonies are flawless. I focus on the words, something about transmutation, about ending up somewhere different from where you are, and this huge knot starts forming in my throat like when I was a kid and something bad would happen and I’d try like hell not to cry in front of the old man so he wouldn’t give me crap for being a wuss supreme, and I’d end up having to go to my room and cry all alone.

  just another turn . . .

  not the whole road . . .

  I’m sucking in air. All this dust. I can’t breathe.

  My mom would take me for rides in the car. Park it away from traffic and lights. Let me sob as hard as I wanted to. Sometimes she’d sob with me.

  I turn away, swallow a throbbing mass of sadness into my stomach, but it’s too big, it’s too dense, it just wants to come back up again.

  I don’t . . .

  I can’t . . .

  “Listen,” Haze says as if he can read my mind. “This is cute and all, but Tosh and I have shit to do.”

  I try to pull in a deep breath, turn away from the window. “Yeah,” I say. “We’ve got all this, y’know, shit we need to do.”

  Ravyn comes over, takes me by the hand. “Wanna see something cool?” she halfway whispers.

  The tears shudder out of my body, as if she’s performed a ritual exorcism by asking that one simple question.

  All I can think is: Please, yes. Anything to make the noise go away.

  I nod my answer, pushing back against the song and the sadness and all the shit Haze and I supposedly need to do, at least for now.

  “We’ll be right back,” she says as she leads me by the hand, and against the best of my judgment, I follow her crazy, mangled-feather hair out of the room.

  I don’t utter a word as we pick our way through the silent corridors, past the paint curling off the walls, back down Peacock Alley (say it again, I silently beg), and up a few sets of crumbling stairs. Then another quick trek down a corridor, where Ravyn throws open the door to one of the rooms, and for a split second my hopes go airborne.

  She motions me in.

  There’s a rotting couch in the room and not much else if you don’t count the piles of debris. I desperately want to sit on those ratty cushions with her. I want to feel the grit of her dusty hair on my fingertips, the slope and curve of her breasts, her waist, the chalky smoothness of her skin. I want to kiss away the traces of coffee and sadness on her lips, taste the music still shimmering on her tongue.

  Ravyn’s definitely not the hostage here; if anything, I am. As if I could ever save this girl.

  “Look,” she says, lifting a hand to point. There’s something weirdly familiar about the gesture.

  But I turn anyway, follow the line of her finger out the decaying window frame, where the city skyline rises hazy and vague in the distance.

  “Isn’t that fucking cool?” she says.

  I turn to her, and something happens to me that I can’t explain, because I’ve only ever worshipped girls from afar and never in one trillion years would I talk directly to a girl I liked, especially if I thought she was hot. But for some reason my mouth opens up and before I know what I’m doing, I say:

  “You’re fucking cool.”

  She smiles but doesn’t come toward me, and I’m not even the slightest bit thrown, because if at some point she lets me kiss her, it would be totally worth making that first move myself.

  I take a step, and then another, and before I know it, I’m less than an inch away from her in front of what used to be a window. The breeze coming in through the opening carries a slight chill with it, and she doesn’t stop me as I slip my hands around her waist, as I hook my fingers into her belt loops, as I lean in close enough to smell the cherry ChapStick coming off her lips. All we need is a microburst of kinetic energy and—

  Ravyn lets out a little gasp, which I interpret to mean I’m about to stick the landing.

  Incorrectly, I might add.

  “Look,” she says, reaching toward me. “You’ve got a sidekick.”

  She touches my shoulder, pulls back, and then—

  There.

  In her hand.

  Is a cockroach.

  Ravyn just plucked a cockroach off my fucking shoulder.

  I try telling myself that passing out in front of the hottest girl in the Boneyard will not be a turn-on for her in the slightest.

  That shrieking like a terrified three-year-old is not a manly thing to do.

  That if I run out of the room, I’ll probably end up falling through the decomposing stairwell and end up one floor down with a concussion—or worse.

  “He’s kind of cute,” she says, holding it up near her face. She pets its long, flat exoskeleton with the tip of her finger. “Should we name it?”

  Suddenly, kissing her holds far less appeal than it did less than a minute ago.

  “I’m not a fan,” is all I can manage to say as the urge to vomit roils in my intestines.

  Ravyn looks up at me. “You should be,” she says. “Cockroaches are really amazing creatures.”

  This can’t be happening.

  “I’m familiar with their many attributes,” I tell her, damn near choking on the words.

  She stares at me for a long, intense moment before setting the vile thing on what’s left of the windowsill.

  “They’re symbolic, don’t you think?”

  “No.” The word comes out of me too fast, hits too hard.

  “The indestructible exoskeleton. The almost transcendental will to live.”

  But all I can think about is how to get out of that room the fastest way possible.

  She steps forward. “Why the rush?” she asks as if she knows, as if she senses.

  “Haze and I. We have some shit to do.”

  “Are you on a mission, Caleb Tosh?”

  I never told her my name. Haze sure as hell didn’t say it. Not my full—

  “It’s just, we don’t have time right now because we—”

  “Time spent u
nwisely waters the seeds of regret,” she whispers, almost to herself.

  My skin pulls into a full-body pucker. The text. On the subway.

  Time unused melts into pools of regret.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “What did you say?”

  Her gaze drifts out the window.

  “Regret is the shadow cast over a life that’s been wasted,” she murmurs, staring blankly across at the skyline. “Eek wrote those lyrics.”

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  Ravyn doesn’t respond, doesn’t budge, doesn’t even seem to breathe for a minute.

  “Am I here to save you?” I press. “Or are you here to save me?”

  “No one can save you,” she finally says.

  I feel my skin peeling, ripping down the length of my body. This girl’s a Prophet. And she’s telling me no one can save me.

  “Then what’s the fucking point?” I ask, rubbing the sting of dust or whatever out of my eyes.

  But again she doesn’t answer; instead I follow her line of vision out the window, wondering what could possibly have her attention in such a headlock. All I see is the brown-gray cityscape unfurling into the distance.

  She swings toward me. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” she asks.

  I stare at her for an extra-long second, lock my sights on her as I slip the phone out of my pocket. How did she know? I never heard it go off, never even felt a buzz. I turn away just long enough to pull up the message.

  It’s a picture of a building.

  That’s it. No info, no address, nothing.

  “Hey,” I say, turning to hold the screen up where she can see it. “Does this look—”

  I stop midquestion, spin a confused circle, panic-scan every square inch of the room. Then I bolt out into the hallway, where my worst fear is confirmed.

  Ravyn is gone.

  12

  I’ve just barely processed that I’m standing alone in an abandoned hotel room when Haze’s spooked voice calls up to me.

  “Tosh! Tosh!”

  I dash toward the sound, practically colliding with him in one of the stairwells.

  “Dude,” he says, panting to catch his breath. “I was explaining the physics behind those sick acoustics in the ballroom, and—”