Croak

by Gina Damico

  “They’re sending us a message,” Driggs said, thinking. “Using any old weapon is no big deal, but stealing Elixir? That takes some serious balls. Whoever is doing this wants Grims to know that they’ve outsmarted the system, that they can harness this power and are willing to do horrible things with it.”

  Uncle Mort nodded in agreement, then handed the paper to Lex. “And here’s where it gets really crazy. Check out the target.”

  Lex scanned the article. “Arnold Scadden, thirty-two years old. No wife, no kids.” Her eyes bulged. “Convicted sex offender?”

  Driggs grabbed the next sheet off the top and skimmed through it. “Susan Karliak, forty-nine. Awaiting trial for third DWI.”

  “Dr. Dennis Nolan, fifty-six. Twice sued for malpractice,” Lex said, showing Driggs the picture. “Look, the dentist!”

  Uncle Mort sifted through the rest. “And thirty or so others charged with assault, extortion, child pornography, fraud, rape, drug trafficking, arson—you name it.”

  A fervor gripped Lex. Someone was really doing it. Someone was going after the criminals who needed to be stopped! “Murderers too?” she said, looking up in excitement. Yet no sooner had the word left her mouth than she realized her mistake.

  Uncle Mort was giving her a harsh look. “No, curiously enough,” he replied in an even tone. “No murderers.”

  “Too bad,” Lex said under her breath.

  Uncle Mort exchanged a glance with Driggs. He leaned in to his niece. “You remember those Terms we went over, right, kiddo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Uncle Mort said. “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here. These are not okay, Lex. I don’t want you to start worshiping this nutjob. You of all people should steer clear of their plans, especially since—” He cut off abruptly, a hesitant and slightly surprised look on his face.

  “Since what?”

  “Well, since I’ve never seen anything like this until you arrived.”

  Lex gaped. “You think it has something to do with me?”

  “No. Not directly, of course. Still,” he said quietly, and more to himself, “it’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  Lex looked up at Driggs, who was looking at her with a strange expression. She made a face back at him. “So where do we go from here?”

  “I’ll jump into the Field for the next few days, see for myself what’s going on,” Uncle Mort said, standing up. “Thank you for telling me about this. And keep the criminal pattern between us, will you?” He hurriedly left the kitchen for his lab, locking the basement door behind him.

  Lex picked at a stain on the table and thought about the implications of what her uncle had just told her. All the evil that was loose in the world . . . a way to rein it in . . .

  She looked at Driggs, who was still glaring at her. “May I help you?” she asked peevishly.

  “Knock it off.”

  “Knock what off? I’m not doing anything.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re scheming.” He got up and walked toward his room. “Scheming leads to crazy ideas. Crazy ideas lead to trouble. I get dragged into your trouble, we both get kicked out of Croak, and the next thing you know, we’re freezing to death in the waters of the North Atlantic.”

  “Dude, you are way too obsessed with Titanic.”

  Driggs looked indignant. “What is so wrong with having a healthy respect for heart-wrenching filmmaking of unequaled —” He shook his head. “Look, this isn’t about me. Just quit it with the evil plots, all right? If you get exiled, I’m going to be pissed as hell.” He slammed the door.

  “Why?” she yelled.

  He poked his head out. “I don’t want to have to clean out your room again.” He slammed the door once more and disappeared into a crash of drums.

  Lex was not amused. Although secretly, she was.

  16

  After finding Corpp’s devoid of Juniors later that evening, it didn’t take Lex and Driggs long to guess that their crew had decided to hole up in the Crypt’s common room for the night. Together they headed down Dead End and made their way through a darkened, narrow tunnel, eventually emerging into a small green courtyard surrounded by a block of rooms. As they approached the largest one, a heated argument between Sofi and Ayjay wafted through the window.

  “I’ve got ten hotels on the Conservatory. Seriously, you owe me, like, eighty gatrillion dollars.”

  “Not until I get my triple-letter score for passing Go.”

