Apocalypse to Go Read Free Page B

before she passed away. Eileen had turned them into storage areas, though recently she’d cleared out the ground-floor room and stashed its contents elsewhere, because it housed the psychic gate to the deviant world level known as Interchange. Uncle Jim had padlockedthe door into that room and hammered a couple of boards across it to keep it shut. We climbed the stairs up to the door of the second storage room. On the landing Michael paused and turned to look at me.
    “I’m real sorry about the bad grades,” he said.
    “So am I. If you want to go to college, you’d better bring them up in summer school.”
    “That’s what Ari said, too. He told me I was hella lucky to have a chance at college.” He reached for the doorknob. “School would be seriously better than going into the army like he did.”
    Michael opened the door and held it to let me go in first. Since an old venetian blind covered the room’s only window, I flipped on the overhead light. The antique steamer trunk in which I’d stored my college notebooks and other souvenirs sat against the farthest wall of the square room. Big storage cartons and a treadle sewing machine blocked the path. Michael began moving things out of the way, then stopped and turned toward the window. He frowned and seemed to be listening to a distant noise. I heard nothing.
    “What is it, bro?” I said.
    “This is totally whack,” he said. “I’m not sure—just let me—” He took a couple of steps toward the window, then stared at it. “There never was a gate here before.”
    “Is there now?”
    “Yeah. I can feel it, but it’s not on right. I mean, it’s sort of skewed or hanging weird, like a door that’s off one of its hinges.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “I’m thinking I could pull up that blind, and then we could see what’s over there.”
    Over on the other side of the trans-world gate, he meant. I ran an SM:D and felt nothing but the usual low hum of suffering inherent in earthly existence.
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.”
    It took us a couple of minutes to clear a path to the window. I stood at one side of it and Michael, at the other, where he could reach the pull cord to open the blind. As soon as he touched the cord, the blind made a clattering noise and melted away.
    Sunlight flooded my vision and made my eyes water. Icould smell fresh air, scented with damp earth and manure. I blinked hard and squinted to look around me. We were standing right on the edge of a flat roof, looking down at a vegetable garden edged with mutant morning glory plants, ten feet high, some of them, supported on poles. We’d come through to Interchange.
    “Oh, shit!” Michael said. “I forgot.”
    “Forgot what?” I said.
    “That the house is different here. It’s only got one room at this end. Nola, step back, a big step, and then turn around. Okay?”
    “Okay.” I followed orders.
    I bumped into a pile of cardboard cartons. Dim electric light replaced the sunshine. I heard Michael whistle in relief, and I let out my breath in a sigh. We were back in the storage room at the Houlihan house.
    “Sorry ’bout that,” Michael said. “That was hella stupid of me.”
    “Well, it’s not like you knew what was going to happen.”
    “Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m having to learn how to world-walk on my own, and sometimes I seriously mess up. I wish Dad was here. It’s gross that he got busted like that.”
    “Yeah, I have to agree.”
    Michael scowled at the venetian blind. “It’s weird about this gate opening up. I helped Aunt Eileen carry some stuff up here just last week, and it wasn’t open then, the gate, I mean.”
    “Huh.” I considered the problem. “Well, I know even less about this stuff than you do, but let’s look at it logically. There’s a couple of possibilities. Dad opened the original gate downstairs a long time ago, but he’s in prison. So, maybe someone else opened this one.”
    “They did a