Hellhole

by Gina Damico

  “What happened?” he asked, afraid of the answer.

  She crossed her arms. “He made some ungentlemanly remarks about my chest.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  She fell quiet again.

  “Anything else?” Max asked. “Did he hurt you?”

  Lore briefly looked touched that he had asked that, but she shook her head. “No. He didn’t even get up from the couch. Just sat there and housed that Chex Mix like a—a—”

  “Like a cheetah devouring the entrails of a zebra?”

  She put her elbow on the table, propped her chin in her hand, and bore a glare directly through to his soul. “Start at the beginning.”

  Obsessive-Compulsive Type

  RECOUNTING THE WHOLE SORDID TALE took the better part of an hour. By the time it was over, Max’s voice had gone hoarse, Lore’s face had gone slack, and the quiche had been all but demolished.

  “And that’s why I stole the Twinkies and shoved them down my shirt,” Max finished, noting that this was maybe the oddest way he’d ever ended a story.

  “I see,” said Lore. She wiped her mouth with a napkin, then folded her hands in front of her.

  Max leaned forward, the better to hear the valuable knowledge she was surely about to dispense. “So?” he prompted.

  Lore looked around, as if expecting someone else in the room to answer. “So what?”

  “So what do I do about all this?”

  “How should I know?”

  Max blinked. “You’re the expert!”

  “I never claimed to be an expert.” She was back to talking swiftly, as she had at the dumpster. “You’re the one who called me, all because of a rumor suggesting a persona and lifestyle I have long since shed and was never all that committed to in the first place. That’ll teach you to listen to gossip, huh?”

  “But you have to help me!” Max was getting that panicky, nauseated feeling again. He’d brought this complete stranger over to his house, exposed her to a demonic being, threatened her safety, jeopardized the secrecy of the situation, and for what?

  “Why?” she shot back. “I don’t even know you.”

  The anxious feeling swiftly morphed into the fluttering one that accompanied confrontation. “I’m sorry,” he said, waving his hands. “You’re right. I am so sorry I brought you into this. Now he knows who you are and what you look like and—oh, crap.” He reached for the nearly empty tin of quiche. “I forgot to save some for Mom.”

  “You think she slept through all this?” Lore asked.

  “She sleeps through everything.” He transferred the microscopic sliver of quiche onto a plate, cut it up into even smaller pieces, poured a glass of water, folded a napkin, and arranged everything on a tray, all in the space of about fifteen seconds.

  Lore watched him dart around the room. “Done this before?”

  “Yeah. My mom is—she’s sick. I take care of her.”

  Lore looked stung. She eyed the floor, while Max’s ears reddened. He never understood why he got so weird about his mom. There was no reason for it, nothing to be ashamed of. But it crept in anyway, against his will, like a stubborn rash.

  “I’m sorry,” Lore said.

  Max didn’t know how to reply to this, so he turned and headed for the hallway. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Okay. I’m gonna go.”

  “Wait, what?” Max spun around, sloshing some water onto the quiche, further ruining what was already a pretty lousy dinner. He came back into the kitchen and put the tray down. “You’re leaving?”

  “Sorry. Need my beauty sleep.”

  “Aw, no you don’t,” Max said automatically, before realizing the implied flirtation and subsequently panicking. “I mean, I guess we can all be a little more attractive, relatively speaking, but it’s not like you’re any less attractive than anyone else. Like, you’re not ugly. Your face has all the requisite features, and none of them are any larger or smaller than they should be, everything is in proportion, and you don’t have any irregular moles or growths, so—”

  You’re doing it again, he thought. Have we learned nothing from the veal incident?

  “I like your last name,” he finished weakly.

  Lore blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

  “Nedry. Like Dennis Nedry, in Jurassic Park? Sorry, I’m sure you get that all the time.”

  “No. This is a first.”

  He shook his head, trying to hit the Restart button. “You can’t leave. What am I supposed to do about . . . him?”

