Croak (11 page)

“Sapphire,” Driggs said, waving a gleaming blue weapon.

“Obsidian.”

Uncle Mort smirked. “Adorable.”

The two rolled their eyes in unison, then disappeared into the ether.

***

“For future reference,” said Driggs as he Culled the soul of a man trapped under a tractor, “I wouldn’t go around telling people about these shocks of yours.”

“Why not?” Lex asked.

“It’s like announcing to the world that you have crabs. It’s embarrassing, and no one’ll ever shake your hand again.”

“But these feelings are not ones of crotchal itching,” she said as they scythed to the bottom of a gorge. She tapped their target, a fallen hiker impaled on a jagged rock, and flinched as the charge coursed through her body. Driggs watched, unnerved. “Why should they be embarrassing? Uncle Mort just said they’re from an overdose of talent or whatever.”

“They’re different. People don’t like different. And if Zara found out—trust me, she’d make your life a living hell.”

“I think it’s too late for that,” she murmured, remembering the look Zara had given her.

Lex tried to suppress the shocks for rest of the morning (which, as Uncle Mort had promised, flew by faster than she could have imagined), but nothing worked. Over the next five hours of Killing, she saw enough death to last for a lifetime of nightmares—car wrecks, geezers, heart attacks, diseases, drugs, suicides, a hodgepodge of other fatalities—and the currents that shot across her nerves seemed to intensify with every target she touched.

And Driggs’s reactions certainly weren’t helping. By the end of their shift, the looks of bewilderment flashing across his face whenever she Killed were making her want to gouge his eyes out with a melon baller.

“I’m trying, okay?” she finally snapped as they scythed onto the deck of a cruise ship. “But I can’t help it! It’s rooted in my nervous system or something, it feels like fireworks exploding through my body—” She jabbed the target, jerked back, sucked on her inflamed finger, and looked at Driggs’s aghast face. “See? You’re staring at me like I’m drowning sackfuls of kittens.”

“I’m not—I mean, partly, but it’s mostly because you’re—” He scratched his ear and seemed almost shy. “You’re
really
fast.”

“Oh. Um, thanks,” she muttered, suddenly very aware of the last time she’d been complimented by a boy (never) and the current condition of her hair (pure chaos). She smoothed it out and tried to change the subject while Driggs Culled the target, a woman nearly burned to cinders in the hot midday sun. “Death by tanning?”

“Nah. Her drink was spiked.”

Lex looked at the empty margarita glass sitting next to the lounge chair. “How could you possibly know that?”

“GHB. Date rape drug. Salty taste, almost impossible to detect in a salt-rimmed margarita glass.”

“How did you—”

“Experience. Once you’ve got enough of it, determining cause of death becomes second nature.”

The urge to search the ship for the guilty party quickly arose, but Lex remembered what Zara had told her the day before, and she reluctantly held it in check. “Oh, really?” she said nonchalantly as they scythed into the stands of a jam-packed baseball stadium. “Then how did this guy die?”

She pointed at the target, a man bent over his souvenir program. Lex looked around, dazed. There was just something eerie about the silent scene of thirty-eight thousand screaming fans fixed in mid-cheer, players hovering in petrified dives toward the bases, and stationary beer splashing its thick globules across the stands.

“Experience,” Driggs said, frowning, “can also be a fickle mistress.” He peered at the field, then dropped to the ground.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a ball,” he said from underneath the seats. “Maybe he was hit by a line drive.”

“Yeah, right. I loathe sports as much as the next marginally intelligent being, but even I know a ball could never reach all the way up here. And even if it could, it wouldn’t be fatal.”

“True.” He straightened up to examine the man more closely. “No visible signs of injury, doesn’t look like he’s having any health problems. Go ahead, touch him.” Lex obliged, though something about this scene was starting to feel very off.

Driggs’s concern grew as he Culled the Gamma. “It’s like he just . . . stopped living. Maybe—”

He stopped abruptly, dropping to the floor once again. He peered up at the man’s face. “Look at this,” he said, his voice strange.

Lex crouched down beside him. “Whoa.”

The man’s eyes were completely white.

Lex frowned. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know.” Driggs nervously shoved the Vessel into his pocket as they scythed once more, this time automatically returning to the Ghost Gum.

