Croak (21 page)

Uncle Mort, his face blank, sat very still. Silence filled the room. The screen door blew open, scattering a candy bar wrapper across the floor like a tumbleweed.

“Well,” he said portentously, leaning in. “It’s about damned time.”

Jaws dropped. “What?”

Uncle Mort rubbed his stubbly cheek. “About a month ago I lost a bet to one of the graveyard shifters and had to take his shift—which was fine by me, I’ll take any excuse to get out into the Field. But the last target of the night was a woman sitting by her pool, eating a grapefruit and watching the last of a meteor shower. It was dark, and I assumed she had gotten hit—until I saw her eyes.”

Lex and Driggs nodded vigorously. “Yeah, that’s a lot like what we’ve been seeing,” Driggs said.

“I thought it odd,” Uncle Mort went on, “because I’ve handled such deaths before, and I can tell you, with a meteorite attack, there’s usually very little target left over to Kill. And the eye thing—I’d never seen anything like it. Ever since, I’ve been waiting for the Field teams to come to me with more anomalies —can’t ask around myself, don’t want to start a panic—but I haven’t heard a thing. Though this is due, I take it, to a Sofi-aided monopoly on your part?”

Driggs looked nervous. “The Juniors—we thought we could—”

“No surprises there.” Uncle Mort cracked a smile. “From you kids, I’d expect nothing less.”

Lex stuck a triumphant tongue out at Driggs.

“It’s gotta be a Crasher,” Driggs pressed on, ignoring her. “Who do you think it is?”

“Beats me.” Uncle Mort got up from the table, ducked into the living room, and began digging through a pile of papers. “The techniques involved in directed Crashing are thought to be so advanced that not even the oldest Grim on earth would have enough experience to pull it off.” He returned to the kitchen and dropped a stack of printed pages onto the table. Lex glanced at the top sheet, a news article under the headline M
YSTERIOUS
D
EATH AT
F
ENWAY
P
ARK
, along with a picture of the man she had Killed at the baseball game.

She turned to her uncle, stunned. “You’ve been following this?”

“Yep.” Uncle Mort sat down again. “One of my many jobs is to keep an eye on the mainstream media for any abnormal deaths. So when these drop-dead-for-no-reason stories started popping up—a couple days after meteorite lady and strictly limited to the eastern region of the country—I figured the two were connected.” He pointed to one of the pages. “Autopsies have turned up jack shit. And the victims’ eyes are fine, so whatever’s killing them must wear off pretty fast.”

“Elixir!” said Driggs, desperate to be of some use.

“Hey!” Lex yelled. “
I
thought of that!”

Uncle Mort nodded slowly, deaf to their bickering. “Don’t know where they’d get it from, but yeah, that would make sense. Doesn’t leave a trace.”

“But why should that matter?” Lex asked. “Why would a Grim go through the trouble of getting Elixir—which, you’re right, who knows
how
they do that—when they could just as easily use arsenic or cyanide or, I don’t know, a gun? Why bother keeping it clean? It’s not like any of the authorities out there can catch them.”

“They’re sending us a message,” Driggs said, thinking. “Using any old weapon is no big deal, but stealing Elixir? That takes some serious balls. Whoever is doing this wants Grims to know that they’ve outsmarted the system, that they can harness this power and are willing to do horrible things with it.”

Uncle Mort nodded in agreement, then handed the paper to Lex. “And here’s where it gets really crazy. Check out the target.”

Lex scanned the article. “Arnold Scadden, thirty-two years old. No wife, no kids.” Her eyes bulged. “Convicted sex offender?”

Driggs grabbed the next sheet off the top and skimmed through it. “Susan Karliak, forty-nine. Awaiting trial for third DWI.”

“Dr. Dennis Nolan, fifty-six. Twice sued for malpractice,” Lex said, showing Driggs the picture. “Look, the dentist!”

Uncle Mort sifted through the rest. “And thirty or so others charged with assault, extortion, child pornography, fraud, rape, drug trafficking, arson—you name it.”

A fervor gripped Lex. Someone was really doing it. Someone was going after the criminals who needed to be stopped! “Murderers too?” she said, looking up in excitement. Yet no sooner had the word left her mouth than she realized her mistake.

Uncle Mort was giving her a harsh look. “No, curiously enough,” he replied in an even tone. “No murderers.”