  “Look, I think things could be a lot worse,” she said in a breezy tone that, to Max, sounded just a little too breezy, as if she were forcing it. “I mean, he’s just some dude. An asshole, to be sure, but just a dude. He likes snacks. So give him snacks.” Her voice turned bitter. “You got off pretty easy, if you ask me.”

  Max felt that the best response to this was some massive sputtering. “But I’m also supposed to find him a house!”

  She was definitely agitated now. She got up and walked toward him. “I don’t know what to do about that. You’re absolutely right, you shouldn’t have gotten me involved. You made your own mess, you clean it up.”

  It wasn’t until Max’s tailbone hit the kitchen counter that he realized he’d been backing up as she spoke. He brought a hand up to his face, and it felt hot, flushed. Lore’s face was red too—he could see this because it was only about a foot away from his.

  Her mouth was trying to form too many different words at once, twitching, trying to escape from her face. Finally, instead of saying anything more, she whipped her head around—brushing Max’s face with her ponytail in the process—and stormed out the kitchen door.

  Max stood there, stunned.

  “What just happened?” he asked the empty room.

  As if arriving specifically to taunt him, Ruckus sashayed into the room, rubbed his cheek against the cabinet, and let out a meow that sounded suspiciously like Ha, ha!

  “Shut up, you,” Max said. He looked out the window and saw Lore struggling to pick up her bike and put on her helmet all at the same time. Finally clicking the helmet strap shut with an angry snap, she pushed off and disappeared down the street. Max opted not to chase after her.

  As if you could catch her, noodle legs! Ruckus implied with a disdainful arch of his back.

  Max gave his head a hard shake. I really need to stop imagining cat dialogue. He picked up the tray, vowing to salvage the only good deed he could accomplish on this awful, accursed day. He stood outside his mother’s door for a moment and attempted to compose himself. The trembling in his hands started to go away, but the ill feeling in his stomach remained.

  At least his mother had been watching Adultery Cove at full volume, which meant she probably hadn’t heard any of the escapades in the kitchen. “Quiiiiiche!” she cried, hitting the Mute button and clapping, though she stopped once she saw how little of it there was. “Geez, Max. You bulking up for the winter?”

  “I . . . guess I got a little carried away,” he said, trying not to let her see his face.

  But mothers always know. “Why are you all red? Hon, look at me.”

  He turned his head. “It’s nothing. I was moving around some stuff in the basement and it was really hot down there.”

  Even Max was surprised by how easily the lie came out. As if that small, bad part of him that had stolen the Twinkies and the cat had now been given free rein to shoot up to the surface and slither out of his mouth whenever it wanted.

  He stared at the transplant pager on her nightstand, that useless chunk of plastic that so steadfastly refused to help them. “Anyway—”

  A loud roar sounded from downstairs. Max caught the words “son of a bitch,” followed by something worse, followed by something much worse.

  His mother struggled to sit up. “What was that? And what are you doing?”

  Max was surprised to find that his mouth was open, and a strange, sustained “lalalalala” was coming out of it.

>   “Singing,” he explained.

  She frowned. “What’s going on down there?”

  “Um”—he looked up at the ceiling—“it’s this new game Audie brought over. It’s called . . . Swearstorm.”

  There’s no way in hell she’s going to buy that, he thought, but she’d finally taken a bite out of the quiche and was set adrift in cheesy, hammy, eggy heaven. “Mmmm. Audie’s here? Tell her I said hi.”

  “Oh, she already left. Had homework to finish.” He began to make his way toward the door. “And I do too. So I’m just gonna go”—he stuck his head out the door, yelled “TURN OFF THE SWEARSTORM,” looked back at his mother, and smiled sweetly—“and study.”

  She looked back at him with a confused expression, fork posed over the last bites of her meal. “Maybe go a little easy on the quiche next time, Maxter. Too much egg can addle the brain.”

  He kissed her good night and flew back down to the basement, only to discover to his horror that the door to the storage area was open and Burg was inside, standing at Max’s workshop—a.k.a. the old Ping-Pong table Max had commandeered to work on his secret dinosaur projects.

