Falling From the Sky (3 page)

Terrence grabs his headphones and shuts out the noise while flipping through Sports Illustrated.

My phone buzzes next to me. It’s Samantha.

I miss you already. I can’t believe you left me for the entire summer. What am I supposed to do without you?

Seriously? The most communication we’ve had in eight months is sitting next to each other at the lunch table. The only reason she’s still with me is because she doesn’t want to be the girl who broke up with the guy who is grieving the loss of his dad. And I haven’t broken up with her because…I don’t know. Because I’m an idiot. There is no good reason.

I don’t even text her back. I can’t. What the fuck do I even say to that? She’s either deathly bored or hoping I’ll write back with some super sweet boyfriend line that she can show to her friends. I’ll assume she’s deathly bored. I’ve never been good boyfriend material anyway, so I know she doesn’t expect it.

“Coach is going to have us running suicides for a week,” Zach says to Aaron. “You might as well just come on and have some fun. We sure as hell ain’t gonna have it on the court.”

Zach lingers around while Aaron puts his shoes on. They’re probably headed out for another late night at the river with whatever local girls they can find and any beer they can score with a fake ID. I wish the housing department had put Aaron in Zach’s room so he wouldn’t keep coming in here. Yeah, Aaron has a smart mouth and thinks he’s funny, but I can tolerate him. Eventually he’ll be static. But Zach Perry? He’s one of those arrogant assholes who lives off his dad’s money, wears name brand clothes, and thinks he’s God’s fucking gift to the world. Samantha would probably like him.

Aaron glances at Terrence and then back at me. “You want to come with?” he asks.

I shake my head. There’s no way in hell.

“You’re missing out,” Aaron says. He grabs a baseball cap, tugs it on over his buzz cut, and leaves with Zach.

My phone buzzes again as soon as the lock on the door clicks shut. Samantha.

I guess you are busy right now. Call me later? XOXO

Yeah. Right. I’ll call later. I’ll tell her about my new shoes and how the carousel guy stalks me because I’m friendless. I’ll tell her about the stone beds and prison walls and Michael Jordan poster. Hell, I’ll tell her I found a replacement for me in the boyfriend department, and his name is Zach Perry. I’ll even send her a picture of him.

I delete the text and debate tossing my phone into the metal trash can by the door alongside Micah’s phone number on that damned mall pamphlet. Instead, I turn it off and throw it onto my gym bag.

Terrence pulls his headphones down around his neck. “McCoy, man, you okay?”

I nod. “I’m fine,” I lie. “I just hate this place already.”

CHAPTER THREE

I open a blank text message and send Micah two words:I’m here.

I’ve avoided the mall all week, but everyone at camp is gone for the weekend. It was either Micah or that stupid Michael Jordan poster. Going home wasn’t an option. I twist the cap off my Gatorade bottle, take a swig, and try to wash away some of this shame.

Sending that text was only slightly less shameful than digging his number out of that metal trash can. Had Aaron or Terrence been there, I would’ve let that damned pamphlet go out with the trash.

My cell phone screen lights up. Micah says he’s at the arcade in the food court. I take my time strolling past the display of movie posters at the mall’s built-in cinema. I try peeking through the arcade’s windows, but they’re tinted. I can’t see anything except flashing red and yellow lights.

I find Micah tucked into a back corner of the arcade once I’m inside. He holds a lime green plastic gun and focuses intently on
Zombie Raiders 2.

“Damn it,” he mumbles. He sticks another gold coin into the machine.

“Here, take this,” he says. Not even a hello.

Instead, he hands me the orange plastic gun that’s also attached to the arcade booth.

He hits the two-player option and pulls his green gun back into place. The laser dot reflects off the screen, and Micah guides his player down a hallway with what looks like a gear shift protruding from the machine. I point my gun at the screen as well, but I’ve never played this game, and I don’t know what I’m doing. Micah guides us through a building and advises me to shoot anything that moves.

A strand of white and red tickets hangs from Micah’s pocket. There’s no telling how long he’s been here waiting for me since I texted him this morning to let him know I changed my mind.

“You didn’t shoot him!” Micah throws his head back and aims his green gun at me. “I’m dead now thanks to you.”

