Reset day, p.1
Reset Day, page 1
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SNEAK PEEK
COPYRIGHT
The lights are so bright, they give Bruce a headache.
“Tell me again,” his coworker, Hal, says, “why we’re pretending like it’s the 1800s? Don’t we have machines that can drill for us?”
Bruce watches Hal look longingly at the unused excavator and jackhammer on the ground. Bruce looks at it, too, but only for a fleeting moment—the smallest, tiniest, most minuscule amount of time. Then they bring up their pickaxes again.
“It’s called a noise ordinance, Hal, and I didn’t invent it,” Bruce grumbles. He’s grumpy, though maybe more for having to explain it for the hundredth time to Hal. “At least we’re getting time and a half.”
“Time and a half, pah!” Hal spits. “We’re working through the night with a toy hammer. Remind me to thank our genius union rep for negotiating such a sweet deal.”
“Remind me to thank him for the overnight shift with you,” Bruce quips, dragging his saw back and forth over the char-stained cement. Though as he chips away at the twenty-five-year-old concrete, he smells a familiar scent of burning wood. Bruce wagers he’ll never understand what warranted destroying a perfectly good amusement park. But he’s probably biased—after all, Bruce was always a sucker for a good tilt-a-whirl.
Then Bruce hears Hal sigh.
“There it is again,” Hal says, raising his nose in the air to get a strong whiff of smoke.
“Just more of a reason to get through this as fast as possible,” Bruce replies, continuing his work. Admittedly, he smelled the smoke before Hal, but he didn’t want to say anything. Hal spooks easily, and Bruce didn’t want to be the harder worker and the braver one … but here we are.
Hal shakes his head. “Those tunnels burned straight through decades ago. There’s no way there are fires still going. Heck, there’s no way there are tunnels at all anymore. Not here in Raven Brooks,” he says.
Bruce is growing tired of Hal’s rants. They never seem to end. But to Hal’s credit, Bruce doesn’t buy the underground fire story, either, not for one second. No, something else happened here … but Bruce isn’t sure what. And at this point, maybe it’s better he doesn’t know.
“Look,” says Hal, peering over each shoulder before leaning in closer to Bruce. “All I’m saying is that those theme-park people messed with things that shouldn’t have been messed with. And somewhere along the line, things got evil. Real evil.”
Bruce is silent.
“Kids died, Bruce,” Hal finishes.
Bruce stifles the shiver he’s been hiding under his collar all night. And it’s not from the cold.
“C’mon, Hal, get a grip. It was a handful of rich people running around with shiny rocks. They got in over their heads, then they got caught, end of story.”
“Okay, so how do you explain Ted Peterson?” Hal challenges.
Bruce laughs. He can’t help it. Ted Peterson? That nutty guy?
“Explain Ted Peterson? I’m not sure anyone can ‘explain’ Ted Peterson.”
But Hal isn’t laughing, and pretty soon, Bruce is back to shrugging that chill from his spine.
“Peterson was worse than any of ’em,” Bruce says, and he means it. But if he has any incriminating intel, he doesn’t share.
Bruce and Hal continue working away, this time in silence. The smoke smell drifts in the air, but it’s not what Bruce is thinking about right now. What exactly was that guy Peterson involved in? Was he really all that bad? Did he mean to kill those kids? And then …
“What if Ted Peterson’s not gone?”
Bruce doesn’t realize he says this question out loud.
As Bruce’s own voice dawns on him, a low-flying crow swoops through the spotlight of their worksite, cawing. And then, like lightning, the earth below them begins to rumble and shake. Pieces of broken cement skitter around Bruce’s and Hal’s boots as they watch helplessly, each waiting for the other to assure them it’s all in their heads.
“Bruce?” says Hal, with the ground still quivering beneath him.
Bruce points to Hal’s feet. “Look out!”
