Ascending the Boneyard

by C. G. Watson

  “What’s in Xanadu?” I ask, testing her.

  “Home.”

  “Whose home?”

  She smiles without looking at me, nods without answering.

  “Whose home?” I ask again.

  “You’re a clever little monkey, aren’t you?”

  For the first time since we met her, Starla clams up, and the next few hours pass long and quiet. We let the drone of talk radio fill up the space inside the car. We stop for food, which Haze pays for. We stop for gas, which Haze pays for. Starla never offers, never thanks us; it’s almost like she thinks she’s the one doing us a favor.

  We spend the night in the car in a parking lot somewhere, and in the morning the fog still has a choke hold on everything in sight. Buildings, trees, cars, people, all reduced to vague shapes and variegated shades of white and gray.

  The known will cease to exist.

  15.5

  Starla Manley is not who she says she is.

  16

  I don’t know how to prove it.

  And maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I don’t know what else to think of this girl. Sure, she looks like one of those self-consciously sexy UnderWorld hostages. I even thought that part of this mission was to rescue her. Now I don’t know what to think.

  Only that this girl is no more Starla Manley than I am.

  With the fog pressing in on us from every angle, we roll into town, down street after street of limestone buildings that have all but disappeared in the thick, milky air. My mind drifts from the fog to the Castle to I-Tech as we push through miles of the same sameness.

  I reach my hand into my bag, let the fringe of the blackbird feather slip against the tips of my fingers. I take it out, move it to my coat pocket.

  The known will cease to exist.

  I don’t hear the words so much as feel them echo through the gaping emptiness inside my body. Devin. The go-kart track. Haze was there—he knows what it was like. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d wanted to. How was I supposed to know nothing would ever be the same after that?

  The fog thins out some as we turn off the highway onto a single-lane road that’s overgrown and weedy, past an old brick building with GOLD MEDAL FLOUR painted on the side, just barely visible through the mist. A rusty, tilted sign off the side of the road says ON-RAMP even though there’s no highway in sight, then one more turn down a dirt path, followed by a long haul to the end of it, and the whole time, Starla doesn’t utter a single word.

  She finally stops in the middle of a crack-ridden parking lot, pulls the hand brake. Haze and I lean forward to get a better view.

  “What’s this?” he half whispers as we stare at the amusement park percolating in the fog before us. The spiraled bones of a roller coaster rising in the distance, the long-chained swings of Devin’s favorite ride swaying against a phantom breeze. The chipped plastic face of a clown with a snow cone dangling by a single screw from the roof of a warped food hut. I always got blue coconut, even though the old man said it was a wuss flavor. He hailed Devin’s choice of tiger’s blood.

  “I thought you said park,” Haze adds, the words bathed in accusation.

  Except, clearly, that’s what this is.

  The last time I saw this parking lot, it was packed with news vans. They’re gone now. Mostly gone, anyway, except for a single burnt-out, rusted hull tipped over on its side at the far end of the lot.

  One last, lone Airstream trailer sits just inside the entrance, right behind a bolted gate with no fence around it.

  Inside the car, nobody moves.

  “It’s okay,” Starla finally says. “Go.” As I reach for the door handle, she snorts and adds, “It’s not the end of the world, for God’s sake.”

  The words flay the skin right off my bones.

  The end is near.

  I slow-mo my way out of the car and Haze stumbles out after me. We stand there, slack-armed and confused as all hell, until I hear Starla jam the car in reverse. I swing around just in time to see her blast off down the dirt road. She doesn’t even shift gears before taking the turn onto the street, and as the little gray sedan disappears in a puff of dust and fog, I realize with a thousand volts of raw, electric horror that I just made the third-worst mistake of my life.

  “Hey!” I scream. “Hey, wait!” I lunge down the road after her, chasing the car on foot and hurling an Uzi round of profanity the entire way.

  Haze trots after me. “Tosh! What’s wrong?”

  How do I begin to articulate that Starla Manley has just left us stranded in the middle of nowhere . . . ?

  And she took my phone with her.

