Ascending the Boneyard (12 page)

Haze has been sound asleep all this time, but the piercing wail of metal on metal rips through the car as we careen to a stop, and he sputters back into consciousness.

He pulls the face mask down under his chin.

“Where are we?”

“Cinderella's castle,” I say, throwing my bag over my shoulder.

The car spasms to a stop and the door wheezes open. I follow Haze outside just as the first dim light of morning bleaches the horizon.

The truth is, I don't know where we are. But I do know without even looking that the subway car is already gone.

I fully expect Haze to fire an Uzi round of questions at me, but he doesn't. We just start walking down the narrow, deserted street, lined with half-dead trees and decrepit, abandoned buildings whose busted-out windows lie shattered under our feet. The crunch of debris against concrete is the only sound we hear as we kick our way through piles of twisted window frames, chunks of Sheetrock and plywood, two-by-fours sprouting rusted nails, a decaying bird carcass lying in the gutter.

Time unused melts into pools of regret.

“I'd kill for a Mountain Dew,” I blurt out.

“Coffee. Same here.”

Even so, we pass several convenience stores and diners without ever stopping to go in. Most of the places don't even look open.

I'm starting to second-guess the decision to come down here without the smallest brigade. I'm not talking about Haze. Haze is my man. He's my shit-caller. I mean, the guy calls me out on my shit at every single turn. But he can't crush a tank on my behalf, or take out a roach mob or cause max damage when the time comes. Haze doesn't know the rules of engagement here.

The road widens and the negative space around us begins to fill in—run-down cars, more empty buildings, brown-gray daylight.

Around a corner, Haze and I stop short in unison, let our gaze slide up the length of the concrete facade of an unfamiliar building. A dozen or so stories of rust-colored brick rise to meet the sharp-angled patina roof as rows and rows of paneless windows gape back at us like a blank stare.

Vacant eyes. Boarded-up mouth. No way in. Devin. A wave of sickness shoots through me.

Should have at least brought a Medic.

“I bet you're going to tell me you want to go in,” Haze says.

“Yep.”

I have no idea what this place is, only that if I don't go inside, I'll have left something undone.

“Notice how the doors and windows on the bottom floor are all bricked up?” he says.

“Yeah, but look right above it.” I point to the two arched windows that flank the entrance of the building. The windows are bricked in, true, but the holes above them aren't.

“Someone's gotten in here who wasn't supposed to,” I tell Haze. “The question is, how?”

“
That's
the question, Tosh? Not, why do you want to commit breaking and entering, or what we're even doing here in the first place?”

sneak in

I'm here to sneak in.
That's what her note said.

But I can't make the words come out.

Haze shakes his head. “Elan was right, man. One of us needs to get his story straight.”

Elan . . .

I tip my head back, fix my gaze on the busted window openings for a long, wondering moment.

“Hey!” I yell at last. “Hey, up there!”

Haze turns eleven shades of white. “Man, what are you doing? This is an abandoned—”

Three scraggly heads of black hair pop out of the windows before he gets to the end of the sentence. None of them is Elan, though, so there goes that theory.

“What's with the yelling?” one of the guys shouts down to us.

“We need a place to squat,” I call back. No idea where that came from.

The heads disappear, and for a moment Haze and I just stand there like a couple of jackasses, cutting our stupefied gazes between the building and each other. But then the one guy tosses something out the window, and it only takes me a second to realize it's a rope ladder.

He wants us to climb up.

“That doesn't look very sturdy,” Haze says, and even though I'm thinking the same thing, I don't let on.

I hoist my messenger bag over my shoulder and grab on to both sides of the ladder. The swaying does nothing to reassure me; if anything, it makes the rope feel even flimsier in my hands than it looked flopping out the window.

“Dude—”

“Haze, shut up,” I say. “If you make one rational argument about why I shouldn't climb up, I'll totally chicken out, and I
can't
chicken out now—got it?”

I wait out the split second of festering silence before he says the one thing I need to hear him say more than anything else in the universe.

“Sure, Tosh. Whatever you need to do.”

I start to climb, forced to acknowledge something I should have considered before sticking my foot through the first rung. I have z-e-r-o upper-body strength. Sad fact: there's nothing remotely like a defined muscle group anywhere on Caleb Tosh's body.

“You'd better hurry,” the dude in the window says. “They can't bust you once you're in here, but they can bust you while you're climbing.”

“Go!” Haze says.

I roll my eyes as the hellish memories of gym class parade before them. No amount of creative visualization can block out the thought that Haze has a backside view of my frayed, one-size-too-big jeans as I climb. Not to mention the dude in the window gets to watch me nearly stroke out while I struggle for the opening.

The dude inside sticks his arm out. “Here, grab me,” he says.

I clasp him around the wrist and he does the same, and before I know it, he's managed to pull me all the way inside. I lay panting on the ground, cushioned in a thick layer of dust and reeling from the shock of physical exertion.

I can hear the guy working to get Haze up the ladder, a feat that probably requires a lot less effort for him than it did for me. But I'm not even watching. My eyes are squeezed shut as I fight to catch my breath.

From the sound of things, Haze has just toppled unceremoniously into the room.

“Tosh.” His voice spins through the filters of his mask. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I sit up, open my eyes, look around.

Sure enough, there's Haze leaning up against the wall under the window, with his hands plastered against his knit cap like he's trying to keep his head from popping off.

I turn and survey the now up-close faces of the threesome: two guys and a girl, all covered in a thin layer of dust that matches the thicker layer of dust covering every other square inch of this low-ceilinged space.