But it’s too late. Bruce can tell that Hal doesn’t see the ground open like a gaping mouth. Nor does he smell the acrid air or feel the waft of heat rising from the cracked earth.
Bruce watches as the ground swallows Hal whole.
“HAL!” Bruce screams, rushing to the edge of the crater that’s just formed, but a wave of heat forces him back and knocks him over, pulling him rolling down a nearby hill.
Bruce lands hard on a pile of concrete rubble before clambering back to the edge of the hole.
“Hal?” he calls out. “Hal? HAL? HAAAL?” Each call is filled with more desperation than before.
But Bruce’s calling is in vain. A final, giant wave of blistering air rises to the crater’s surface. It grabs hold of Bruce and drags him in.
As if on cue, the night sky gets darker. And the crow perches in a tree, watching it all unfold.
“Are we there yet?” my sister, Delia, calls out as she kicks the back of my seat. She’s asked this question maybe two hundred times since we got in the car on the drive to our new house, and if I hear her perky voice again—and feel her legs against the ridge of my back—I’ll have no choice. I’ll have to disown her.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to need some serious massage therapy ASAP,” I say, rubbing the spot where she punctured me through the seat.
“Pip, you’re thirteen, not three hundred,” replies Delia.
Mom, driving swiftly through some empty roundabout, realizes she has to play mediator.
“Girls, hold it together for another five minutes. We’re almost there.”
I groan. Mom has been saying “five more minutes” for the past hour. I won’t admit it, but I agree with Delia. This road trip has taken forever.
I lean my head out the open window and feel the wind in my hair. The purple dye has faded to a lavender I actually like more, and it looks almost iridescent in the sun.
As Mom’s car pushes on, the trees around grow thicker, almost like we’re entering a different part of the world. And I guess, in a way, we are. When I told my old friends I was moving to place called Raven Brooks, no one—including me—had ever heard of it. I put up a stink about moving, but then Mom said I could dye my hair if we did, and, well … you know the rest of that story.
“I think I made a wrong turn. Piper, weren’t we on track near that forest preserve?” Mom says, chewing the fingernail on her index finger. She keeps asking me to check the map app on my phone, but it doesn’t seem to recognize where we are, either.
The fading sun hits the tiny diamond on her wedding ring, and I swallow the knot that forms in my throat. Truth be told, my position as “road-trip navigator” is new—that was always Dad.
Dad isn’t here anymore, I remind myself. You’ve inherited the mantle.
“Mom, that wasn’t a road. That wasn’t even a hiking trail,” says Delia, and for the first time in over an hour, I don’t argue with her.
After all, it’s not Delia’s fault. It’s not Mom’s, either. This whole mess isn’t anyone’s fault but the universe’s.
Thanks, Universe.
I’m about to restart the map app for the eightieth time when Mom races by a signpost covered almost entirely by a massive tree branch.
“Mom, stop!” I screech.
In a move I don’t think even she saw coming, Mom jams her foot down on the break, lurching all three of us forward and skidding the car to a full stop in the middle of the road.
“What?” Mom demands.
“Uh, I think I saw a sign,” I say meekly, and she eases back into the driver’s seat, ignoring the tiny snort from Delia behind her.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize you were so …”
“Exactly,” Delia helps me out. “Nope. Not tense at all. Totally chill.”
Mom reverses the car down the empty road.
There, as if hiding on purpose, is the back half of a sign. I can just barely make out the “RAV” above the “OKS” below it. But once I do, there’s no mistaking it—that’s the sign for Raven Brooks.
Mom stops the car so I can get out and move the tree vine in the way.
“Hmm,” I say, peering at the sign. “Get this. It says Raven Brooks: three hundred feet.”
Mom shakes her head. “That’s not possible.”
I shrug and point up. “Tell that to the sign.”
I have to admit, though—Mom’s right. Three hundred feet? Surely we’ve been everywhere in that radius at this point. And it’s all overgrown shrubbery.