“Too bad,” Lex said under her breath.

Uncle Mort exchanged a glance with Driggs. He leaned in to his niece. “You remember those Terms we went over, right, kiddo?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Uncle Mort said. “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here. These are
not
okay, Lex. I don’t want you to start worshiping this nutjob. You of all people should steer clear of their plans, especially since—” He cut off abruptly, a hesitant and slightly surprised look on his face.

“Since what?”

“Well, since I’ve never seen anything like this until you arrived.”

Lex gaped. “You think it has something to do with me?”

“No. Not directly, of course. Still,” he said quietly, and more to himself, “it’s a hell of a coincidence.”

Lex looked up at Driggs, who was looking at her with a strange expression. She made a face back at him. “So where do we go from here?”

“I’ll jump into the Field for the next few days, see for myself what’s going on,” Uncle Mort said, standing up. “Thank you for telling me about this. And keep the criminal pattern between us, will you?” He hurriedly left the kitchen for his lab, locking the basement door behind him.

Lex picked at a stain on the table and thought about the implications of what her uncle had just told her. All the evil that was loose in the world . . . a way to rein it in . . .

She looked at Driggs, who was still glaring at her. “May I help you?” she asked peevishly.

“Knock it off.”

“Knock what off? I’m not doing anything.”

“Yes, you are. You’re scheming.” He got up and walked toward his room. “Scheming leads to crazy ideas. Crazy ideas lead to trouble. I get dragged into your trouble, we both get kicked out of Croak, and the next thing you know, we’re freezing to death in the waters of the North Atlantic.”

“Dude, you are way too obsessed with
Titanic.
”

Driggs looked indignant. “What is so wrong with having a healthy respect for heart-wrenching filmmaking of unequaled —” He shook his head. “Look, this isn’t about me. Just quit it with the evil plots, all right? If you get exiled, I’m going to be pissed as hell.” He slammed the door.

“Why?” she yelled.

He poked his head out. “I don’t want to have to clean out your room again.” He slammed the door once more and disappeared into a crash of drums.

Lex was not amused. Although secretly, she was.

After finding Corpp’s devoid of Juniors later that evening, it didn’t take Lex and Driggs long to guess that their crew had decided to hole up in the Crypt’s common room for the night. Together they headed down Dead End and made their way through a darkened, narrow tunnel, eventually emerging into a small green courtyard surrounded by a block of rooms. As they approached the largest one, a heated argument between Sofi and Ayjay wafted through the window.

“I’ve got ten hotels on the Conservatory. Seriously, you owe me, like, eighty gatrillion dollars.”

“Not until I get my triple-letter score for passing Go.”

“No way! You couldn’t remove the Charley Horse, remember?”

“So? I still found the Lead Pipe in Park Place!”

“Which you had to mortgage after Queen Frostine totally sank your battleship!”

Lex attempted to follow this conversation as she walked through the door, but she failed somewhere around the time Elysia almost toppled over on the Twister mat. “Jump in,” Elysia said from the floor, wobbling way too close to the jellyfish tank. “There are a couple of tokens left in the box.”

Driggs sat down on one of the many battered couches and dug through the box, removing a wrench, a top hat, a rook, a green gingerbread man, and a decapitated Rock’Em Sock’Em Robot. Lex looked at the game board on the table, a mangled conglomeration of Monopoly, Clue, Candy Land, Scrabble, and chess.

“What the crap?” she asked the room.

“Don’t touch the Candlestick or you’ll automatically lose,” Elysia warned from the mat, flicking the spinner with her free hand. “Right foot red. Okay, so one night last year we came home from Corpp’s really late, but we were all still too drunk and giggly to go to sleep, so Ferbus took all of the board games that had been sitting in the closet since the dawn of time and mashed them up into one.”

Lex held up a rogue Uno card. “What are the rules?”

“No one really knows,” Kloo said, peering at her tray of Scrabble tiles. “We kind of just make them up as we go along.”

“I see. And what do you call this game?”

“Doesn’t have a name,” Zara said, absently watching a
Simpsons
rerun playing on their ancient television.

“Lies!” yelled Ferbus, twisted into a pretzel underneath Elysia. “It’s called Ferbusopoly, and you all know it!”

“Hey, Milton Bradley? Your railroads are flooding.”