Lex looked in surprise at the sun, directly overhead. Their shift was over already? She’d never be able to get used to this time-warping business.

Driggs, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been doing this for four years, and I’ve been able to find the cause of every single death.” He swallowed. “But that guy—I have no idea.”

Lex thought. “Heart attack?”

Driggs shook his head. “You can’t die from a heart attack that fast. There would have been at least some sign of distress.”

“Poison? Drugs?”

“No chemical works that instantly. You saw the guy—it looked like he was still reading his program.”

“Then what, magical fairy dust? Vulcan death grip?”

“Focus, Lex. Wake up that lonely brain cell.”

“Well, what are you trying to say? He wasn’t supposed to be dead?”

“That’s what it looked like, but—”

“But how is that even possible?”

“It’s not.”

They were silent for a moment. Lex stuck her hands into her voluminous hoodie pocket, only to quickly yank them out again. She had forgotten about the heaps of Vessels Driggs had given her to store there.

“Are we going to unload these things?” she asked, a trace of nervousness creeping into her voice. “They’re starting to gross me out.”

“They’re just souls.”

“But they’re warm. Like eggs. I feel like a spawning salmon.” Driggs laughed. This only made her voice get higher. “And they’re people’s souls, and they’re kinda important, so shouldn’t we maybe, I don’t know—dammit, what are we supposed to do with them?”

“Hey.” Driggs put his hands on her shoulders and caught her manic gaze. “Relax, spaz. I’ll show you.”

***

Over at the Bank, Kilda was terrorizing a pair of uneasy Frenchwomen seated on the lobby sofa. “Of course black sweatshirts are in style here, they’re the rage everywhere in America!” She leaned in ominously, her gigantic corsage almost touching their noses. “Now, let me give you some dining options for the next town over!”

Driggs led Lex down the hallway and up the flight of stairs, coming to a halt at the top upon a small landing. In front of them was an unmarked door. He turned the knob.

Lex had expected something a little more illustrious to exist on the only second floor in all of Croak, but disappointment ensued as they stepped into the room. It contained nothing more than a potted plant, a black door on the left-hand wall, a steel bank vault door in front of them, and a desk, behind which sat a bored-looking kid about Lex’s age with a head of moppy, fluorescent orange hair. He was staring fixedly at a computer and pounding at its keys.

“D-bag,” he said without looking. “What up?”

Driggs closed the door behind them. “I brought you a present. This is Lex.” The kid did not respond. “Hey.”

“What? I’m trying to work here.”

“This is Lex,” he repeated. “She’s training today.”

He gave her an unenthusiastic thumbs-up, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “Stupendous.”

Driggs crossed the room, sat on the desk, and glanced over the kid’s shoulder. “Level sixty-three, nice. Who’s the hot elf?”

“Wait a minute,” Lex said, glancing at the game on the screen. “Does that get Internet?” she asked the kid.

“Not for you.”

Lex crossed her arms.

“Lex,” said Driggs, “meet best friend Ferbus.”

“Seriously?” she said with a glance of skepticism. Driggs and this nerdlinger? “You guys are best friends?”

Ferbus looked up briefly to give her a smug look. “We prefer the term heterosexual life mates.”

Lex rolled her eyes. Driggs stood up and knocked on the enormous circular vault door, which was made of spotless brushed metal and extended all the way to the ceiling. At its center was a large wheel, the kind that looked like the helm of a pirate ship. “How’s the weather in there today?” he asked Ferbus.

“Partly rowdy with a chance of gunfights.”

Driggs grinned at Lex, but all she could do was give a listless shrug. She had no idea what was going on. Plus, she felt a little uneasy in the room, as if something were slightly wrong with the physics of it. But she couldn’t figure out what it was. She glanced at Ferbus, then at the window behind him, then at the vault door. She frowned. That couldn’t be right . . .

“Okay, first stop on the tour,” Driggs said. “Check this out.” Her eyes followed his finger to something she hadn’t noticed before: a miniature version of the vault door, about the size of a grapefruit, fixed into the wall beside its massive counterpart.

