GHOST CROWN: THE TRACKS TRILOGY - Book Two

by J. Gabriel Gates

  On one side of the fort, a lean-to structure stood erratically against one wall. Its roof was a cracked, plastic Shell gas station sign. Together, Raph and Aimee peered inside. There were a few soiled rags, some sharpened sticks, and more bones. A ring of stones surrounded a pit of dark ashes, but it looked to Aimee as if there hadn’t been a fire there in a long time. Unless the men wanted to start tearing down their fort, there was nothing to burn—at least nothing she could see on this devastated landscape. An ancient-looking M-16 assault rifle leaned against one wall, but it was covered in dust, its barrel bent. It was clearly unusable. The smell inside the lean-to was bad—like rotten meat marinated in sweat, and Aimee couldn’t stay in there for long. Raphael followed her back out into the icy wind.

  “She’s not here,” Aimee said, her voice barely audible over the gale. Raphael put an arm around her. “It’s okay,” she continued. “I’m glad she wasn’t in this place, with them. But I heard her voice. You did, too.”

  He nodded.

  If she’s not here, then where is she? The question echoed through Aimee’s mind. “If Oberon brought her through with the Wheel, she could be lost in some other time,” she said.

  “Or even some other dimension,” Raphael said gently. “We’ll figure it out, I promise. But for now, let’s get out of here. There might be more of them, and we don’t know when they’ll be back.”

  She took Raphael’s hand and together, they walked out of the fortress. As they made their way down the slippery hillside, she asked, “What do you think happened—to make the world like this?”

  Raphael only shook his head. “It could have been anything,” he said. “Some natural disaster. Or—like you said—an asteroid. But . . . I think it was war.”

  “If this is the supposed to be the future, does it have to turn out this way, or do you think we can we change it?”

  “I sure hope we can change it.”

  He picked up the windsurfer from where it lay tipped over on the desert floor and gestured for Aimee to get on it with him. A second later, they were skimming across the cracked, ruined ground at an unbelievable speed. They made it back to the tunnel mound in what seemed to Aimee like no more than two minutes.

  As they headed up the tracks, into the mouth of the tunnel, Aimee hazarded one more glance over her shoulder and noticed something she hadn’t seen when they first arrived. What she had taken for a boulder was in fact the top of a tank turret, almost completely buried in the ground.

  “It was a war,” she said.

  “Hmm?” Raphael asked. He was digging through his backpack, looking for the flashlight.

  “Nothing,” Aimee said. “Let’s get out of here. This time sucks.”

  

  Aimee experienced a barrage of conflicting emotions on her walk back to Hilltop Haven. She was relieved and disappointed they hadn’t found her mother in that weird alien world, but she was still worried. Wherever her mom was, she might be in terrible danger. If Raphael was right about the Wheel, and about traveling through time, then her mom could be trapped in one of any number of alternate worlds.

  But knowing that Raphael loved her, and that he was willing to fight anyone or anything to keep her safe, was a feeling Aimee had never experienced, and it filled her with a giddy, feverish warmth. It made the thought of losing him even harder to bear.

  He was always thinking of her best interest, too. Though she’d insisted on staying with him in the Flats until her dad showed up and dragged her onto the Montana-bound plane, Raph had convinced her to go home.

  “It’ll work out somehow,” he’d assured her as they walked out of the tunnels together, hand-in-hand. “But if you run away with me now, your dad is going to find you, and he might do something even worse than send you to Montana. I can’t let that happen, Aimee. I think you’d better go back, at least for tonight, until we can come up with a better plan.”

  She protested at first. Deep down she knew he was right, but that didn’t make the idea of leaving him any easier to stomach.

  By the time she got back to Hilltop Haven, her dad would probably have the plane ticket all lined up to send her back to Montana—tonight, for all she knew. She spent the rest of her walk concocting an elaborate escape plan. If her dad insisted on sending her away again, then fine, she would leave. But she wouldn’t go to Montana. She’d go someplace her dad would never find her—and somehow, she’d find a way to take Raphael with her.

