The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

by Rhett McLaughlin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. As you might have guessed, Rex and Leif are based on us as teenagers and Bleak Creek is loosely based on our hometown of Buies Creek. And Ben is a tribute to a very close friend. Otherwise, the rest of the book is strictly a result of our wild imaginings. If there is any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (or undead), events, or locales, it is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln “Link” Neal III

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McLaughlin, Rhett, author. | Neal, Link, author. | Rubin, Lance, author.

  Title: The lost causes of Bleak Creek: a novel / Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal with Lance Rubin.

  Description: New York: Crown, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017895| ISBN 9781984822130 (hardback) | ISBN9781984822147 (trade paperback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Humorous fiction. gsafd | BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. |

  FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C576 L67 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019017895

  ISBN 9781984822130

  Ebook ISBN 9781984822154

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Nil Ultra

  Images: Mr.adisorn khiaopo/Shutterstock (hand); MagicDogWorkshop/Shutterstock and misa.karaffoav/Shutterstock (textures); Umberto Shtanzman/Shutterstock and Komsan Loonprom/Shutterstock (bubbles)

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Rhett Mclaughlin & Link Neal

  About the Authors

  Excerpt from Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality

  PROLOGUE

  THE BOY RACED through the woods, blood streaming from his hand.

  He was growing faint.

  Can’t pass out. Just gotta make it to the fence.

  He heard his pursuers yelling. They sounded as panicked as he felt.

  He didn’t know if the dizziness was due to blood loss or the shock of what had just happened.

  They were gonna kill me.

  He’d known this place was twisted from day one, when they’d stripped him of everything, including his own name. But even with all the vile things he’d seen, he had still assumed that the brutal punishments were designed to intimidate. Not exterminate. That’s why he’d been so calm, willingly letting them guide him along blindfolded and gagged, right up until the moment they’d sliced his palm.

  What if this particular test was no different? Maybe he was doing exactly what they wanted him to, running through the trees like a trophy animal. They had only cut his hand. No arteries. Plus, he’d somehow gotten away from the two men holding him, one of them enormous, much bigger than any of the other adults he’d seen there. Had they purposely let him go? No, he shouldn’t sell himself short. He’d fought like hell.

  The boy felt a flash of pride. All those hours of memorizing Jean-Claude Van Damme’s moves had been worth it.

  Can’t wait to rewatch Kickboxer.

  He struggled to move at a full clip, as branches, rocks, and logs snuck up on him in the sparse moonlight. He dodged the obstacles, hoping he was heading in a straight line.

  Where’s the damn fence?

  He saw it just before he collided with it, the grass of the pasture on the other side of the chain links glowing a dull gray under the night sky. He started to climb without thinking, pain exploding as the metal wire slipped into his open wound. He stifled a scream, hoping to conceal his exact point of escape. While clenching his jaw, summoning the resolve to hoist himself up the ten-foot barrier, he saw it: a cut section of fence not five steps away.

  Lucky.

  As he pushed his way through the flap and stood in the pasture, he heard the roar of an engine to his left. A pickup truck was hurtling across the pasture in his direction.

  They were trying to head him off.

  He broke into a sprint toward the cover of trees bordering the pasture, his shadow sprawling in front of him as the headlights shined on his back. He was confident in his speed. Ninety-ninth percentile in the President’s Challenge Shuttle Run. He’d timed himself.

  But they were closing the distance, fast.

  Get to the tree line.

  He knew there’d be a barbed-wire cow fence at the edge of the field. He’d have to clear it in stride.

  In only a matter of seconds, they would be upon him.

  He was steps from the trees.

  The headlights lit up the short fence, helping him judge his distance. He stutter-stepped to set up his leap, then threw his lead leg in the air.

  A clean jump.

  He heard the truck skid to a stop on the wet grass behind him, the doors opening. Men screaming.

  He knew this stretch of forest well; there was barely a patch of nature around town he hadn’t explored. Another hundred feet or so and he’d make it to the clearing.

  He broke into the lane cut through the forest, a grassy corridor that followed the sewage line along its lazy descent to the water treatment plant. He heard the chasers clumsily moving through the woods, crashing into branches and grumbling to themselves.

  Morons.

  Randomly choosing a direction, he dashed down the clearing, reaching a manhole in less than fifty steps. He grabbed a nearby stick and jammed it into the notch on the cover, just as he’d done a thousand times before, no longer thinking about his throbbing hand. The weighty metal disk lifted, releasing an acrid smell. He raised the lid on its edge and swiftly descended into the rank darkness below, skittering down the iron rungs as fast as he could.

  The disheveled men popped out of the trees no more than ten seconds after he’d dropped the manhole cover in place.

