Scorch

by Gina Damico

  Uncle Mort didn’t take the bait. “They’ve put in their time,” he said, focused. “And all that work. You know they’re qualified. They have every right to be Seniors, same as you do.”

  “But the people have already voted, Mort,” said Norwood with an innocent look. “What are you going to do, overturn their decision? You think you know better than your lowly subjects?”

  Uncle Mort glared at him, then at the crowd. He seemed to be thinking.

  “Two months,” he said, nostrils flaring. “We’ll do another vote in two months. Kloo and Ayjay will take on Senior shifts until then to prove that they’re worthy of the title.” He jumped off the fountain. “Though I’m no longer sure that certain Seniors present are worthy enough themselves,” he said under his breath as he pushed through the crowd, returning to Lex and Driggs.

  The townspeople looked to Norwood for guidance. He had the look of someone who’d just tasted something rancid. “Back to work,” he said curtly. The crowd dispersed while Kloo and Ayjay climbed down from the fountain, looking crushed. Pandora and Corpp, the elderly couple who, respectively, owned the town’s diner and bar, gently escorted them through the plaza to where Uncle Mort, Lex, and Driggs stood.

  “Slap my sassafras!” Pandora squawked, watching Norwood with a look of extreme distaste. “Who does he think he is?”

  Corpp hugged Kloo and Ayjay around the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  Ayjay scowled harder. “No.”

  “What did we do wrong?” Kloo asked, close to tears. “We have flawless records! Don’t we?”

  “Yes, you do,” Uncle Mort said. “This isn’t your fault, Kloo. Or yours, Ayjay. You got that?”

  “And why Norwood?” Kloo went on, not hearing him. “I thought you were always the one to induct Seniors.”

  “I was. I am.” He suppressed a growl. “Listen, guys, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been looking forward to this for years, and the fact that it didn’t go as planned—let’s just say I will look into it. Carefully.”

  Corpp and Pandora took one look at the seething mayor and took the hint. “Come on,” Corpp said to Kloo and Ayjay, steering them toward his bar. “Let’s get some Yoricks in you.”

  The miserable still-Juniors nodded an assent as they left. “Oh, hey—” Kloo turned around with a pained smile. “Welcome back, Lex. We missed you.”

  Lex jumped at the sound of her name. “Thanks,” she said, her eye twitching again. “I missed you too.”

  Ayjay kept his eye on her as they walked away. “Is she all right?” he not so subtly asked Kloo.

  “Shhh!” she hissed, adding, “I don’t know.”

  Uncle Mort, Driggs, and Lex stood in silence. It wasn’t until Lex’s lip started bleeding from her picking at it that she realized they were staring.

  “You’re not all right,” said Uncle Mort.

  Lex blotted the blood with her sleeve. “Ahviouthly.”

  Uncle Mort watched her for a moment more, then turned to Driggs. “I think you better take her. Now.”

  “What about Norwood?”

  “I’ll deal with him. I want Lex back to normal. Things are changing fast, and I need all of you at full capacity. Distraught, fidgety teenagers are the last thing we need right now.” He turned to Lex and took her by the shoulders. “Lex, I know these past couple of weeks have been hard, but it’s time to snap out of it. You chose this, remember? You chose to come back here and deal with it. I know it sounds callous, but you need to sane up and turn back into a functional human being. Otherwise I can’t let you stay.”

  Lex started picking her lip again.

  Uncle Mort straightened up with a sigh and pointed at the Bank, Croak’s official command center. “Go.”

  Lex began to feel even more nervous as they walked to the Bank, though she couldn’t tell why. Maybe it was the fact that the whole way there, Driggs didn’t say a word to her.

  “Welcome back, Lex!” Kilda yelled as they entered. Lex blinked at the ever-jubilant director of tourism/public relations specialist/postmaster. “We’ve missed you terribly! It just hasn’t been the same without you! And be sure to stop by the desk sometime, I’ve got some new potpourri!”

