Scorch

by Gina Damico

  “You kids, out,” Trumbull told the Juniors. He grabbed a handful of bandages and other supplies and threw them into their hands. “Go back outside, see if anyone else needs help. It’s getting too crowded in here.”

  “But Kloo—”

  “Out!”

  Reluctantly, Lex, Driggs, Elysia, and Ferbus wove their way through the hemorrhaging sea of humanity and piled out the door. The air had cleared, affording them a full view of the aftermath. The obelisk had been blown clean off the fountain—yet remarkably, it was still largely intact, lying on its side near the door of Corpp’s. A few small fires still smoldered, but Uncle Mort was putting them out. Not many people were left on the ground—what few remained seemed to be only slightly injured—but some had been laid out on the porch of the Bank, Wicket working furiously among them. Her eyes were red and wet—she’d undoubtedly learned of Roze’s fate, but was still going. Norwood and Heloise, on the other hand, stood idly among the victims, wearing coats over their pajamas and doing more gawking than helping.

  The Juniors hurried to the porch and began to distribute the supplies. Norwood sneered at them. “Where have you been?”

  “We were in the Morgue,” Driggs said, bandaging a woman’s knee. “Enjoying your night off?”

  “We told him,” said Heloise, a haughty tone in her voice. “We told Mort not to do this, that it was only an invitation to chaos. There we were, spending a quiet evening at home, and boom!”

  Lex glared at her, noting how much shorter she was without her spiky stilettos. She didn’t look nearly as threatening in slippers. “Well, thanks for taking some time out of your lounging to help,” Lex said, pressing a piece of gauze over a man’s gaping head wound. “Could you hold this for a minute while I grab some tape?”

  Heloise hesitated and made a face. She tapped Norwood’s shoulder to get him to help, but after one quick look at the cut, his lip curled as well.

  Lex’s eyes narrowed as she got up to get the tape herself. “I see. Wouldn’t want to get any blood on our hands, would we?”

  Uncle Mort let out a shout from the square. “Everybody out of the Bank!” He waved his hands and pointed at something above them. “There’s another one!”

  Lex jumped off the porch and looked up. Under the eaves of the Bank roof, a small red light blinked back at her. She took out her flashlight and shone it at the boxlike object. Colorful wires stuck out of it in all directions.

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Get them out!” She echoed her uncle’s words and gestured hard to the others. “Wicket, we gotta go!”

  Wicket’s face fell. “We can try, but—” Her eyes looked desperate as the Juniors began to grab the victims. “There’s not enough of us,” she said more quietly.

  Norwood and Heloise fled the porch. “Get back here and help!” Wicket shouted after them, but they stormed over to Uncle Mort.

  “Do something!” Norwood told him.

  “Do what?” Uncle Mort’s face was furious. “Fly up there and get it? You bring your broomstick, Hel?”

  “This is no time for jokes, Mort,” she countered.

  “The real joke is that you two cowards bothered to show up at all.” Uncle Mort took off for the porch, leaving the couple to fume for a few seconds before running into the Morgue.

  “You guys should go,” Wicket whispered to the Juniors on the porch. “It’s too late.”

  “No!” said Driggs. “All these people—and what about you?”

  She looked at them, miserable. “I don’t care.”

  “Wait!” A strident voice cut straight through the panic. Pip was a blur as he dropped down from the trees, ran across the square, and began to scale the Bank.

  The Juniors jumped off the porch to watch him climb. “What are you doing?” Ferbus yelled. “Get down, idiot!”

  Pip ignored him and went even quicker. When at last he reached the top, he grabbed the bomb from under the roof’s peak and tucked it under his arm.

  “What’s he doing?” Driggs asked as Pip descended.

  “I don’t know,” Elysia said, “but he’s only bringing that thing closer to us.”

  A whistle came from the trees. Bang bounded out of the woods and ran up to the Bank, where Pip had landed on the roof of the porch. She whistled again. He nodded and tossed her the bomb.