  As she came around a row of bushes, she saw her dad’s car pulling into the driveway. She ducked back behind a hedge, praying he hadn’t spotted her.

  She watched as the garage door slowly lowered, obscuring her dad’s custom license plate, and then she came out of her hiding place. She ran as fast as she could up the side of the house, to the trellis, trying desperately to make it to her bedroom before he did. The first thing he would do the minute he got inside, she knew, would be to go upstairs and check on her.

  She clambered up the trellis like a monkey with a sugar rush. Near the top, one of the wooden slats snapped beneath her foot, but she clung to the vine it supported and managed to keep from falling. Crawling up onto the rooftop, she shot across it in a crouching run, all the while listening for her dad’s voice calling up the stairs to her. She slid her window open and dove inside, headfirst. She could already hear his footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Aimee?” he called.

  She fought to disentangle herself from her curtains and yanked the window shut.

  “Yeah!”

  He was outside the door now; his hand on the knob.

  “You decent? I’m coming in?”

  She fought to pull her coat off, but the zipper was stuck. She yanked it up over her head, thrashing.

  She could hear the doorknob turning as she frantically pulled the coat free and stuffed it under her bed, and then she grabbed a book and flopped down on her stomach on top of her duvet. She opened the book a microsecond before her dad opened the door.

  “What have you been up to today?” he asked, already suspicious.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Reading, homework. You know.”

  “Not thinking about your actions and how they affect this family?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I did some of that, too.”

  He nodded, his brow furrowed. “We got the news on your brother’s arm, in case you were wondering.”

  “Right. Sorry. What did the doctor say?”

  “It’s a break,” he said solemnly. “He’s out for the rest of the season.”

  Karma’s a bitch, huh bro? she thought. Out loud she said, “Oh—that sucks.” For a flash, she almost felt some sympathy for Rick. Football was pretty much the only thing in life he cared about; the news today must have been devastating for him.

  “It sucks alright,” her dad agreed, and then his eyes narrowed. “What happened to you?”

  Panic threatened. “What do you mean?” she asked tentatively.

  He pointed to his own ear, and she reached up and touched hers. It stung, and her fingers came away bloody. The memory of that desert rider biting her ear flashed in her mind for a moment. The skeletal thing hadn’t taken a chunk off or anything, but he’d perforated it through and through.

  “Oh, it’s just . . . I was trying to pierce my ear. It didn’t work.” She shrugged and added, “I was bored.”

  He only shook his head, the look on his face a mixture of bewilderment, annoyance, and disgust. “Pizza’s on the way. Be down in five.”

  “Wait—what about Montana?”

  “It’s all set,” he told her. “We’re just waiting for a space to open up—and that could happen any day.” He started to leave her room and then turned back. “And one more thing,” he said with exaggerated patience. “If you don’t stay away from that Kain kid, I’m going to ruin his life. And it’ll be your fault.”

  He shut the door beh
ind him, but his words hung in the air, as black as a flock of crows.

  Aimee flopped back on the bed and let out a deep, pent-up sigh. For now at least, she was safe. But her father’s final words echoed through her mind again and again.

  I’m going to ruin his life. And it’ll be your fault . . .

  

  Nass stared out the window, through the heavy purple of twilight, at the apartment building across the street. Earlier, he’d taken a walk around the block with Clarisse tagging along (even though he’d tried to discourage her), and he’d seen a Shao Construction pickup truck parked in the back. Since then, workers had put cardboard over all the first-floor windows so it was impossible to look inside, but now Nass could see lines of yellow light around the edges of the cardboard. The construction guys were in there, and they were working on something.

  “Hey, ’Nacio,” Clarisse called from the kitchen. “Come help us with dinner.”

  Nass rolled his eyes. Was there no escaping her?

  “Coming,” he said.

