Croak

  “Experience,” Driggs said, frowning, “can also be a fickle mistress.” He peered at the field, then dropped to the ground.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a ball,” he said from underneath the seats. “Maybe he was hit by a line drive.”

  “Yeah, right. I loathe sports as much as the next marginally intelligent being, but even I know a ball could never reach all the way up here. And even if it could, it wouldn’t be fatal.”

  “True.” He straightened up to examine the man more closely. “No visible signs of injury, doesn’t look like he’s having any health problems. Go ahead, touch him.” Lex obliged, though something about this scene was starting to feel very off.

  Driggs’s concern grew as he Culled the Gamma. “It’s like he just . . . stopped living. Maybe—”

  He stopped abruptly, dropping to the floor once again. He peered up at the man’s face. “Look at this,” he said, his voice strange.

  Lex crouched down beside him. “Whoa.”

  The man’s eyes were completely white.

  Lex frowned. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know.” Driggs nervously shoved the Vessel into his pocket as they scythed once more, this time automatically returning to the Ghost Gum.

  Lex looked in surprise at the sun, directly overhead. Their shift was over already? She’d never be able to get used to this time-warping business.

  Driggs, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been doing this for four years, and I’ve been able to find the cause of every single death.” He swallowed. “But that guy—I have no idea.”

  Lex thought. “Heart attack?”

  Driggs shook his head. “You can’t die from a heart attack that fast. There would have been at least some sign of distress.”

  “Poison? Drugs?”

  “No chemical works that instantly. You saw the guy—it looked like he was still reading his program.”

  “Then what, magical fairy dust? Vulcan death grip?”

  “Focus, Lex. Wake up that lonely brain cell.”

  “Well, what are you trying to say? He wasn’t supposed to be dead?”

  “That’s what it looked like, but—”

  “But how is that even possible?”

  “It’s not.”

  They were silent for a moment. Lex stuck her hands into her voluminous hoodie pocket, only to quickly yank them out again. She had forgotten about the heaps of Vessels Driggs had given her to store there.

  “Are we going to unload these things?” she asked, a trace of nervousness creeping into her voice. “They’re starting to gross me out.”

  “They’re just souls.”

  “But they’re warm. Like eggs. I feel like a spawning salmon.” Driggs laughed. This only made her voice get higher. “And they’re people’s souls, and they’re kinda important, so shouldn’t we maybe, I don’t know—dammit, what are we supposed to do with them?”

  “Hey.” Driggs put his hands on her shoulders and caught her manic gaze. “Relax, spaz. I’ll show you.”

  ***

  Over at the Bank, Kilda was terrorizing a pair of uneasy Frenchwomen seated on the lobby sofa. “Of course black sweatshirts are in style here, they’re the rage everywhere in America!” She leaned in ominously, her gigantic corsage almost touching their noses. “Now, let me give you some dining options for the next town over!”

  Driggs led Lex down the hallway and up the flight of stairs, coming to a halt at the top upon a small landing. In front of them was an unmarked door. He turned the knob.

  Lex had expected something a little more illustrious to exist on the only second floor in all of Croak, but disappointment ensued as they stepped into the room. It contained nothing more than a potted plant, a black door on the left-hand wall, a steel bank vault door in front of them, and a desk, behind which sat a bored-looking kid about Lex’s age with a head of moppy, fluorescent orange hair. He was staring fixedly at a computer and pounding at its keys.

  “D-bag,” he said without looking. “What up?”

  Driggs closed the door behind them. “I brought you a present. This is Lex.” The kid did not respond. “Hey.”

  “What? I’m trying to work here.”

  “This is Lex,” he repeated. “She’s training today.”

  He gave her an unenthusiastic thumbs-up, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “Stupendous.”

  Driggs crossed the room, sat on the desk, and glanced over the kid’s shoulder. “Level sixty-three, nice. Who’s the hot elf?”

  “Wait a minute,” Lex said, glancing at the game on the screen. “Does that get Internet?” she asked the kid.

  “Not for you.”

  Lex crossed her arms.

