by Gina Damico
Driggs frowned. “Bang and Pip came from Chicago. And I think Ferbus once said he used to live near Seattle.”
Lex’s eyes widened. “You think this is how Uncle Mort tracks down potential Grims?” she whispered.
“Why, yes it is!” Uncle Mort boomed in a game-show-host voice. “Grotton, tell them what they’ve won!”
Grotton narrowed his eyes. “Don’t drag me into this.”
“This is how you track down rookies?” Lex asked Uncle Mort, incredulous.
“Yep.” Uncle Mort had broken away from the table, moved on to the shelves, and was now grabbing things left and right. “As soon as kids turn delinquent, they start to emit a sort of signal through the ether. The stronger the signal, the more potential they have as a Grim. All I have to do is pick out the brightest.”
Driggs frowned. “Why aren’t I on here?”
“You weren’t the brightest. Heads up!”
He tossed something at Driggs. It looked like a little football. It was shaped like a little football. It was, for all intents and purposes, a little football—except that it was made of gold. Driggs’s eyes went wide at the prospect of dropping a priceless invention to the floor and thereby blowing up the universe or doing something equally undesirable, but he managed to catch it with only the smallest of fumbles.
“Woo!” he hooted in celebration, hoisting it above his head. “Sports!”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Uncle Mort said, stuffing a large compass into his pocket. “Unless you want to kick-start a new bubonic plague. If you want to kick-start a new bubonic plague, then by all means, continue with the excessive celebration.”
Lex just stared at him. “You tossed a potentially plague-starting device at someone who is, at best, intermittently tangible?”
“You need to lighten up a little bit, Lex,” Uncle Mort replied. “If you can’t have fun at the end of the damn world, when can you?”
Lex and Driggs exchanged glances. “I hope you’re kidding.”
“So do I. Hand me that map, would you?”
Lex limply passed him a rolled-up world map. She was beyond trying to understand what was going on. She’d just go where she was pointed. She’d do whatever she was instructed to do. She’d stop asking questions.
“What are we doing?” burst out of her mouth milliseconds later. “What about the other Juniors? What is the plan, exactly?” She looked to Driggs for backup, but he had placed the plague-ridden football on the floor and was staring at it warily. “Why are we down here?”
“To stock up on weapons.” Uncle Mort crossed to the far wall. “We need lots of ’em. Driggs, pick that up, it’s not going to kill you—” Driggs gave him a look. “Okay, it won’t further kill you. Take a couple of these, too.” He handed Lex and Driggs a few thin vials of Amnesia each.
“What are these for?”
“Weapons. Aren’t you paying attention?” He walked to yet another wall and began to load up on items that were, at long last, recognizable as instruments of death.
“Guns?” she asked, surprised for some reason. “Not, like, Amnesia blow darts?”
“Oh, which reminds me.” He took something else off the shelf.
“What’s that?”
“Amnesia blow darts.”
Lex shook her head. “But why guns, if we have all of this other cool stuff?”
“Because despite our best efforts to use Amnesia as much as we can instead of lethal force, we’ll probably need to kill some people, and guns kill people.” He moved on to the next wall and began rifling through more gadgets. “Or people kill people. I forget how the hippies say it. Now, this one’s for you, Lex. I’m going to need you to guard this with every meager iota of attention span you have left. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. Don’t lose it.”
Lex got all her hopes up—even though she’d gotten to know Uncle Mort pretty well by now and should have known better than to get even a small percentage of her hopes up. And sure enough, the item he gave her caused the smile to evaporate right off her face.
“Don’t lose it,” he repeated.
Her eye twitched. “What is it?”
“What does it look like?”
“An oversize hole punch.”
“Exactly.”
“What?” she boomed as he went back to his papers. “You get guns, and Driggs gets the deadly Heisman, and all I get is an office supply?”
“Yes. Don’t lose it.”