  I don’t make it very far down the dirt road before I start wheezing in agony. I bend over, grab my thighs, catch my breath until I’m ready to launch again.

  “Damn it all to hell!” I scream, kicking at the dead grass shriveled inside cracks of faded asphalt.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I don’t want to say it. I really don’t. But I have to.

  I brace myself.

  “Starla’s got my phone.”

  “What? You let her take it? Why’d you let her take it?”

  “I didn’t let her do anything, Haze. It was plugged in when she fled the scene. Goddamn sonofabitch!”

  The door of the Airstream flies open and a wiry coat hanger of a man in a wheelchair rolls down a too-short wooden ramp, gaining momentum as he hits the bottom.

  He spins the rear wheel with one hand and levels the barrel of a shotgun right at us with the other.

  “I hope you boys know Jesus!” he calls out.

  My arms fly up in surrender, like I did that day at Goofy Golf when I was surrounded by commandos. I start to back away, but it soon becomes obvious that there’s no need to beg for our lives here. I drop my hands back down, stick them in my pockets, and nod at him, just once.

  “You selling tickets today?” I ask.

  Haze latches his stunned gaze onto me. I’d do the same in his position.

  The old geezer sizes the two of us up without saying a word. For a second I think maybe he’s fallen asleep. I keep my eyes on the gun, and as soon as the barrel flags just a bit, I take a step or two forward.

  “Who are ya?” the geezer finally says, reanimating, using the gun to point at us in a way that makes me bead with sweat. “What d’ya want?”

  “We want to buy some—”

  “Y’don’t look like much, neither of ya.”

  “No, I guess not,” I say, eyeing the way his wilted body folds into the harsh angles of the wheelchair. A little backwash of stomach juice rises into my throat, and for a split second the old geezer goes in and out of sight, strobing alternate images of him and Devin in that chair. I swallow against the burn.

  “We’d like to go in,” I say. “Do we need tickets for that?”

  The shriveled old carny dismisses the thought with a wave of his gun-wielding hand.

  “No one come in here in years. Decades.” He turns and spits, mumbles something unintelligible.

  “Are you the only carny left?” I ask.

  I can hear Haze’s breath spinning through his filters.

  The old guy lets his arm go limp, lets the barrel brush against the ground. “Others left after the accident,” he says.

  The air fills with distant, silent screams and the hollow sound of chopper blades. I clamp my eyes shut, wishing I had my phone, wishing I could drown out the noise.

  Others left after the accident.

  After the accident.

  “So . . . the tickets?” I ask again, squeezing my face tight to keep the sting off it.

  I look up just in time to catch his watery, hazel eyes follow the twisted, rusting skyline of the amusement park.

  “This place.” The rifle wobbles in his flimsy grip as he points it in the general direction of the park. “It don’t sing anymore. Don’t dance. People say it got no soul.”

  I squeeze my eyes so tight they burn. But I still see Devin. Curled up and useless. Swimming in
his oversized wheelchair.

  Haze’s elbow catches me between two ribs. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “You watch your mouth,” the old guy says, wiping spit off his mouth with the back of his hand. “It hears you. It knows your heart.”

  Haze turns his head away from the carny, lowers his voice to a whisper.

  “This guy’s a goddamn lunatic, Tosh.”

  “You boys need to quit talking about God like He ain’t here,” the old man says. “He’s everywhere, an’ don’t you forget it! The Lord Almighty will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire.”

  I hazard a few more slow steps toward the carny, my heart metal-thrashing a frantic rhythm inside me. “Can we go in?” I ask, hoping to snap him out of his incoherent tirade.

  “Thunder and earthquake!” The old geezer starts pushing himself around the yard, his rickety wheelchair wheezing from the exertion. “Tempest! And flames!”

  He doesn’t even know we’re here anymore. I grab Haze by the arm, push him past the locked gate with no fence around it as the carny shouts on, waving the rifle around for emphasis.

  “The end will come! You’ll see. You’ll see, boy.”

  The words ring in my ears like gunshots.

  I spin around. “What’d you say?”

