Hellhole

  “What?” she said in a distracted voice, as if surprised to learn that the counter kid spoke Human. “Uh, yeah.”

  Wiggling his eyebrows, Max held up the bag of Cheetos. “Processed cheese snacks,” he said with a knowing nod. “I like that in a woman.”

  Audie had to excuse herself.

  Krissy gave Max a look. “They’re not for me. I’m getting the soy chips and diet protein water.”

  “Oh, yeah, you gotta have protein,” he said, scanning the rest of her items and placing them in a plastic bag. “Amino acids are, like, the shit. You like veal?”

  “I— What?”

  “Me neither. It’s baby cows, did you know that?” Max could already feel this thing going south, yet he pressed on, as always. “I don’t think I could eat a baby anything. Except baby corn. Those things are so weird. It’s like, are you real corn, or were you shrunk by a shrinking ray, or what’s going on here?”

  Krissy’s eyes darted to the security camera. “Am I on a reality show right now?”

  “No,” Max said. “Why?”

  “Okay. Um, here,” she said, tossing him a twenty-dollar bill and grabbing the plastic bag.

  “But it’s only twelve—”

  “Keep the change!” She grabbed the elbows of the other two girls and plowed out the door, barely able to keep her giggles in as she relayed the tale of her encounter with the troglodyte cashier. Brown Ponytail threw a languid glance back at him as they left.

  Audie emerged from her hiding place behind the motor oil, holding her stomach. “You should be studied by scientists,” she said between laughs. “Veal? Veal?”

  Max shrugged. This was nothing new. Humiliation in the face of the opposite gender was an unfortunate plague he’d simply had to get used to, like high milk prices or the continued existence of the Kardashians.

  “So what are you doing after you get back from the airport?” he asked Audie just as the door opened. He nodded hello at the new customer, a guy sporting heavy black eyeliner, several piercings, and a visible hangover. The man nodded back, making a beeline for the coffee machine.

  “I don’t know,” Audie replied with a shrug. “Maybe go see the new Michael Bay explodathon.”

  “Spoiler alert: Everyone dies.”

  Audie rolled her eyes, having grown sick of Max’s standard spoiler-alert joke long ago. “We’ll see. I was gonna devote the day to Madden”—here she cracked her knuckles as she always did at the mention of the game, like a Pavlovian response—“but my Xbox is busted.”

  Max gasped.

  His voice dropped to a horrified whisper. “The red ring of death?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  Max’s main fear in life was, of course, that his mother could drop dead at any given second . . . but if he was being completely honest, the prospect of the same thing happening to his Xbox struck him with an almost equal amount of terror. “Well, you can go play on mine if you want.”

  “Really?” She did her Audie-is-super-excited-about-something hop, bouncing from one foot to the other. “Key still under the mat?”

  “Yep. I’ll call my mom and tell her not to bash the intruder’s head in.”

  “Thanks, man!” She lunged across the counter and gathered Max into a headlock. “All is forgiven. As long as you come to my game next week.”

  “I’ll . . . see what I can do.”

  “Just once before the season is over! That’s all I ask!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Or at the very least, come to the pep rally this Wednesday. You don’t have any secret dates with fictional people on Wednesdays, do you?”

  “I do not.”

  “Then come.” She tossed the empty Slim Jim wrapper at him. “And thanks for the meats.”

  “Any time.”

  Audie laughed as she exited the store.

  Guyliner brought his coffee up to the counter, his eyes bleared and tired. “And a pack of smokes. Whatever’s cheapest.”

  “Sure.” Max rang up the purchase and placed the cigarettes on the counter.

  The guy let out a small laugh. “You were there too?”

  “Huh?”

  He showed Max the back of his hand, which featured the faded slash of a black Sharpie. “At the concert,” he said, nodding at the similar mark smeared across the back of Max’s hand.

  From the ash that floated up out of the hole. Max hadn’t noticed until just then that it was still there. But I took a shower . . . ?

  “Killer show, right?” the guy said, handing Max some money. He took a long gulp of coffee. “Lucky I didn’t black out in a gutter somewhere. Anyway, cheers.” He held up his cup in thanks and exited the store.

