Croak

“But you’re an adult. You should be able to do whatever you want.”

  “Yeah, right.” Lex snorted. “Not in the real world. You have no idea what it’s like to have—”

  “What? Devoted parents?” he said coldly, his eyes suddenly hard. “An endless supply of unconditional love? People who actually give a damn about where their kid is?”

  Lex clenched her fists, the anger rising yet again. Seemed like it was on full blast tonight. And she was sick of backing down from the “woe is me, I’m an orphan” defense, anyway. It wasn’t her fault her home wasn’t broken.

  “What happened to your parents, Driggs?” she said in a voice that was exceedingly frosty, even for her. But she was feeling reckless. “Why are you so secretive about them? Everyone else seems to love wallowing in their tales of misery and sorrow. Why not you?”

  Driggs’s nostrils flared. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a low, distant voice. “Is that so hard to understand?” He leaned in. “Do you, Lex, find it so unfathomable that a person might want to keep a few secrets for himself?”

  That hit a nerve. Lex returned his gaze, both of her black eyes drifting automatically to his sole blue one, which was reading her perfectly. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” She jumped to her feet. “Enough of this cagey, elusive crap that you people incessantly spout! Can’t you ever say anything of substance?”

  “Why?” he exploded, leaping up as well. “So you can come back with something witty and sardonic that’ll make you seem all self-important and superior, even though it’s clearly a half-assed attempt to hide your own insecurities?”

  “Oh, nice work there, Freud. At least I don’t have to boost my low self-esteem by inhaling fistfuls of Oreos, downing a keg of Yorick, and pretending to be a homicide detective.”

  “Do you honestly think I can’t tell what sort of warped stuff you’ve been entertaining in that sick little mind of yours? You might be able to dupe the others, Lex, but not me.” Breathing heavily, he tapped her forehead. “There are a lot of malicious impulses rattling around in there, and it’s pretty clear that you’re in no hurry to get rid of them.”

  She donned an expression of mock terror. “Oh, excuse me for not dropping dead with terror at the thought of breaching one of Croak’s beloved Terms.” She was inches from his face. “I wouldn’t want to end up as a scaaaaary exile!”

  “Maybe you deserve it!”

  “And maybe you should just go back to your sanctuary of spider friends and cry yourself to sleep!”

  “At least they’re not abominations like you!”

  “Coward!”

  “Freak!”

  It suddenly occurred to both Driggs and Lex, in that very same instant, that neither of them wanted anything more in the world than to tear off every single piece of each other’s clothes and make wild, passionate, messy adolescent love under the radiant glow of the full moon.

  Their chests rose and fell. A few seconds passed.

  “I’m going to sleep,” Driggs panted, clambering off the roof.

  “Me too,” Lex huffed, right behind him.

  And without another word they fled to their rooms, slammed the doors, and threw themselves into bed, where they both spent the next five hours dazedly contemplating their respective ceilings.

  17

  The next morning, things were awkward.

  To say the least.

  Fleeing the bathroom they shared, Driggs mumbled a hasty apology after accidentally knocking Lex’s toothbrush into the toilet. At the breakfast table, Lex poured orange juice into her cereal instead of milk.

  “What’s with you two today?” Uncle Mort asked on his way out the door.

  “ . . . not much sleep . . .” Driggs grumbled.

  “ . . . that time of the month . . .” muttered Lex.

  Their silent walk into town was eclipsed in unease only by their check-in at the Bank, which vastly paled in comparison to their shift. By the time they arrived back at the Ghost Gum and headed to the Morgue for lunch, Lex sensed that she was only seconds away from spontaneously combusting into a cloud of mist and thorny resentment.

  It didn’t help that Kloo and Ayjay were the only ones there, and that they had decided to spend the majority of their lunch hour eating each other’s faces rather than their burgers. Lex and Driggs sat on either side of them, silently lamenting the discomfort of the situation. Lex examined the salt shaker. Driggs picked at a piece of gum.

  Eventually the mortification of it all became too much to bear. “Wanna go?” Lex honked in a weird voice.