  Little Geno’s Pizza Oven closed unexpectedly for the day, for some kind of meeting with the new owner, and Nass had hoped to head over to Dalton’s house to try to patch things up. But he’d had no such luck: Clarisse was following him around like a shadow. Raph was off with Aimee, and the rest of the Flatliners were at their weekend jobs or having family time. So with nowhere to go and nothing to do, he’d been stuck in the house all day while his mom and Clarisse prattled away together in Spanish.

  Nass’s mom was born in Mexico, in Monterrey, so Spanish was her first language. But his dad was born in Arizona, so Nass grew up hearing a mix of the two languages—but mostly English. And although he knew some rudimentary Spanish, he couldn’t follow the rapid-fire dialog his mom exchanged with Clarisse—who was fluent.

  Half the time they’d look over at him and laugh happily, and when he would irritably ask them what they were saying, his mom would respond with something like, “Relax, mijo. We’re just talking about how cute you are,” and she and Clarisse would burst out laughing again. Now they were in the kitchen, giggling and making dinner together.

  The inside jokes weren’t really what was bugging him, he thought as he glanced down at his cell phone. No missed calls. In the few private moments he’d found today, he had called Dalton three times. Each time he’d left a message with Lily Rose, who told him Dalton would have to call him back; except she hadn’t. He knew she was mad at him, and he totally understood why, but that didn’t make it any more bearable. Not being able to talk to her about it was torture.

  At least he had his lookout duty to keep him occupied, he thought as he shoved his phone back into his pocket. Ignacio wandered back to his post at the window. Just as he leaned against the frame, a pair of headlights drifted up the street outside and stopped in front of Emory’s building. It was a big, new, white Caddy, and the two guys who got out of it looked to Nass like a couple of 1930s gangsters, complete with funky old-school derby hats. They slammed their car doors and headed up the driveway, toward the back of the apartment building.

  The knowing crept into Nass’s bones again. Whoever these guys were, they had something to do with why that building had been cleared out. A big something.

  He started for the door.

  “Hey,” Clarisse said, poking her head out the kitchen doorway. “You helping or what?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just a sec. I just—forgot something in the car,” he said.

  Clarisse wrinkled her nose up and threw a black olive at him. He caught it in his mouth and winked at her as he chewed it up, and she blew him a kiss. As he slipped out the door, he could hear her laughing. Conflict rippled through him as he remembered all the fun they’d always had together. But Dalton was so . . . so Dalton! He couldn’t imagine being without her. And he couldn’t tell her why Clarisse had suddenly come back into his life and why she had to stay there for a while.

  He dialed her number again as he hurried down the stairs.

  As it rang, he stepped out the front door of his apartment house, crossed the street and stopped to lean against a thick tree trunk. From this shadowy vantage point, he could keep an eye on the building without being seen.

  Dalton’s phone was still ringing. Finally, Lily Rose’s ancient answering machine picked up. His brain churned into overdrive, trying to come up with something to say, but when the beep came, he was still pretty much blank. He cleared his throat to buy himself some time.

  “Hey, uh, it’s me, Ignacio. Nass,” his voice sounded unnaturally low and serious and he wished he could start over, but that would be really stupid, so he continued. “Dalton, if you can, call me back, all right? I need to talk to you. Um—it’s Nass. Okay. Bye.”

  He shut his phone and sighed, pretty sure he’d just made an ass of himself.

  “Important call?”

  He jumped and turned to find Clarisse standing behind him, her keen eyes watching him.

  “Your mom sent me out to see what you’re doing. She’s worried about you.”

  “Oh. I was just—” Suddenly a low, rumbling hum seemed to vibrate up from the ground, through the soles of his feet. Actually, he thought, it wasn’t so much a sound as a feeling. “You feel that?” he asked.

