Chapter 6: Revelations

Dead Boy shakes himself free from the vision of the past and the Frozen's chill grasp just in time to feel an icy tentacle snake around his left ankle. He looks down in horror and sees the wraith—a spectral snake emerging from the Frozen's torso. It's beginning to solidify into hard ice at its tail end. More long snaking fingers of ice slowly extend from the beast's tail toward Dead Boy as if seeking out his body heat.

Dead Boy pulls away but the tentacle tugs hard on his ankle. He falls flat on his back. His head whacks the cement hard, and his axe clatters to the ground a few feet away. He gropes at the back of his head and his fingers are wet with blood.

"Damnit, Dead Boy! Get out of there!"

Dead Boy looks sideways to see Soda frantically waving down at him from atop the ice wall. Dead Boy's head hurts so much he can barely think. He waves a red hand back at Soda in a daze, his ears suddenly ringing like a siren.

The grip around his ankle tightens. Three of the wraith’s smaller fingers intertwine to become another tentacle, thick as a snake, reaching out toward his other foot with a tickling "come here" gesture. By the time Dead Boy snaps back to reality, the wraith is starting to slowly lift him off his back and into the air by his feet. He flails his hands for his axe, which lays just beyond his reach.

Inch by inch, Dead Boy's back rises off the ground until only his shoulders and neck are still planted on the cement of the street—and then he is airborne, hanging upside down by his ankles. The blood rushing to his concussed head fills his senses with fire like a shot of strong whiskey. He faints away for a split second, but the pain that throbs at the back of his skull wrenches him back to consciousness. He shouts out a wordless bark, trying desperately to force some will back into his body.

A sudden loud popping sound echoes down the street, accompanied by a high-pitched zing! that flies past Dead Boy's ear. Another deafening bang rings out, followed by a spray of shattered ice. The wraith holding Dead Boy aloft emits an unearthly shrieking howl and swings its ice tentacles in pain. It continues to rock its half-spectral body free from its corporeal prison--the Frozen, which now lacks a head. Soda must have shot it.

The wraith writhes around more and more frantically, Dead Boy dancing with it. His suspended body jerks and bobs upside-down in the air as the tentacles twitch blindly. And then, in a split second—for he has little more than a mere moment of time, the wraith is spasming so ferociously now—Dead Boy's body dips low enough that his reaching hand finally grasps his fireman's axe.

With a roar of rage and sheer determination, Dead Boy swings his axe with both hands in a wide arc behind his head, taking the Frozen's legs off at the knee with a single strike. The wraith, still partially joined to the Frozen at the midsection like a freakish conjoined twin, falls sideways to the street at the same time as the collapsing corpse. Dead Boy thumps painfully back to the ground, too. Twisting around to get a better angle, he swings his axe two more times in rapid succession to free his legs from the tentacles binding them.

Dead Boy scrambles to his feet and runs for the wall with all his might. He closes the last few feet with a leap, swinging his axe up high so that it sinks deep into the ice wall above his head. Using the long handle to hoist himself up the first couple of yards, he finds a handhold and yanks his weapon free with his other hand. Then, tucking the handle of the axe through a loop on his backpack to secure it, he climbs the rest of the way up the wall to join Soda at the top.

Echoing through the street they’d just escaped from, hundreds of wraiths suddenly howl like a million whispers combining into a single ear-splitting crescendo. The one that Dead Boy chopped slithers toward the base of the wall—it's fully corporeal now and free of the Frozen that had kept it tethered. It's a massive snake-like thing longer than a car, with six long writhing tentacles and a face like a flattened dog’s head with long, pointy teeth.

The few other wraiths they can see through the fog are still spectral, but they’ve nearly fully escaped from their Frozen bounds—meaning hundreds more wraiths are almost loose, and these spectral wraiths can fly.

"Time to move," Dead Boy says, and with that they scramble down the other side of the wall and run down the street as fast as their legs can carry them on the slippery ice.

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"Penny for your thoughts?"

Carlita, who'd been wearily hugging her knees on the floor with her face buried in her arms, raises her head then smiles when she sees who it is. "Yeah? You got jingle?"

"Just a few coins," Raz answers with a wink. He sits down next to Carlita, pulls out a penny, and holds it aloft. "United States of NBAZ—in God we trust!"

Carlita laughs for the first time all day. "I don't trust it'll do you much good anywhere else!"

"Hey," Raz jokes back, "it's better than lugging around junk to barter with all day. Best part of living downtown—we're so civilized!"

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Carlita laughs again and gives her friend a playful shoulder punch, but her smile still bears the hallmarks of sadness and any trace of mirth quickly flees from her eyes. She stares down between her knees and sits silently for a few moments by the side of the tunnel where she had finally given up wandering half an hour ago. Raz bumps shoulders with her reassuringly.

"You don't wanna pay for my thoughts. I'm not in a good place today," she says.

"Heard you had a blowout with your aunt." Raz idly flips the penny up in the air and catches it over and over again.

"And Del Rey. And my mother." Carlita hugs her knees tighter.

"Ah. One of those days."

Carlita smiles at Raz again, and although it's still a weak smile, this time she kind of means it. She likes Raz—everybody does—and knows he means well. He's the kind of guy who understands how to speak naturally with anybody, very much unlike Del Rey, who always clams up whenever Carlita's in the room. Raz understands feelings, instinctively knows when somebody needs cheering up, and has a great sense of humor. Del might as well be a robot for all the empathy he has, and Carlita's pretty sure she's never even once heard him crack a joke.