  “No way! You couldn’t remove the Charley Horse, remember?”

  “So? I still found the Lead Pipe in Park Place!”

  “Which you had to mortgage after Queen Frostine totally sank your battleship!”

  Lex attempted to follow this conversation as she walked through the door, but she failed somewhere around the time Elysia almost toppled over on the Twister mat. “Jump in,” Elysia said from the floor, wobbling way too close to the jellyfish tank. “There are a couple of tokens left in the box.”

  Driggs sat down on one of the many battered couches and dug through the box, removing a wrench, a top hat, a rook, a green gingerbread man, and a decapitated Rock’Em Sock’Em Robot. Lex looked at the game board on the table, a mangled conglomeration of Monopoly, Clue, Candy Land, Scrabble, and chess.

  “What the crap?” she asked the room.

  “Don’t touch the Candlestick or you’ll automatically lose,” Elysia warned from the mat, flicking the spinner with her free hand. “Right foot red. Okay, so one night last year we came home from Corpp’s really late, but we were all still too drunk and giggly to go to sleep, so Ferbus took all of the board games that had been sitting in the closet since the dawn of time and mashed them up into one.”

  Lex held up a rogue Uno card. “What are the rules?”

  “No one really knows,” Kloo said, peering at her tray of Scrabble tiles. “We kind of just make them up as we go along.”

  “I see. And what do you call this game?”

  “Doesn’t have a name,” Zara said, absently watching a Simpsons rerun playing on their ancient television.

  “Lies!” yelled Ferbus, twisted into a pretzel underneath Elysia. “It’s called Ferbusopoly, and you all know it!”

  “Hey, Milton Bradley? Your railroads are flooding.”

  “What?” He crashed to the floor and ran over to the board. “Dammit. I should never have left Colonel Mustard in charge,” he moaned, mopping up a soggy Short Line.

  “Hey, you guys are never going to believe this,” Driggs said to the room. “Mort already knew about the white eyes. He’s been tracking them since they started.”

  “No way!” Sofi said. “That’s so crazybread!”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Lex said dryly.

  “Was he mad?” asked Kloo, handing them a couple of slices of pizza.

  “Nope,” said Driggs. “In fact, he seemed kind of proud of us.”

  “That’s because Mort is infinitely cooler than Norwood,” said Ferbus. “What else did he say? Any ideas on who? Or why?”

  “No. And . . . no.” Driggs shot a warning glance at Lex to keep her mouth shut about the pattern of criminals. “But we did figure out how.”

  “We?” Lex said.

  “Okay, Lex figured out how.”

  She told them about the Elixir and Corpp’s interrogation. “Duh!” Elysia cried, pulling at her hair. “I work with that frickin’ stuff all day long, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Still, if it’s not coming from Corpp’s or the Afterlife, where are they getting it?” asked Ferbus. “And how are they killing people with it? And why did we stop playing my game?”

  The discussion continued as they battled into the night, devouring box after box of Pandora’s delicious pizza. Lex herself built a Jenga tower on Boardwalk, sank Driggs’s destroyer with a double word score, and captured a bishop in the Peppermint Forest with Mrs. Peacock, making it obvious that years of family board game nights had crafted her into a force to be reckoned with.

&
nbsp; Perhaps it was too vivid a reminder—Lex’s memory jumped back to her family with each roll of the dice. She gazed longingly at the Scrabble board, remembering the time Cordy had theatrically thrown a pile of useless consonants at her face.

  Lex sighed. No matter how hard she tried to ignore it, the thought of home was always there, perched in the back of her mind like a lurking vulture. Her strategy of squashing any images of her family before they could fully surface just wasn’t working anymore. As amazing as her time in Croak had been, the wound of separation from her family remained fresh and raw—and the further she slid into the Grimsphere, the worse it got. She had been gone just over a month, yet already she was being torn in two distinct, worrisome directions. Never in a million years had she expected to enjoy herself on this upstate summer banishment. But her immersion in Croak had been so swift, so complete. It felt as if she had lived there all her life. How was she expected to yearn for a home that now felt unbearably mundane by comparison?