“Looks like you did a good job of dying on your own plenty of times before I got here,” I say, pointing to his tickets.

“Shut up,” he says. He pulls the orange gun from my hand and puts it away with the green one. “It’s a new game. We just got it in last week, and I like to have the highest scores just to piss off all the kids who go from game to game and see M. Youngblood next to the top score.”

He pulls the long strand of tickets from his pocket and folds them together.

“Besides, I like zombies,” he says.

I follow him to the front desk of the arcade. The kid in front of us can’t decide between a two inch racecar or a dinosaur sticker. Arcades really are a rip off. They’re like casinos for kids. He picks the T-Rex sticker.

“Is it Abby day or Jade day?” the girl behind the counter asks Micah.

He smiles and hands her the lump of tickets.

“Neither,” he answers. “But we’re going to go Abby style on this one.”

The girl makes a stupid face and pulls back the sliding door of the display case.

“Which one?” she asks.

Micah looks me up and down.

“Hmmm. I’m thinking blue,” he says.

She hands him a blue rabbit’s foot from inside the case. He smiles and thanks her, and we walk out of the arcade.

Micah walks across the food court toward the carousel, and I follow like a stupid puppy. I haven’t the slightest clue what my plans for the day are, but the fact that I’m going to see his life and culture makes me nervous. I imagine teepees and campfires with ladies molding pottery while the men skin a few deer. They’ll be wearing feathers, beads, and moccasins while I’m chilling in a T-shirt and Nikes. But then again, Micah doesn’t dress out of the norm so it can’t be too bad.

Micah walks inside the black gate on the railing around the carousel and motions for me to follow. He locks it behind us and stops in front of a horse that reminds me of an old western movie.

“This is the one we’ll start with,” he says.

I’ve never actually ridden a horse, but this one looks like it has two saddles, and I know that can’t be right. The top seat is small and brown. The bottom saddle is a lot bigger, and it’s Cookie Monster blue. A small lion is perched on the back of the brown saddle, and a jeweled rifle decorates the blue one. A tan rabbit hangs from the body of the rifle, and I dread everything about this horse.

“Give me a hint,” I say.

Micah laughs and shakes his head. “Use your imagination.”

My imagination says we’re going to go rabbit hunting. That’s the obvious answer, anyway. Hunting isn’t the worst recreational activity, but I’m not one for gutting and skinning the animal myself. I had always let Dad do that part. But he still let me tell my friends that I did the cool, gross stuff that really made me vomit if I watched. I wonder if I should tell Micah now that gutting rabbits will make me puke. I’ve never eaten rabbit meat, and I would die of embarrassment if I threw up on his tribe’s campfire. This whole carousel horse thing is starting to sound like a really bad idea. Maybe we’ll just watch awful black and white western films all day while he tells me about the cowboys and Indians and how terrible we white men were for stealing his land.

“My imagination isn’t very optimistic,” I tell him.

“Well, if it eases your mind, it’s nothing you’d ever guess by looking at the horse,” he says.

He fumbles the blue rabbit’s foot between his fingers. Then he hands it over to me.

“I got that for you,” he says. “For good luck. With basketball. Or whatever else you need luck with.”

I don’t want it, but it’d be rude not to take it. The fur is coarse, and its nail pokes my skin. I hook the metal clasp around my finger so I don’t actually have to touch it. So gross. And awkward.

“Umm, thanks,” I say. “I’ll probably need some luck.”

Micah nods, like I’m a loser who really does. “So, you ready to head out?” he asks.

On the way out of the mall, Micah stops in front of the arcade. Some little kid is playing the new zombie game, and Micah takes too much pleasure in watching the kid lose. We wait for a few seconds before Micah bursts out laughing and says that the kid will never get past the level making the same mistakes over and over.

I’ll never last ten horses with this dude. He talks too damn much.

“I like zombie games,” he says even though he’s already told me. “And zombie movies. Basically anything with zombies. If I had to go to camp to be something, I’d go to zombie camp.”

“You wouldn’t last,” I tell him as I push through the double doors and walk out toward the mall’s parking lot. “Zombies don’t talk, and I don’t think you could manage a life where all you could say was ‘braaaains.’”