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Make up, you two,” Pandora said as they slunk out the door. “At this rate, you’ll never get into each other’s pants.”

  ***

  At the Bank, Driggs handed Lex his scythe and bolted up the stairs. “You check in,” he said, undoubtedly in a rush to escape her. “Back down soon.”

  “Wait—oh, fine,” she said bitterly. “Say hi to your wife Ferbus.”

  Lex was majorly out of sorts. Not only had last night’s fight left her and Driggs’s already-muddled relationship in a full-blown state of emergency, but the whole fire thing was still really bugging her. So much so that she finally decided to simply stop thinking about it, to lock it in an abandoned part of her brain, far, far away from any important thoughts, in a space normally reserved for sports trivia and the preamble of the Constitution.

  She scoured the hub. The only available Etcetera was Sofi. “Naturally,” she muttered to herself, approaching the desk.

  “Hi, Lex,” said Sofi. “Checking in?”

  Lex grimaced. Interacting with Sofi always made her want to jam a thumbtack into her eye. “Yeah.” She plugged in the scythes and slid onto the desk, knocking over a snow globe in the process. “Sorry.”

  After it became clear to both of them that Lex wasn’t going to pick it up, Sofi sighed and did it herself. “Why don’t you like me, Lex?” she asked with a pout.

  Lex decided to issue a denial. Sofi wasn’t exactly a shrewd individual; she could easily be duped. “Of course I like you,” she said, thinking up a way to change the subject. “In fact, I was wondering—what do you think the Loopholes are?”

  Sofi looked pleased to be consulted, but she shrugged. “Like I’d know!” She leaned in. “Whatever they are, I bet they’re, like, Crazy McCrazyface. Why else would they get destroyed in the process?”

  “Wait a minute,” Lex said, shocked that what she thought would be a ditzy filler conversation was actually going somewhere. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the only known part of them—that whatever the procedure is, the Loopholes themselves are involved in it and get used up or something.”

  “So the number of Loopholes grows less and less each time one is found?”

  “Yuppers. And because no one knows how many there were to begin with, no one knows how many are left. Since it’s been so long since the last one was found—in the early eighteen hundreds—some people think none.”

  “Although judging by what’s going on now, that’s obviously not true,” Lex snapped.

  Sofi raised an eyebrow. “Chica, you need to relax.” She reached into her desk and handed Lex a sparkly gel-filled stress ball. “Here.”

  Lex gave the ball a squeeze. “I’m just—and this Loophole—it can’t have anything to do with the Smacks? There’s no way to override the system?” she asked.

  “Not unless you turn into a jellyfish,” Sofi said. “They’re the only ones who can pick up the Gamma signals. They send them to us, and we send them out to you via the scythes, which are synchronized perfectly. They’ll always take you smack-dab to the middle of the death, at exactly the right time. You can’t scythe any other way. It just won’t work.”

  “And you guys never interfere?” Lex said, throwing a suspicious glance at Norwood and Heloise.

  “No,” Sofi loudly replied. She threw a fearful glance arou
nd the hub, then lowered her voice. “Only when you guys make special requests, which I’m not supposed to agree to. Or if, like, your grandma dies. No one expects you to Kill your own family.”

  “And there’s no way for you to program Grims who aren’t checked in?”

  Sofi was starting to hesitate. She looked at the door. “Where’s Driggs?”

  “Upstairs. Why, do you need his permission?”

  Sofi let out a high-pitched huff. “I don’t take orders from Driggs.”

  Lex snorted. “Except that you do, all the time.”

  “It’s complicated, okay?”

  “Why? You guys hook up or something?” Lex blurted with all the subtlety of a rocket-propelled grenade.

  A smug grin spread across Sofi’s face. “I knew it!” she screeched. “That’s totally why you don’t like me. You think we got a thing going on.”

  Blood pounded through Lex’s cheeks. She swore to herself that the next time her tongue started wagging without express written consent from her brain, she’d hack the damn thing right off.