  A loud yell from Ferbus snapped her back. He drew a Candy Land color card, then placed the Revolver on Baltic Avenue. “What’s Professor Plum doing here?”

  “Protecting the queen,” Driggs said.

  “What? Duel!” The two boys jumped up and stalked to the middle of the room, eyeing each other like prowling tigers.

  Lex felt a sharp jab in her ribs. “Come on,” Zara said quietly, nodding in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Wait, they’re going to fight,” Lex said. “I wanna see.”

  “Those morons, fight? They’re just gonna play Hungry Hungry Hippos,” Zara said, pulling her out of the room. “The winner gets to be Supreme Ruler of the Electric Company and the loser has to spend a turn trapped inside the secret passage between the Kitchen and the Library.”

  “Crap. My submarine is hidden in there.”

  Zara’s eyes flashed as she dragged Lex to the stove, out of the others’ view. “I want to ask you something.”

  Over the past few weeks, on the sporadic occasions when they were able to steal away from the group, Lex and Zara had established an unusual relationship. Zara wasn’t exactly her new best friend, but upon her confession that she too felt an overwhelming shock while Culling, Lex thought it might not be such a bad idea to have some company on her descent into madness. Little by little they had begun to confide in each other, swapping stories of the jolts they experienced. And secretly, Lex was glad to have someone with whom she could entrust these allegedly shameful feelings. Every time she brought them up to Driggs, he gave her that same look, the one that made his blue eye appear extremely judgmental. Not so with Zara.

  Yet the cutthroat rivalry between them remained palpable. Now that Lex had superseded Zara as Croak’s best Junior, their exchanges had gotten a bit pricklier.

  “How’s work going?” Zara asked, stealing a glance at the doorway. “No changes to your . . . you know. Right?”

  “No,” said Lex. “They’re getting stronger, I keep telling you that. Yours are too, right?”

  “Of course they are!” Zara looked offended. “I’m just paranoid, I guess. That yours will stop and I’ll be the only one left.”

  “Which is what you really want, isn’t it?” Lex muttered under her breath.

  Zara looked stung. “I’m going to ignore that.”

  “Anything else?” Lex said, growing impatient.

  “Yes.” Zara came closer and lowered her voice. “Is that really all Mort said? Or is there something else you’re not telling us?”

  Lex noted the flash of jealousy in Zara’s eyes. Should she bring her in on this? There was no denying that her expertise had some worth, but Lex could easily imagine Zara taking all the credit, proudly declaring to Uncle Mort that she had figured out everything by herself. That simply couldn’t happen.

  Plus, Lex thought somewhere in the far reaches of her mind, if someone really is going after criminals, I want to be the one to find them.

  “No, that’s all,” Lex said.

  Zara’s face morphed into the expression of someone who knows she’s being lied to. “Come on, Lex. Maybe I can help. And admit it—you owe me.”

  Lex’s shoulders slumped as she remembered the secrets Zara had kept, the knowledge of Lex’s shocks and vengeful urges that she hadn’t spilled to the other Juniors—or even to Norwood. Lex really did owe her.

  So she caved.

  “That’s insane,” Zara said, her eyes worried, after Lex had told her everything about the criminals.

  Lex chewed on the inside of her mouth, images of the girl with the teddy bear flashing across her mind. “Is it?” she said quietly, an angry fever burning up her neck.

  “What do you mean?” Zara gave Lex a look. “You’re not still lunging at murderers out in the Field, are you?”

  Lex narrowed her eyes and backed up against the stove, an empty pizza box digging into her back. She knew she shouldn’t push things any further, but the words just spilled out, growing louder and louder. “Is going after these monsters unethical? Yes, absolutely. Is it wrong?” Her face was red, her hands burning hot. “I’m not so sure.”

  “We’re not supposed—”

  “—to interfere. I know. But maybe we should!”

  “But that’s against the Terms—”

  “Screw the Terms!” Lex exploded, slamming her hand down.