Micah sighs. “Not a fan of zombies?”

I shrug. I’m totally a fan of zombies. I used to play the
Zombie Sanctuary
games with my dad. He was an Xbox junkie, even more than I was. We would stay up for hours playing a new game after he brought it home. I had been really excited about the third game because it was a double disk where you could play the levels as a human or as a zombie.

We flipped a coin and started playing the human side first. That was around the time that Dad got his promotion and had to travel more for work. Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks overseas, and I would refuse to play the next level without him. It sat at level seventeen for a long time, even after his death. Until Jordan “accidentally” erased everything. I haven’t forgiven him for that yet. I haven’t had the heart to play the game either.

“Ridge?” Micah asks. “You okay?”

“I like zombies,” I say. But that doesn’t answer his other question. “I’m fine. So what’s the plan? Standing around in the parking lot?”

“Brain surgery.” Micah is quite serious when he says it. “The movie,” he clarifies.

“That movie doesn’t come out for another two weeks,” I say.

Brain Surgery
is supposed to be the movie of the summer. It’s based off of the Xbox game series,
Zombie Sanctuary
. I hate admitting that I’m really excited for it. I also planned not to see it in theatres just in case the Dad-reminder was too much.

“To the public,” Micah corrects me. “That cinema belongs to the mall. The mall belongs to my family. And that means I can get a free screening of any movie before it’s ever released.”

He raises his eyebrows, and it takes everything in me not to drop to my knees on the pavement and beg him to take me with him. I can handle a private screening.

My eyes struggle to adjust to the sunlight when I step out of the movie theatre. It feels like it should be dark already. Micah talks too fast for me to understand a single word that’s coming out of his mouth.

“I never would’ve thought to look in the jar,” he says.

He finally slows down. He rambles on about level thirteen in the game, the one that’s set in the morgue. I don’t know what he’s talking about, though.

“For what?” I ask him.

“The ‘unlock all’ feature, to unlock all the freezers,” he says. “You know, the ones that pull out and each one has a different corpse in it? Like the cabinets in the morgue?”

“Why would you want to unlock all of them?” This is probably a stupid question.

Micah’s eyes grow wider, and I realize it
was
a stupid question.

“So you can change all of them to zombies at once.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing on the planet.

I shrug. “I’ve never played that side,” I confess.

“But you said your brother deleted seventeen levels.”

“On the human side,” I say. “I never played the zombie side.”

He freezes in his tracks on the middle of the sidewalk. This stupid grin plasters across his face, and I know what he’s thinking, but I play dumb.

“You’ve gotta play it with me,” he says. “It’s like a thousand times better than the human side, and we’ve already seen the movie, so we’re like a step ahead of the rest of the world.”

He’s talking fast again. He’s too excited. “And I’ve only gotten through level twelve because I couldn’t find the unlock all key in thirteen, but we could go back to my house and–”

“Okay!” I shout. “Calm down. We can play it.”

I really don’t want to, but I actually feel sorry for him. He reminds me of how I used to get when my dad would call from a business trip and talk about the next levels. Besides, if I play it here, I won’t have to worry about seeing my dad’s Xbox login pop up. The thought of it makes me want to fall from the sky myself.

Micah instantly makes plans. “I’ll follow you back to camp so you can leave your car and ride back to the res with me.”

The Bear Creek Indian Reservation is just a few miles up the road from the mall. The pavement turns to dirt, and it’s hard to see anything through all the dust kicking up around Micah’s truck. He lets off the accelerator, and the sandstorm spirals back to the ground.

“So, that western-looking horse,” I say. “How is that part of your culture? Did your tribe invent zombies or something?”

Micah laughs. “There are Jocolnu legends about the undead.”

“And you gave me a lucky rabbit’s foot to help me survive an apocalypse?” I ask. “And the plastic guns in the arcade – was that practice for when it happens?”

I stare out the window as I talk so I can’t see his face. He’s probably giving me evil eyes. I should be more respectful.

Luckily he laughs.

“That was for luck because I’m going to kick your ass at Xbox games,” he shoots back.