Ascending the Boneyard

by C. G. Watson

  If you get in that car and drive away, you really are crazy.

  If I stay here, I’m even crazier.

  Echoes of Haze’s voice ricochet off the tree bark, crash into echoes of mine, fuse together like twisted metal, careen into my head through my ear holes and tear ducts and up my nose into my brain matter, burrowing into my amygdala, sending me deep into fight-or-flight mode.

  I’m not crazy.

  I just want to save it.

  I want to keep the end from coming, man.

  All I need is one chance to make things right again.

  25

  As soon as the engine is running, the woods around me spring to life and I’m surrounded by every manner of weps, drawn and aimed straight at me.

  I quick lock the doors before pushing against the clutch as hard as I can—not an easy task with my foot shaking uncontrollably. But I jam the gears anyway, cringing as they grunt and grind until I find the right one, and not a second too soon.

  I gun it, and the soldiers roach-scatter away from the vehicle.

  Once I’m in the clear, I start machete-wielding through my own head, try not to panic, get my thoughts sorted out, watch for landmarks so I can at least figure out where the hell I am since I don’t have a mapper. At this rate, I’ll never bank enough Ascent Credits to become Worthy.

  I don’t even know who I’m raiding for anymore.

  Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I mind raiding for Showdown. Something about Mason’s mission felt so real to me, so familiar. I wanted to help her. I still do. But before I can be of any use to her, I need to finish my own battle.

  The tick-tick-ticking of the mantel clock is so earsplitting loud, I can barely hear my own thoughts. Not to mention, it takes an impossible level of exertion to stay in the seat during the rugged trip down the mountain passage.

  I’m doggedly fighting the ride when out of nowhere comes an entire battalion of soldiers looking hell-bent to stop me.

  Or kill me.

  This is dire. I have no weps, no platoon, no dps. I don’t even have a phone. All I can do is dodge the AoE spread that comes at me and drop the pedal to the floor. The trees are closing in on me tight and the road begins to narrow. But I don’t want to slow down, not even to take the curves. I can’t afford to get caught in the crossfire.

  But the next turn is a full three-sixty hairpin so sharp I have no choice but to pull my speed back to near nothing. When I finally push through it, the trees thin out just a little and the road widens up a bit, and that’s when it starts raining birds.

  Blackbirds.

  By the hundreds.

  I swerve to miss them, until I realize how dangerously stupid it is to swerve on a winding mountain road for any reason. The wheel becomes slippery in my sweat-logged hands, but I hold my position and drive on.

  Still, the birds keep coming and coming, and each time one of those little carcasses hits the windshield, it lands like a blow in the center of my chest. I have to fight the impulse to stop, get out, scoop them all up and save them so they can fly away. That’s what she wanted.

  learn to fly

  fly away

  Only I know that I can’t. If I stop to save the birds, it’ll be a suicide mission, and I’ve made it too far to give up like that.

  I turn on the wipers, sweep off the dead carcasses piled up against the windshield, swallow my own sickness as they tumble onto the road.

  I’m sorry, I silently transmit to them as each one hits the pavement behind me.

  They keep coming, though, every one identical to the still-alive bird I scooped off the track down at Goofy Golf after the die-off, identical to the one I first killed when it dive-bombed my go-kart on my twelfth birthday.

  I take one shaky hand off the wheel, fish around in my jacket pocket for the feather I found stuck inside the cup outside City Hall Station. I spin it between my fingers a few times. I still don’t know why this ended up on my Trade Screen. It hasn’t helped me in any way, hasn’t earned me Ascent Credits or given me extra rations or dropped any of the cool new weps from the expansion pack. For a while I thought it might be a special kind of buff, like an invisible shield or something. But it’s not.

  This feather hasn’t done one thing for me. It’s just a useless souvenir.

  I open the window an inch or so and let it blow out, flicking my gaze to the side-view mirror to watch it disappear behind me. A tight little lump forms in my throat as it flaps in the wind. Only it’s not just one feather anymore; it’s two, and they’re attached to the body of a bird and just before it hits the ground, it flies off.