  Not so secret anymore, he thought upon seeing Burg, who was holding Secret Project #17 in his hand.

  “What are you doing in here?” Max asked.

  “Those rotten video games of yours keep telling me I lost, so I was looking for something to smash the TV with.” He held up the item. “This’ll do.”

  “No! Put that down,” Max said. “Gingerly.”

  Burg dropped it to the table with a crash. “What is it anyway?”

  Max picked up the pieces of the project he’d been painstakingly sculpting out of wire mesh, papier-mâché, and plaster. “It’s supposed to be a T. rex skull.”

  “Looks pretty real.”

  “A true scientist always strives for accuracy,” Max said.

  “A truuue scientist always strives for aaaccuracy,” Burg said, mimicking him in a high-pitched little-girl voice. “You’re such a nerd.” He walked farther down the Ping-Pong table and grabbed a rough curved object that somewhat resembled a talon. “What about this one?”

  Secret Project #11. “That’s a replica of a fossil found up on Ugly Hill about ten years ago,” Max said, taking it from him and turning it over in his hands. “Last year I emailed the professor who found it, and he sent me a couple of high-definition photos, and I’ve been working off of those. No one knows what it is—Dr. Cavendish was beginning to theorize that it came from some bird-dinosaur missing link. But he died a few months ago, and everyone was starting to think he was a crackpot anyway. Now nobody cares but me.”

  Burg squinted at the talon. “That’s not from a bird.”

  “A prehistoric bird. They were different. Bigger.”

  Burg shrugged. “Is that why you were digging up on the hill?”

  “Yeah. I’ve always thought I could find more by myself, but . . .”

  It sounded so idiotic when he said it out loud. Why was he saying it out loud anyway? And to Burg, of all people?

  “Never mind,” he muttered.

  “What happened?” asked Burg. “Daddy wouldn’t build models with you anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Why? Because you’re so lame?”

  “No, because I don’t have a dad.”

  “Oh? Were you conceived via asexual reproduction?”

  “Okay, I technically have a dad, but I’ve never met him. He could be dead, for all I know. Maybe even in hell. Ever come across a guy down there with persistent body odor and hair shaped like a baseball cap?”

  Burg held up his hands. “No way. Not my department. I’ve got nothing to do with the stiffs, their eternal judgment, any of that.”

  “Why not? You’re a devil, aren’t you?”

  Burg put his hands on his hips, puffing out his voluminous belly. “Think of hell as one big corporation. You got your Satans, in charge of damnation and dead folk and all that heavy important stuff—the CEOs, if you will. Then there’s middle management, the ones who oversee the dispersal of evil into the world. And then there’s me and the rest of the operational staff, doing all the grunt work.”

  Max rolled the model through his fingers. “What sort of grunt work?”

  “Well, for example, I’m in the Vice Department,” Burg said. “We’re the ones who cause humans to lust after all the dumb shit their reptilian brains can’t help but become addicted to. Drugs, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, money, television, bacon. I’m an Associate Imp in charge of Salty Snacks.”

  Max blinked. “So . . . you’re not really evil, then, are you?” he asked, for the first time feeling some of his panic dissipate.

  “Oh, I’m evil. It’s just that some devils are more evil than others. I don’t know what goes on in the upper management offices, but I do know that those are the vilest bastards we’ve got. Not that there aren’t some pretty serious assholes in my division. Take the Moneygrubbers, for example—the committee in charge of stimulating human greed. These are fourteen of the douchiest, slimiest guys you can imagine. Anytime you hear about a particularly nasty white-collar crime or bank robbery, that’s all their doing. Then there’s the Donut Team—I don’t need to tell you how wicked those guys are. Oh, and then there’s Rusty, that entry-level kid we got a few years ago. He handles those addictive cell phone puzzle games. Real assgoblin, that one.”

  “Wow.”

  “We have fun,” Burg said cheerfully. “But I needed some air. Needed to get away for a while. It’s really hot down there, you know?”

