“Who’s next?” Travis asked once the pair finally unlocked lips.
Kyle shot a look towards Cody. “Sophie, of course.” He grinned, though it was difficult to read under the shadows cast by his hood. Maybe it was just the idea of hanging out with Sophie Pearce in close quarters that put him on edge. He had only ever really passed her in the hall, and even that was enough to make his heart race. Even if he did have a thing for Holly Marsh, he was thousands of miles away. What happened in Alaska, stayed in Alaska, right?
Cody tore himself away from Kyle’s gaze and glanced up the street. “Doesn’t Brandon live near Sophie?”
Kyle and Travis were already walking down the street. Amy turned over her shoulder, lip curled in disgust. “The fat kid? He’s not joining us, is he?”
Cody half-jogged, catching up with the rest of them. “You didn’t invite him?”
“Fuck no,” Kyle rebuked. “You think we’re going to be dragging around that tub of lard if shit hits the fan?”
“What if the cops come?” Travis asked. “He’ll blab everything. Ain’t no way he’s going to be outrunning them on those two stubby legs.”
Cody overtook the group and turned to face them, walking backwards to match their stride. Now that they were out in the cold air his sleepiness had gone and he felt a fresh wave of energy running through him. “He’s a good guy. He’s not going to dob us in if the cops come, okay. He’s also got a spare ball that’d be useful if something happens to the first one.”
Plus, having him here would make me feel a whole lot easier about all of this.
Kyle considered this for a long moment as they passed under the glow of the streetlights and turned right onto Abbington Alley. Cody’s eyes drifted above them to where towards the Aurora, noting that the strange red hue had overtaken almost half of the green, and looked as though it was continuing to bleed across the lights.
“Fine,” Kyle said. “You want your snuggle blanket, you can go get him. We’re not slowing down for fatso just because you want him here.”
Amy let go of Kyle’s hand and threw down her fists. “Are you kidding me? You’re letting him join?”
“Sure. Why not?” The grin was back on his face. “New kid makes a good point. If the cops come, we can use him as fodder to slow them down.”
“Just like that joke about the bear.” Travis touched his chin, his brow creasing in thought. “How fast do you need to run to outrun a bear? It doesn’t matter. Just run faster than the guy behind you.”
“Or girl,” Amy added.
Kyle nodded. “Exactly.”
Travis took the basketball from Kyle and prodded the exterior. “The extra ball wouldn’t go amiss, either. When was the last time this was pumped? 1982?”
Cody’s brows knitted together but he remained silent. There was no use arguing with them, they had their opinions of Brandon, and he had his. If anything, he only felt thankful that he wasn’t going to be left alone with Kyle and Amy. While Sophie’s presence was definitely a helpful reason to be outside at this late hour, the farther he strayed from his house, the more he wished he had stayed indoors.
Why? So you can sit in your bed and shiver until your nipples are tough enough to cut glass?
Cody remained tight-lipped and bit back a retort to Travis, his eyes lingering on the Aurora for a moment longer as the strange magnetic phenomenon continued its transformation.
They split up just five minutes later, Travis, Amy, and Kyle sparing little in the way of glances back at him. Cody pulled his arms tightly around his body and strode in the other direction, feeling the sudden weight of loneliness grow with every step.
Night time always made it worse. Back in London there was always someone nearby. During the day, the roads were choked with traffic and the pavements drummed the steady beat of pedestrian foot traffic. Planes flew overhead, holiday-goers taking off from Stanstead to pursue their adventures in Europe, India, or Asia. Even at night, the steady hum from the roads outside cocooned Cody in a comforting drone, reminding him that he was not alone in this world.
But here…
Denridge Hills had been the last place he had expected to set up his temporary life. In the last few months, Cody’s life had flipped on its head and there wasn’t a part of it he now recognized. Six months ago, he had been a regular kid, living the life that any fifteen-year-old raised in London should be living. Never in a million years would he have believed that he could lose both parents in a single accident.
