It was definitely one of those days.
“I’ll drive.” Chandra flung open the door.
“Well, that was the wrong thing to say,” Warren muttered as she stalked around the cab.
“Chandra hates being mistaken for a man,” Gregor explained as he opened the driver’s side door, but his eyes were laughing again. And at least I knew I wasn’t the first to have done so. Unfortunately I also knew women. They rarely forgave a slight like this, and Chandra didn’t seem terribly forgiving in the first place.
“Don’t wait up for me, kids,” Gregor said, exiting the car.
“Call if you’re gonna be late,” Warren said.
“Nag, nag, nag.”
The doors shut behind Chandra, and she slammed the car into gear.
“Shit,” I heard Felix mutter.
“Got your belt on?” Warren asked. The car revved, tires squealing and spinning over gravel before finding purchase and jolting forward. I was thrown back into my seat, my gaze fixed straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I saw Gregor’s diminishing bulk in the sideview mirror. However, the solid concrete wall standing twelve feet before us seemed a more pressing issue.
“Women drivers…” Warren said, sounding weary.
Perhaps the car could fly, I thought as the wall loomed closer. Or maybe the wall moved or disintegrated or we’d disappear right through it like it wasn’t even there. But then Warren braced himself beside me, and I knew that wall wasn’t going anywhere.
We struck it going at least sixty-five miles an hour. The impact propelled me into the seat in front of me, and the angry screech of metal kissing concrete married burning rubber and dust-filled air. Bricks scraped against the sides of the car, slamming atop the roof before we came to a halt as violently and abruptly as any normal car would. When I opened my eyes, however, I saw the shell of the cab was undamaged.
“I hate that part,” Warren muttered, unbuckling.
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and came away with fresh blood. “What the hell was that?”
“What?” he said, raising a brow. “You thought crossing over to an alternate reality would be easy?”
“You’ll get used to it,” Felix said, smiling as the doors swung open. “Helps if you have a cocktail first.”
“You mean I’ll have to do that again?”
Chandra smirked at me through the rearview mirror. “Welcome to our world,” she said, and got out of the cab.
Bitch, I thought, watching her stalk away through debris.
“Come on,” Warren said, waving me along. I sighed, shook my head, and went ahead and followed him into his world.
I stepped from that cab in the same way other adventurous humans once stepped onto the moon. A small step here, another tentative one there; gravel and cinder block and glass crunching beneath my boots. It seemed we were in a dusty, debris-scattered courtyard, with oddly shaped sheet metal stacked and leaning at every angle and high walls ribboned with whorls of cyclone wire. Glancing back, I tried to see Gregor through the breach in the wall, but all the dust stirred by our vehicle’s impact had wafted toward that opening like smoke to a chimney flue, and it was congealing there somehow, as thick and unyielding as cinder itself, swirling like concrete being poured through air.
The others were in front of me, walking single file, Warren’s gimpy gait even more pronounced as he picked his way around the sheet metal. As I rushed to catch up with him I realized the steel pieces in the yard weren’t scraps of metal at all, but signs sporting words like Normandie, Photo Shop, and Le Café. There was a life-sized cactus with chipped green paint and holes where bald and broken bulbs protruded like thorns, and a six-foot martini glass outlined by clear glass tubes. There were acres more of shattered incandescent lamps, fluorescent paint, and the historic signage that had dotted the Vegas skyline when Italian men were still running the city and flashing neon drenched the streets from dusk to dawn.
“Where are we?” I asked, glancing at scripted individual letters someone had lined up to spell Casino.
“Neon Boneyard,” Warren shot over his shoulder, picking his way past the Landmark and Dunes signs. Each letter was larger than he.
“Where the lights go to die,” Chandra said, smirking as she twirled to face me.
“Where the Light goes to rest,” Felix corrected, suddenly appearing beside me. He smiled again, and I was gratified. “It’s as close to home as you’re ever going to get again.”
We followed Warren past the Aladdin’s original genie’s lamp, and took a left at a sign that said Thunderbird in script. About an acre in we stopped in front of the largest, gaudiest piece in the yard, still magnificent, even with all its lights busted and burnt out. “Here,” Warren said.
I gazed upward, nonplussed. “The Silver Slipper?” Next to the Foxy’s Firehouse and the hundred-foot clown still standing in front of Circus Circus, the Silver Slipper had been my favorite neon landmark as a kid. As I got closer, I saw the bulbs that had once studded the bright evening shoe were long gone, their threads rusted, maintenance halted after the property was demolished. I was surprised to see it was only fifteen feet high—it had always seemed larger looming above the property on its rotating axis—but it looked to weigh at least two tons, and I watched as the others crossed to the back of the giant shoe and began to climb a rusted staircase attached to the heel.
At first I just stood there, craning my neck upward, gazing from the ground as three superheroes became silhouetted in the waning evening light. Chandra was first. She didn’t look at me or anyone else as she reached the top, but sat down unceremoniously and slid down the great, bulb-stamped pump. Just before she slid off the front of the curved toe, a light flashed and she disappeared.
“Come on,” Felix yelled down to me. “You’ll fall behind.”
Which was the last thing I wanted. Slinging my duffel over my shoulder, I scurried to the staircase and began to climb. I arrived just in time to see a path light up, much like a landing strip for an airplane.
“What do we do?” I asked, though Felix was already kneeling for his slide, which meant I was about to find out.
He smiled at me over his shoulder. “Just follow the light. It’ll lead the way.” And he let himself go, sliding down the giant slipper until—flash!—he disappeared into the toe.
“It’s like anything else,” Warren said, stepping onto the narrow platform. He extended his bad leg out in front of him first, then the good. “You take the first step with the faith you’ll end up where you want to be.” Without waiting for a reply, he too disappeared.
“Where I want to be,” I repeated, though there was no one left to hear. I was no longer sure exactly where that was…though I was relatively certain it wasn’t a hole in the ground beneath the Silver Slipper in the Neon Boneyard where discarded Las Vegas signage went to die.
Just take the first step. I did, and a preternatural landing strip lit up before me. That had to be a good sign, I thought, eyeing the beacon at the end. I took another step. Suddenly the Slipper exploded with light, the small landing strip disappearing into a void so bright I had to shield my eyes, locking them tight. If anything, the light grew brighter.
I stepped back, trying to feel my way off the platform. I was afraid I’d fall but I couldn’t take my hands from my eyes long enough to look because they were tearing up in defense. I heard a sizzling sound and smelled burning. Then I tasted it, hot and cloying at the back of my throat, and realized it was coming from me.
Agony jigsawed through my skull, drilling at my temples, and I cried out and rushed forward blindly. I had no choice but to move. I was incinerating on that platform, like I was shut in a microwave, organs heating within me, roasting from the inside out.
I stepped, slipped, and slid into oblivion. The incline was like a greased luge run, and me without a sled, I thought hysterically. And while the drop into the toe was not unexpected, my breath was sucked away. Light, brilliant but miasmic, streamed past me, surrounded me…and instead of illuminating me, infected me.