  “Lex,” said Driggs, “meet best friend Ferbus.”

  “Seriously?” she said with a glance of skepticism. Driggs and this nerdlinger? “You guys are best friends?”

  Ferbus looked up briefly to give her a smug look. “We prefer the term heterosexual life mates.”

  Lex rolled her eyes. Driggs stood up and knocked on the enormous circular vault door, which was made of spotless brushed metal and extended all the way to the ceiling. At its center was a large wheel, the kind that looked like the helm of a pirate ship. “How’s the weather in there today?” he asked Ferbus.

  “Partly rowdy with a chance of gunfights.”

  Driggs grinned at Lex, but all she could do was give a listless shrug. She had no idea what was going on. Plus, she felt a little uneasy in the room, as if something were slightly wrong with the physics of it. But she couldn’t figure out what it was. She glanced at Ferbus, then at the window behind him, then at the vault door. She frowned. That couldn’t be right . . .

  “Okay, first stop on the tour,” Driggs said. “Check this out.” Her eyes followed his finger to something she hadn’t noticed before: a miniature version of the vault door, about the size of a grapefruit, fixed into the wall beside its massive counterpart.

  He began to twirl its little wheel. “This is where we deposit the souls.” The door swung open to reveal nothing but darkness. Lex leaned in to inspect it further, but she saw only more of the black space, with a tiny pinprick of white far off in the distance.

  “At the end of every shift,” he said, taking a handful of Vessels out of his pocket, “we run up here, pop open the tunnel, and deposit all collected Vessels. Just place them in this hole, and then—” The first Vessel was gone, sucked into the tunnel before he could finish his sentence. “That’s it.” One by one, he fed in the rest, each disappearing as quickly as the first. “Now do yours.”

  Lex dug into her pockets and eagerly deposited the white globes into the hole, glad to be rid of them. When they were all gone, she gazed down the tube. “Where do they go?”

  “To our next stop on the tour. Are we okay to go in, Ferb?”

  “Not sure. Burr and Hamilton dueled it out again this morning. Last time I checked, Abe was still cleaning up the mess.”

  He picked up the phone, his eyes still on the screen. Lex noted that he didn’t punch any numbers into the keypad before he started talking—if one could even call it talking. His side of the conversation was more like a series of monosyllabic grunts.

  He hung up and resumed tapping at the keyboard. “All clear, head on in.”

  “Awesome.” Driggs shut the little tunnel door and turned to Lex. “You ready to see something really crazy?”

  “It’s about time,” she deadpanned.

  Ferbus typed a code into the computer, prompting a series of whirring, clicking noises to sound from behind the vault. Driggs grabbed the heavy wheel on the door and spun it counterclockwise.

  And that’s when Lex realized what had been bothering her about the room. By all rational accounts—according to her mental floor plan of the building—that vault should have opened straight into the nothingness of sky, two stories above th
e Field.

  But, of course, that’s not even close to where it actually led.

  9

  The rational part of Lex’s brain surmised that she had not been thrust exactly into the center of the sun, but in terms of brightness, she must surely have been within a dangerous proximity. The blinding luminescence could be felt even through her closed eyelids. As she groped in the direction of Driggs, her feet bounced and wobbled over a plush, cushiony surface. And yet, despite all of the very good reasons to panic, an overall feeling of peace began to settle through her frayed nerves.

  “Takes a minute to adjust at first,” Driggs said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “This is the eight hundredth time you’ve said that,” she said, blinking. “Is there anything here that I’ll never get used to?”

  “Probably these guys.”

  Lex opened her eyes.

  For a moment she could have sworn she was standing in one of those history-comes-alive museums—the kind that feature animatronic robots, the narration stylings of James Earl Jones, and the sort of exhibits that invade children’s nightmares for years to come. But instead of a cyborgish John Wilkes Booth discharging his deadly bullet into the back of a plastic Lincoln’s head, a very real version of the assassin was engaged in a furious arm-wrestling match with Elvis Presley.