  The Juniors cringed as it soared through the air, but Bang gingerly caught it in her outstretched hands. She flitted to the fountain and set the contraption on the ledge. Crinkling her nose in concentration, she got to work, poking at the wires and removing components from the device. The entire square was silent; even the injured had stopped moaning to watch.

  Time seemed to slow down. The seconds crept by, each more agonizing than the last. Finally, with one last yank, Bang straightened up and tossed the bomb to the ground, where it landed with a crunch.

  The red light was off.

  A few people let out a cheer, but most simply stood around with their mouths hanging open. A second later, half a dozen Seniors came out of the Morgue and scurried to the porch to provide Wicket with some much-needed backup, wholly unaware of the situation that had just unfolded in the square. Uncle Mort grabbed a few of them on the way, directing them to sweep the other buildings and make sure there weren’t any more explosives waiting to detonate.

  The Juniors just gaped at Bang. “How did you do that?” Elysia asked.

  Bang let slip a shy smile and signed something that no one understood. “She went through an electronics phase last year,” said Pip, swinging down from the roof of the porch. “For our science fair she built a working solar-powered lawn mower and a robotic—”

  “And you!” Ferbus yanked Pip into an affectionate headlock. “SpiderPip!”

  Driggs gave his head an appreciative shake. “You sure know how to pick ’em, Mort.”

  Uncle Mort was staring at the rookies, his expression stunned yet impressed. “Guess so.”

  “What in tarnation is going on?” Pandora hobbled onto the street from the direction of the Field. Her eyes swept across the destruction of the square. “Mercy . . .”

  Corpp appeared a few minutes later and hugged Dora close as they conferred with Uncle Mort. “You think Zara planted the bombs when she attacked Driggs?” he asked.

  Pandora shook her head. “I scrubbed that fountain top to bottom getting that boy’s blood out of it. I didn’t see any bombs.”

  “Then how do you figure she slipped past your sensors tonight?” Corpp quietly asked Uncle Mort. “I thought alarms were in place.”

  Uncle Mort looked troubled. “They are.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I’m not sure.” He gave Corpp and Dora a knowing look. “But if I were to take a wild guess—”

  They flinched at the sound of a loud bang behind them. Ayjay had kicked open the door of the Morgue and was now walking calmly across the square.

  “Ayjay?” Lex called out. His face looked funny. “You okay?”

  “Too much,” he muttered to himself as he walked, tearing off his eye patch and hurling it to the ground. “Too much.”

  The Seniors’ expressions changed in an instant; they knew something was wrong. Uncle Mort broke into a run after him. “Ayjay!” he called out, frantically gesturing at the Juniors to help in the chase. “Stop him!”

  Ayjay took one look back at Uncle Mort, then began sprinting toward the Bank. Wicket said something to him as he bounded up the stairs of the porch, but he blew right past her, jumping over a prone body and heading into the foyer.

  The Juniors started after him, but no one was fast enough— not even Pip. Lex pushed through the crowd and caught up to her uncle as he pounded up the stairs to the second floor. “What’s going on?”

  “Kloo’s dead.”

  “What? You don’t know that!”

  “Trust me. She is.”

  “But—” Lex sputtered, remembering what she had gone through when Cordy died. “Even if she is, Ayjay knows she’d be too confused to see him
this soon in the Afterlife! Why would he go in there?”

  “He’s not.”

  “Then why are we chasing him?”

  Uncle Mort slowed as they stepped into the office. The sole Senior working the graveyard shift watched them, dumbfounded. The door to the Lair was wide open, the security keypad ripped out of the wall and hanging by a wire.

  Uncle Mort’s shoulders sank. “We’re too late.”

  Ayjay sat curled up in a corner, clutching an empty bottle of Amnesia and staring groggily at the crowd of people gathered around him.

  He blinked once.

  “Who are you?”

  11

  Lex emerged from the woods, hugging herself. She let out a breath and watched the cloud of vapor drift away as she walked toward the center of town. Clouds blanketed the sunless sky, turning the morning into a gray, stagnant realm of crapitude. Ferbus and Elysia sat atop the remnants of the fountain reading The Obituary. Driggs pounded his feet on the ground and blew into his hands to keep them warm.