  The boy listened as their cursing voices passed him.

  He waited in stinking silence for another five minutes.

  Thrusting open the cover, he emerged into the damp air.

  The boy fled deeper into the woods.

  1 />
  THOUGH REX MCCLENDON knew that he and his best friends were about to attempt something audacious, he never could have anticipated the category-five suckstorm that would spin out from the next hour of his life.

  As he scanned the crowd for Leif and Alicia, his dad’s camcorder heavy in his backpack, the muggy August day hit its first sour note as Rex realized he’d forgotten to put on deodorant. He stuck his nose under the collar of his No Fear T-shirt to get a sense of exactly how dire things were.

  It was awful. Almost horselike.

  “Stop smelling yourself in public, sweetie,” Martha McClendon whispered. “People are staring.”

  Rex pulled his nose out of his shirt. If his mom thought this was bad, she was going to hate his plans for the afternoon, which hinged entirely upon people doing just that: staring.

  “Let’s see if we can find your father.” Rex’s mom led him through the masses gathered in the parking lot of the sole strip mall in Bleak Creek, North Carolina, pragmatically named the Shopping Center. It was home to a majority of the local economic powerhouses: Piggly Wiggly, C.B.’s Auto Parts, the Fish Fry, Thomble and Sons Hardware, Morris Coin Laundry, and the living testament to Bleak Creekians’ year-round appetite for celebrating Jesus’ birthday, Cate’s Christmas Cave.

  Every few steps, Rex and his mom returned the customary polite smiles and heys doled out by familiar faces. His shoulders tensed up as they made small talk about the weather with Sheriff Lawson, whose mirrored aviators and perennial look of disapproval did nothing to stem the mounting feeling that maybe his dad’s camera should stay zipped in his backpack. There was still no sign of Leif or Alicia.

  They arrived at a massive barbecue smoker resting in front of the laundry. In Bleak Creek, it didn’t take much to justify cooking a pig. Today’s excuse was a Second Baptist Church fundraiser to replace the copper pipes that had been stolen from the church’s organ (for the second time—it had happened just six years before, too). Everyone knew who had taken the pipes (Wendell Brown, again), and everyone knew why (to fund his cough syrup addiction), but in a way, people were appreciative, because it had been three weeks since the last “pig pickin’.”

  Rex spotted his dad in his usual white shorts about ten feet from the barrel-shaped smoker, staring at the grillmaster Wayne Whitewood with a combination of awe and resentment. Whitewood and his mane of perfectly coiffed white hair were beloved in Bleak Creek for many reasons, one of which was his opening of the Whitewood School, a reform school for wayward youths, in 1979. The school was seen as the primary reason Bleak Creek had made it to 1992 unscathed by the “Devil music and crack pipes” that plagued the big cities. That alone would have cemented Whitewood’s status as a pillar of the community, but he was also considered to be one of the town’s premier pork gurus.

  Rex’s dad had worked hard on his own barbecue stylings for the better part of a decade, but he’d never been bestowed that great honor, the highest a Bleak Creek man could receive: being asked to cook a pig for a town event.

  “I think it’s because I’m a mortician,” he’d say. “People don’t like the idea of me touchin’ people then pigs.” Steve McClendon was the owner and operator of the McClendon-McClemmon Funeral Home, formerly known as the McClemmon Funeral Home. When Martha’s father, Mack McClemmon, died in 1984, Martha had convinced Steve to move the family back to her childhood hometown and try his hand at the funeral business. The result: a funeral home with a name few locals could correctly pronounce on the first try.

  Today’s choice for chef was a no-brainer, as Wayne Whitewood was also Second Baptist’s organist, the player of the very instrument for which this entire event had been planned.

  “We gotta get Whitewood his pipes back!” said Mary Hattaway, the secretary at Second Baptist, a thin woman with highlighted hair that spiked in the back, giving her an unintentional resemblance to Sonic the Hedgehog. She repeated her mantra as each new person arrived at the pay table, raising one bony fist in the air.

  “Picking up any tips?” Rex said, attempting to break his father’s trance.

  “Huh?” Steve said, recoiling as if Rex were a door-to-door salesman before realizing it was his son. “Oh, no, not really. I know most of these techniques already.”

  “Right, of course,” Rex said. It was unclear what techniques his dad was referring to, as Whitewood was just sitting there reading the Bleak Creek Gazette while the grill did its thing.

  “You ready to join us, honey?” Martha asked Steve. “You’re probably makin’ Mr. Whitewood nervous.”

  “Oh, it don’t bother me,” Whitewood said, surprising all three McClendons, who hadn’t realized he was listening. “I’m flattered you care that much.” He returned to his paper.

