Ascending the Boneyard (27 page)

No one can save you.

I can't accept that as reality. I can't.

I lean against the truck wall, watch somewhere spiritual shrink into the distance.

My eyelids close. I feel the drift of the truck moving through time and space, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to die. Weightless, painless, floating on the jet stream of the universe. I'd do anything to stop the ache, the constant gaping, bleeding, infected wound that never heals, never closes over, just sits there, raw and oozing, every minute of every day.

I know I should stay awake, that it would be a tactical mistake to drift off. But I'm so tired, I'm not sure I can fight it.

I'm tired of having to fight.

•  •  •

My head kicks straight up off the corrugated metal truck bed as we hit a pothole or something. I'm not even fully awake yet before I come down again, hard enough to get serious cranial reverb.

Massive headache now added to the groggy, but it still isn't enough to pull me out of this deep, narcoleptic-grade sleep I'm in. I drift off again.

•  •  •

I have no idea how long I've been in the back of this truck, only that at some point my eyelids fly open as I realize we're not moving anymore. I lean up, get my bearings, notice that I'm covered in a wool army blanket, as if someone tucked me in somewhere along the way.

I worm my way to my knees, crawl to the back window, push my head through the plastic flap. We're definitely stopped, but I have no idea where. It looks pretty woodsy, and the air smells like a Christmas tree in February, like a pine air freshener that's almost but not quite used up. Patches of bright blue sky hang between huge thunderheads over the tree line, only for some reason I can see the Carew Tower sticking up between the tips of two soaring redwoods, and it's tripping my shit because I feel like I'm as far from home as I've ever been.

“Hello?” I call out, my voice echoing flat and hollow back to me. “Anyone there?”

No answer.

I immediately start calculating how I can climb out of the back of this truck without needing to use my hands. I'd like to keep from falling out if possible, because (a) that would look ridiculous if anyone's watching, and (b) if no one
is
watching, I'd probably end up cracking my head open on the asphalt and bleeding to death in the process, and I just lost the only person who could throw me a rez or even a heal.

I try standing, but the canopy is too low for me to get any higher than a hunch. That doesn't stop me from attempting to swing one leg over the back anyway. But the bumper is also too low and I avert castration-by-tailgate by a few minuscule centimeters.

I drop back inside, not ready to give up yet. There has to be a way out of this.

My Trade Screen is completely blank by now, thanks to my endless string of failures. I scout the bed of the truck for anything sharp enough or at least sturdy enough to saw through a hard plastic zip tie. Other than the military-issue blankets, there isn't so much as a used Spork back here.

Plan B: work my hands out of the cuff by bending and flexing, Houdini-style, until they slip through.

Plan B may take a while, though, partly because it's not as easy as they make it look on TV, and partly because my arms have fallen asleep—arms that don't have a whole lot of muscle tone in them in the first place.

As I wriggle my fingers and wrists in various states of contortion, I keep my ears open for the sounds of voices or footsteps or even tires coming down the road. Amazing what you can be attuned to without an earful of Bunny Puke slamming into your head.

My hands are nerve-sweating so bad by now, the zip tie actually starts to give a little. I get it up around my left wrist, nearly fold my hand in half to yank it all the way out. My arm muscles burn like crazy, but then . . .

Freedom.

Or so I think.

I tip my head, cue in to the crunch of footsteps on gravel echoing somewhere nearby. They're faint, but they're there, and I close my eyes against the translucent memory of Stan, his boots, our walkway. I shake the memory out of my head, lift the back window flap, catch a quick look around. Wherever those footsteps are coming from, it isn't behind the truck. I slip over the tailgate, proud as hell at how stealth I'm managing my escape as a prisoner of war.

But I'm not out of the weeds yet.

Can't let myself get lost in the details.

I peek around the side of the truck: the driver's side is clear too. I crouch as low as I can get and tiptoe around to the door. No time to wuss out. I press the button, ease the door open, crap myself with relief that no one's inside, and close the door as soft as possible after climbing in. A quick glance out the front window reveals nothing but wilderness. Which means those footsteps didn't come from in front of me either.

I bend down, check near the steering column, where, sure enough, the keys are in the ignition. I shake my head, stunned by this turn of good fortune. Maybe this is a reward drop from the expansion pack. Hell, I deserve
something
for staying in the game this long against all odds.

I'm fully aware that if there's a platoon within the slightest radius of this truck, it'll be instantaneously obvious, because as soon as I fire up the engine, they'll all come running. But the only alternative is to not start the engine, and if I stay here—

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.