EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Thirty-Two

The street, if you could call it that, was mostly just a large expanse of empty yellow dirt. It was everywhere, the dirt. Coating the windows and the people and the trash that seemed to pile up into higher and higher mountains as I walked, taking the place of the houses that had once almost certainly contained it all. But it must not have been trash then. It must have been people's things.

From the map Tina had shown me, Adam's old house was over in a part of town where Robbie's childhood friend Scott lived. I hadn't been there very many times, as Scott hated me and I was never invited over. But I had been with Mom in the car once or twice when we picked Robbie up, and I knew how to get there. It was about a quarter mile from where our high school was—or, I guess, where our high school had been, since I had no idea if the school was still there or not.

And if it turned out the school wasn't there, then what about the portals beneath it?

How would Adam and I get back home...assuming I could find Adam at all?

Finally, I reached the neighborhood. Several houses still stood, though they were in varying states of disrepair. The ones that remained in decent shape had the highest fences, sometimes made of jury-rigged pieces of other structures, like a mismatched army defending a wartime fort.

My mind couldn't help but search desperately for some clue as to what had happened here. Climate change clearly had something to do with it, as nothing green could live in all this heat and pollution. And the thicker the dust had become, the more it had stifled plant life; the more the plant life had depleted, the more the land had turned arid and produced more dirt.

It was something scientists had been predicting for decades, but it wasn't supposed to happen this quickly. Only forty years had passed.

We were supposed to have more time than this.

That is to say, I thought we'd have more time.

My feet stopped walking, and it was like they knew something my brain didn't. There was a word in stenciled letters on the gate of the house before me. I couldn't read it through the caked-on dirt, of course, and had to use my shirt to wipe it down before I could be sure it was right.

When I saw it at last, I wanted to cry with relief: "Martel."

I looked around for any bell to ring, but instead I noticed a cord hanging from a hole in the wooden fence. I pulled on it, and what sounded like a cowbell clanged on the other side. My hands clenched back towards my sides, shocked by how loud it had it been, echoing against the cavernous spaces left behind by the missing houses.

Nothing happened. I raised my hand, willing myself to pull the string again as gently as possible.

But I didn't get a chance. Because the gate opened then, and the barrel of a gun was in my face.

And on the far end of the gun were a pair of green eyes that looked painfully similar to the ones I had dreamed about every night for a year. But these eyes weren't the same; they were cold and creased with age, and resting in a face more chiseled with time and anger than the one that I loved.

"Jonah Martel?" I asked.

"What do you want?" He didn't lower the gun.

"I'm looking for your brother."

The gun lowered then, and I could see the face more clearly. But nothing about its wrenched features softened a bit as he used the gun like a matador's red cape to wave me past the gate and onto the property.

**

There were small signs of life in Adam's childhood kitchen—the life that had existed here many years before. A cabinet with some ancient blue china plates and matching cups, all peeping out from beneath a mountain of dust that had settled on them through a small hole in the glass door. An embroidery hoop with the hand-stitched words "Home is Forever" in red cursive letters. A large candelabra high up on a shelf that, upon further inspection, looked like a menorah that Jewish people might light at Hannukah; yet another fact about Adam I had never had a chance to learn.