  Max examined his hand. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against his skin, but no matter how hard he tried to wipe off the mark, it wouldn’t go away.

  When his watch alarm went off at the end of his shift, Max slammed his pen and crossword book onto the counter and pumped his fists into the air.

  “I win at LIFE!” he shouted, enjoying for a moment the delusion that completing twenty-five crossword puzzles in fourteen hours meant he’d won at anything at all.

  Stavroula’s grumpy face poked out from behind the Funyuns. “Why you yell?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Max said, lowering his arms. “I just—” But talking about his victory would make it sound even sadder. “Nothing.”

  She looked at her watch. “Okay, ten o’clock. You go home now.”

  He took off his vest, threw out the wrapper from his Hot Pocket dinner, and stuffed his crossword book into his bag. “Thanks, Stav.”

  “And tell your mom I say feel better.”

  The sting of the earlier lie prickled in his stomach. He nodded gravely. “I will.”

  He biked home under a moonlit sky. Bracing for the worst as he opened the mailbox, he was relieved to find nothing more than a Home Depot catalog. That, he could handle. They made good shovels.

  On his way to the back kitchen door, he assessed the house. Dark, except for the flicker of television visible through his mother’s bedroom window and the rectangle of light coming from the basement. The leaves of his mom’s beloved ficus tree inside blocked the view of the small den down there, but judging by the guttural noises and whistle blows coming from within, Audie was well into her Madden conquest.

  After dumping his stuff onto the kitchen table and wondering why Ruckus hadn’t greeted him with a friendly claw to the face, neck, and torso, Max grabbed a granola bar and headed to the basement. Sporty football music hit his ears as he descended the stairs. “This was my plan all along,” he sang down to Audie. “You wear your thumbs down with hours of playing and then I swoop in to kick your ass.” He unzipped his hoodie as he neared the bottom of the steps. “Jesus, Aud, it’s like a hundred degrees down here—”

  He stopped.

  The granola bar fell to the floor.

  Perched on the edge of the plaid 1970s-era couch, where Max had fully expected to find Audie, was a man in a teal-blue velour tracksuit. His beard was rust colored and shaggy, as was his hair, out of which poked two white, jagged horns. And though he was currently dumping the remains of a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos into his mouth with a cheese-dusted hand, the coloring didn’t end at the edges of his fingertips.

  Every visible inch of his skin was red.

  He shook the controller at the television with his other hand and flashed Max a garish grin, food globs flying out of his mouth as he spoke.

  “This shit is awesome.”

  Demolish, Variation

  “AAAAAAAH!” MAX SCREAMED, then added another “Aaaaaa-AAAAAaaaaah!” for good measure.

  He spun around and bolted up to his mother’s bedroom, pounding the door open so forcefully she nearly fell out of bed in surprise.

  “Max!” she shouted, fumbling with her covers. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?”

  He blinked several times, terrified that he’d just ruptured her aorta. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes! Why are you
so freaked out?”

  Max swallowed. He wanted to tell her, but shocking her into cardiac arrest was not optimal. “I’m . . . not,” he said slowly, trying to force blood back into his cheeks. “I just—I heard ambulance sirens on my way home, and I worried.”

  The tension washed out of her face, giving way to a smile. “Well, sorry to disappoint there, pal. I’m still here, healthy as a glue-factory-bound horse.”

  He hated when she brought up the glue factory. “Okay. Uh, I’m just going back downstairs to . . . play some video games with Audie. Yeah. So if you hear anything weird, that’s . . . what we’re up to.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not doing drugs, are you?”

  “What? No!”

  “Sorry. I’m contractually bound to ask.” She picked up the TV remote as some screaming reality show contestants began to throw mud at each other. “Have fun. Tell Audie I said hi.”

  Audie. Max sprinted back down the hallway and headed for the front door. When he opened it, a piece of paper taped to the door fluttered in his face.

  “Sorry to refuse your most generous Xbox offer,” it said in Audie’s handwriting. “But Mom made me go clothes shopping instead. Pray for my poor, doomed soul.”

  He flipped up the doormat—the key was still there. Okay. So she was never here. Good.