  “You’re blushing!” Sofi said triumphantly. She grabbed a nail file and went to work on her tips. “Well, don’t worry. I’ve never jumped aboard the big Drigg. Though it’s seriously not for lack of trying.”

  Lex, her lip curling, throttled the stress ball.

  Sofi widened her heavily mascaraed eyes. “Honestly, though? You’re barking up the wrong tree with that kid. You know how he carries that photo around with him everywhere? I think he’s got a girl, like, on the outside or something, because no one here has ever gotten so much as a peck on the cheek from him.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Seriously, he’s a lost cause.” She clicked her tongue. “Major issues.”

  Lex gave her head a violent shake, as if to expel all of the uninvited thoughts clanging around in there. “Whatever. I don’t care, okay? This has nothing to do with anything, and you’re wrong about everything anyway.”

  “Okeydokey, Grumpypants,” Sofi said, that coy look still plastered across her face.

  Flustered, Lex abandoned her line of questioning and jumped off the desk to leave. “Are we checked in?”

  “Yep,” Sofi replied, unplugging the scythes. “Say hi to loverboy for me.”

  A thick film of goo instantly blanketed the cubicle.

  “Sorry,” Lex said, tossing the exploded stress ball at a dumbfounded Sofi. “It slipped.”

  ***

  Over the next few days Lex decided to focus her nervous energy on something useful: the computer. She sneakily read article after article, extracting every bit of information about the unexplained deaths that had been reported all over the East Coast and the laundry list of offenses that each of the targets had racked up. And the more Lex read, the more she resolutely believed—no matter what her uncle or Driggs or Zara said—that every one of the victims got exactly what he or she deserved.

  What Lex did not do, however, was write a single email. She ignored her brimming inbox, pretending not to notice that Cordy had emailed her at least once a day, sometimes twice. Lex just couldn’t bring herself to respond. When it came to Cordy, silence was better than lies.

  At least the awkwardness between her and Driggs had dissipated. This was no more evident than the afternoon Lex caught Driggs lying face-down on the ground of the Lair, allowing scores of black widow spiders to crawl over his body. “Again?” Lex said, exasperated. “Really?”

  “You gotta try it,” he said contentedly into the floor.

  “No way. They don’t like me the way they like you.”

  “Probably because you don’t cry yourself to sleep in their presence,” he said, quoting her taunt from their big fight. The whole thing had turned into something of a running joke between them. Often, when bored or uncomfortable, they repeated the insults they had hurled at each other that night, loudly guffawing at each reiteration. This is what is known as a defense mechanism.

  Driggs had, however, started to spend a lot more time in his room, banging away at his drums. He was doing just that so loudly one evening as Uncle Mort got home from work that Lex, reading an article about a notorious arsonist, didn’t even hear him come in.

  “What are you doing?” Uncle Mort asked her.

  She snapped off the screen. “Solitaire.”

  He rubbed his eyes and banged on Driggs’s door. “Hey, Ringo, give it a rest!”

  The drumming stopped. “How’d your shift go?” Lex asked as Uncle Mort sank, exhausted, onto the couch. He had been taking on as many shifts as he could over the past few days. “Did you see any more?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Weird as hell.”

  “So now what? More shifts?”

  “No,” he said, thinking. “You guys keep doing what you’re doing, and let me know if anything changes. I don’t want it to look like I’m too involved. I don’t have the time, anyway.”

  “Really?”

  He let out a sigh. “Why do kids think adults lead such opulent lives of leisure?” He shook his head. “Believe me, I don’t. I’ve got a town to run, reports to be sent to Necropolis—plus this anomaly, whatever it is, I’ve spent way too much time obsessing over it—not to mention the hunt for this year’s rookies—”

  “What do you mean?” Lex said. “I thought I was the rookie.”

  “Yeah, well, this was a bizarre year. The Junior training period usually starts at the beginning of what would be the eleventh grade—in September, not June. But last September’s duo washed out right away, and then Rob took off for business school—”

  “Loser!” Driggs yelled through the wall, apparently listening in.