He began to twirl its little wheel. “This is where we deposit the souls.” The door swung open to reveal nothing but darkness. Lex leaned in to inspect it further, but she saw only more of the black space, with a tiny pinprick of white far off in the distance.

“At the end of every shift,” he said, taking a handful of Vessels out of his pocket, “we run up here, pop open the tunnel, and deposit all collected Vessels. Just place them in this hole, and then—” The first Vessel was gone, sucked into the tunnel before he could finish his sentence. “That’s it.” One by one, he fed in the rest, each disappearing as quickly as the first. “Now do yours.”

Lex dug into her pockets and eagerly deposited the white globes into the hole, glad to be rid of them. When they were all gone, she gazed down the tube. “Where do they go?”

“To our next stop on the tour. Are we okay to go in, Ferb?”

“Not sure. Burr and Hamilton dueled it out again this morning. Last time I checked, Abe was still cleaning up the mess.”

He picked up the phone, his eyes still on the screen. Lex noted that he didn’t punch any numbers into the keypad before he started talking—if one could even call it talking. His side of the conversation was more like a series of monosyllabic grunts.

He hung up and resumed tapping at the keyboard. “All clear, head on in.”

“Awesome.” Driggs shut the little tunnel door and turned to Lex. “You ready to see something really crazy?”

“It’s about time,” she deadpanned.

Ferbus typed a code into the computer, prompting a series of whirring, clicking noises to sound from behind the vault. Driggs grabbed the heavy wheel on the door and spun it counterclockwise.

And that’s when Lex realized what had been bothering her about the room. By all rational accounts—according to her mental floor plan of the building—that vault should have opened straight into the nothingness of sky, two stories above the Field.

But, of course, that’s not even close to where it actually led.

The rational part of Lex’s brain surmised that she had not been thrust
exactly
into the center of the sun, but in terms of brightness, she must surely have been within a dangerous proximity. The blinding luminescence could be felt even through her closed eyelids. As she groped in the direction of Driggs, her feet bounced and wobbled over a plush, cushiony surface. And yet, despite all of the very good reasons to panic, an overall feeling of peace began to settle through her frayed nerves.

“Takes a minute to adjust at first,” Driggs said. “You’ll get used to it.”

“This is the eight hundredth time you’ve said that,” she said, blinking. “Is there anything here that I’ll never get used to?”

“Probably these guys.”

Lex opened her eyes.

For a moment she could have sworn she was standing in one of those history-comes-alive museums—the kind that feature animatronic robots, the narration stylings of James Earl Jones, and the sort of exhibits that invade children’s nightmares for years to come. But instead of a cyborgish John Wilkes Booth discharging his deadly bullet into the back of a plastic Lincoln’s head, a very real version of the assassin was engaged in a furious arm-wrestling match with Elvis Presley.

Lincoln was watching the tussle, amused. “Come on, John,” he said. “You can do better than that.”

“He’s all talk,” Elvis whispered back.

“Silence!” roared Booth. “I’m trying to concentrate!”

Lincoln rolled his eyes.

Lex was stunned. “What. The. Hell?”

“Not hell,” said Driggs. “Just the Afterlife.”

***

After narrowly escaping a biplane containing the Wright brothers and receiving a hearty welcome from a bombastic Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of the entire gang of former presidents, Lex demanded an explanation.

She tried to follow Driggs as he took her aside, but it was hard to walk normally, as the strange substance that formed the floor was too bouncy and uneven to navigate. Fortunately, they soon came upon a hammock made of the pillowy white stuff. As Lex climbed into it, Driggs grabbed a couple of handfuls for himself, sculpted them up into a seat, and plopped down next to her.

“So,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “this is the Afterlife. See, there are our targets from this morning.” He pointed to a confused-looking mass of people. Lex recognized the drugged woman from the cruise ship. “The tunnel flings the Vessels into this space, the atrium. Think of it as a big entrance hall. Once here, the Vessels dissolve and the souls are released and take bodily forms again. They are then welcomed by an ambassador.” He gestured at George Washington, who shook the woman’s sunburned hand. “The ambassador fills them in on the situation, then leads them out of the atrium and into the Void.”

Lex shook her head, as if to free up more space to comprehend all of this. “And that’s . . . heaven?”