  He grabbed the key, then a fireplace poker on his way through the living room. Pausing at the top of the basement stairs, he took his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “I’m calling 911!” he shouted down.

  “No, you’re not!” the man yelled back.

  Instantly, the Beige Wonder went dead. Max stared at it, his eyes doubling in size. He ran back into the living room to click on the cordless but found only dead air, no dial tone.

  He planted himself at the doorway again. “How are you doing this?”

  “Stop yelling and get down here. We’ll have a nice, reasonable chat.”

  Squeezing the poker, Max slowly made his way down the stairs. The man hadn’t moved—he was still on the couch, still playing Madden.

  Somehow, with his eyes glued to the screen, he sensed Max’s intent to harm. “Go ahead,” he scoffed. “Do your worst.”

  Max’s worst wasn’t very terrible at all, but years of shoveling had at least given him some decent upper-body strength, despite a poor showing in other areas. And there were laws about self-defense and protecting one’s own home, right? So he gave it a shot, hurling the poker straight at the man’s torso, where, amazingly, it hit its target.

  It even stuck. The poker sank several inches into the man’s beer gut, and yet . . . he didn’t flinch. He didn’t bleed. A second later he took one hand off the controller to casually pull the rod out, but in doing so, he gave up a touchdown and lost the game.

  “Damn it!” he shouted, hurling the controller to the floor. “See what you made me do?”

  Max watched, aghast, as the yawning stomach wound got smaller and smaller until it disappeared. “Sorry . . . ?” Max stuttered, unsure whether apologizing to the man who’d broken into his house was sound etiquette.

  Unfazed, the man began licking the Cheetos dust off his fingers one at a time. “No worries. I get that a lot.”

  Now unarmed, Max settled into what he thought, based on countless movies and television shows, was a fighting stance. “Listen—”

  “Relax, kid, will ya? I’m not going to hurt you.” He reached for the Cheetos bag, then, remembering that it was empty, frowned. “You got anything else? Combos?”

  “No.”

  “Cheez-Its?”

  “No.”

  “Meth?”

  “What?” Max shouted, horrified. “No!”

  “Ugh,” the man groaned. “No one ever has meth.”

  Max shook his head. Maybe he was on meth. Had Stavroula slipped some into his Hot Pocket?

  The man was now picking his teeth with the fireplace poker. Max backed up against the wall, hoping to be camouflaged by the horrid wood paneling. “Who are you?”

  “Hmm?” The man paused in his dental work to shoot Max a disinterested glance. “Oh. I’m Satan.”

  Max blinked. “You’re . . . Satan.”

  “Well, I’m a Satan. There are six hundred and sixty-six of us, not that anyone’s counting. But you people always seem to want to lump us together into one all-powerful, malevolent being, so I like to give my audience what it wants.” He started to sink into a deep bow, but he burped in the middle of it and the moment was ruined. “The name is Burgundy Cluttermuck, devil-at-large. I do bachelorette parties and retirement galas, but no more children’s birthdays.” He sucked in some air through his teeth. “Too much screaming.”

  Max could no longer feel his extremities. “Burgundy Cluttermuck?”

  “Please, call me Burg,” he said with a smile, his beard widening. It wasn’t a well-trimmed beard, but rather the feral, unkempt kind that resulted from a weeklong bender, with Cheetos debris sprinkled throughout. His forehead was tall, his brow cavemanlike. His hair probably had things living in it. And his horns, while white and polished and slightly iridescent, ended in ragged, cracked tips.

  In short, he didn’t look like the devil. He looked like the kind of early-forties, thrice-divorced alcoholic who owned a grungy car wash and had to become a sperm donor to pay rent.

  Max swallowed. “I’m not—”

  “—sure you need a devil in your life? Well, can’t help you out there, kid. You brought this on yourself.”

  Max racked his brain. There had to be people on this terrible earth who were far, far more evil than he was. Unless it was because he’d stolen that cat—but it was just a stupid plastic cat, for chrissakes!

  “This has to be a mistake,” he said.

  “No mistake. You must have done something to deserve me. What’d you do, kill a guy?”

