Ascending the Boneyard Read Online Free Page B

eye, too, because he focuses right in on the bright green drink cup lying on the track in the middle of all that black carnage. The shot gets tighter and tighter until he’s right on top of it, and I’m barely breathing as I listen to the anchorwoman declare that the birds all died in flight, that their dead bodies literally fell out of the sky.
    But not this one. This one’s still alive, just barely, but alive and struggling to flap its wings against the ground like it’s begging for someone to notice it isn’t dead.
    The sky will fall and death will beat its wings against the ground.
    Synapses start firing and misfiring in my brain; incoherent thoughts, truths, half-truths, and flat-out lies, all going at it simultaneously.
    This can’t be the same bird that dive-bombed me and Haze on my twelfth birthday. . . .
    That bird is dead. We killed it. We didn’t mean to. It just happened.
    So why is it still alive? I mean, here it is on the TV screen, next to the green cup Haze threw onto the track that day, and it’s alive, and it’s begging to be saved.
    I spin my gaze around the trailer again, chill bumps running up my arms. Where the hell’s the old man, seriously? He should be sitting here right now, scratching his well-developed pony keg through the decaying fabric of his shirt, spewing conspiracy theories at the TV.
    I fall forward again, crawl toward the screen for a better view, only my cell phone slips off my lap and vibrates a text alert at me.
    I do the slow-motion-reach thing, pick it up off the floor, tap it open.
    It’s the cockroach. The goddamn cockroach, the one I just killed in my room. That motherfucker is tracking me.
    The end is near , it says.
    I panic, ratchet my arm back, hurl the phone against the wall, hear the sickening crack of plastic and glass against wall board.
    â€œText me now, you bastard!” I yell, only I know Turk can’t hear me—for one thing, because I think I just busted the shit out of my phone, and for another, if I’d actually ever found Commandant Turk, I would have Ascended by now.
    My heart sinks straight through the bottom of the trailer.
    The end is near.
    Jesus, that’s what it said on the map during the raid that day. All those platoons, fleeing the tunnels in flames, every one of them tagged with the same line of words where it should’ve been nothing but green.
    I panic-scan the room.
    Where are they?
    I scramble to my feet, fly down the hallway, kick open Devin’s bedroom door.
    Empty.
    The old man’s, too.
    The car’s not in the drive.
    Ragged breath shreds through my lungs. It’s not like that coward to just go off, especially not with Devin. He never takes Devin.
    Unless there was some kind of emergency.
    I clamp my eyes shut against the far-distant sound of sirens, the cries for help, the helicopter blades that airlifted Devin off the track at Goofy Golf that day.
    The end is near. Shit. Who would send a message like that?
    I retrieve my phone, carefully slide the cover back to reveal a massively cracked screen. The way I threw it, I’m shocked it’s not dead. But it isn’t—it even buzzes in my hand as I reread that last text through the cracked screen.
    I quick open the new message, terrified it’s the old man about to lay some kind of gut-wrenching, nut-filled turd on me.
    It’s not.
    It’s a text. I don’t know from who, exactly, only that the two-word message hits my brain like a mortar round.
    Save it.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    I stagger back down the hall toward the living room, hoping to see the old man sitting there, hoping against hope that my brother’s with him, that they’re watching Roundhouse , or even Promzillas , and drinking beer and eating the bag of snack mix I hid in the back of the cupboard for safekeeping.
    Anything but knowing he went off and left me here alone in this roach-infested trailer.
    I catch a