"Well, day's almost ended," Carlita says with a light sigh. "I suppose I can pull myself out of this rut."

"Yeah?" Raz grins and flips his penny again. "Enough to come grab a bite to eat with me?"

"Oooh…" Carlita winces. "That sounds great, but my foot is absolutely killing me. I don't think I could go." She frowns—she hates admitting her weakness, but she hopes Raz'll understand.

"Then I will bring dinner to you!" Raz proclaims with an air of playful chivalry, and Carlita laughs again. "I've got just enough for a couple kebabs. Bug-farm variety, but hey, we can't be too picky."

Carlita graciously accepts his offer and waits patiently while he fetches their dinner. Her mood improves somewhat—though despairing memories of her terrible day keep flitting through her mind, the prospect of a warm dinner and good company give her a lot to look forward to.

Raz returns some twenty minutes later with two freshly made cricket kebabs and a small jug of lukewarm tea. The dinner tastes delicious—or as palatable as can be expected, anyway—and Raz provides ample small talk while they eat. Before long, their bellies are full and the two friends are happily leaning back against the wall.

"Thank you," Carlita says genuinely. "I wasn't expecting to eat a proper dinner today. I spent all my jingle on a snack earlier."

"Least I could do," Raz replies with a wink. "It's not every day a topside friend goes AWOL."

"Oh, Raz, do you think the Committee will give me the boot? I don't want to live down here. It's just horrid!"

"Nah, first infraction, right? You'll be fine." Raz pats her knee. "And you know, it isn't really all that bad down here. Life goes on pretty much the same as upstairs, minus about half the rules."

Her mind wanders back to her argument with her mother. About half the rules and twice the difficulty. And even more so for me, with my disabled foot … She doesn't want to admit it to herself, but Carlita's beginning to believe Sonoma might be right: if she winds up exiled to the Crypts, Carlita'll probably end up begging just like her mother.

She shudders and places her head on Raz's shoulder so he can't see her fading smile. At least right now, for this one evening, she's just visiting down here with a good friend.

###

"So are you actually going to tell me what the hell that was back there?" Soda lies exhausted and wheezing on the hillside, just a few meters above the edge of the fog. The two boys had run uphill as fast as they could and now Soda's lungs feel like they're burning right out of his chest.

"What…you mean the Frozen?" Dead Boy seems to be in a bit better shape, although still tired.

"Of course I mean the Frozen!" Soda shoots back, his voice hot with anger. "What the hell were you doing? Just … just standing there staring at it like an idiot?! I only have one bullet left now, thanks to that stunt!"

Dead Boy glares at his companion for a few moments, then snorts and rises to his feet. "Come on," he says as he starts off up the hill. "I'll explain as we walk."

Groaning with a mixture of misery, exhaustion, and rage, Soda has no option but to follow, as Dead Boy's already jogging around the side of a low stone structure. When he catches up, Dead Boy speaks without looking at him. "I was checking to see if Jamar might have died back there. If he … might have run up against the same wall and been cornered or something."

Soda stops short, forcing Dead Boy to do the same, and stares him down with a dead-set poker face broken only by his still-labored breathing. "Well? Explain," Soda says, his voice dry and expressionless as the gray stone wall they stand beside.

"I have … some kind of weird psychic ability," Dead Boy says slowly, his eyes darting to look down the hill. "I can gaze into the eyes of the Frozen and see what they see. And what they saw in the past."

Soda cocks an eyebrow and continues staring.

"I saw what made that ice wall. It was big."

"Did Jamar make the ice wall?" Soda asks, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

Dead Boy's face burns and he meets Soda's eyes with full intensity. "I didn't see Jamar. I saw a monster."

An awkward, angry, accusatory silence passes between the two boys like storm-charged atmosphere. Soda breaks the standoff with a loud sigh. He's never seen Dead Boy act like this in his life, and he doesn't know what to make of it.

"I swear it's true. I don't understand how or why, but it's true," Dead Boy says, his voice as close to imploring as Soda has ever heard it. "This weird ability just started a few months ago. It really freaks me out … I hate it."

The awkwardness returns in full force. The two boys both start walking up the hill again, eyes on their feet. After a minute, Soda asks, "Is that why you got the eye tats?"

"Yeah."

Soda nods. It seems to make sense. He always wondered why Del changed so suddenly after Jamar started taking him out on runs. Everybody gossips about how odd it was that he'd changed his name and his face and become a whole new person practically overnight.

"Okay," Soda says in an accepting tone. "So, what do we do now?"

"We talk to Old Man Elvis." Dead Boy points up the hill. Soda notices a wooden watchtower poking over a concrete wall. A figure in the watchtower's watching them approach with a rifle pointed in their direction. Dead Boy waves his arm wide and ushers Soda onward.

At the top of the hill, a wide field hides behind a low stone barrier. Two large granite boulders jut out of the scrubgrass on the west and north sides of the field. Eight large yurts covered in green tarpaulin have been erected between the rocky outcroppings. The watchtower—much squatter than Soda'd originally guessed—stands at the south end.

A thin trail of smoke rises from the center yurt, in front of which stands an old man with long white hair. He waves in greeting. "Welcome back, Del Rey! It's good to see you," Elvis says in a pleasant southern drawl. "Please, come in and have some food. Dinner's almost ready!"

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