The Other Side by Joshua McCune Read Free Book Online Page A

in—”
    â€œNo locations. Can you make it to the white mountains?”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œYou have the SIM card?”
    â€œYes.” I pulled it from the map in the crate.
    â€œPut it in the phone. That’ll tell you what you need to know.”
    â€œWhat’s going on? I couldn’t contact—”
    â€œBad stuff, Cosgrove.”
    â€œWhat about Papa?” I ask, which is Keith’s code name.
    â€œFine. No time to talk. Get here if you can. Sorry we can’t help. Good-bye.”
    â€œWait! Is Jame –” I catch myself. “Is Jay okay? We haven’t heard anything from him in a month.”
    â€œYou don’t know?” he says. There’s something else in his voice now. Also something I’ve never heard. Melancholy? Despair? “I’m sorry.”
    â€œSorry?” I mumble. “Is he okay? Tell me.”
    â€œI don’t know, Callahan. I just don’t know,” he whispers. The fact that he slipped and used my real name terrifies me almost as much as his words. “Everything’s hosed. I’m sorry.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I ask, but the phone’s gone silent. I look at the screen. Call ended.
    When I tap out the number again, a message appears— Locked— and I’m asked for a passcode. After my third failed attempt, the screen goes blank.
    Preston must have programmed the phone to deactivate after I called him. Worried that I might try to contact someone else. Like my father or brother. How could he do that to me? What if we needed an ambulance again? And what about James?
    Deep breath. In nae. I fetch my pack, retrieve the SIM card, and slide it into the phone’s back. The screen lights up, and that digital map from the crate appears in miniature. I jab at the red pushpins that dot the evacuated territories. Touching one pulls up the name of a city, mountain, or national park and assigns it a code phrase. No other information. No photos. No detailed maps. Nothing.
    Worse, “the white mountains” are Denver. That’s at the edge of the drone zone. The city’s a pile of rubble, abandoned to nature and the ghosts of the dead these past ten years. Maybe a place for humans to hide, but not dragons.
    I scan through the remaining hideouts, committing them to memory, for all the good it’ll do. When I remove the SIM card, I test the phone again, but it might as well be a drink coaster. I hurl it at the wall, then stomp on it.
    I stare unblinking at the broken remnants and feel a familiar sting behind my eyes.
    â€œNo!”
    No more tears. I did not cry for Grackel; I will not cry for James.

7
    After showering and changing into our spare clothes, Allie and I return to the nurse’s station. Nurse Frown’s not frowning anymore. She wraps my ribs extra tight, gives Allie a lollipop that’s instantly gobbled, and tells us Colin’s looking good and should be out of surgery in an hour.
    I thank her and ask if I can use her cell phone to call a cab so Allie and I can get breakfast. Nurse Frown starts frowning again, then lectures me about cell phones causing cancer, extra so because of Dillingham’s poor reception. Once she’s exhausted her fund of knowledge, she escorts me to the hospital’s old-school push-button phone and looms over me until I hang up.
    Ernie’s Cab drops us off at the Twin Dragons restaurant, which the driver informs me used to serve Chinese beforebeing converted to a diner when some “cheechakos bullied their way in.” Two fire-breathing, interconnected neon dragons adorn the front window. Long, snakelike, wingless. Nothing at all like real Reds or Greens, other than the bright glow.
    The first thing I notice when we enter is the unhealthily delightful smell of grease and bacon. A waitress greets us with a perfunctory hello and shows us to a booth. The few other patrons in the diner at the early hour don’t pay us any