It took every ounce of Lex’s strength to not kick the bubonic football into his face. Noticing this, Driggs swooped in and wrapped her in a calming, solid embrace. “Relax, spaz,” he said.
“But he—”
“—wouldn’t give you a bazooka. Oh, the unbearable trials and tribulations of the living.”
Lex deflated. Nothing put things in perspective like remembering that your boyfriend had been killed not a few hours earlier and was now stuck in some hellish existence halfway between life and death.
“Sorry,” she said, giving his arms a squeeze, happy that she could even do that.
“That’s okay. Human problems are hard. Hangnails and tricky toothpaste tubes and getting shat on by birds and the like.”
“Mondays suck too,” she mumbled into his chest.
“Oh, Mondays are the worst.”
They hugged for a moment more, then parted—at which point Driggs’s body immediately faded. “Hmm,” he said.
“What?” Lex asked.
“The same thing happened when we were holding hands earlier. The second you let go, I faded.”
“You think your solidness has something to do with my touch?” She reached out for his skin, but her hand passed through. “No, that can’t be it.”
“Maybe you can’t make me solid,” he said. “Only keep me solid once I do it myself. Which . . .”
Would be happening less and less. This unsaid bit led to a pained exchange of glances—the most pained they’d exchanged yet, by far—followed by a series of nervous scratching of necks and the inability to say anything that would ever make this any less excruciating.
But at the end of it all, she put her hand in his—through his—and smiled up at him. He smiled back. They pretended this was normal, because they had to. Otherwise they’d just start screaming.
“Almost done,” Uncle Mort said. He crossed back to his laptop, minimized the night-vision window, and started to compose an email.
“What are you doing?” Lex asked.
“Just leaving a parting gift with Kilda, if she’s still alive to receive it,” he told her. “A little educational film for her to play for the townspeople in secret. To help sway them back to our side.”
“Back to our side?” Lex could hardly say it without laughing. “The townspeople hate us. They voted you out as mayor, they wanted me dead even before I Damned Corpp and Heloise, and—” She scowled. She was really starting to hate being able to tick off the names of the people she’d killed. “What could possibly sway them back to our side?”
Uncle Mort brought up the night-vision video again. “This.”
Lex squinted at the thick white lines. They seemed familiar yet alien, like a big, picked-clean skeleton.
“I always knew Norwood’s big fat mouth would do him in,” Uncle Mort said. “I just didn’t know he’d make it so easy for me.”
Staring at the bright lines, Lex suddenly understood. “The Ghost Gum tree!” When Uncle Mort had ramped up security right after Zara attacked Driggs, he’d put in more security cameras. If he’d put one in the tree—“It would have recorded the whole thing. Me Damning Heloise, Zara giving him my Lifeglass—”
“And Norwood bragging that he blew up the fountain.”
Lex should have been able to anticipate her uncle’s guerrilla genius, but it still surprised her, every time. Kloo hadn’t been the only one to die in that explosion—a bunch of Seniors were killed, and many others had been injured. It had enraged the townspeople, whipped them into such a furor that they’d overthrown Uncle Mor
t and replaced him with Norwood, never knowing that Norwood was the one responsible for the explosion in the first place.
Uncle Mort was right. This they couldn’t forgive.
“If, deep down, Croakers are as loyal as I think they are,” he said, “then perhaps by the time we get back, they’ll be a little more open to our position. And willing to fight for us, not against us.”
This was good news. Which, of course, meant that bad news was not far behind.
“So then—wait,” Lex said to Uncle Mort. “We’re escaping to Necropolis, right? What do we need so many weapons for?”
Uncle Mort paused in his work to look up at her. “Do you know of a better way to invade a city?”
“What?” Lex looked to Driggs for help, but he appeared just as startled as she did. “We’re invading?”
“Well, yeah. Necropolis is built like a fortress. Can’t just waltz in there and expect to be greeted like it’s a family reunion and we’re the eagerly awaited branch of really attractive cousins.”