  “I stole a bobblehead!”

  “Huh. Well, we can’t all be Mansons.”

  Max shook his head, then shook harder. “No. It must have been someone else.”

  “Pretty sure it’s you. You’re the one with the shovel, right?”

  Max froze. Ugly Hill. “Yeah, but—”

  “You even kind of look like a shovel. All skinny in the middle, big head, wide feet. May I call you Shovel?”

  “My name is Max.”

  “Revolutionary new tactic, Shovel, if I may brag so myself. Can’t wait to share it with the guys below.” Burg polished his horns. “See, any act of evil can bring up a devil, but the big ones exert the strongest pull; murders are very popular, because they require the least amount of effort on our part. But the smaller ones can work too, with a little advance planning. So I got myself into position close to the surface—loaded myself into the gun, so to speak, which you then fired by stealing. Since you so graciously dug a hole for me, popping out was a cinch.”

  “But I didn’t mean to!”

  “Too damn bad. What’s done is done. I’m on an extended vacation now, homeslice, and you’re my brand-new pool boy.”

  Max started to feel dizzy. He put his hand on the wall to steady himself.

  Burg pointed to the streak of ash on Max’s hand. “See, there’s your proof right there, Shovel. I’m allll yours. It’s like you went down to the pound and picked me out and—oh!” He clapped with glee. “I’m a rescue!”

  “You are not a rescue,” Max said, trying to keep his voice even. “You are not mine. I’m sorry I opened up your . . . hole . . . but I swear it was an accident, and what I really need right now is for you to go back to wherever it is you came from!”

  “Hell.”

  “Well, go back to hell, then. Please.”

  “Too late for that.” Burg lifted his sweatshirt to scratch his belly. “You’ve been marked. That means that until you find me some shelter of my own, you’re responsible for sharing yours.”

  “I never agreed to that!”

  Burg shrugged. “Your hand begs to differ. Now!” He rubbed his palms together and started to stroll aro
und the room. “I’ll require a hot tub—obviously—and a walk-in closet, three spiral staircases, a full-size meat locker, a bumper car racetrack, a sex dungeon, and a llama. Those last two are unrelated.”

  “I can’t get you a house with all that stuff,” Max sputtered. “I can’t get you a house at all!”

  Burg flung himself back onto the sofa. “Well, I’m not leaving this couch until you do, so you’d better find me some pillows and sheets while you’re at it. Egyptian cotton. Twelve hundred thread count.”

  Max was pacing now, frantically trying to come up with a solution. “Look, there has to be some way around this. I can’t keep a devil in my basement.”

  Burg burped again and picked up the remote, switching the television from Xbox to cable. “Tough titties, Shovel. You know the saying, ‘You can’t fight city hall’? Well, hell is a lot worse. Lot less forgiving. OH MY STARS AND GARTERS!”

  Max had another heart attack. “What?”

  “I LOVE THIS SHOW.” Burg scooted up to the edge of the sofa and eagerly leaned forward. “Oh bitch, you did not just squeeze that other bitch’s husband’s ass. Shove a martini glass down her throat!”

  The rich housewife flipped a table and wobbled away, only to trip over a teacup poodle and face-plant onto the floor. Burg hooted with laughter. “That’s what you get! Time for a new nose!”

  “You know this show?” Max asked. “You get cable in hell?”

  Burg looked at him as if he were the dumbest kid in the world. “Uh, yeah. It’s hell.”

  Max decided that if there were ever a time for him to grow a spine, now would be good. “As I was saying,” he said, his squeaky voice already undermining his attempts at bravado, “you can’t stay here.”

  “Can and will. Stab her with your stiletto! Go for the jugular!”

  “And what if I say no?” Max shouted over him, puffing out his chest. “What if I refuse?”

  As the show went to commercial, Burg finally looked at him. “Oh, I’ll kill your family,” he said in a casual voice. “Destroy everything you hold dear. Deliver hellfire and brimstone, etcetera and miscellany, so on and so forth.”

  Max tried to emit a skeptical scoff, but a tightness was creeping into his stomach. “Kill my family? Yeah, right.”