Sunderworld, Vol. I: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry by Ransom Riggs

Author:Ransom Riggs [Riggs, Ransom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2024-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Nine

His old green bike was wedged between the water heater and a beat-up surfboard in the garage. The frame was bent and the rear tire was nearly out of air. He couldn’t find the pump, so he rode it half-flat all the way out of Brentwood, standing up on the pedals to coerce them into motion while the duffel thumped rhythmically against his back. He was winded by the time he reached the gas station on Barrington, where he filled the tire and checked the location of Tiny’s Scrap and Tow on his phone.

It had forty-five reviews and one star on Google.

The sky was orange from some distant wildfire. He labored against gusts of Santa Ana wind that sandblasted him with grit and shook the palms overhead into bursts of applause. At a red light he reached down to unspool a fast-food wrapper from his spokes and realized people were staring at him from their cars. Downtown he wouldn’t have rated a second glance, but this close to Beverly Hills he cut a strange figure with his duffel bag and his old bike, wearing hiking boots in the summer.

Down Bundy to San Vicente. Down San Vicente past the fancy boutiques and restaurants marked $$$$ on maps until they gave way suddenly to a sprawl of tents and shopping carts. The tow yard was still miles away, in Culver City by the oil fields.

Leopold didn’t care. He would’ve ridden to the next state.

He veered left on Eisenhower and cut through the vast and crumbling VA complex where Richter had taught him to drive stick, then paralleled the veterans cemetery with its stones like a gently undulating sea of white teeth. He knew people who wouldn’t drive past it. On misty mornings it looked like a hundred thousand ghosts all rising from their graves.

The city was all ghosts now.

In every neighborhood there lurked some unwelcome reminder of his disappointing life. He began to interrogate his nascent plan. Once he got Bessie back, he’d use the coffee shop cash to fill the tank and— Drive east? North until the needle was on red? And then what?

And then he’d figure something out.

Wilshire to Sawtelle, sand grinding in his gears. Noodle bars and pink motels, birria and phở and dingbat apartments. They stopped building dingbats after the Northridge quake wiped out so many, but there were still plenty left, scattered across the city like little beige time bombs. At the freeway underpass a weathered sign announced that this section of the 10 was called the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway, and he passed into a howling tunnel of gloom. Cigarettes flared in the dark. A shambling cluster of shadows. He splashed through a fetid river flowing from a pair of half-crushed porta-potties, then raced toward the glare of the sunlit world with shouts at his back.

Who needed the Ninth Realm? LA had its own versions of hell.

By the time he reached Culver City, the heat had dried the rain from his clothes and soaked him again with sweat.

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