  “Some things never change,” Driggs said, dragging Lex down the hallway. She looked at the clouded windows of the hub —where Norwood and Heloise were no doubt toasting to their devious success—then at the stairs she soon found herself ascending. Pangs of nausea stung with every step. Something was making her feel frantic and sick, but her brain was spinning out like a car on ice, unable to gain traction on whatever the Big Dreaded Thing was—

  “Wait!” she yelled at the top of the stairs.

  “What?” Driggs said, his face worried. “What’s wrong?”

  Lex’s mind snapped into focus. She looked at the door. “I know what you’re doing. I know why we’re here.”

  Driggs softened. “You have to do this. You want to do this.”

  “I know. But—” She took a deep breath. “Oh, shit. Shit.”

  He took her hand. “Come on.”

  The office on the second floor of the Bank had changed very little since Lex last saw it. The desk, the gigantic vault door that led to the Afterlife, the potted plant—all were the same. The only difference was a new security keypad fixed next to the door to the Lair, where thousands of black widow spiders produced both the silken Vessels used to transport the souls of the dead and Amnesia, a venom that made tourists forget they’d ever stumbled into Croak.

  There was one other difference, Lex noticed: a change in personnel. Sitting at the desk was a Senior Grim whom Lex had seen around town but never formally met—a young guy with expensive-looking clothes, slicked-back hair, a pair of sunglasses atop his head, and an artfully placed patch of facial hair beneath his lower lip. “Well, look who’s here,” he said in a mocking tone. “The little revolutionary.”

  “Knock it off, Snodgrass,” Driggs said. “Let us in.”

  “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin,” he sang in an infuriating voice. “No unauthorized entry, remember?”

  Driggs moved closer. “We are authorized.”

  “By?”

  “Mort, who else?”

  Snodgrass flashed a smarmy grin. “Not sure that’s enough, bro.”

  Driggs narrowed his eyes at him and leaned in to Lex. She could have listened to what he was whispering—that when Ferbus and Elysia had been fired from their respective posts, they had been replaced by first-rate douchebags—but she barely registered a thing he said. All she could think about was who was behind that vault.

  Driggs eventually fell silent and stared at Snodgrass, who by then had gone back to inspecting his eyebrows in the reflection of the computer screen. “Fine then, bro,” Driggs murmured, his lips barely moving. “Plan B it is.”

  Driggs grabbed the sunglasses from Snodgrass’s head and hurled them out the door and down the stairs. Snodgrass jumped up to chase them, but by the time he realized his mistake—by the time Driggs had grabbed the computer keyboard and entered the code—it was too late. The vault had swung open.

  “Go!” Driggs shouted to Lex. Her body obeyed, propelling her into the fluffy white Afterlife and shutting the door behind her. Her mind, however, was in a panic. She shut her eyes tight, terrified at the prospect of seeing Cordy hurt, betrayed, miserable, dead—

  A minute passed in silence. Lex opened one eye, then the other.

  Nothing.

  She was standing in the atrium, the neutral mingling space for both the living and the dead. Other than the usual gaggle of deceased presidents—along with some poor sap Senior Grim in the middle of them all, trying to keep them in line—the place was empty.

  Then a faint, sustained whoop began to issue forth from the Void, the bright area in the distance that was off-limits to the living. It grew louder and closer, kicking up so much fluff that Lex couldn’t see what it was until it came to a stop in front of her.

  Cordy blew her hair out of her eyes and beamed. “Hi
, turdface.”

  Lex nearly had an aneurysm. She pounced at her sister with a savage lunge, so intense was her need to bury her head in Cordy’s frizzy hair. But the closer she got, the farther away Cordy retreated. It was as if they were being repelled from each other, like opposing magnets.

  “We can’t touch,” said Cordy with a crooked smile. “Kind of a bummer, I know.”

  Lex had forgotten this. Her outstretched arms fell limply to her side. She could do nothing but stare into her sister’s eyes, trying to discern what possible reason there could be for the joy and warmth she found there. Didn’t Cordy know what had happened? Didn’t she know that Lex was responsible? Didn’t she know she was dead?

  “You can stop making that face,” Cordy said. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine?” Lex sputtered. “Cordy, don’t you get it? You’re dead! Deceased! Your body is rotting in a grave in Maple Grove Cemetery, all because of me!”