  “It was his choice,” Uncle Mort shouted back. He looked at his niece. “There’s always a choice.”

  Lex fidgeted.

  “Anyway, that left us three short,” he continued. “But once I learned that you had turned delinquent, I decided you’d be a suitable replacement.”

  “But I’d been that way for two years already. Why didn’t you bring me here last September in the first place, for my junior year?”

  “I really shouldn’t have brought you at all,” Uncle Mort said softly. “But the world, as it turns out, had different plans.”

  Lex said nothing for a moment. All this talk of September was only serving as a reminder of her impending departure. She looked at the jellyfish, then down at her hands. “Do I really have to go back home at the end of the summer?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  Uncle Mort looked at her thoughtfully. “I’m sure your parents want you to finish your education.” He removed a glass ball from his pocket and distractedly rolled it through his hands.

  “But who cares about senior year?” she half yelled. Driggs was probably still listening, but she didn’t care. “I already know more than most of the teachers at that worthless school, and I’d just come right back here after I graduate anyway. I’m training for a career! It’s the same as college!”

  “All valid arguments. You be sure to present them during your visit.”

  “What visit?”

  He tossed the bauble into the air. “Your mother’s birthday, I believe?”

  Lex clapped her hands over her mouth. It’s fairly common for children to forget a parent’s birthday, of course, as most kids can’t conceive of a situation in which the world stops revolving around themselves for twenty-four hours. But due to Lex’s strategy of suppressing all thoughts of her family, that particular date—tomorrow, she realized with growing remorse—had completely slipped her mind.

  Not only had Lex forgotten to send a card; she hadn’t bothered to call in weeks. She couldn’t begin to imagine how disastrous an actual visit would be. They’d hang her on the spot.

  “You’re taking the weekend off,” Uncle Mort said.

  “No, I’m not! There’s no such thing as a weekend here! Death waits not for five-day workweeks!” she chanted in desperation, quoting the mantra Driggs had recited a month ago when she first asked why he was jumping on
her bed so early on a Saturday morning.

  “We’ll somehow survive without you,” Uncle Mort said. “Besides, I already got your bus tickets.”

  “Tickets?” Lex asked in apprehension. “With an s?”

  A loud ba-dum-CHING crashed forth from Driggs’s room.

  This triggered the panic. “Oh no no no . . .”

  Uncle Mort grabbed a newspaper from the top of the pile. “This reporter at the Post seems to have taken a real interest in the mystery deaths, has written about a fair number of them. I got Driggs into a meeting with her tomorrow under the guise of an internship interview. He’s going to find out how much she knows.”

  Lex was instantly jealous. “I could do that!”

  “You sure could. If you didn’t have to visit your family.”

  She let out an anguished grunt. “This is so unfair.”

  “I had a feeling you’d react like this,” Uncle Mort said. “Which is why I booked you for only one night. I told your parents we need to get an early start on the cow inseminations this year.”

  Lex stared at him, open-mouthed.

  “You can thank me later,” he added. “Just remember to give the family my best. And obviously, not a word of Croak’s business to anyone.”

  Lex slumped back, defeated. There was no weaseling out of this one. Her stomach gave a lurch at the thought of soon seeing her house, her parents, her relentlessly inquisitive sister, her bedroom with its photos and bookshelves and—

  “Wait a minute.” She pointed at the ball dancing through Uncle Mort’s hands. “I’ve seen that thing before! You gave one to me and one to Cordy that time you visited!”

  “Did I?” He tossed it to her with a sly smirk. “How imprudent of me, bringing my young nieces an unperfected invention.”

  Lex studied the sphere. Similar to a flickering light bulb, its surface was made from smooth, cold glass. Inside, dozens of small flecks of light whizzed and flung themselves about the space, crashing into the sides and each other, emitting small, bright flashes with every collision. It almost looked like a preserved Gamma.

  “What is it?”

  “This,” Uncle Mort said proudly, “is a Spark. Measures the life force of any given being. In this case, mine.”