Ascending the Boneyard (23 page)

The known will cease to exist.

Jesus, how does anyone keep going, knowing that might be true?

Mason points to the phone. “Fire it up.”

I look at the screen, at the little red light flash-spasming up at me.

“I'm dying,” I tell her.

“Oh. Use mine, then. It's in the glove box.”

I shoot her a look.

“I have to hide it while I'm driving,” she says. “I used to have a little problem.”

Haze snorts in disgust but stops short at revealing that I made that mistake too.

A minuscule smile crosses Mason's face as I take her phone out and fire up the GPS. I try to smile back, want desperately to feel its reluctant pull at the corner of my mouth. But I can't.

“What am I looking for?” I ask instead.

Her eyes leave the road, start scanning the air. “I can't remember what it's called. How about typing in . . . ?” She darts a quick look at her phone and then at me. “ ‘Spiritual West.' ”

A dull throb starts in the epicenter of my chest cavity, radiates out in waves of invisible pain. I have no idea where Stan promised to take my mom. All I know is, she wanted to go somewhere spiritual.

I choke a little on the thought.

My phone buzzes from where I stashed it under my leg, and I open it, even though I probably shouldn't use up any unnecessary juice.

Fear will rock the world to its foundation.

Oh shit.

“Pull over,” I tell her.

“What?”

“Pull over!”

She does, and within seconds, we're hit by a strong aftershock. The ground completely liquefies around us.

Mason spins on me as soon as the shaking stops.

“How'd you know that?” She searches my face like she's trying to read a map, and something in her eyes makes me want to do more than answer her. I want to tell her the truth.

I'm just not sure what the truth is anymore.

“We
are
in an area of heavy seismic activity,” Haze says, pulling the answer out of his ass á la Roundhouse. “There's always more shaking after a quake.”

I'm impressed. Not that I'd tell
him
that; I haven't forgotten we're still in the middle of a fight.

She shakes her head in awe as we get back on the road and continue southwest, stopping every few miles to let the ground buckle beneath us. Between the aftershocks and the NIM convoy, which I'm sure must have us on its radar again by now, I keep checking out the windows, waiting for the other combat boot to drop.

From time to time, I sneak-look at Mason, watch the Supergirl logo on her shirt rise and fall with each frightened breath. My phone continues to buzz the same way it has right before each aftershock, and each time, I warn her to pull over. She has no idea I'm getting advanced insider information about the quakes, but she looks at me like I'm Einstein every time it happens, so I only feel a little bad.

“God,” she says as we pull back onto the highway. “You're like a human Richter scale.”

“Now you know my superpower,” I say. “You have to swear your undying secrecy and allegiance forever.”

I've finally managed to get a full-blown smile out of her. Dimples crease the space between her cheeks and her chin, and faint lines feather out the sides of her eyes. The bigger she smiles, the more her mouth pulls slightly to one side, and I decide then and there that it could easily be my new mission just to make that happen again.

“It's a deal,” she says.

We hang out in that unblinking moment: me, tethered to Mason by a lame joke that had the power to make her smile, and her, distracted from driving by a gaming geek from Sandusky, Ohio. Just then, Haze shouts, “Watch out!” and Mason slams on the brakes. But it's not enough to keep us from careening into a massive pile of twisted yellow metal.

For a terrifying moment, the world is a blur of jagged edges and crushed glass and torn canvas and smoke and blood and asphalt, but eventually it stops and we come to a rest, upright and mostly unscathed. We take a few seconds to catch our breath, and then . . .

It can't be.

It's not possible.

But it's true.

We're knotted up in a mangled dog pile of Termi-Pest trucks.

19.5

Mason says she's stuck,
so I whip around to her side of the Jeep for an assist. Haze falls out after her.

We cough into the smoke-filled air, wave it away from our faces. I watch as she takes a bandanna out of her pocket, as she ties it around her nose and mouth to help her breathe.

My mouth slowly falls open.

I know her.

Mason Barshaw.

I absolutely know who she is.

20

“Look at that,”
she whispers.

I peel my eyes away from her, cast a glance over my shoulder, spin the rest of the way around.

It's the most chilling thing I've ever seen.

Larger-than-life cockroaches, a dozen or so of them, lie scattered all over the highway, like mutant insects in one of those black-and-white Japanese horror movies.

Even worse, the Jeep is totaled.

We pull our stowed bags from behind the seats and start picking through the massive wreckage, but a low murmur pulls my attention to an area off the side of the road, about fifty yards past the hissing pile of bug-mobile carnage. I crane my neck until I see that the Termi-Pest drivers have congregated together like a Dickies-clad battalion, talking in hushed tones that carry easily across the flat landscape, and suddenly I know down to the microscopic fibers of my being that one of those guys is Stan.

To hell with Turk's lair. I've got Turk right here in my sights, right in the middle of his fucking army.

I lunge forward, and almost on cue, the men spot me. They stir, agitated, like a nest of hornets that's been disturbed.

They spread out, take a defensive posture.

“Stan?” I call out. “
Stan!
Show your face, you coward!” I start jogging toward them. “I know you're here, you sonofabitch! Where is she?
Where is she?
”

Mason calls after me.

So does Haze.

“Tosh!”

But all I want to do right now is go pummel the shit out of Stan, so I block Haze out. And Mason too. Only that's a lot harder because she sounds scared and worried. I'm already mad at Haze, but I don't know what to do with scared and worried. Never did. Never knew what to say to my mom when she got that way.

By the time I reach the bug guys, they're shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity.

“Stan!”

I scan the faces, searching for a blip of familiarity while the echo of work boots landing flat on wooden steps ripples in the air, and the shouts of anger and accusation, of Cam screaming in one ear to get in the fight and Haze in the other telling me to get out of it, and the shatter of a maroon lamp across the brick walkway, and the blood.

The blood.

“Stan!”
I scream, because I'm ready for this fight. Because I've been ready for this fight for a long time. But it doesn't matter now.

Stan isn't here.

And neither is my mom.

Only now I'm trapped toe-to-toe with an army of bug guys in gray Dickies, ready to exterminate at will if it should come to that.

I push my hands into my eye sockets and drop to my knees in the middle of the highway, stunned yet again by what an oxygen-sucking failure I am.

I finally got the chance to take the guy down, to tell him what I really think of him and his putrid pest-control truck and his carefully concealed ass crack and his utter ineptitude at extermination because he and my mom hadn't been gone for five fucking minutes before our place was crawling with cockroaches again and everything went to hell and the known ceased to exist.

I finally had the chance to become Worthy.

And I wiped.

20.5

Mason tries
to comfort me with soft words and kindness, but I won't let her. She doesn't know me—what a failure I am, what a worthless son, brother, friend.

I can't even finish this one single mission without wiping.

Don't follow me,
I tell them inside my head.
I don't deserve a buff.