Lex was shell-shocked. “I thought—” She didn’t know why, but up until now she’d believed that Necropolis was the one place they could go where they’d be safe. She thought it’d be full of all the other Grimsphere rebels, people who supported the Juniors and believed in Lex’s innocence. She thought it would be a sanctuary, not a deathtrap that was even more dangerous than Croak.
“No one there is on our side?” said Lex. “Not even the Juniors? Aren’t they being persecuted just as much as we are?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to stick their necks out for a band of notorious criminals.”
“So let me get this straight,” Lex said slowly. “We’re leaving pitchfork-waving townspeople behind to march headlong into a heavily armed military? Why are we going to a city that wants to see us dead?”
“To be fair, Lex,” he said matter-of-factly, “every city in the Grimsphere wants to see us dead. So it’s not like we have much choice in the matter.”
Lex felt sick. That whipped cream bonanza had been a huge mistake.
Uncle Mort’s face softened. “We’re going because what I said back in the cabin is true, Lex. All the human involvement and corruption in the affairs of death has triggered a destructive chain reaction in the Afterlife. Any time a Grim does something that we’re not supposed to be able to do—Damn or Crash, anything outside the realm of reasonable involvement in people’s deaths—another hole gets poked in the Afterlife. These transgressions against the natural order—violations, they’re called—are what’s causing the vortexes, the memory deletions, and whatever else is bound to pop up the more we interfere. If we don’t stop the damage soon, then poof—no more Afterlife for the currently dead, the soon-to-be dead, or the centuries-from-now dead.”
“Okay,” said Driggs. “So how do we stop the damage?”
“We permanently seal off the Afterlife from the rest of the world.”
Lex all but stopped breathing. “What?” she shouted. “How?”
Uncle Mort paused, then sighed.
“By destroying the portals.”
3
For a moment, there was silence. “Destroy the portals?” Lex repeated in a whisper. Sealing off the Afterlife would mean never seeing her sister again, not until Lex herself died. “Completely?”
“Yes,” Uncle Mort replied. “And the tunnels we use to deposit the souls, too. Once those openings are sealed, the damage will stop. The portals are in and of themselves violations of the highest order—I mean, they’re giant honking holes between this world and the next, and ones that Grims are free to go in and out of as they please. They’re certainly not helping matters.”
“I—” Lex was too stunned to form a sentence. “Huh?”
“Of course, the act of sealing the portals is yet another violation,” he continued, “and will most likely cause even more damage within the Afterlife, but you know what they say: Sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs to preserve the everlasting life of mankind.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lex. “Without the tunnels, how will Grims get the vessels to the Afterlife? Won’t all the souls just get trapped here on earth?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “Backup plans are in place, don’t you worry about that.”
Lex scoffed at the answer that wasn’t really an answer, leaving Driggs to jump in. “Why Necropolis first?” he asked. “Why not Croak?”
“Because the portal in Necropolis is one of the biggest in the world—if the Afterlife can withstand the kickback from its destruction, then it’s likely it can handle the rest of the portals being closed too. Unfortunately, Necropolis is armed to the teeth, its citizens are incredibly well trained, and the city itself has about a billion and one ways to make us all dead. The only way for us to do what we need to do is go rogue, so to answer your original question: Yes. Weapons.”
Lex shook her head in disbelief. “What kind of a weapon is powerful enough to destroy a friggin’ portal?” she said to Driggs.
“Oh, there’s only one thing on earth that’s capable of that,” Uncle Mort said with a cryptic smirk, stuffing the last of the many mystery items into his bag—any one of which could be the thing that would sever Cordy from Lex’s life forever.
Lex shivered.
Two sharp noises blared from outside, followed by one long, dying goose–like honk. If Pandora wasn’t physically sitting atop the car horn, she was at least giving it everything her bony elbow had.