“Thanks,” I say.

“No problem,” the guy from the window says. “We're the Prophets.”

My eyebrows ricochet into my hairline as I search my memory for any brigade with that name. Nothing.

“You're who?” I ask.

“The Prophets. Industrial-techno-folk-punk. Lemme guess . . .” He turns to Haze, sizing up his post-apocalyptic headgear. “Electronic-thrash-reggae?”

A brigade with a backstory. Not sure how I feel about that.

“Naw,” I say. “We're just looking for a place to hang out.”

“Oh.” He slides his gaze back and forth between us a few more times. “I get it. Yeah, that's cool. Lots of rooms here. Very private.”

I shoot a confused look at Haze as my brain absorbs the words “very private.”

“Not, like,
private
,” I say. “We just need to lay low for a while.”

“Oh yeah? What are you guys on the run from?” he asks.

Another intriguing question. I stall, trying to think up an answer, and for a few seconds I wonder if we somehow ended up somewhere we didn't intend to go. I don't have a mapper, so it's possible, I guess. But no . . . that's not right. I know this map. I've been here before, tons of times.

I decide to test them.

“We stole a car,” I say. “So now we're on the run.”

“
You
stole a car,” Haze cuts in.

“Right.
I
stole a car, so . . . anyway. We're on the lam now.”

“On the lam,” the guy says. “Cool.”

The girl moves forward, and that's when I notice they all have the same short-cropped, chopped-up, black-dyed hair. They look like mangled crows, to be honest. That'd be a great band name—way better than the Prophets.

The girl's kind of hot.

“I'm Ravyn,” she says as I try really hard to hold eye contact with her and not let my eyes drift to her purple bra, which I can clearly see because it shows straight through the thin white fabric of the tank top she's wearing.

Ravyn is curvalicious.

“Tosh,” I say. “That's Haze.”

Haze, still plastered against the wall, lifts one hand in greeting while holding on to his head with the other.

The window dude comes forward with his arm stretched out. “Eek,” he says, giving me one of those multiplex handshakes. “It used to be Zeke, but I ditched the
Z
, man.”

“Sweet,” I say.

The other guy throws a peace sign from across the space. He's eating a candy bar, but what I'm really tripping on is that his head almost touches the ceiling. I don't think it's because he's especially tall, though. I just think this is a ridiculously short room.

“I'm Bill,” he says.

I nod, wondering what we're supposed to do now that the formalities are over.

“We usually crash in another part of the Castle. You guys coming?” Eek asks.

The Castle?

“Sure.” I swivel toward the windows. “Yo, Haze. You coming?”

Haze finally looks up. “Why am I sitting next to a pile of bricks?”

Eek points to an uneven circular hole in the wall between the two perfectly geometric ones. “Crashers,” he says. “Bastards have totally laid waste to the Castle. It's a shame, really.”

“Aren't you crashers?” Haze asks. There's an edge to his voice that makes me nervous.

“Hell no,” Eek says. “We're squatters. And actually, we don't stay here. It's just a really cheap rehearsal space.”

“Any idea how much a practice studio costs in this goddamn place?” Bill asks, trying to fish a chunk of candy bar out from between his crooked teeth with a dirty fingernail. I narrow my eyes and study him. He's too nervous. His eyes bulge out too far, his too-long, bony fingers twitch like antennae as they flail around in his mouth.

I'm not sure what kind of mission these guys are on. Nothing like what we're doing—that seems obvious. But I know one thing for absolute: he's their platoon leader. He shouldn't be since he's a jackass, but he is, and there's something about the guy I just don't trust.

“
Any
idea?” he asks again.

“Not a clue,” I say.

“An ass-load.” Bill holds up the offending nut, flicks it into the air.

I wince in disgust.

“Only problem is,” Eek adds, “we're not the only ones. Lots of bands use this building. It's perfect because of all the rooms and the great acoustics. But we have to leave by seven, because school starts at eight.”

My eyes go rogue as I try to discreetly make sense of this last bit of info. They call themselves “bands,” not “platoons.” Plus they don't give off any kind of studious vibe whatsoever.

“You guys are still in school?”

“Not us, Josh,” Bill says, and that's when I decide it's not so much that I dislike this guy as I actually kind of hate him. It's Tosh.
Tosh.
Four letters—how hard can it be?

Bill points to one of the windows. “That over there's a school. If they hear us playing, they'll call the oinks and that'll be the end of the Prophets as we know it.”

Eek gives me a knowing nod. “But only in the sense that we'd have to find a new rehearsal space,” he says.

“Which is hard,” Bill adds, his pointless breath fouling up the air around us, “because, as I said, cheap space is impossible to find.”

I nod like I get it even though I'm massive confused, and that's when Ravyn finally breaks her silence. She struts past me, reaching out with one long finger and running it across my chest as she passes.

“There are lots of abandoned buildings in this town,” she says, only the way she says it sounds like a total come-on. I swing my messenger bag around in front of me.

Ravyn is halfway out of the room by then. She throws her chin over her shoulder, looks back in my direction.

“Coming?” she says.

Holy shit.

I double step it until I'm at her side. Three sets of muted footsteps fall in behind us.

As we duck under a length of low-hanging metal pipe, one of the guys asks Haze, “So, what's with the gas mask, sport?”

“It's for all the fucking asbestos in here,” Haze says, and that's when it hits me. It's eight a.m. and Haze is still uncaffeinated.

Oh yeah. Shit's about to get real.

10.5