  But the old guy is rolling in circles, lost in his rant. “Windstorm, and great noise!”

  Haze pushes me forward, and we stumble onto the amusement-park grounds. I run like I know where I’m going, like I’ve been here before. Which I have. I mean, I’ve been to Goofy Golf loads of times, only Goofy Golf doesn’t have a roller coaster—you have to go to Cedar Point for that. Not that we ever did. The old man would never spring for us to go to a deluxe park like Cedar Point. Maybe if we’d gone there on my birthday instead—

  I snap off the end of that thought, use the soaring track of the roller coaster as my beacon, spot the go-kart track up ahead. Buggies piled in a junk heap off to the side. Even so, I can almost hear the roar of the engines echo faint in my ears.

  “Tosh, wait up,” Haze says, and it’s only then that I realize I’m running.

  Running straight for the track, which is barricaded by chain-link. Nothing in my arsenal to cut through something like that.

  Haze easily catches up to me, says nothing as I clutch at the fence till my fingers go numb. I stare at the bleached-out buggies stacked up against the concrete wall, exposed to time and the elements.

  I’d give damn near anything for some Bunny Puke in my ear to drown out the phantom noises of the go-kart engines, the screams of people plunging down the steep arc of the now-crippled roller coaster, and the whispered echoes of carnies hawking corn dogs and cotton candy and funnel cakes.

  I start pulling at the fence, hoping to find a weak spot, an opening, a section that’s not clamp-fused to the rusted metal posts. I have to get in there. Have to go back, to fix it. To save it. It’ll be different this time. This time I’ll know exactly what to do—that’s why I got the expansion pack, ASCEND: Armageddon. To get another chance at coming back to this level. To try it again.

  I alternate tugging at the fence and grunting like a caged animal, but the sound is hollow and distant, like it’s bouncing back at me from somewhere else.

  “Tosh,” Haze says. “Tosh.”

  I start to climb.

  “What are you doing?”

  I can’t tell him the truth now—we’re too far in it. I could never make Haze understand the simple appeal of the Boneyard: if you fail, you can always try again.

  All I have to do is become Worthy.

  As I tumble over the back side of the fence, I feel the blowback from the go-karts whizzing past, even though I know these karts haven’t been moved in years.

  Winded from the climb, I bend down, quick catch my breath. I taste the ages-old exhaust fumes and remnants of deep-fried funk that seem to still hang in the fog after all this time as I suck in lungfuls of air.

  I open my eyes, shoot my gaze straight at the dog pile of go-karts, mentally stripping away each buggy until I see the one at the bottom, the one beneath it all. Dim yellow paint chipped in sections, frame twisted up like it’s cowering in fear.

  Back tire spinning for no discernible reason.

  “You boys wait up!”

  I’m not sure how he made it so far so fast, but the carny’s calling out from behind us.

  “Hey! Stop right there!”

  I turn in time to see the guy come jogging straight up to us, and my blood runs cold as I crane my head around, looking for a wheelchair that should be there but isn’t. My vision short-circuits, flickering like when the cable goes out. For a split second I see news footage of the bird die-off down at Goofy Golf blinking in between the abandoned highway in the Boneyard and the carny, who’s now headed our way.

  I spin around, grab Haze by the arms, hoping I can see something in his lenses: a superimposed view of the map, maybe, or the reflection of a Medic in those mirrors, or any explanation for the massive heal that has turned the old geezer into a fucking soldier whose hulked-up body is jogging, not walking, toward us.

  But all I see in the reflection of his cop shades is the Caleb Tosh who turned twelve at the Goofy Golf Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio, four years ago.

  The young, sweat-stained carny is right over my shoulder.

  “You need tickets for this!” he barks around a fat cigar.

  “I know how we can sneak in,” Haze says, and I turn my disbelieving eyes on his bare head: no shades, no beanie, no face mask. Just his dusty head of stiff kid hair, so dirty it doesn’t even move as we spin off toward the tracks.

  I go back to scanning the go-karts with an urgency I can’t explain. They’re all lined up now, a row of shiny, happy buggies just waiting for action. I recognize ours right off: the bright yellow two-seater, sitting at the front of the pack, chugging and ready to go.