  “Let’s go, Steve,” Martha said. “Nice to see you, Wayne,” she lied.

  “You take care now,” Whitewood said without looking up, turning a crumpled newspaper page.

  “Yessir,” Steve said. “You too. Can’t wait to eat your meat.”

  Wayne Whitewood shot his ice-blue eyes at Steve without moving his head from the paper, staring at him for a few uncomfortable seconds. Despite his small stature, Whitewood was remarkably intimidating. He seemed to be waiting for Steve to correct himself.

  Rex’s dad took the bait and stammered, “Well…the meat. That meat. The barbecue.”

  Whitewood’s mouth cracked a smile, his eyes unchanged. Martha grimaced and tugged Steve’s arm as Rex put a guiding hand on his back.

  “What was that?” Martha whispered to Steve once they’d put some distance between themselves and the grill.

  “I don’t know! I’m just tryin’ to make a connection!” Steve shout-whispered back.

  “Yeah, I think he definitely got that impression.”

  Rex was glad his parents were distracted by their own drama, as it meant they’d be slower to notice the carefully manufactured drama he was about to shoot—using all the fundraiser attendees as unsuspecting extras—for the film he’d been making all summer with Leif and Alicia. He again checked the crowd for his collaborators, wondering if Leif would have a Speed Stick in his bag whenever he showed up. It wasn’t impossible. Leif was always bragging about how prepared he was. Probably the more appropriate question, though: Even if he did have some, would he let Rex use it? Leif could hardly share a can of Mello Yello—no way he’d okay indirect armpit contact. Rex gave himself another sniff, hoping that his proximity to the smoker might have helped to mask his odor.

  Nope. It actually smelled worse.

  “All right, folks,” C.B. Donner, of C.B.’s Auto Parts, said into a staticky microphone. “It looks like Chef Whitewood will be platin’ up some of his heavenly pork in a matter of minutes, so get your bellies ready. And once we chow down, it’ll be auction time!” Ever since C.B. and his wife, Diane, had divorced earlier that year, he’d made a point of emceeing as many town events as possible. “I’d also like to take a moment to remind all you ladies out there that my store’s got a sale on air fresheners, and we just got a new scent in. It’s called Pink Swan. Come by and smell of it all you want.” He pointed down to his neck, where he was wearing one of the air fresheners as a necklace. True to the name, it was a pink swan. Rex wondered if it would solve his own scent problem.

  “Hey, you ready?” a voice asked from behind him.

  He turned to find Leif Nelson, at last, standing there in a white T-shirt and a clip-on tie, with his dog, Tucker, leashed next to him.

  “Hey,” Rex said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Sorry I’m late. I was getting Tucker ready for his scene.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like, I was prepping him. Getting his mind in the right place.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you don’t have a dog.”

  “Oh, hey, Leif,” Rex’s mom said, smiling, for the fir
st time all day, like she meant it.

  “Nice to see you, Mrs. McClendon. Mr. McClendon.”

  “Good to see you, too,” Rex’s dad said, rubbing Tucker’s furry head. “Those specs are lookin’ sharp!” Leif had been wearing glasses for several months now, but Rex’s parents had made a habit of complimenting him like they thought he was insecure about them.

  “And I like that tie,” Rex’s mom said, pointing to the clip-on.

  “Oh, thanks, it’s for our—” Leif was about to say movie until he saw Rex staring him down. “Fundraiser. Well, not our fundraiser. But this fundraiser. That we’re all attending now.”

  “Well, okay.” Rex’s mom had gotten used to her son and his best friend saying inscrutable things. “Is your mom comin’ by?”

  “No, ma’am, she’s at work,” Leif said. His mom had three jobs, which meant Leif was usually on his own. Rex loved this, as it meant Leif was always around to hang, as had been the case that whole summer.

  “Looks like folks are startin’ to sit down,” Rex’s dad said, wiping sweat from his bald head with his black and white McClendon-McClemmon Funeral Home handkerchief, and pointing to the two people who’d taken a seat. “Shouldn’t be long now till we eat.”

  “Hey,” Rex said to Leif under his breath as they walked toward the tables. “You got any deodorant on you?”

  “Any what?”

  “Deodorant.” Rex looked around to see who was listening, realizing that maybe he wasn’t so different from his mom after all.

  “Why?” Leif asked.

  “Like, to use.”

  “You want to use my deodorant?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Oh.” Leif stared at Rex as if seeing him for the first time, like he’d just discovered some long-buried truth about the best friend he’d known since he was six. Or maybe he’d just inhaled. “No. You think I just carry deodorant around with me?”