Croak (19 page)

“Where are we?” she asked, approaching the water’s edge.

Her question was met by silence. “Driggs?” she called, frantically looking around the small beach. He had disappeared. Again.

Lex tried not to freak out. The shadows were just shadows. The white thing was gone. She was in a safe place. All she had to do was find her way back up the path, go home, and quietly murder Driggs in his sleep. Easy.

The trees began to creak, an otherworldly chorus of eerie moans. Lex blindly faced the menacing forest, her back to the water, vulnerable and trapped. Vowing never to leave her scythe at home again, she grabbed a nearby stick, as if this could possibly defend her from the horrors materializing in her imagination. She had just begun to calculate how many jabs in the eye it would take to bring down a chupacabra, when—

A twig snapped.

Someone yelled.

And seven well-aimed water balloons hit Lex directly in the face.

Instantly drenched, she let out a shrill cry not unlike that of an angry, bathtubbed cat. She shook the water from her eyes, flung her useless stick into the void, and growled as the army of laughing Juniors emerged from the trees.

“What the hell??” Lex shouted, struggling with the logistics of how to punch seven people all at once.

“Sorry, Lex, nothing personal.” Driggs grinned. “Rookie always gets clobbered on their one-week anniversary. No need to mess with tradition, right?”

Lex lunged at him, but Ferbus held her back. “Hold that thought,” he said, plopping a bucket of slippery ammo at her feet. “Water balloon fight to the death. Grab as many as you can and show no mercy.” He stuffed about a dozen balloons into the front of his shirt and scampered off into the forest.

Lex fished a rubbery shard out of her hair and let out a short laugh. “Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” said Elysia, scooping up balloons. “I’d stock up if I were you.”

Lex caught a glimpse of Ayjay taking aim at her from across the beach. Devoid of a better plan, she quickly grabbed a handful of balloons and took shelter behind a nearby log. Another cry rang out, and chaos ensued.

The carnage was unspeakable. Balloons torpedoed in every direction. Clothes were soaked. Peals of laughter echoed off the wall of trees into the inky sky. And before long, everyone ended up in the pond, clothes and all.

Except for Lex.

“Careful!” Kloo yelled at Sofi and Zara as they shoved each other under the water. “I’m not doing CPR this time, I mean it!”

Lex gaped at a stark-naked Ferbus as he swung from a rope into the pond. “You’re all cracked,” she said to no one in particular.

“Lighten up, Lex,” Driggs said as he ran by, splashing into the water and drenching her completely.

She couldn’t resist it any longer. “You are so dead!” She dove after him into the abyss. The cool water instantly soaked through her clothes, dragging her down into the murky depths. As her lungs got close to bursting, she kicked up to the surface and popped her head out of the water, only to find herself looking directly at a single blue eye.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

Driggs smiled. “Your nose is all snotty.”

“Sucks to be you, then,” she said, slurping some water into her mouth and spitting it at his face.

Driggs gave her a reproachful look, but she didn’t care. She threw herself backwards, did a little flip, then floated to the surface and gazed up at the star-filled sky. How was it possible that only a week ago she had been trapped in such a crappy little life? And now here she was, the happiest she had ever been, surrounded by people she liked and who miraculously liked her back, and possessing a crapload of talents she’d never even known she had.

Once again, her mind flooded with thoughts of the little girl with the teddy bear, of the man who’d done such inhuman things to her and the heat that had pulsated through Lex’s hands. What could she have done to him if Driggs hadn’t stopped her?

Lex knew she was here for a reason. She felt it every time she Killed, with every blinding shock. What other talents lay hidden within? Her future was full of limitless possibilities. Even Uncle Mort had said she’d go far.

Her lips curled into a sly grin.

Just how far could she go?

A lot can happen in a month. Hideous caterpillars morph into beautiful butterflies. Christmas trees go from symbols of holiday cheer to naked, shriveled cadavers doomed to the woodchipper. And one month after arriving in Croak, Lex too had undergone a curious transformation. She had delved into a state hitherto unknown, been introduced to a foreign territory, and changed into something she never could have imagined.

Lex had become popular.

In fact, she had risen so quickly through the social ranks of Croak’s Junior Grim population that it seemed as though no one could remember a time when she hadn’t been at the top.