“What?” He crashed to the floor and ran over to the board. “Dammit. I should never have left Colonel Mustard in charge,” he moaned, mopping up a soggy Short Line.

“Hey, you guys are never going to believe this,” Driggs said to the room. “Mort already knew about the white eyes. He’s been tracking them since they started.”

“No way!” Sofi said. “That’s so crazybread!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Lex said dryly.

“Was he mad?” asked Kloo, handing them a couple of slices of pizza.

“Nope,” said Driggs. “In fact, he seemed kind of proud of us.”

“That’s because Mort is infinitely cooler than Norwood,” said Ferbus. “What else did he say? Any ideas on who? Or why?”

“No. And . . . no.” Driggs shot a warning glance at Lex to keep her mouth shut about the pattern of criminals. “But we did figure out how.”

“We?” Lex said.

“Okay, Lex figured out how.”

She told them about the Elixir and Corpp’s interrogation. “Duh!” Elysia cried, pulling at her hair. “I work with that frickin’ stuff all day long, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Still, if it’s not coming from Corpp’s or the Afterlife, where are they getting it?” asked Ferbus. “And how are they killing people with it? And why did we stop playing my game?”

The discussion continued as they battled into the night, devouring box after box of Pandora’s delicious pizza. Lex herself built a Jenga tower on Boardwalk, sank Driggs’s destroyer with a double word score, and captured a bishop in the Peppermint Forest with Mrs. Peacock, making it obvious that years of family board game nights had crafted her into a force to be reckoned with.

Perhaps it was too vivid a reminder—Lex’s memory jumped back to her family with each roll of the dice. She gazed longingly at the Scrabble board, remembering the time Cordy had theatrically thrown a pile of useless consonants at her face.

Lex sighed. No matter how hard she tried to ignore it, the thought of home was always there, perched in the back of her mind like a lurking vulture. Her strategy of squashing any images of her family before they could fully surface just wasn’t working anymore. As amazing as her time in Croak had been, the wound of separation from her family remained fresh and raw—and the further she slid into the Grimsphere, the worse it got. She had been gone just over a month, yet already she was being torn in two distinct, worrisome directions. Never in a million years had she expected to
enjoy
herself on this upstate summer banishment. But her immersion in Croak had been so swift, so complete. It felt as if she had lived there all her life. How was she expected to yearn for a home that now felt unbearably mundane by comparison?

A loud yell from Ferbus snapped her back. He drew a Candy Land color card, then placed the Revolver on Baltic Avenue. “What’s Professor Plum doing here?”

“Protecting the queen,” Driggs said.

“What? Duel!” The two boys jumped up and stalked to the middle of the room, eyeing each other like prowling tigers.

Lex felt a sharp jab in her ribs. “Come on,” Zara said quietly, nodding in the direction of the kitchen.

“Wait, they’re going to fight,” Lex said. “I wanna see.”

“Those morons, fight? They’re just gonna play Hungry Hungry Hippos,” Zara said, pulling her out of the room. “The winner gets to be Supreme Ruler of the Electric Company and the loser has to spend a turn trapped inside the secret passage between the Kitchen and the Library.”

“Crap. My submarine is hidden in there.”

Zara’s eyes flashed as she dragged Lex to the stove, out of the others’ view. “I want to ask you something.”

Over the past few weeks, on the sporadic occasions when they were able to steal away from the group, Lex and Zara had established an unusual relationship. Zara wasn’t exactly her new best friend, but upon her confession that she too felt an overwhelming shock while Culling, Lex thought it might not be such a bad idea to have some company on her descent into madness. Little by little they had begun to confide in each other, swapping stories of the jolts they experienced. And secretly, Lex was glad to have someone with whom she could entrust these allegedly shameful feelings. Every time she brought them up to Driggs, he gave her that same look, the one that made his blue eye appear extremely judgmental. Not so with Zara.

Yet the cutthroat rivalry between them remained palpable. Now that Lex had superseded Zara as Croak’s best Junior, their exchanges had gotten a bit pricklier.

“How’s work going?” Zara asked, stealing a glance at the doorway. “No changes to your . . . you know. Right?”

“No,” said Lex. “They’re getting stronger, I keep telling you that. Yours are too, right?”

“Of course they are!” Zara looked offended. “I’m just paranoid, I guess. That yours will stop and I’ll be the only one left.”