  I flick my gaze to the rearview mirror, watch as the bird becomes smaller and smaller the higher it flies until it’s nothing but a black speck far behind me.

  When I turn back to the road, I slam the brakes so hard the Jeep almost careens off the side of the mountain. I pull over, watch as the blackbird carcasses continue to fall, turning gray and dissolving before they touch down.

  I crane my neck to look out the window. This must be some kind of screen trick. Stupid Relic; it’ll show things sometimes that aren’t really there until I toggle the mouse back and forth. But this is no trick. The birds are coming down, their falling bodies disintegrating until all I can see around me are quintillions of subatomic gray particles, and before I know it, I’m sitting on the side of the road, gearshift in neutral, in the middle of a fog so dense I can barely see past the end of the truck.

  I lean against the seat and scratch my head. The goggles—Cam’s gamer goggles—are right there on my face, just like when I left the house.

  Brain spin. Someone’s really trying to trip my shit.

  NIM. For all I know, there are enemy outposts all around me. If they can control things like earthquakes, then for sure they can control something easy, like weather. And why wouldn’t they? They know I can’t speed through triple-dense fog. They’ve got me exactly where they want me, and they want me to fail this one last, crucial time.

  I put the truck in gear, ease back onto the road, keep it much slower than I want to. I’ll never make it through this fog on these roads if I don’t maintain near-crawling speeds, but that’s also what makes me 1200 percent vulnerable. It’s a calculated risk that I have to take, because this time plan B does not exist.

  The fog congeals, and I back off the gas even more. The Relic continues to play screen tricks on me, flash-framing gray-scale chunks of Goofy Golf and Napoleon Burger at me between screen grabs of the fog-shrouded trees. I want to trust the map; I really do. I can’t throw my hands up in surrender. I know the fog is a block, that they’re trying to confuse me, make me quit. But just because I can’t see the road doesn’t mean I have to give up on the mission.

  I take a quick look around the cab to see if there’s anything in here I can use—handgun, bazooka, switchblade—which, of course, there isn’t. But lined up along the face of the dashboard is an entire panel of knobs, one of which happens to be a radio.

  Are you kidding me? How could I not have thought to look for a radio?

  I reach out, turn it on, twist the dial looking for a break in the static. But I’m up in the mountains, engulfed in air so superdense I can barely see—I mean, what are my chances of getting a signal up here?

  I hit the scan button anyway and let it run. Blips of words out of context pop out at me through the radio: a pebble of conversation here, a shard of theological wisdom there.

  Know that Jesus loves—

  WFIN in Sandusky—all talk, all the—

  It makes sense for the noise to come in and out in fragments like that. I mean, nothing will ever be intact the way it was at one time.

  I swallow the knot of sickness that pushes into my throat. Negotiate the next curve slower than I have to. Look around. Realize with a jolt that my attention has gone completely into soft focus. I sharpen the view, notice the road has taken a steep downward curve, catch a glimpse of what looks like the shores of Lake Erie through the fog-camouflaged trees. Before I can eve
n register the curved arch of the Cedar Point roller coasters in the dust-choked distance, I’m already off the hill, and while it’s not exactly sunny anymore, at least the haze has started to lift some.

  The road stretches out long and flat in front of me, and after I quick check the mirrors, I hit the gas and take off like a bat out of hell.

  But I don’t make it very far.

  Down the highway about five or ten miles, the road bucks as if something has slammed against it from deep underground, and before I know it, I’m dodging huge chunks of earth that look like they’ve been tossed across staggering distances like Styrofoam movie props. Slabs of asphalt lie scattered along the entire length of the road, chunks that the earth must have regurgitated during the recent quakes.

  I grip the wheel, swerve like crazy to keep from hitting stuff big enough to take me out of commission. But the debris is literally everywhere: toppled electrical poles, unnatural land formations, spires of black smoke dotting the landscape, a pile of wreckage, broken glass, twisted yellow metal. . . .