  “I’m aware of the situation,” Cordy said. “Seriously, Lex, it’s no big deal.”

  “It is a big deal. It is a very big deal.”

  “Only to the living.”

  “But you’re—” Lex choked on the words. “You’re gone.”

  “I’m not gone. I’m right here. And so are you, and I can see my dear freakypants sister whenever I want. That’s a lot more than most other souls can say.”

  Lex studied her. “Wait a sec. You’re happy in here?”

  The expression on Cordy’s face confirmed this. “Not gonna lie, Lex. It’s pretty bitchin’.”

  “So I’ve been worried sick about you this whole time, picturing you miserable and wrecked and plotting my excruciating demise, and you’re telling me this has all been a summer cruise?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Cordy looked guilty for a second, then smiled. “I can’t even begin to explain it, Lex. Do you know how many roller coasters I’ve built since I got here? Four!” Her face was glowing. “Not sketched, not made out of Tinkertoys, but built, life-size! No—bigger!”

  “But—”

  “And Gramma and Grampa are in there!” she went on. “Nana and Pop-Pop too! Do you know what they did when they saw me?”

  “Gave you butterscotch candy?”

  “Yes! And the places you can go, the people that are here—it’s unreal. Just unreal.”

  Lex looked at Cordy’s face, its exhilaration such a stark contrast to the ponderous dread of the town outside. Lex smirked sadly. “Maybe I should off myself right now and come join you.”

  Cordy frowned. “Why?”

  “Well,” said Lex, “it’s no picnic over here in the land of the living. The whole town hates me, Mom and Dad probably despise me, there’s an angry, murderous bitch tearing up the country, I’ve got your death to avenge, and no one’s offering me any hard candy.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Seriously, Cordy, if the Afterlife is so amazing, what’s the point of staying here on this stupid, miserable planet?”

  A flicker of sadness flew through Cordy’s eyes. “Because it’s life,” she said softly. “I mean, it is amazing here, but I still miss things.”

  “Like what? What could you possibly miss?”

  “Like—” Cordy thought for a moment and sighed. “Like our room. I tried to reconstruct it here, but it’s just not the same. Plus, you’re not in it, so why bother?”

  Lex softened. “Oh.”

  “Ice cream’s different too. The consistency is wrong.” Cordy bit her lip. “I miss Mom and Dad. The way Mom would put those silly ‘Made with love’ notes in our lunches, the way Dad honked the horn in the school parking lot extra embarrassingly whenever the football team ran by.” She let out a small laugh. “Other things, too. Sneezing. The smell of gasoline. That blurry feeling between being asleep and being awake. The way you can hold your hands at just the right angle in the shower so that it looks like beams of water are shooting out from your fingertips like a superhero.” She looked at Lex. “None of it’s the same. I’ll never get any of that back.”

  Lex’s chest tightened. “You’d still have it if it weren’t for me.”

  “Lex, stop. If you say that this was your fault one more time, I’m going to make President McKinley kick your ass on two nonconsecutive occasions.”

  “But—”

  “I mean it, enough with the guilt. Life was—” She twisted her mouth, thinking. “Life was like that time we went to that little hole-in-the-wall dessert place on the Lower East Side and we got that peanut butter and banana cheesecake that was so good it made our taste buds stand up and sing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.”

  “The place that closed a week later?”

  “Yes! Remember how we went to a dozen more after that, even the supposed best places in the city, but they were always only second best? So there was nothing we could do but savor the graham-crackery-crust memory and move on.” She gestured at the Void. “That’s all I can do—savor the memory of life and move on. But you can still scarf the good stuff. So do it for as long as you can.”

  Lex felt exhausted. “Fine. I won’t throw myself under a bus. But what about you?”

  “What about me? I’ll be okay in here. The Afterlife may be second-best cheesecake, but it’s still cheesecake.”

  “But aren’t you mad? I mean—” She gestured weakly at their surroundings. “This is great and all, but Zara killed you. She killed you. Aren’t you pissed?”

  Cordy’s eyes darkened briefly. “Yes.”

  “Good. For a minute there, I thought you were gunning for sainthood.”