  Lincoln was watching the tussle, amused. “Come on, John,” he said. “You can do better than that.”

  “He’s all talk,” Elvis whispered back.

  “Silence!” roared Booth. “I’m trying to concentrate!”

  Lincoln rolled his eyes.

  Lex was stunned. “What. The. Hell?”

  “Not hell,” said Driggs. “Just the Afterlife.”

  ***

  After narrowly escaping a biplane containing the Wright brothers and receiving a hearty welcome from a bombastic Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of the entire gang of former presidents, Lex demanded an explanation.

  She tried to follow Driggs as he took her aside, but it was hard to walk normally, as the strange substance that formed the floor was too bouncy and uneven to navigate. Fortunately, they soon came upon a hammock made of the pillowy white stuff. As Lex climbed into it, Driggs grabbed a couple of handfuls for himself, sculpted them up into a seat, and plopped down next to her.

  “So,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “this is the Afterlife. See, there are our targets from this morning.” He pointed to a confused-looking mass of people. Lex recognized the drugged woman from the cruise ship. “The tunnel flings the Vessels into this space, the atrium. Think of it as a big entrance hall. Once here, the Vessels dissolve and the souls are released and take bodily forms again. They are then welcomed by an ambassador.” He gestured at George Washington, who shook the woman’s sunburned hand. “The ambassador fills them in on the situation, then leads them out of the atrium and into the Void.”

  Lex shook her head, as if to free up more space to comprehend all of this. “And that’s . . . heaven?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more like whatever you want it to be. You can do anything—hang out with all your dead relatives, eat donuts all day, go skiing for months at a time—”

  “Rue the day you were born,” moaned a thin man with a black mustache, digging through a nearby pile of debris and seemingly carrying on a conversation with the sleek, dignified raven sitting on his shoulder. “I told you it wasn’t here, Quoth. Has anyone seen my cravat?” he shouted to no one in particular.

  Lex fell right out of her hammock. “What the—are you Poe?”

  “Regrettably.” He sighed, smoothing his pants. “Call me Edgar. Or the Tell-Tale Fart, that’s Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite.” He shot a distasteful glance at the crowd of presidents. “Jerks.”

  “Wow.” Lex blushed, starstruck for the first time in her life. “Um, how are things?”

  “Lamentable.”

  Lex looked at Driggs. He shrugged.

  “O . . . kay,” she said, reboarding the hammock and looking around for walls or a ceiling, neither of which she could find. “How big is this place?”

  “Huge,” Driggs said. “Bigger than anything you can imagine. It contains almost everyone who’s ever died—”

  “Almost everyone?”

  “—and has room enough for everyone who eventually will die. It has to be gigantic. But you can live wherever you want—”

  Edgar let out a snort.

  “Sorry, go wherever you want,” Driggs said. “Deserts, oceans, glaciers, the Land of Oz, outer space—anything you can dream up. Some souls have even created entire planets just for themselves.”

  “Like Mozartopia,” Edgar said, sulking. Quoth resentfully ruffled his feathers.

  “Can I see them?” Lex asked.

  “No,” Edgar told her. “You’re still alive.”

  “We can’t physically go past the atrium,” Driggs said, pointing. “Only the dead are allowed into the Void.”

  She followed his finger into the distance, where the light intensified too brightly to see anything. “Why?”

  “We’d get lost pretty quick. With billions of souls warping the space, it would be impossible for any of us mere mortals to find our way around. Plus, if we tried to stay even in the atrium for more than ten hours or so, we would start to, uh . . . how to put this lightly . . . die of exposure.”

  She gave him a dubious look and was about to press further, but she got sidetracked as Thomas Jefferson walked by wielding a pair of homemade nunchucks. “They’re very nice, Tom,” Driggs told him. The founding father nodded proudly and scampered away.

  “Why are there so many presidents here?” Lex asked.

  “Because we’re the Grim town closest to where most of them died. Some volunteer to be ambassadors, and the rest just like to hang out in the atrium solely for the reactions. The looks on new souls’ faces when they meet dead presidents in the flesh, so to speak—those guys just eat it up.”