  My hands grip the wheel as I sweat-panic through the obstacles, force myself not to close my eyes against the devastation.

  I drop my foot to the floor, gun the engine, cut straight through a massive plume of black-charred air. For a moment, even with the goggles on, I’m blinded by the choking sting of smoke that has engulfed me.

  I can’t let it suck me in. I gotta power through, man.

  Power through, or die trying.

  25.5

  I swipe at the rivulets of sweat dripping down my face—only it’s not sweat, it turns out. It’s tears.

  I need a platoon.

  I need a mapper and a healer.

  I need cc’s.

  But I’ve got nothing.

  It’s just me.

  Caleb Tosh.

  I’ve never been more alone.

  26

  The sky is coated in a brown-gray film.

  Occasionally a radio station comes in clear enough to hear music or talking, but it’s just a blip or two before the signal is lost again. I keep it on scan anyway, in case something comes through eventually—some minuscule reassurance, at least, that I’m headed in the right direction.

  As if on cue, the static coughs itself to life, and for a few seconds, it’s a battle between bits of music versus sound bites of conversation. When it finally settles on music, I lean forward in disbelief.

  It’s Ravyn. It’s the song Ravyn sang at the Castle, when she started with the melody and Eek joined in and something about the words had wrapped so tightly around me I couldn’t breathe. It moved me that day, listening to her sing. I felt something. Something real. For the first time since my mom climbed into the bug truck with Stan.

  And I know how crazy it sounds, but that song is playing on the radio right now, and it’s her singing it, I swear. I’d know Ravyn’s voice anywhere.

  “That was the Prophets with their latest track, entitled—”

  I strain to hear the name, but the DJ’s voice sputters and falls away.

  I start panic-mashing the buttons on the panel, trying to find the song again through all the static. My gaze shifts between the radio and the road until I finally have to accept that the radio is pretty much useless at this point.

  The truck feels less and less steady the longer I drive.

  I scan the horizon for signs of battle.

  The air is full of the crackle and sulfur of unleashed rage.

  The road stretches out long and vacant in front of me, and my eyes slip in and out of focus. My head still hurts from the blow I took when I was kidnapped by the commandos, and somewhere along the way, the combination of exhaustion and pain starts messing with my head. The highway pixilates, blurring bits of shape and color in the space in front of me until I can’t distinguish asphalt from landscape anymore. I lift up the yellow goggles, rub my eyes to clear out my vision, but the road keeps narrowing, fills in with traffic. Trees materialize along its edges that weren’t there a second ago, and then people and dogs and kids on skateboards, and I swear it looks just like the street in Sandusky, Ohio, where I live.

  Up ahead, a small yellow pixel appears right smack in the middle of my line of vision. It performs an act of mitosis, splitting once, then splitting again and again until it comes into full view in the shape of a bug truck.

  Only then does it begin to close in on me; and just as it passes by, frame by stuttering frame, Stan the Bug Man turns and stares at me, and so does my mom. Shadows and light fall across her face as she watches me over her shoulder.

  I call out for her.

  But they keep going, speeding the wrong way down a one-way street, and her face washes out, and so does the Termi-Pest logo on the truck’s siding; and just as I swing forward again, hands gripping the wheel, ready to spin the truck around and go after them, a mortar round hits the road ahead of me, then another, blowing a hole in the asphalt big enough to swallow me and the Jeep whole.

  I jerk the wheel to keep from falling into it, but the movement is too quick, too uncontrolled. I start flipping, flipping, more times than I can count. By the time the truck stops rolling, I’m sure I’ve been ejected, that I’m bleeding out on the side of the road.

  Something inside me isn’t right. I can feel it. Like someone hit the kill switch, and now the signal between my brain and my road-thrashed body has been sheared off at the core.

  I try to move, but I can’t.

  Can’t get my eyes to open.

  Can’t talk.

  Can’t even hear myself think over the sound of all the air traffic.

  Wait a minute. . . . What’s with all the air traffic?