A flash of the scene came to him. He had never seen photographs of the aftermath, but he and Alex had driven past the slip road on their way to the airport to begin their new life only a few weeks ago and he had imagined the ghost of it then. A jacknifed arctic lorry. A road slick from a torrential downpour. Tailbacks of red brake lights as far as five miles along the motorway.
Cody was told that his parents hadn’t suffered, that the impact had been immediate. There was no way that anyone would have survived a crash like that and, he supposed, for that he was thankful. Yet, that still didn’t fight off the guilt that he felt in the very pit of his stomach that it had somehow been his fault. That, by arguing with his Dad for that extra thirty seconds about inviting Erik over to play the latest Call of Duty, he had somehow lined up the stars of fate in such perfect unity that he had personally guided his parents into the lorry.
It was an insane notion, but the stillness of silence and the burden of isolation can do crazy things to a pubescent mind.
Cody researched the sleepy little town of Denridge Hills on Google Maps the instant his new guardian had informed him of his imminent research trip. At first it seemed exciting, getting the opportunity to travel miles away from the epicenter of his heartache and pain, to run away and escape the relentless misery that had withered his juvenile heart and caused him to break down in the school cafeteria and collapse into tears in front of his friends. He had viewed the unremarkable smattering of houses in the northernmost frozen coastlines of Alaska as a place to escape, the tiny town which was bordered by a horseshoe of forests spreading out several miles in each direction.
Yet, it turned out that silence only magnified wounds. In the witching hour it often felt as though they were still with him, whispering to fill the silent void that pressed on him in all directions. No matter how far from home he ran, deep down he knew that his parents still lived inside of him, and somehow, he would have to manage his own pain.
Cody stopped outside of Brandon’s house, recognizing it instantly by the way the entire shack tilted several degrees to one side. In the upper right-hand window, the curtains were peeled an inch apart. Cody removed a glove, regretting it almost instantly, and dialled Brandon’s number. Just because Kyle wanted to play Romeo, that didn’t mean that Cody had to.
As the dial tone came, he glanced up and down the street. Snow started to fall around him, and the emptiness stretched in either direction. The skin on the back of his neck prickled as the feeling of being watched settled on him.
A groggy voice spoke. “Cody? What is it? Is everything okay?”
“Hey, yeah. Everything’s fine. Look, I know this is random as all hell, and I’m sorry to wake you, but are you free to come out for a bit?”
A pause. Rustling. “Dude, it’s just gone one in the morning.” Another pause. “Are you okay? Having more of those dreams?”
“No, nothing like that… It’s just…” Cody spared a glance in the direction of the others. He couldn’t see them now, which was a concern. He hoped that all of this wasn’t just an elaborate prank that would be regaled around the tight-knit community of Denridge High School come morning. He sighed and told Brandon what had happened.
“I thought I’d heard them talking about midnight basketball,” Brandon said. “In fifth period, today. Didn’t know they had you in mind. Just tell them you don’t want to come out. It’s got to be freezing out there.” Brandon’s round face appeared in the window, his bright eyes staring up at the Aurora. “Woah, dude. Have you se
en the lights tonight?”
Cody turned skyward, unsettled by the dominating shade of crimson the lights had taken on. He had seen hues of pinks, and greens, and oranges, and blues in his short time here, but if he didn’t know any better, he’d say that someone had cut open the sky and it was bleeding down upon them. “Freaky, right? Have you seen it like that before?”
Brandon pawed at his eye, naive to Cody’s presence below. “Never. Must be some turn of the moon, or… I don’t know. Something. I’ll ask my dad in the morning. You should get some rest, tell Kyle to fuck off. He might get mad, sure, but do you really want to spend the night out there with him?”
Cody coughed. “Look down.”
Brandon’s eyebrow raised. He turned his head and found Cody. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Cody gave a weak grin. “C’mon, man. This might be my only chance to hang out with Sophie outside of school. Besides, it could be fun. You’re always going on about adventure and excitement. This could be your chance to do something daring. Do you want to look back at this when you’re fifty and regret not taking the opportunity?”