  Cordy shook her head. “I hate her for what she did to me—and even more, for what she did to you—but it’s hard to be full of rage here. Trust me, I’ve tried. But then I just go build a roller coaster or something.” She shrugged. “I guess there’s just a lot more here to distract you from being sad.”

  “Yeah. Until the novelty wears off and you realize she trapped you here for eternity before you even got a chance to live.”

  “Still cheesecake, Lex.”

  Lex gave up. Cordy was happy, more or less—and wasn’t that all Lex had wanted in the first place? For the first time in days, her heart unclogged itself from her throat and slid back to its rightful place in her chest.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice now situated in a more natural octave. “So what else have you been up to besides building vomit comets and choking down butterscotch?”

  “Looking for a boy,” Cordy said with a sly grin. “Shouldn’t take much longer, either—this place is a buffet of hotness. John Steinbeck? Stone-cold fox.”

  Lex laughed. Just then the vault door swung open to reveal a harried-looking Driggs. He stumbled in and made an attempt to smooth his hair. “Good, you found each other.”

  “Have you guys met?” asked Lex.

  Driggs shook his head. “Not yet. Mort wanted us to wait until you reunited first.” He waved to Cordy. “Hi, I’m Driggs.”

  “Damn, boy. You’re even cuter up close.” Cordy looked him up and down hungrily. “Got any dead brothers in here?”

  Lex made a face. “Cordy, ew.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to ask!” She peered at Driggs. “Now tell me, what are your intentions with my sister?”

  Driggs became flustered. “Um, I don’t know. To love her . . . and, uh . . . honor . . . protect . . .”

  Lex went red. “Driggs, shut up.”

  “Awkward.” Cordy beamed. “Love it.”

  “We have to go,” Driggs said in an unnecessarily loud voice.

  “Yeah, you do,” said the approaching Senior who had been wrangling the presidents. He had straight bleached-blond hair that swept over his face, leather pants, and a nose ring through his septum, all of which made him look like a bull that got lost on the way to a punk rock concert. He too had an air of douchebaggery, though his face looked slightly kinder than Snodgrass’s. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  Driggs glared at him. “So we keep hearing.”

  “Sounded like you were torturing
Snodgrass.”

  “Come on, Lazlo. I messed up his hair.”

  “Precisely.”

  Driggs rolled his eyes. “Lex, say goodbye.”

  Lex looked at Cordy. Now that she’d seen her and knew she was all right, she didn’t want to leave. “I’ll be back, okay?”

  “I know you will.” Cordy grinned. “Good luck with the angry mob.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Later, Cordy,” Driggs said. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “Nice meeting you too.” She looked at Lazlo’s alluringly long eyelashes. “And you as well. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself!” Lex yelled as Driggs dragged her out.

  “Don’t care!” Cordy shouted back.

  ***

  The walk back to Uncle Mort’s house was strange. Lex yammered on about how relieved she was to see Cordy, but Driggs just nodded and remained silent. With the exception of that weird and seemingly automated “love and honor” nonsense, he’d been all business since she’d arrived. He just seemed so distant, so distracted. The longer they walked, the tighter Lex’s stomach got. Maybe he didn’t like her anymore. Maybe he wasn’t crazy about dating the girl who’d really shit the bed on the whole not-demolishing-the-Grimsphere thing.

  It wasn’t until they approached the house that he finally said something. The door was wide open, and shouts were coming from within.

  He looked at her. “That’s probably bad.”

  4

  Three pairs of furious eyes watched them as they entered. Uncle Mort, Norwood, and Heloise stood facing one another in a triangle, their scythes drawn.

  “Oh, good,” Heloise said, her mouth forming into a thin line. “The peanut gallery’s here.”

  “Kids, go up to the roof,” Uncle Mort said, his voice tense. “We’re just talking.”

  Lex’s gaze jumped back and forth between Heloise’s ruby red scythe and Norwood’s bright yellow sulfur scythe. “Doesn’t look like you’re just talking.”

  “Lex. Go.”

  One look at his face confirmed that he wasn’t kidding around. Lex and Driggs backed out the door, the codirectors watching their every step.