  Work had been called off for the day; Necropolis had agreed to take on Croak’s targets while Uncle Mort and the town dealt with the aftermath. Most of the victims had been stabilized and were recuperating, and those who hadn’t been as lucky were laid out in the alley behind Corpp’s—seven in all. They’d be buried the next day.

  “Hey,” Driggs said as Lex reached the fountain. “All done?”

  Lex nodded and pulled her sleeves over her trembling hands. The pillar of fiery anger in her chest had been surging like a sun storm ever since the explosion, and it had just come to a head, sending her into the forest to discharge. “Sorry. I just—there’s been a lot to rage about.”

  “I know.” He glanced back at the woods. “What did you Damn?”

  “I don’t know,” Lex said, distracted. “Dirt or something.”

  Driggs raised an eyebrow. “You can Damn dirt?”

  “I can Damn whatever I want,” she snapped.

  “Whoa, okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “I just—hey, how’d it go?” he said to someone behind her.

  “Fine,” Uncle Mort said, walking briskly. “He didn’t put up a fight or anything.”

  Not only had everyone stayed up all night tending to the victims, but the Juniors also had to pack up Ayjay’s entire room, making sure to discard anything that had to do with Croak. Meanwhile, Uncle Mort had taken Ayjay into isolation and begun the delicate process of dissolving his career as a Grim. This involved a lot of sedation combined with something that was almost like hypnosis—Lex wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it had convinced Ayjay that he’d spent the past five years in college, but had gotten into a car accident and injured his eye as well as the part of his brain that affected his memory. Lex thought this sounded ridiculous, but Ayjay bought it—and why wouldn’t he? What other explanation was there?

  After that, all that was left to do was stick Ayjay on a Greyhound bus with nothing but a forged college degree, a couple forms of identification, and five thousand dollars to his name. It felt cruel—it was cruel, but there were no other options. That gigantic whiff of Amnesia had erased all memories Ayjay had ever had of Croak, including Kloo.

  Which, after all, was the point.

  Lex rubbed her eyes and tried not to picture Ayjay sitting alone on that bus seat, his eye futilely searching for answers as to who he was, where he was going, why he was on a bus, and who on earth had put him there. “What about the population monitoring system?” she asked Uncle Mort.

  “Seems like it’s working,” he said. “The sign clicked to two less when we passed out of the town limits, then plus one when I came back, just like it’s supposed to. And I checked the logs from last night—it was working just fine, no glitches.”

  “Then how did Zara get in without us noticing?”

  Uncle Mort lowered his voice. “I don’t think she did.”

  “‘The bomb went off at eight fourteen p.m.’” Elysia was reading from the newspaper, her speech peppered with little squeaks of pain as Ferbus changed her bandage. “‘Rumors of a second, undetonated bomb have surfaced, but such claims have yet to be confirmed. Seven are dead, and many more are injured.’ Ow!”

  “Sorry!” Ferbus cried, flapping the bandage. “Too much pus!”

  Elysia gave him a sour look mixed with a hint of a smile, then continued. “‘Authorities say that Zara was able to breach the protective safeguards in effect, but details as to how she accomplished this are still unclear. One thing is for certain: No detection devices were triggered, despite Croak’s authorities’ claims that the town was prepared for any type of intrusion.’”

  “They don’t like you, Mort,” said Driggs.

  Uncle Mort snorted. “What else is new?” He flashed them a hollow smile. “Won’t be long now.”

  Driggs frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have a call to make,” Uncle Mort said, heading for Corpp’s. “You kids stay together. I’ll be right back.”

  Driggs sat down on the ledge with a sigh. “Where are our little rookie saviors?” he asked Elysia.

  “Back at the Crypt, sleeping.”

  Lex kept pacing, her body not allowing her to calm down. She was too busy thinking about Zara. And the bodies rotting not thirty feet away from them.

  None of this made any sense. Up until now, Zara had carefully targeted her victims, whether they were criminal or innocent. Blanket destruction just wasn’t her style.