  “Hurry,” Haze says, pushing up against me. “The carny!”

  “Screw the carny!” I shout with glee.

  “Shh! Don’t let your mom hear.”

  My mom . . . ?

  I swing around, recoil at the blast wave of “Surprise!” that hits me. About a dozen kids from school sit around a Goofy Golf picnic table with a plastic tablecloth covering it, festive paper plates scattered along both sides, and dozens of balloons and an ass-load of candy and punch and a big old sheet cake frosted in white with those brightly colored icing balloons that turn your whole mouth blue.

  I look up. My old man’s got a cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth, and next to him, my mom is standing stiff and tight, like someone shrink-wrapped her.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask, gape-mouthed.

  “It’s your birthday, jackass,” the old man says. “Don’t go and do anything stupid.”

  “Come on,” Haze says, pulling me by the sleeve. “Let’s hit the go-karts.”

  Hey, yeah! Once a kid turns twelve, he can ride without a grown-up. Haze and I have been waiting for this day our whole lives.

  “Come on!” Haze calls out. “What’s the holdup?”

  “We’re going to the go-karts!” I shout, and the posse of boys sitting at the table scrambles after us.

  “Take your brother!” the old man bellows.

  When we hit the tracks, Devin wants to ride with us.

  “Get your own, ass-puke,” I say, gloating over the fact that he’s two years too young to get his own.

  “But I wanna ride with you guys.” He starts climbing into the bright yellow buggy with us.

  “Buzz off!” I push my hand against his chest, against the thin fabric of his T-shirt, against the bright green background with the yellow Termi-Pest logo printed across the front.

  COCKROACHES ARE OUR SPECIALTY.

  Haze shoves me into the seat and climbs in over me. He takes the last few sips of pop and throws the cup out of the buggy as I fire it up, shooting down the tracks like a bat out
of hell.

  Devin gets into the kart behind us with a kid from my class who I hate so much I’m not even sure why he’s at my party except that our moms somehow know each other.

  I gun it.

  “Slow down!” Haze calls to me, but I’m a newly minted twelve-year-old on a mission.

  “Slow down!” he screams, pointing at a blackbird that’s headed straight for us. “Watch out!”

  I scream, jerk the wheel. Our go-kart slams into Devin’s, ricochets into the wall. Tire hits concrete, go-kart goes vertical, catches, flips over once, twice, tangles with Devin’s.

  In a flash, we’re strewn across the track, the air around us thick with shrieking go-kart engines and cries of agonizing pain.

  I open my eyes.

  The doctor is setting my broken arm and I’m screaming bloody murder because it hurts like hell and my mom is folded into the corner of the room as the old man rants about how this is the fifth emergency-room visit we’ve made that year alone and how if Devin and I weren’t such jackasses we wouldn’t be in this position again, and I can’t even sit next to her and comfort her because the next thing I know, this other doctor comes in and just blurts it out.

  He will never walk again. He will never talk again.

  Devin’s body is an abandoned, empty hull.

  I haven’t even been twelve for a whole day.

  • • •

  The fog rolls in as the wheels of that faded yellow go-kart spin silently at the bottom of the heap.

  Haze calls over to me as I lift myself out of a crouch, as I start walking, then running, down the go-kart track. I hear him jogging to catch up to me as I get to the third turn, where I fully expect to see a green-and-yellow drink cup with a mostly dead bird lying next to it.

  But it isn’t the bird I see below the skid mark, not moving, barely breathing.

  It’s Devin.

  Crumpled on the concrete track inside his worn black hoodie.

  Curled into an impossible-shaped heap.

  The puniest of agonized moans leaking onto the concrete next to a thin stream of blood.

  “Devin!”

  Haze grabs my jacket as I lunge forward.

  “Tosh! There’s nothing there,” he says as the blood and the hoodie and the Devin-shaped heap disintegrate into particles of fog, rise up in a sudden gust of wind, spin around us before dissipating into the agitated sky.