Hellhole Read online

  “Ah.”

  You know, Shovel, dinosaur movie quotations are not the panty-droppers that all your paleontology heroes would have you believe.

  Max flinched, then glared into the living room. “Go away!” he hissed under his breath. When Lore looked startled, Max pointed at his temple. “Sorry, it’s Burg. He’s in my head.”

  “Oh. Weird. Well, tell him to vamoose.”

  Max laughed.

  “What?” Lore asked, grinning.

  “Vamoose. You’re funny.”

  “Am I?” Lore looked dubious yet pleased.

  “Yeah.”

  Ugh, Adultery Cove is more stimulating than this, Burg scoffed. Here. Watch and learn.

  “I like jazz, myself,” he heard Lloyd say. “In my opinion, nothing on earth is more sublime than a good saxophone solo.”

  His mom sighed in admiration.

  “Stop it,” Max whispered. “Just stop it.”

  Not gonna happen.

  “I’m also a volunteer fireman,” Burg droned on, “though sometimes that conflicts with my schedule of delivering toys to impoverished—argh!”

  Burg had recoiled to the other side of the couch.

  “What’s wrong?” Max’s mom asked as Ruckus nestled in her lap. She ran her hand down his furry orange back, prompting his butt to pop up in the air, his tail wiggling with pleasure. “You don’t like cats?”

  Max shouted, “That’s a real deal breaker, right there!”

  “Max!” his mom shot back. “Be nice!”

  “No, no,” Lloyd said with a dashing yet forced grin. “I love cats.” He held out his hand and gave Ruckus’s head an unconfident tap, as if he’d never petted an animal before. “Here, kitty. Here, Undisputed Lord and Master of the Universe.”

  Max’s mom raised an eyebrow at him as Ruckus jumped away. “No need to stand on ceremony. ‘Ruckus’ is fine.”

  Burg shot her a smolder. “You’re fine.”

  Max started to stand up, but Lore pulled him back into his seat. “Max, look at me.” He turned away from the gurgling couple and looked at Lore. She pointed her fork at him. “Don’t get mad. That is the key to this operation. When you get mad, you don’t think straight, and you need to be thinking as straight as you can. So ignore him. Eat your pasta.”

  Incensed, Max stuck his fork into the noodles, and gradually, through the soothing power of carbs, began to calm down. Lore plunged her fork into the same bowl, spurring Max to hope for a Lady and the Tramp moment, where one single, strong, determined strand of spaghetti would venture its way into both their mouths, and as they slurped each end, their lips would get closer and closer—

  “Ever seen Lady and the Tramp?” Lore asked.

  Max chomped down on his strand in surprise, causing it to break and jettison a gob of sauce at his chin. “Yeah,” he said, willing his voice not to squeak. “I was just thinking about that.”

  But Lore wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the floor, and her smile had disappeared. She put down her fork.

  “Max,” she started, then stopped, then started again. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to—well, I don’t really know what I want you to promise. I guess I just don’t want you to be weird about it.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “I just mean—I’ve never talked about it much. You’re really the only friend I’ve had since I transferred back here.”

  Max felt his heart crack like the Liberty Bell when he heard the word “friend” and all that it implied, but he nodded and did his best to look concerned. He was concerned. “Sure. You can tell me.”

  “It’s about Noah,” she said to the tablecloth. For a moment it seemed that she’d changed her mind, but then she started talking much faster than before. “Um, the thing I sort of left out about Noah was that even though he was my best friend, I was also sort of in love with him, and I was going to tell him, but then the devil thing happened and then he died, and I never got a chance to.”

  Max blinked. “Oh.”

  “That’s—” A flush went up her cheeks. “That’s the lie I told, the one that brought Verm up. Instead of telling Noah how I felt about him, I told him that the girl he’d been seeing was cheating on him. Which for all I know she was,” she added defensively. “But he was heartbroken. And I felt awful.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t really know why I’m telling you this, except—well, I guess it’s because—”

  “Hang on,” Max said, unable to stop himself from glancing into the living room.

