Ascending the Boneyard Read Online Free Page A

groggy, all crust and confusion, with no memory of what happened last night. Did the old man put me to bed? I’m usually the one who takes care of him at night. That’s the ritual: brush my teeth, put on my least-dirty T-shirt, scoop up the dozen or so empties from around the couch, and leave a light on in the kitchen so he doesn’t break his fucking neck in case he decides at some point to get up and go to his room.
    I roll over, still hazy, pick some of the junk out of my eyes, get them to focus just in time to see the cockroach scurry across my pillow.
    I hit the wall in a flash.
    My gaze ricochets uncontrollably around the room until I spot the computer on. The Boneyard’s up and running even though I always make sure the Relic gets shut down at night. I squint at the screen, at the highway map teeming with UnderWorld mobs, turn back to the cockroach on my pillow that’s waving its antennae at me like a middle finger.
    I don’t know how he found me, or how he got into my room from the Boneyard. But I have to kill him. I have to get him and kill him before he brings the rest of Turk’s army back here and all hell breaks loose.
    I scramble back to the bed, flick the little bastard onto the floor. Its hairy legs flail in the air for a second or two before it flips over and beelines up the wall. I quick grab a sneaker and start smashing the holy hell out of it for two full minutes. The crunching exoskeleton makes my stomach roil, but I ignore it. You have to go full tilt to kill a cockroach. They’re virtually indestructible, and I want this one ten kinds of dead.
    I grunt and swing and finally my arm falls limp at my sides while I stand there panting. The roach is nothing more than a splotch of brown pigment and yellow gut paint now, and I sink to my knees, fighting to catch my breath. I use a dirty sock off the floor to wipe sweat and tears and snot from my face.
    My red-rimmed gaze drifts over to the door, and suddenly it hits me.
    All that pounding.
    All that smashing against the foam-board walls of this trailer . . . and the old man hasn’t come in to yell at me for it.
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    I stumble out of my bedroom in a daze, down the hall, into the living room, where the TV’s on but no one’s watching it. I stop, blink in disbelief around the empty room, at the spot on the couch where the old man should be parked in front of the TV but isn’t.
    Waves of blue-gray light pulse at me from the mute screen, and I take one guarded step after another toward it, kneel gape-mouthed on the floor. The events unfolding on-screen slowly register in my head, and before I know it, the trailer feels like it’s missing a wheel, like everything’s slanting to one side.
    I grab the remote off the TV table, unmute it, change the channel again and again, but every station it’s the same thing. Even the sports and cooking shows have crawlers across the bottom.
    MASSIVE BIRD DIE-OFF IN OHIO. EXPERTS BAFFLED.
    I tumble backward, sink onto the floor, keep watching, listening.
    â€œScientists are baffled by a massive bird die-off discovered early this morning at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.” The anchorwoman smiles as she says it. There’s something absolutely skeletal about her toothy grin.
    The shot cuts over to video footage taken down at Goofy Golf. The mini-golf course, the go-kart track, even the bumper-boat pool, all littered with bird carcasses.
    The remote trembles in my hand as the video switches to an interview with some world-renowned bird expert.
    â€œWe’re looking into the possibility of an electrical storm that passed over Ohio last night as being a plausible source of the die-off,” the man says. “But frankly, at the moment, we’re just not sure.”
    The feed cuts back to the footage of the dead birds as the field reporter blathers on. But something catches my eye, and it catches the cameraman’s