  It happened faster than either of them realized. They froze in horror, unable to move, staring at the pizza box that had burst into flame.

  After a beat, they sprang into action. Zara flung open the refrigerator and grabbed a pitcher of water while Lex reached for a nearby spatula and began to bat at the box, trying to push it into the sink. Eventually their combined efforts succeeded and the flames were extinguished, the smoking, charred shell of the box giving off an acrid smell.

  Zara looked at Lex with giant, scared eyes. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know!” Lex cried, just as alarmed. She pointed at the stove. “I must have turned it on by accident!” They both looked at the burner knobs, all plainly in the off position. “And turned it off too, I guess?”

  “Right. Yeah.” Zara studied her. “Has this happened before?”

  “Has what happened before?” Lex shot back, Zara’s accusatory expression sparking her rage all over again. “A kitchen fire involving grease-soaked cardboard? Only about a billion times, probably!”

  Zara gave her a dubious look and opened her mouth to say something more, but a loud cry from the other room made her stop. “We should go back—”

  Lex didn’t know what made her do it, but she grabbed Zara’s arm. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  Zara wrestled out of her grip. “Might want to get rid of that,” she said icily, nodding at the soggy box as she exited the kitchen.

  Lex swallowed, then busied herself with destroying the evidence. As she shoved the box into a trash bag and started waving the fumes out the window, her mind churned. It was an accident, obviously. There was no other explanation.

  Except . . . she had brought her hand down on the box, not the knob. She was sure of it. And why were her hands still scalding hot, her temper still flaring?

  Stop it, she told herself. Accident. Nothing more.

  As she shoved her hands into her pockets and made her way back into the living room, Lex was relieved to discover that both her absence and the fiery incident had gone unnoticed. Ferbus held his fists over his head in triumph as the others cheered (including Zara, who was acting as if nothing had happened), while Driggs looked dejectedly at his losing hippo.

  “He cheated,” he complained to Lex as she sat down. “Distracted me with a Hershey bar.”

  Ferbus rolled the dice and moved his top hat token forward. “And that would be a Connect Four.” He grinned. “I win.”

  The group heaved a collective groan of defeat. Lex looked around in disbelief. “What?” she said, still fuming. “He won?”

  “Geez, Ferbus.” Driggs sighed with a hint of admiration. “You ever gonna lose?”
r />   “Of course not, he’s making it all up!” Lex yelled.

  The group gasped.

  Ferbus clucked his tongue. “You just insulted the Almighty Conqueror of the Universe,” he said, handing her a box. “Which means you have to clean up.”

  ***

  Twenty full minutes of repacking later, Lex and Driggs headed home.

  Lex decried the rules (or lack thereof) the whole way, focusing her anger on something real, something that made an iota of sense. “Marvin Gardens is a no-fly zone, my ass.”

  “Only for thimbles,” Driggs said, climbing up onto the roof. “Hey, what did Zara want with you?”

  “Oh—um, she just wanted to trade for a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  He frowned. “But she wasn’t in jail.”

  “Would it have mattered?” she said peevishly.

  Lex was, in a word, torn. She trusted Driggs, but the truth was just so damn tricky. The fire thing—well, she didn’t know what to make of that, and neither would he. All of this Zara business, the shocks they shared—it was too hard to explain. And she didn’t even want to think about what would happen if she told him that she’d gone and spilled the secret of the criminal pattern Uncle Mort had found. To Zara, of all people. He’d probably dropkick her off the roof.

  So she said nothing.

  “You sure know your way around a Jenga tower,” Driggs said.

  “What?” Lex replied, distracted. “Oh. Thanks.”

  “How’d you get so good at those games?”

  “My family—we played them all the time. I could probably recite the Monopoly properties to you in my sleep.” A small smile appeared on her face. “I don’t know, I guess my parents thought they were educational.”

  Driggs watched her. “You really think they’ll make you go back at the end of the summer?”

  She sighed. “I don’t think. I know.”