“So we’re at this really nice restaurant for our birthday, and Cordy takes the biggest bite of steak I’ve ever seen,” she told the group, sitting outside around the fountain as they ate lunch. “It’s roughly the size and shape of a golf ball, I kid you not. Unsurprisingly, she starts choking. So my dad grabs her around the waist and does the Heimlich, the wad of beef soars out of her mouth, and bam—I catch it
midair!
But Cordy was too busy dealing with the asphyxiation and all to notice. So I hid it in a napkin, took it home, then wrapped it up and gave it to her as a birthday present later that night. We laughed so hard, the neighbors complained.”

The Juniors laughed too. “Classic,” said Kloo, wiping tears from her eyes. “Classic.”

“Yeah. She almost died.” Lex grabbed a near-empty ketchup bottle and shook it vigorously over the onion rings that had been given to her. When nothing came out, she ran to the door of the diner and stuck her head in. “Dora!” she yelled across the restaurant. “Would it kill you to replace these ketchups once in a while? I know you treasure your relics from the Stone Age, but it might be time to let go!”

The elderly proprietor hobbled over. “What a mouth on this one,” she grumbled to herself, practically throwing a new bottle at Lex. “Whatever happened to respecting your elders?”

“Isn’t that what paleontologists are for?”

Pandora scowled, her wrinkles like crags. “Young lady, you are the rudest, most despicable hellion ever to disgrace the grounds of this establishment.” Her frown transformed into a hideous gaping grin. “You remind me of me.”

Lex smiled. “Thanks, Dora. Oh, this morning’s weirdest was a guy choking on a hamster.”

“Sweet sassy molassy,” Pandora said in awe.

A couple of weeks before, Lex had naïvely bragged to Dora that she had already witnessed every single way a human being could possibly bite the big one. Dora, a former Killer herself, promptly smacked Lex upside the head and informed her of her error. “I once Killed a gentleman who had fallen into a swimming pool full of porcupines,” she said. “Some deaths defy all reason. There’ll always be a few humdingers, mark my word.”

The endless cavalcade of inconceivable deaths soon forced Lex to concede. There was the woman who tried to use a hair dryer in the shower. The airport runway attendant overrun by a rogue luggage cart. And the kid who fired a nail gun into his chest in order to kill the mosquito that had been sitting there. The list was endless. The more bizarre deaths Lex observed, the more she was forced to admit that a lot of people were just plain imbeciles.

But by far the strangest fatalities were the white-eyed ones, which were growing both in number and peculiarity at an alarming rate. None of the bodies had yet to exhibit any clear-cut signs of death—in fact, more often than not, the targets were dying in the most harmless settings or situations imaginable. Clearly, something unusual was being done to extinguish these perfectly healthy people in such an instantaneous manner—the glassy, icelike eyes were proof enough of that—but none of the Juniors had come any closer to figuring out what it was. Or who was doing it.

So on they plodded to the end of July, every day brainstorming new ideas but never coming to any solid conclusions. Discussion abounded among the Juniors after every shift, but all they had to show for their work was a handful of empty leads and a byzantine list of suspects.

But all that was about to change. “Uh, guys?” Ferbus said in a strange voice, paging through that day’s copy of
The Obituary.
“You might want to take a look at this.”

Lex returned to the fountain and squeezed in around the paper. “‘Unusual Deaths Crop Up in Necropolis,’” she read out loud. “‘Last night, seven Senior Grim teams returned from their overnight shifts with reports of abnormal target activity across the Midwest region. While details of the irregularities have not yet been released, authorities have publicly stated that there is no cause for concern. However, they ask Field Grims who observe anything out of the ordinary during their shifts to please contact their local mayor as soon as possible.’”

“Whoa,” said Ayjay.

“Abnormal targets?” said Kloo. “That must be the same thing we’ve been seeing, right?”

Ferbus flipped through the rest of the pages. “Seems like it.”

“But we’ve only gotten one a day here. Seven in one night seems like a lot.”

“Not if you think like a serial killer,” Driggs said. “We’re assuming this person is a Croaker, right? So—”

“Why are we assuming that?” asked Zara.

“This is the first mention in
The Obituary
of any strange deaths elsewhere in the country. So unless there’s another Grim town with a society of plucky youngsters determined to solve the Mystery of the Arctic-Eyed Stiffs on their own without alerting any Seniors, I think we’ve got a monopoly on this one.”