  I squint my eyes, get them to open to little slits, just enough to make out a sky full of Chinooks and Harriers and F-16 fighter jets. Some of them shoot rounds toward the ground; they are instantly returned, which means there must be tanks or brigades amassed along the side of the road, engaging them.

  I’m lying half dead right in the middle of the Battle of UpRising, and I have nothing left to fight with.

  “T-Man!”

  It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open, let alone focus on who’s calling my name.

  “You’re still in it! Your platoon’s holding off mobs of infiltrators, but they can’t keep them down much longer. If you can get to the tunnels, you’re in. You’re ready to Ascend, dude. Ascend!”

  I’m having trouble squaring the sound of Cam Tyler’s voice with the sight of his toon, Tyco, kneeling on the ground next to me. All I know is, there are no tunnels. I can’t Ascend now.

  “It’s a trap,” I tell him, the words semistuck inside my mouth.

  “No, it’s not!” He grabs me by the arm of my coat and tries to hoist me up. “Doomstalkers has 12/12 for UpRising. We got full rezzes and heals, and Deathtoaliens found the entrance to Turk’s lair!”

  He doesn’t understand. Turk just passed me in his bright yellow Termi-Pest truck going the other way. He’s not in the tunnels anymore. He’s not anywhere anymore.

  She was with him.

  And they were going the wrong way.

  Another mortar round hits too close for comfort. Rocks and debris scud all around us, but I can’t make myself get out of the line of fire.

  “You’ve got full weps and max damage,” Tyco screams. “Goddammit, Tosh, if you don’t launch, you’re gonna draw aggro and we’ll be—”

  The ground is rocked by explosion. I raise my hand to block out the lethal brightness of a helicopter bursting apart in a midair cataclysm of fire and smoke. Tunnel raiders stagger down the highway in flames; others scream against the agonizing strikes of machine-gun rounds as they drop like bugs in an extermination death march.

  It’s gonna be another wipe.

  I drag myself to a sitting position while Tyco geeks out nearby, hopping around, shouting orders at me to “Level” and “Ascend.” Something quick-whizzes next to my head, and the next thing I know, Tyco collapses onto the road next to me.

  I look arou
nd to see who took him out, watch in horror as infiltrators pour out of every abandoned, burnt-out, decaying building and onto the highway. They are fully loaded with weps and max damage, follow shoot-to-kill orders on UpperWorld soldiers and tunnel raiders, who fly through the air spurting blood and profanity as they die.

  Just down the road, an anti-aircraft tank nose-dives into one of the craters laid open by mortar fire. Behind it, the convoy slams its collective brakes, and the panicked shriek of metal on metal pierces straight through the chaos of battle. Too late. The tanks and Jeeps crash into one another, triggering an explosive collision of chassis and fire and smoke and glass. I throw my arm up, shield my face from the fiery blast wave that follows.

  The world goes deafeningly silent.

  Flaming embers, wisps of charred debris, spirals of blackened smoke rain down from the sky, fall all around me without a trace of sound.

  Everyone.

  Everything.

  Gone.

  26.5

  The blackbird just lay there on the go-kart track, flapping its little wings like it was begging someone to notice it wasn’t dead.

  I don’t understand why it had to go and die. I mean, it must have known that someone was coming to save it. Otherwise, why would it have fought so hard? What good does it do to stay alive through all the crap stuff only to give up right at the end, just when things are about to turn around?

  27

  The only thing moving are the pyres of smoke rising up all around me.

  Every car, truck, and tank is upended; every helicopter a smoldering hull of fuselage on the ground.

  Soldiers and commandos alike, all dead. Even Tyco.

  I’m sprawled out in the dust and rubble of complete and total loss. Not bleeding the way I thought I would be. Nothing seems broken.

  Except that everything seems broken. There isn’t a square inch of me that doesn’t ache with defeat.

  I drag myself across the crumbling landscape, grab on to the fender of an overturned delivery truck, pull myself vertical. Try to absorb the totality of destruction.