“That’s our cue,” said Uncle Mort, zipping up his bag.
“Wait, wait,” Lex said. Everything felt as if it were unraveling—although, really, it had unraveled already. Now the unraveled bits were unraveling even further, until there would be nothing left but wispy threads of utter bewilderment. “I thought all we had to do—all I had to do—was destroy Grotton, and that would fix everything.”
“It will—but we have to seal the portals first. The Afterlife needs to be stabilized.” His eyes were serious now, his voice steady. “This has all been in the works for years, Lex.”
“But you said I was the one who started the war.”
“Let me put it this way: I built the bomb. You lit the fuse.” He shouldered his bag and headed for the door. “Now it’s time to blow shit up.”
***
“What in blazes were you doing in there?” Dora said as they all piled back into the Stiff. “Poppin’ peas?”
“Oh, just gathering together an arsenal that could rival that of a small country,” said Driggs, settling back into the Designated Coffin Area.
Bitter, Lex held up her weapon. “See? I got a hole punch.”
“Careful with that!” Uncle Mort scolded, pushing it down to the floor of the car. “Lex, please. There is a time and a place.”
“What, like a regional sales meeting?”
After a couple more spurts of fire to keep the townspeople away, Pandora pulled onto the road and headed toward the center of town. Lex tried not to look at the Field, but she found that to be impossible. The melted snow around the Ghost Gum was a grisly reminder of the events that had transpired there. Whatever remained of the body had been removed, but that’s where she’d Damned Heloise. And now her soul was who knew where, blindly suffering in unending agony.
She deserved it, a small part of Lex thought.
But did she? Really?
They passed the Bank as well, cold and unfriendly in the reflected light of the snow, not at all the cheery place it was in the daytime. All the buildings were dark, the citizens either holed up in hiding or part of the mob. Other than the ruins of the bombed fountain, the streets of Croak were empty—so empty that the passengers of the Stiff just stared out the windows in silence, probably remembering all the happier days they’d spent there. Lex certainly was. She touched the window as they passed the Morgue, wondering if she’d ever get to taste Pandora’s tasty onion rings again.
Pandora was evidently wondering the same thing. She cleared her throat, then
swished Grotton’s ghostly form out of the way and looked at Uncle Mort. “Where to, boss?” she asked, her voice more gravelly than usual.
Uncle Mort narrowed his eyes and made a badass face, one that didn’t fit at all with the words that came out of his mouth next.
“The Happy Spruce Inn.”
***
Uncle Mort wouldn’t say another word about the next phase of the plan until they collected the rest of their party, an event that Lex was simultaneously really anticipating and really dreading.
On the one hand, she’d get to see her friends again. She could stock up on some of Elysia’s soul-restoring hugs and maybe feel a little less horrid about all that unpleasant business of starting a war.
On the other, nastier hand, unless Ferbus had drunk himself into oblivion since the last time she saw him, he’d notice that his best friend had been turned into some sort of ghostish creature. And he’d blame Lex with the fury of a thousand orange-haired dragons.
And he’d be correct in doing so.
Which meant there was a very good chance that Lex would be receiving a kick to the face or a knee to the gut, or he might just go balls-out and rip out her circulatory system. It would be interesting to see what approach he would take, but not so interesting that Lex was looking forward to finding out.
The car ride was mostly silent, with the exception of the occasional snicker or gasp from Driggs, who seemed to be having a ball testing out the new benefits of having an intransigent body. “Ghost perk!” he said. “Look what I made.”
Lex had been staring out the window, lost in thought, but when she looked at him, all she got was a face full of snowball.
“That’s just great,” she said, wiping it off as he demonstrated how he’d stuck his hand through the roof to gather up the snow sitting atop the car.
“And check this out.” He put his hand through the front seat and jabbed Uncle Mort in the back.
“Ow!” Uncle Mort turned around with an annoyed look. “Must you use your newfound powers solely for irritation purposes?”