Unless, a voice creeps in the back of my head, it isn’t?
Mom sighs, her thousandth deep breath of our trip across three state lines. She sounds exhausted. I guess I would be, too. We only lost Dad a few months ago, and now we’re moving, and on top of it all, she’s got to deal with me and Delia. Mostly Delia, of course, but me, too. The very least the universe can offer her is an easy drive to our new home.
I climb back into the car. If I had any confidence that Raven Brooks really was three hundred feet ahe
As we creep toward the three-hundred-foot mark, Mom slows the car to a near stop.
“There!” I yelp after several seconds of silent searching.
“Piper, are you sure?” Mom says, squinting into the thick spate of trees crowding the road’s shoulder.
“Oh! I see it now,” Delia says. “Just under the branch of that big, gnarly one.”
She points to a tree suitable for any nightmare. It has that knotted-twisted-old-oak look that just screams I’ve been here longer than you, and I’ll outlive you five times over.
“How on earth did you girls spot that?” Mom says, leaning over me to get a better look at the alleged road.
“It’s Piper, remember?” says Delia, and I can practically hear her eyes rolling back into her head. “It’s her superpower.”
My superpower. I cringe at Delia’s words, but she’s not wrong. I have a talent that’s useless 99.9 percent of the time—an ability to notice what others usually don’t. Or, as Dad used to say, I have the devastatingly boring gift of “observation.” Mom says I have an eye for detail, but Delia characterizes it the way only a little sister could: She calls me Eyeball, which is maybe the most disgusting name to give a sibling. Except for Nose Hair. That’s the name I’ve blessed her with. (And you can probably guess why.) I win.
Mom cranks the wheel of the car and rolls us slowly over the crunchy foliage blanketing the road. Tree branches scrape the top of the car, making a spine-rattling screech with every pass underneath one of the old trees’ claws.
“Bird,” Delia says suddenly from the back seat.
“Bird?” Mom asks.
This time I chime in. “Mom, look out for the bir—”
Mom hits the break. There’s an enormous black bird standing in the middle of the road.
“Is it … playing chicken?” says Delia, snorting at her own joke, and I hate myself for laughing a little, too, but this enormous black bird is just standing there in the middle of the road, looking straight at us through the windshield like it’s daring us to move forward. I’m not sure how much more bizarre this trip can get.
“Just inch up,” I suggest. “It’ll move.”
Yet even as I say the words aloud, something inside of me doubts I’m right. I can’t stop staring at the bird—its onyx eyes, its tiny fluff of feathers hooding the top of its slightly hooked beak, its oil-slick feathers pushed tight against its large body. This bird has no intention of moving out of our way.
“Maybe just … move around it?” I say when I notice Mom realizing the same thing I am.
“Around it how?” Mom asks, and I see what she’s saying. It’s hard to know where the edge of the road stops and the forest starts. Who knows what lies underneath all that overgrowth? It could be a six-inch drop, or some furry animal’s habitat. Or some creepy bird’s ground nest full of hatchlings.
Mom eases the car in a slow semicircle around the bird, tires crunching over the forest bed.
“Why does that bird hate you?” Delia whispers from the back seat. No one answers. To be honest, I’m not really sure.
Once we’re past it, Mom picks up a little speed, glancing one last time in her rearview mirror.
“It still hasn’t moved,” she says.
“I’m sure it was just protecting its nest,” I posit.
“On the ground?” asks Delia unhelpfully.
As soon as we turn left, there stands another huge crow, stock-still in the middle of the road.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” says Mom.
“Do you think … it’s the same one?” says Delia, but if this is another of her jokes, none of us are laughing.
“It’s not,” I say, noticing immediately the distinct white feather sticking up from this one’s head.
“This is nuts,” says Mom, again edging around the crow in our path. “And not birdseed nuts.” Again, the bird makes no move to fly away.
