Ascending the Boneyard Read Online Free PDF Page B

here. Besides, I know it’s not Stan’s truck. Stan’s truck didn’t have any equipment in the back the last time I saw it.
    I fake stride across the entrance to the park, very authoritative and official-like, still mystified that no one so much as does a double take in my direction.
    I take that back. A girl in black Chuck Taylors and a SUPERGIRL T-shirt leans over the chain-link fence. There’s nothing noteworthy about her, except that she’s the only one who seems to be tracking my entrance. I hop down the stairs two at a time, head to the go-kart pit, pick up the pace until I’m around the first bend, and only then do I break into a jog-walk toward the discarded cup near the skid mark, which I know is somewhere around the third turn. The ground is littered with festering bird carcasses. It’s a grotesque enough sight by itself, but I have to dodge them as I go, like some creepy, morbid version of Frogger.
    My hyperventilating breath pools inside the toxic-smelling mask until I start to feel claustrophobic, and the more I focus on the claustrophobia, the more I start to panic, which makes me totally question the whole point of coming here; and just as I’m about to give up, to ditch the hazmat suit and the mask, retrieve the skateboard from where I stashed it in the bug truck, and thrash-spasm my way back home, there it is.
    The skid mark.
    The cup.
    And the bird. Still alive, still trying to flap its little wings against the pavement.
    Alive. But barely.
    I squat down, look into its little black BB of an eyeball, hoping it’ll offer me some kind of insight of greater meaning. It doesn’t. It just stares back, pleading.
    I pull the toxic paper mask down over my chin, suck in a couple lungfuls of fresh air over my shoulder, blink tears off the surface of my eyes. Save it, the message said.
    I’m trying, I swear.
    I run my hands over the front of the hazmat suit, find a pocket with a pair of latex gloves tucked inside. I put them on, lean over, pick up the green drink cup, and scoop the bird inside even though it takes me a couple of passes because I can’t get my hands to stop shaking like crazy. I’m careful to put the little guy in feet first so it can breathe and not feel claustrophobic, the way I felt a moment ago inside this paper mask.
    I hold the cup up to eye level, stare into the bird’s unblinking little face, and smile for the first time in weeks.
    We did it, I convey telepathically. You made it—I saved you. Looks like I’ll get to level after all.
    I keep looking, though, keep looking as if the bird is going to open its beak and thank me or something. But it doesn’t. Within seconds, it stops pulsing its exhausted wings against the insides of the cup, and I hold my breath, waiting for it to restart. But it never does.
    It’s dead.
    The bird is dead.
    The go-kart track starts to bend and stretch around me and I’m sure I’m going to black out, only my phone starts buzzing in my back pocket just then. I reach to answer it, but it’s buried under a layer of Tyvek so super-constructed that there’s no way to rip through it. I have to unzip, reach around, fish it out with one hand while holding a dead, probably disease-infested bird in a used drink cup with the other.
    I finally get the phone out.
    It’s the cockroach. Grotesquely cracked and fragmented in my broken screen.
    What the fuck, man?
    The cockroach found me.
    My arm drops as I spin one way, then the other, looking for signs of an onslaught I know must be coming. But there’s nothing. No one. Not even backup to keep my sorry ass out of hot water. I’m alone, all alone on the go-kart track at Goofy Golf with a dead bird in one hand and a dead phone in the other.
    Helicopter blades pulse through the air somewhere off in the distance, and the mantel clock Stan threw in the back of his truck tick-tick-tick s from an unseen place behind me, followed by the