  Clarisse nodded. She was frowning, as if concentrating on the sensation. “You have earthquakes here?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. But that’s what it felt like. A tiny, sustained tremor. He turned back to stare at the apartment building a moment, and then he started walking toward it. With each step he took, the vibration beneath his feet grew more pronounced. Clarisse came up next to him.

  “I think it’s coming from over here,” she said, moving closer to the building, but Nass grabbed her arm.

  “No, don’t go in there—it might not be safe,” he said quickly, and wondered why he’d said it. Probably, whoever was renovating the building had some heavy equipment running.

  But no, the knowing told him—it was more than that. “We shouldn’t go snooping around,” he finished.

  Clarisse slipped out of his grasp. “All right, fine. Let’s go home, then—your mom will wig out if the food gets cold.”

  As Clarisse took his hand and pulled him back across the street, a host of emotions assailed Nass all at once. He felt worried and loved and confused—but most of all he felt trapped.

  

  Raphael, Nass, and Clarisse stood atop Raphael’s apartment building, passing around a pair of old hunting binoculars that had been Raphael’s dad’s. When Nass called to report the activity at Emory’s old building, Raphael had invited him to come over. He had guessed that his building’s view of the back of Emory’s apartment would be more useful than Nass’s view of the front—and so far, he’d been right. From their high vantage point, leaning cautiously on the rickety iron rail of the rooftop widow’s walk, they had been able to see half a dozen men going in and out of the back door of the building. Several of them were Asian—special employees of Shao construction, Raphael guessed, and the rest looked like regular, all-American construction-worker types, though Raphael didn’t recognize any of them. He guessed they were probably day laborers from Benton.

  “What do you think they’re doing in there?” Raphael wondered aloud.

  “Just renovating, I guess,” Nass said with a shrug. “It sucks that they kicked everyone out to do it, though.”

  Clarisse gave Nass a look. “They’re not renovating,” she said.

  “No? Why do you say that?”

  “Come on,” she responded impatiently. “Your dad worked with my dad in renovation for the last eighteen years—and you don’t know anything about it?” She turned to Raphael and explained. “The first step of any renovation project is demolition. So if they’re doing renovations, why aren’t we seeing them come out with old toilets, sinks, buckets full of debris? There’d be a huge dumpster som
eplace to put all the junk in. There’s none of that here. Just a couple guys coming out to make phone calls or smoke cigarettes, then going back in.”

  “True,” Nass agreed.

  “So what are they doing?” Raph asked.

  As if in response to his question, two of the Asian workers came out the back door of the building and walked over to the bed of the pickup truck. They pulled back a heavy black tarp and carefully unloaded a large contraption. It had a big, T-shaped metal handle and there was a white disk, about three feet wide, suspended from the bottom of the T. At that moment, the two men in the derby hats came out the back door and stood on the stoop, watching the workers as they set the T contraption upright. One of them was holding a briefcase.

  “Those are the weird-hat guys I saw going in!” Nass said.

  As they watched, the two workers removed a black, rectangular plate that was attached to the T and gave it to one of the hat guys. The way he was handling it, it seemed to Raph like an iPad or something. The two workers each grabbed one side of the T handle and methodically carried it back and forth across the yard, sweeping the disk over tufts of wilted grass. The man on the porch gazed intently at the screen of the iPad thing.

  “It looks like a big metal detector or something,” Nass said quietly.

  Raphael nodded. “Or sonar. Something like that.” He lifted the binoculars again and kept them under surveillance.

  The shorter of the two derby-hat guys opened his briefcase, took something out of it, and walked down into the yard. At first, Raph couldn’t make out what it was. Then it caught the moonlight and he understood—sort of. The item the man was holding was shaped like a big Y or more accurately, a wishbone. Made of some sort of highly polished silver metal, it glittered in the starlight and from the way the guy was holding it—delicately, with one tip of the wishbone between the forefinger and thumb of each hand—it was also very light. The man waded down into the weed-filled backyard and slowly marched along behind the workers with the sonar device, holding the metal “Y” parallel to the ground and watching it intently.