We’re silent as we approach the next break in the trees, and when this sign points us to the right, we hold a collective breath and prepare for the crow that we’re now sure will be waiting for us on the forest floor. Instead, the tree canopy thins, and what we see in place of the crow is a massive brick wall.
“What on earth?” Mom breathes.
I roll down the window and lean out to examine the wall, only to find it isn’t actually a wall at all, but a sort of watchtower. I can see a turret at the top. Beside my head is a small metal box with a little black handle that says PULL.
Who am I to argue?
Inside the box is a tiny red button below a circular pattern of holes.
“I think it’s a call box,” I say, pushing the red button.
We’re met with silence.
Mom leans over me toward the speaker anyway. “Hello? We’re looking for Raven Brooks,” she says. “Can you tell us if we’re on the right track? We may have taken a wrong turn at the …”
“At the crow,” Delia mutters. But that’s absurd—there’s no way that crow is a permanent fixture of the road.
Or is it? I think.
I scan the wall in front of me, looking for an actual door. Unless it’s hidden in the mortar that joins the bricks somehow, I’m not seeing it.
What I am seeing, though, is the tiniest carving etched into the brick closest to the car tire on my side. I lean farther out of the window to get a better look, and what I see is … honestly, I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that I don’t like it.
Someone has carved into the brick a sort of crude bird, except it doesn’t look exactly like the birds that “greeted” us in the road. Instead, this looks like an unnatural cross between a man and a bird, standing on its two feet hunched and stooped, its neck sloped forward at an odd angle, its feathers hanging knotted and limp on long limbs that aren’t quite arms but aren’t quite wings, either. And unless my eyes are playing a trick on me, I’d swear that its beak is a set of teeny-tiny razors, ready to destroy whatever comes its way.
“I feel sick,” Delia says behind me, and at first I think she’s seeing the same carving in the brick that I am.
But when I turn, I see that she’s pointing to a tattered piece of paper affixed to the brick farther down the wall. It says:
“Huh?” Mom says. “How do you just close an entire town?”
“I wonder if this town was built on a fault line,” I say. “Maybe it’s earthquake-prone.” It’s the only explanation I can think of. Though I’m not really sure crows are so attuned to seismic activity.
I take another look at the call box. Mom’s given up on it.
“Should we give it another go?” I suggest.
Mom shakes her head. She’s got another idea.
There’s a ditch nearby with a culvert through it.
“I don’t like it,” Mom says. “But we could drive through that.”
“Aw, come on. What’s the worst that could happen?” Delia says. “So we drive through a little standing water in a giant ditch. Maybe we get a little radiation poisoning. Maybe we get some superpowers out of it.”
Mom takes a deep breath. Then she hits the accelerator.
“Yes!” says Delia. “I hope I get turned into a centaur.”
“You’re not going to get turned into a—”
“A radioactive centaur!”
As we reach the mouth of the culvert, it’s a little narrower than I thought. The top has a lower clearance, too. With a bunch of our luggage latched to the car roof, I’m a little nervous about it all clearing. I wouldn’t care so much, except my sound equipment is in the box strapped to the very top of the car and some of it was a gift from Dad.
I hear my metal case scrape against the top of the tunnel and wince.
“You know what’d be great to see on the other side?” Delia says. “Another creepy bird. Ooo, maybe my first task as a radioactive centaur would be to fight it. Wouldn’t that be fun to watch?”
I have no idea what we’ll find on the other side of the ditch. A road? Another wall? A raccoon in a top hat? Another bird?
All I really want to find is home. My new home, I mean.
Mom is a master driver, and once she’s successfully navigated us through, we indeed emerge on a road.
It couldn’t all end that easily, though.
Seconds after Mom stops the car on the other side, the roof that fought so hard against my case full of sound equipment groans loud enough to make my ears hurt. With a sickening twist of metal, the brick wall that formed the top half of the culvert begins falling away in chunks. The tin roof of the tunnel bows at a tight angle toward the ground.