  “Max, are you listening to me? I’m kinda trying to say something here.”

  Max nodded, but the bulk of his concentration was devoted to shooting glowers at Burg-Lloyd, who had put his hand on his mother’s knee. “Yeah, totally—”

  “Max!”

  “What?” He whipped back around to Lore. “What is it?”

  She screwed up her face, then stood up, her chair loudly scraping across the floor. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  With that, she stormed out through the kitchen. It happened so abruptly, Max didn’t get up and run after her at first. By the time he stumbled over to the kitchen door, she was already flying down the street, hair streaming from beneath her bike helmet.

  Max scratched his head. Confused and exhausted, he sat back down at the dining table. “What was that all about?” he mused aloud.

  The Popsicle-stick turkey looked on.

  For the next half hour Max sat in an armchair in the living room and watched as Lloyd and his mother canoodled. It was disgusting. It was infuriating. And it made Max want to claw his own eyes out with salad tongs, if only they owned a pair.

  Finally, finally, his mother did the one thing she could always be trusted to do: she fell asleep. With her head on Burg’s shoulder.

  Max snapped his fingers at Burg. “Leave,” he said, pointing to the door.

  “But she’s sleeping!”

  Max rushed forward, gently took his mother’s head off of Burg’s shoulder, and switched it to the arm of the couch. “There,” he whispered, yanking Burg to his feet. “Out. Now.”

  Burg made his way toward the front door. “Should I leave my number?”

  “Go!”

  Once he was sure that Burg had reached the end of the driveway, Max shut the door and locked it. He’d collect on the cure later that night, after the pep rally. For now, all he wanted was for that guy to be out of the house.

  And for his skin to stop crawling.

  Despite his mother’s insistence that he would be on time, Max was late for the pep rally. Though the sky was dark, the huge, powerful lights of O’Connell Stadium lit up the field. The air had cooled a little, but it was still pretty warm for a September evening; instead of hats and blankets, the crowd sported shorts and flip-flops and drank cold lemonade rather than steaming cups of hot cocoa.

  Not that Max would have known what the norm was; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to a sporting event that didn’t take place inside his Xbox. Way out of his element, he sat at the top of the wooden bleachers, next to the announcer’s booth so that Audie could duck out every so often to chat. But between commemorating alumni, introducing the seemingly endless series of montages of the team’s greatest moments on the Jumbotron, and the abundant raffle announcements, she didn’t have much time to make the weird nerdy kid feel at home among the throngs of cheering sports fans. There wasn’t enough time in the world, really.

  Besides, her side of the conversation was peppered with so many comments like “Did your devil friend happen to mention if I’m in mortal danger today?” that Max finally had to insist, for the first time in his life, that he’d prefer to talk about football over anything else, especially devils.

  “Ugh, fine,” she relented, plopping down onto the wooden bench next to him. “Are you having fun, at least?”

  Truth be told, he’d gotten distracted by a bird’s nest under the bleachers for the past twenty minutes or so, but she didn’t need to know that. “Absolute
ly.”

  Audie laughed and tousled his hair. “I’m glad you came. If you’re half as miserable as you look, I take it to be a remarkable honor that you’re sticking it out.”

  “I’m not miserable,” he said. “I’m enjoying the great outdoors without the danger of a sunburn. I’m appreciating the statistics you’ve been announcing. And that lady over there took pity on me and gave me half of her giant pretzel.”

  Audie rolled her eyes. “There are cheerleaders, you know,” she said, pointing at the bouncing pyramid of flexible girls. “It’s your civic duty as a teenage boy to ogle them. Look at their short skirts! Behold their perky bosoms!”

  Max furtively adjusted his pants. “Uh, Wall looked pretty good in that montage,” he said, his voice cracking. “Knocked a lot of people down. Caused an impressive amount of spinal injuries, from where I was sitting.”