  Lex stopped short in front of Corrp’s, where the obelisk had fallen. The point caught her eye—she’d never really looked at it before, it had been so high up. She crouched down to examine it, then drew back, surprised. Etched into the stone was a series of symbols:

  “Driggs,” she called. “Look at this.”

  He walked over and crouched next to her. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Have you ever seen these symbols before?”

  “No.”

  “Not in any of those books you read while researching Croak, the Wrong Book, Grotton?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Lex thought for a moment. Then, in a flash of revelation, she grabbed a nearby shred of paper debris and a charred piece of wood and began to make a crude rubbing.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Saving our asses.”

  “Naturally. How?”

  “Not sure yet,” she said, sweeping the paper into the air with a flutter and taking off toward the library. “Give me five minutes!”

  He started to follow her. “What—”

  “Alone!”

  ***

  Lex could feel the resistance. She strained against it, pushed as hard as she could, but the resulting pain got to be too much. She tried to fight through it, gritted her teeth until she thought for sure her body would break apart, and then bam—she’d relent and it’d throw her right back to where she started.

  Once the allotted five minutes had passed, Driggs walked into the library. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said breezily, brushing off her hoodie.

  He sat on the table and stared at her. When she said nothing, he crossed his arms.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You going to tell me what you were doing?”

  She blinked.

  “Lex,” he said patiently, “you know how you love that thing I can do with my teeth? Consider it off the table until you tell me what’s going on.”

  Lex held firm for a moment but ultimately caved. She did love that thing. “I was trying to get into the cabin, okay?” she said, lowering her voice. “I thought that maybe the symbols on the obelisk had something to do with it, that if I had them in my head, I could somehow get past the shield—”

  Driggs grew angry, as she knew he would. “By Crashing? Are you nuts? You don’t know how to control it—and even if you did, are you remotely prepared for whatever’s waiting for you inside? Why take the risk?”

  “Because seven more people are dead!” She took a step forwa
rd. “Dozens more are injured, Ayjay fried his own goddamn brain, and now that Zara’s tested the waters, she knows precisely how vulnerable we are for next time. So I want to get to the Wrong Book first, before Zara does. Because if it falls into her hands, if she gains one more advantage over us, that’s it. We’re toast.”

  Driggs looked as if he was thinking this over and was almost about to agree when a yell came from the town square.

  “Something’s up,” Lex said, looking out the window.

  “We’ll fight more about this later.” Driggs opened the door. “Come on.”

  Heloise had shooed Ferbus and Elysia away and taken a position atop the fountain’s ledge. The frumpiness of the previous night was gone; she was back in fine form, with bright red shoes to match her lipstick.

  The citizens of Croak—those who could walk, at least —poured out of the Morgue and gathered around her. More filtered in from the Bank, and some even came from the direction of their homes, as if they’d known to meet at a specified time. Lex looked at her watch. Noon, on the dot.

  The Juniors gathered in the back, near Pandora and Corpp. “Not good,” Elysia muttered to Lex.

  “Thank you for coming,” Heloise announced. “We have a lot to talk about.” She began to walk back and forth atop the fountain, her heels clicking across the stone. “As we all know quite well by now, the Grimsphere is under attack. And when people are under attack, the one thing they must never display, under any circumstances, is weakness—not in their defenses, not in their willingness to fight, and most assuredly not in their leadership.”

  Uncle Mort poked his head out of Corpp’s. Heloise cleared her throat and stared at him, causing everyone to turn around and do the same. “Show’s starting, I see,” he said, stepping outside and leaning against the building. “Break a leg, Hel.”

  “Up until a few months ago,” she continued in a honeyed voice, “Mort was an exemplary mayor. No one is disputing that. But times have changed, and Mort has not changed with them. He doesn’t seem to see the danger we’re in, to realize that we cannot continue to live our lives in the carefree way we once could. What’s more, he has relied on old tried-and-true defenses—defenses that are not only obsolete but detrimental to the cause of protecting our fair citizens. We need look no further than the pile of bodies behind the Morgue to affirm that changes must be made.”