“It’ll never happen with Sophie.”
“It might. Kyle ended up with Amy. Who knows?” He held Brandon’s stare. “Please? I’ll give you my ’97 Legacy Michael Jordan card?”
“You’d do all this for Jordan?”
Cody chewed his lip, the cold making his teeth hurt. His hand had grown numb. “Okay, maybe not Jordan. But someone else… How about Charles Berkley?”
Brandon let out a heavy sigh. “Give me a minute.”
Cody hung up the phone and rushed to return the glove to his hand. It took a few minutes for his fingers to warm up, and by the time that Brandon carefully closed the front door behind him, he could finally bend his fingers again.
“You know that this is insane?” Brandon said through a mask of thick woollen scarves. He was easily twice as wide as Cody, and a few inches shorter. The layers of clothing didn’t help him at all, adding extra puff to the parts of his body that were already squishy and wobbled when he walked. “Batshit insane. I’m only doing this for you because of your psychotic episode the other day.”
Cody cringed, reliving the repeat of the same breakdown he had experienced in London. Only, this time it was in a cafeteria full of strangers in a school located halfway across the world. Was there anywhere that grief couldn’t follow?
“Gee, thanks.” Cody gave an appreciative smile. “Didn’t the health nurse tell you not to bring that up again?”
Brandon shrugged. “My dad always told me that the truth will set you free. You don’t need the world lying to you right now, you need someone who’s going to be upfront and honest. Someone who can smack reality into that head of yours and remind you that it takes time to heal.”
“Wow. Poignant and brutal.”
Brandon gave him a knowing look. Cody wondered what it would have been like for Brandon losing his own mother at such a young age. Maybe it would’ve spared the pain of understanding what loss truly is.
“You’ve been through a lot. I’m not going to sugar-coat that shit, you know that, don’t you?”
“Does it always come back to sugar with you?”
Brandon gave him a weak punch in the arm. He held Cody’s stare, then they both broke into quiet laughter. “I’ll let you have that one.” He pointed a gloved hand up the road. “Sophie lives that way. Is that where the others are?”
Cody nodded.
Brandon sighed. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. The things I do for signed NBA memorabilia.”
“Oh, that reminds me. Can you grab your ball, too? We need a spare.”
Brandon rolled his eyes before returning to his house.
4
Alex Goins
The wind hushed against the side of the house, a soothing lullaby to some, a nightmarish drone to others. No matter how insulated the houses were in Denridge Hills, the wind had its own intelligence. It could sneak into the cracks and find the tubes and chambers which created the most haunting of whistles. Soft enough that it sounded like ghosts practicing the harmonies of their choir, a thousand miles away.
He had been promised more than this, but still hadn’t expected much. A seasoned traveller of the world, Alex Goins had ridden in the cramped fuselages of a hundred planes over the past few years. He had developed sores against his thighs and feet from uncomfortable seating, his skin grown clammy as it rub together while he tucked into plastic-wrapped reconstituted meats and watched Cheers re-runs for the tenth time in a row. He had stayed in humid rainforests surrounded by monolithic trees, sun-drenched hotels in which the air-conditioning was the only respite from a heat so intense that it drew the very moisture from your skin, cities in which buildings fought like plants for the tallest stretches, and mud-dried shanty towns where your closest sleeping companions were the rats and the Petri dish of diseases which ran rife through the poverty stricken communities.
Alex had witnessed more of life than the average man could witness in three lifetimes, but still there was something about the Alaskan north that caught him off guard. He had stayed in the alps on weekend skiing breaks, visited the frigid caverns of Iceland, climbed the heights of the Siberian mountains, and a big part of him thought that he would be used to the relentless colds that could sweep in with the winds…
But nothing had prepared him for this.