  “Yeah.” Audie smiled, as if this talent for imposing pain were one of the things that made her fall in love with him. “Recruiters are coming to the homecoming game on Friday. From Alabama.”

  “Wave Power?”

  “Roll Tide.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s pretty nervous about it. It’s kind of cute.”

  “I’m sure he’ll crush more than enough vertebrae to impress them.”

  “That’s the dream.”

  Someone inside the booth shouted for her to come back, so she jumped to her feet. “Gotta go. Have some fun, okay?”

  “I’ll try. There were some kids in the marching band who tripped and lost their hats. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see if they found new ones.”

  Audie made a dismissive noise and disappeared into the booth. Max tried to focus his attention back onto the field, but he was distracted by the image that had just flashed onto the Jumbotron: Edwin O’Connell’s wrinkled, puffy face, along with a few words about his recent death, lifetime generosity, and the fact that the homecoming game would be played in his honor.

  Max looked away.

  In doing so, his nose caught a whiff of cotton candy. Nearby, a mother fed the fluffy pink stuff to her two small children, who were laughing and pinching their sticky fingers together.

  A wave of urgency threatened to bowl Max over, knocking him clean off the top of the bleachers. His mom. The cure. What was he doing here? Why hadn’t he insisted that Burg fix her right then and there in the living room? He’d been so focused on getting rid of him that he hadn’t been thinking clearly.

  It was enough to make him stand up to leave. He prepared to pound his way down the rickety bleachers when the cotton candy caught his eye again.

  But it wasn’t the kids who stopped him dead in his tracks. It was the tall, bearded, tracksuit-wearing gentleman they were feeding it to.

  Max bounded across the bleachers so fast he practically became airborne. “Hi.” He grabbed Burg by the shoulder, forcing a smile onto his face so as not to scare the kids. “There you are, Uncle, uh, Lance.” Lance? Where did Lance come from? “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “This stuff is mind-blowing,” Burg said, stuffing the fluff into his mouth. “Is it food or is it insulation? No need to choose!”

  He licked his fingers, then grabbed another handful of cotton candy out of the little girl’s hand. Her lips were starting to quiver.

  “Where did your mommy go?” Max asked her.

  The little girl pointed at the concession stand. “To get napkins.”

  “And ruin the sticky fun?” Burg cried. “That witless cow!”

  Before the children could start crying, Max pushed Burg to the uppermost corner of the bleachers, as far away from other spectators as he could get. He threw him down onto the seat, the creaky sound screeching all the way down the length of the bench to a group of parents, who turned to stare.

  “What are you doing here?” Max demanded in a low voice.

  Burg slapped on an innocent face—a face, Max noticed, that was not red, but rather a normal human skin tone. “Rallying my pep.”

  Max spun around to make sure no one was watching them, then faced Burg again. “You have to go,” he said. “Now.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too dangerous!”

  “I’ll say. These bleachers are a million years old. I almost broke my neck getting up here.”

  Max had to bite his tongue to keep from saying that this would have been a wonderful development. “I mean it’s too dangerous for other people. There are little kids!”

  Burg waved a dismissive hand. “Ah, kids love me.”

  “Seriously. Go.”

  “Come on, let me stay,” Burg said, kindly pretending that Max had any real control over whether he stayed or not. “I’ve never been to one of these before. And Madden doesn’t replay any of the gruesome injuries. Would you really deprive me of the chance to witness a compound fracture on the Jumbotron?”

  “I don’t think they put those in the montages,” Max said, but he thought about this for a moment. A happy Burg might be more apt to finally live up to his end of the bargain. Plus, how much damage could he do, all out in the open like this?

  “Fine,” he told Burg. “You can stay, as long as you don’t remove your pants.”

  “Shovel, the pants go where they want.”

  “And as long as you agree with me that I did what you asked. I got you a date with my mom. Did I not?”

  “You did.”

  “Would you agree that I have more than upheld my end of the bargain?”

  “I would.”

  “Then will you please cure her already?”