“That’s true,” said Zara, nodding. “Continue.”

“Okay. So far, this person has only been able to Crash to locations within Croak’s jurisdiction, staying primarily in the eastern region. But now they’re spreading their wings a little, finding that they can scythe farther and farther out, halfway across the country, until—bam! All-night crime binge.”

“Wow,” said Lex. “Nice work, Nancy Drew.”

“This is impossible,” Elysia huffed. “Everyone in Croak works either all day long or all night long, with no time to break for homicidal sprees. They’d have to be in two places at once. It doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“Yeah,” Lex said, thinking. “I mean, are we supposed to be finding some sort of meaning in all this, or maybe a pattern? What’s this crackpot’s objective?”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” said Kloo.

“You think they’re killing all these people just for fun? Is that what Grotton did?”

Elysia took a deep breath, the way she always did before talking for several minutes. “No, he—”

“SHHH!” everyone but Lex hissed.

Lex looked around. “What?”

“Uh—nothing.” Driggs was a terrible liar. It was one of his many faults.

“Come on, guys,” Elysia said. “She’ll find out sooner or later.”

“It’s always sooner, in your case,” said Ferbus. Elysia showed him a choice finger. He returned the sentiment.

“Okay, there might be a teensy bit more to the Grotton legend that we didn’t tell you,” Driggs told Lex guiltily, his voice lowering. “But people never talk about it—”

“That’s because no one knows for sure what it is!” Elysia interrupted.

Driggs glared at her. “I’m sorry, Elysia, do you want to tell the story?”

“Yes, I do.” She swept an anxious glance around the street, then spoke in a whisper. “Grotton learned how to Crash with direction and murder people while time was frozen, but he didn’t stop there. One day, the messy slaughter stopped. No more stabbings, no more crossbows.”

“What do you mean?” Lex asked. “He gave up?”

“No,” Elysia said. “Grotton was doing something even worse than murdering his victims. But the stories were so horrid, only a few of them got passed on—only crazy rumors of bodies piled up in the woods, corpses that had been incinerated.”

“He set people on fire?”

“From the inside out,” Ayjay said.

“Ew.” Lex frowned. “How’d he do that?”

“No one knows,” said Elysia. “And get this—their souls
disappeared.
Or at least they didn’t end up in the Afterlife, that much is for sure.”

Lex let out a long breath. “So what happened to them?”

“No one knows that either,” said Kloo. “But if this person is even remotely hoping to achieve the same end . . .”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Guys, we gotta tell Uncle Mort,” Lex finally said. “No matter how much trouble it gets us in.”

“Finally,” said Zara triumphantly. “At least
some
one doesn’t want us all to get killed.”

“But who would want to kill us?” Ferbus countered. “Can you honestly think of anyone in Croak who could do this?”

They shrugged, defeated. “No,” Driggs said simply. “I can’t. At all.”

“Great. It’s utterly hopeless,” Ferbus said, throwing up his hands. “Shall we grab a Yorick and call it a day?”

“And why might we be doing something like that?” a shrill voice sounded from above. A raptorlike Heloise stood over them.

“Feed it something,” Lex said loudly, “before it gets cranky and devours an unsuspecting passerby.”

Heloise sneered down at them as if they were something she had just picked out from beneath her pointy shoe. “Hilarious.” She looked at her watch. “Is there any particular reason why you’re not back at work yet?”

“We’re sunbathing,” said Driggs. “Tell me, how has a vampire such as yourself managed not to disintegrate into a pile of ashes by now?”

Heloise was less than delighted. “I was under the impression that you
children
have a job to do.” Her thin eyebrows sharpened. “I hardly think that even a prominent dignitary such as Mort’s beloved niece should be exempted from her duties.”

“Hey, did you read the paper today?” asked Ferbus, oblivious to her scolding. “Should we be keeping our eyes open for anything weird?”

Heloise pursed her lips. “Nosy little weasel, aren’t you?” She glanced at the newspaper. “Not that it’s any of your business, but
our
office hasn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. I suspect this whole thing is just the same old capital nonsense. Necropolis has always been plagued with its share of problems, just as Croak has been perpetually cursed with slothful adolescents.”