There was a small landing strip on the western side of the town, nothing more than a flattened line of dirt that allowed the limited air traffic to land. On the day that he and his nephew, Cody, had glided over the miles of barren tundra, the pilot informed him that visits to Denridge Hills were unpredictable at best, with many pilots refusing to bring their modest aircrafts that far north at all. The winds were often unpredictable, and even on a sunny day the weather could take a turn and force the aircrafts to U-turn and hightail it back to Deadhorse Airport in Prudhoe Bay where they would lay quiet until the storms had died down before heading back to the safety of the mainland two hundred miles south the moment the chance came.
“So, you don’t get a lot of visitors?” Alex squinted through his sunglasses at the burning shades of peaches and ripe fruit that bled from the sun and into the sky.
The pilot chewed gum which had to have turned flavourless by now, each grind of his teeth accompanied by a wet smack of his lips. “This ain’t a tourist town. You’re born in Denridge, you die in Denridge. The rare few that escape never come back. It’s a real primitive place. Family trees are tangled. A lot of third cousins fall in love.”
Cody scoffed, the roar of the plane’s desperate engines not enough to cover up his disapproval.
Alex resisted turning back around to the kid. “They’ve still got Wi-Fi, though. Haven’t they?”
Cody shifted behind him, his attention caught.
“Oh, sure they’ve got Wi-Fi. Doesn’t mean it’s reliable. A couple cell towers which can easily be buffeted by the winds and snows. You’ll be lucky to sustain a decent enough connection to jack off to those blue sites and reach your climax before the thing glitches out and you’re left staring at a—”
“Alright, alright.” Alex waved his hands and glanced back at Cody, catching his eye for just a moment before the kid returned his gaze to the sunset.
It was shortly after their pilot announced that they were closing in on the town that a shiver ran up Alex’s spine. He peered through the windscreen, searching for the fabled town, hoping to catch his first glimpse, but all he could see were endless pine trees below. Great things that stretched out of the ground like witches’ fingers, clustered so densely together that it was impossible to see the forest floor.
“What you’re looking at is Drumtrie Forest, one of the last stretches of unexplored woods this side of the globe. The thing stretches for miles in either direction, wrapping its arms around the town. Once you’re in Denridge, the only way back is by plane. Unless you want to hit the Arctic by boat and paddle the dozen or so miles to the nex
t thoroughfare out of there.” He winked at Alex, chewed his gum. “Lucky you, eh?”
Alex had seen the forest on the map and had grown immediately curious. It was because of this unique living situation that he had chosen Denridge as the target of his latest research trip. When his most recent novel, ‘Burning Sands,’ had been released a little over a year ago, it had received a slew of literary acclaim. He had rejoiced in seeing his name in online features and magazines. His phone hadn’t stopped ringing for weeks. When the pay checks came in and he saw the royalty statements, he couldn’t stop smiling. Finally, after years of toiling behind the clacking keys of his keyboard, he had made it as a writer.
He had released novels before, of course. Each one granting him a little extra glimpse of the success that he had been aiming for. His particular brand of fiction boasted an in-depth look into some of the world’s most misunderstood cultures, bringing an authentic lens to foreign civilizations and cultures. ‘World Writers Magazine’ commented that his writing: ‘Blew the competition out of the water. Goin’s books, while not only thoroughly researched to a standard that any tenured academic would envy, also delivered plot lines so thick with tension that the reader walked the high wire from beginning until end. One could get lost in the pages for hours, emerging at the end with a profound sense of confusion and disarray as they struggled to acclimatize once more with the world they had left behind.’
Yet, after those weeks, Alex struggled with the dilemma that all successful professionals then faced. How to follow up on a global bestseller?
The money rolled in. Despite it all, Alex did his best to remain humble. He bought a new house on the borders of London, and for a few months he allowed himself to purchase several items he had desired greatly for a number of years (including his brand-new Honda HR-V), before placing the rest in a savings account.
Weeks passed where he sat at the keyboard, head in his hands, searching for his next great idea. He researched the Amazon rainforest; he considered an exploration of North Korea. After six months his agent started cranking up the heat, and it was in a desperate need to escape and clear his head that he found himself in an East-London pub with his old school friend, Ian Vance.
The First Fall Page 4