  “Guess I better go fill that hole in, then,” Max muttered. “Before more of you sprout up.”

  “Yeah, probably should.”

  Max fumbled the talon. “Wait, really? I was just joking. That’s a possibility?”

  Burg gave an innocent shrug. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Irritated at his vagueness, Max studied him. “What happened when Lore came down here?” he asked. “Why didn’t you scare her or attack her or something? Not that I wanted you to,” he rushed to add, “but our previous interactions led me to believe that you might rip the head off of anyone who invades your space.”

  “Nah.” Burg walked back into the den, sank into the sofa, and took a long swig of Mountain Dew. “No challenge there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Burg took another sip. “She’s too miserable.”

  “Lore? She’s not—” Max stopped himself. “She’s not that miserable.”

  Burg reached a hand down to the floor and fished around until he found a crumpled-up Mountain Dew can. He held it up to illustrate.

  “This is your miserable friend,” he said. “Already crushed. I can squeeze it into a tighter ball if I want, but it’s hardly satisfying.”

  Max nodded, his face pale. He didn’t like where this was going.

  Burg tossed the balled-up can to the floor, then finished his current soda and held up the empty can. “This,” he said, his left eyebrow arching up to form a point, “is that next-door neighbor of yours. Happy. Full of life. Bright, shiny future.”

  With a metallic crunch, the can imploded in his grip until there was hardly anything left, an aluminum apple core.

  Fear sliced through Max’s stomach, but he tried not to show it. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Liar. I watched her through the window. Saw her skipping off to church this morning, giddy as a flag on Flag Day.” With an unsettling leer he glanced out the window that faced Audie’s house, then grinned back at Max. “I love a good challenge.”

  Max wanted to scream. It was hard enough to protect his mother from this monster, and then he’d gone and roped Lore into it—now he had to worry about Audie, too? How many innocent lives could he endanger within a twenty-four-hour period?

  There was a knock at the kitchen door.

  Burg started to get up, that predatory look still in his eye, but Max cut him off. “Stay here,” he ordered.

  The leer was replaced by
a petulant frown. “But I’m hungry.”

  Max ignored this and went back up into the kitchen. He couldn’t blow Audie off forever. And he’d much rather cause a scene in his kitchen than in the middle of a crowded school hallway.

  “Hey, Audie,” he said, pulling the door open.

  “That,” said the visitor, “is not my name.”

  Lore stood on the stoop, her face red and sweaty from biking, her ponytail windblown.

  “Oh,” said Max. “Hi. Again.”

  Lore shifted her weight to one foot, then the other. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  Max noticed a pair of dark circles under her eyes. Had those been there before? “That’s okay.”

  “I’m just going through some stuff—still going through some stuff . . .” She looked frustrated with herself, then shook her head. “Whatever. It’s no excuse. Sorry.”

  “Ain’t no thang,” Max replied, inexplicably.

  “Because actually—” She brought her eyes up to his. “I changed my mind. I want to help you.”

  That he did not expect. “Really? Why?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Uh, okay. But—” Max at least had the presence of mind to know he shouldn’t look a gift horse in its scowling, deadpan mouth, but he had to be up-front. About this, at least. “But it could be really dangerous. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” she said, examining her chewed-up, unpolished nails. “All the more reason to dispose of him, for your sake and your mom’s sake. So here I am. Just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to accept her devil-expelling assistance.”

  “Okay. I mean—God. Thank you.”

  Lore walked past him into the kitchen, tossed her bike helmet onto the table, and turned around.

  “Well?” she said impatiently. “We can’t love it when a plan comes together if the plan doesn’t come together, right?”

  Max kicked off their brainstorming session that evening in the only way he knew how: with school supplies.

  “Wow,” Lore said, sitting on the living room sofa and taking in the two-by-three-foot posterboard easel in all its nerdly glory. “That is a thing that you own.”

  “Oh, this is just left over from the Paleontology Club,” Max said. “I’d had high hopes for getting an Ankylosaurus swap meet going and—you know what, forget it.”