  “Can’t,” Burg said, popping more cotton candy into his mouth. “Our original bargain has been invalidated.”

  Everything around Max fell silent, or at least it felt that way. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the house. You haven’t secured me a house.”

  “Yes, I did! You moved in! It’s all yours!”

  “Not anymore,” Burg said with a smarmy grin. “The owner came home.”

  Max biked furiously up the streets of Honeybrook Hills, sweat pouring down his face. Lore pedaled alongside him. He’d immediately decided to call her, but since he didn’t have her number, it was the Beige Wonder to the rescue. Because it was a phone designed for seniors, an operator had been standing by to connect him, though she did seem surprised to hear the voice of someone under the age of seventy.

  “Hey,” he said as they rode, still feeling weird about the semi-fight they’d had after dinner, “about earlier—”

  “Forget it,” she said, focusing straight ahead. “This is more important.”

  Yes, this. This awful thing that he could not believe was happening. They’d checked! They’d scoped out every room of that house, and Max was positive no one was living there. Granted, they’d been there only about twenty minutes before giving it the green light, but the beds hadn’t been slept in, there was no food in the kitchen, no car in the garage . . .

  Max tried the door. It was locked.

  He knocked. No one answered.

  He rang the bell. No one answered.

  Lore, ready with Russell Crowebar, jammed it into the door and popped it open, re-splintering the wood they’d demolished the day before. They fanned out into the living room and looked around.

  “Looks the same as yesterday,” Lore said. “I’ll check the kitchen.”

  Max rechecked the bathroom and the closets. “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s no one here. And the owner is dead. Why would Burg . . .”

  Lore emerged from the kitchen holding a milk carton. “Okay, so this is kind of weird,” she was saying. “I opened the fridge and found some stuff in there. Did Burg go shopping?”

  The milk carton exploded in her hand.

  As the mist of airborne dairy cleared, their eyes flew to the foyer. Standing there was a man with salt-and-pepper hair, aiming a rifle.

  Escapes Injury

  “DON’T MOVE,” SAID THE MAN.

  Max did his best to o
bey, though he was sure every organ in his body had simultaneously liquefied. He tried to look at Lore out of the corner of his eye, but all he could make out was that she was relatively still, not shaking the way he was.

  “What are you doing here?” the man asked.

  Max tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry to work properly. He tried a second time. “We’re sorry, sir. We—um, we got lost, and—”

  “We broke into your house,” Lore said casually. “Sorry.”

  “I called the police,” the man said. His aim was still trained on Max. “And you’re going to sit down on that couch and wait until they get here.”

  Max speedily uttered, “Yes, sir,” and scooted his butt onto the plaid sofa. Lore, on the other hand, yelled “Run!” and plowed right toward the man, knocking his rifle aside as she ducked around him and sprinted out the front door.

  Max watched her go, baffled.

  I have chosen poorly.

  The man threw one last look at the open doorway through which Lore had made her escape, grunted, and aimed back at Max.

  Furniture turned out to be just as terrifying as Max had initially thought. He clutched the fabric with clawed hands, trying to squeeze all his fear into it—yet he still had enough left over to ooze out of his sweaty pores. Blood pulsed through his ears in a steady hum. The man sat across from him in the rocking chair, gun pointing directly at Max’s head.

  “Sir, is there any chance you could just forget about this and let me go? I won’t come back, I swear.”

  The man shrugged. “Already called the police.”

  Max slumped further into the sofa and looked at his hands, pale and lifeless beneath the stark black ash mark.

  Ask him who he is, Burg thundered.

  Max inhaled sharply.

  “What’s wrong?” the man asked, tensing up.

  “Nothing,” Max said evenly. “Just . . . scared.”

  The man relaxed. “You should be. Some hard jail time will do a punk like you good.”

  Max had been called many things in his life, but “punk” had never been one of them.

  Go on, Burg urged. Ask him. The house belonged to that old guy, right? Maybe you’re just encroaching on something that this guy already stole.