  “So there really are other Grim towns?”

  “All over the world,” said Driggs. “In the U.S. alone, there’s DeMyse on the West Coast—which I’m told looks like one big Oscar party—and Necropolis, the capital, in Kansas. Croak’s jurisdiction only covers the eastern third of the country.”

  Lex shivered all over for a moment, the sort of shiver a person experiences when they realize how little they really know about the world.

  She studied the Void. “So wait, what about religion and the Devil and all that?” She turned to Edgar. “Is there a God?”

  Edgar’s face went blank. His mustache twitched.

  “If there is, no one’s telling,” Driggs said. “The souls are very secretive about all that meaning-of-life stuff. That’s another reason the living aren’t allowed in any farther.”

  “You’ll just have to wait your turn,” Edgar snipped.

  Lex swung the hammock a little and looked up at the sky, or whatever it was. “So if this is heaven—”

  “It’s not heaven,” Driggs said. “And it’s not hell. It’s the Afterlife. Completely neutral. It’s whatever you make of it.”

  “Much like life,” Edgar said.

  Lex thought for a moment. “But if there’s no hell,” she said, sitting up, “if there’s no chance of punishment afterward, then why even bother trying to be good while you’re alive? Isn’t there at least a pit of hungry snakes or something?”

  Driggs shrugged. “Maybe. But we won’t find out until we get there.”

  Lex angrily pointed to the crowd. “John Wilkes Booth! What is he doing here? And why do those people seem to actually like him?”

  “I don’t,” Edgar said. “He stole my favorite quill.”

  “But . . . no fire and brimstone for the bad guys?” Lex sputtered. “That’s just not fair!”

  “Well, life’s not fair,” Driggs said quietly. “Why should death be any different?”

  Lex fell silent.

  “I should go,” Edgar said, giving Quoth a gentle pat. “Roosevelt’s probably turned my cravat into a pirate
flag by now. Ingrate.”

  “Okay,” Driggs said. “Later, Ed.”

  Lex grumbled. “Sorry we weren’t better company.”

  Edgar gave her a stately nod. “I enjoyed when you fell out of the hammock.”

  Driggs watched him trudge away, then turned to a troubled Lex. “It’s a lot to digest, I know,” he said. “But it’ll sink in.” He stretched and got up from his makeshift seat, which melted back down into the ground. “We should probably take off, too. I still have to show you the Lair.” And it was just as well that they decided to leave, because by then an angry, frizzy-haired Mark Twain had arrived to chase them out of his hammock.

  As they neared the vault door, Lex noticed a desk sculpted from the fluff, which the sudden blindness had prevented her from seeing before. “Omigod! Hi!” exclaimed the perky blond girl who sat behind it.

  “Crap,” said Driggs.

  “You’re Lex, aren’t you?” The girl jumped up and grabbed Lex by the shoulders, which her head barely reached. She wore a green sundress, a gold necklace, several bracelets, and a huge smile. “I’m Elysia. Sorry I couldn’t greet you on the way in, I was dealing with another one of Taft’s hissy fits. But I’m so glad you’re here! We’ve been waiting for you for forever. What happened to your eye? Have you already started Killing? I know you were going to stop by yesterday but then you didn’t so I’ve been wondering what you were up to. I manage the front desk in here, so I’m stuck inside all day. This is your first time to the Afterlife, huh? What do you think? Pretty cool? I told the presidents to behave when you arrived and it seems like they all acted okay. Ugh, except for McKinley. Bill!” She scolded into the distance. “He’s just so enchanted by the invention of boxer shorts that he can’t help showing them off. Personally, I think he might be a little retar—”

  “Elysia!” Driggs interrupted. “Slow the hell down.”

  She grinned at Lex. “Sorry. I talk a lot when I get excited.”

  “That’s okay,” Lex said with an impish nod. “We all have our flaws. Driggs here loves Titanic.”

  “Really??”

  Driggs folded his arms and studied the girls. “I can already see the ramifications of an alliance between you two. And they are troublesome.”