Hellhole

by Gina Damico

  He slid open the door and stepped onto the balcony, bracing himself for what he was about to see. But he could have been bracing for weeks, steeling himself for this all his life, and he still wouldn’t have been prepared for what awaited him in the hot tub.

  Fourteen devils, one for each of the dead—naked, drinking, and cackling like madmen.

  Secret Weapon

  MAX RAN SOME MORE.

  All the way to the top of Ugly Hill. There he stood, gulping air as he ran his flashlight over what he desperately hoped were figments of his imagination.

  But they weren’t. They were there, carved right out of the earth, identical to the one he’d accidentally opened up a week ago.

  Holes. Everywhere.

  More running.

  Down the hill. To his house.

  To retrieve his last-ditch Hail Mary secret weapon.

  One final sprint. Back up Ugly Hill.

  Max stared into the holes, lowering his backpack to the ground in awe. So many of them. So, so many of them.

  It was nothing personal, Shove.

  Max clapped his hands over his ears. “Get out of my head!” he shouted.

  WHOOSH.

  Max turned around, then fell on his butt, blinded. A massive column of flame had erupted from one of the holes, like a flamethrower shooting up from the center of the earth.

  Burg walked out from behind it. “Sorry,” he said as the whooshing died down. “It was nothing personal, Shove.”

  Max held up his arm to block the light. Heat pulsed out from the flames, which receded to a height of about twenty feet, like a huge bonfire.

  It was so hot Max wanted to cover his face—he could feel his skin scorching, like a bad sunburn—but he kept his eyes on Burg, alert, like a cornered animal. He stood up and took three steps closer.

  “When I asked you to pose as O’Connell,” Max said evenly, “when I asked you to sign the paperwork at the office, you said it didn’t matter whether you helped us or not.”

  “Yeah,” said Burg. “So?”

  “Tell me why it didn’t matter.”

  Burg shrugged and picked up two dried-up shrub branches from the ground. “The way I saw it, you guys had two options.” He held up one. “Either you enlisted me to help you secure the house, thereby guaranteeing my continued domesticity there, thereby keeping me happy, thereby keeping up your end of the deal, thereby earning a cure for your mom.” He held up the other branch. “Or, you hung me out to dry. You decided that enough is enough, you canceled the deal, and you let the house slip away. Problem with that one is—”

  “You kill my mom.”

  “No!” Burg shot him a don’t-be-ridiculous smile. “No, that’s the great part, Max! Your mom gets to live! You, of course, get arrested for murder once I tip off the police to the fact that O’Connell’s body is perforated and lying at the bottom of the lake, thereby prompting an investigation that’ll reveal your fingerprints all over the house, thereby nicely depositing you out of the picture, thereby giving me the freedom to move in on your mom!”

  Max stared at him, shell-shocked.

  “So it’s like I said.” With a vindictive grin, Burg held up both branches. “Win-win situation for old Burgy.”

  He tossed them both into the hole, instantly doubling the height of the flames.

  “Of course,” he said, taking a step closer to Max, “once she’s good and healthy, I see no reason not to proceed with Plan B. Though I suppose, as a courtesy, I could allow you to continue operating under Plan A—continue to do stuff for me, get me snacks, keep me happy, miscellany and so forth. Then, if you decide to get rebellious, I’ll simply invoke the Plan B protocol.”

  Max was no longer looking at him. He wasn’t looking at anything. Eyes open, but not seeing. Just staring at the space before them, the world a blur of blacks and grays and eye-searing yellows.

  I’m trapped, said his brain.

  A bird let out a lonely, strident call.

  No, you’re not, said another part.

  You heard the guy, rational brain said. He’s right. Either we don’t help him and get arrested, or we do help him and become his slaves. We’re totally screwed.

  . . .

  Not if we take the third option.

  “Or,” Max said in an eerily calm voice, taking another step forward, “we go with Plan C.”

  Burg grinned. “Okay, Shove,” he said, playing along. “What’s Plan C?”

  Max flashed him an expression he’d never sported before, a hint of a smile mixed with a hint of a snarl.

  “I send you back to hell.”

  And with a mighty, pectoral-muscle-filled push, Max shoved Burg into the flames.

  They burst into an impossibly bright fireball. Max shielded his eyes, staggering away for a moment before looking back—and scowling at what he saw.

  Burg lazily looked up at Max. He appeared to be floating in the fire, bobbing up and down as if it were nothing more than a kiddie pool.

  He was laughing, too. Cackling. “Really, Shove? That was your plan? To throw me into a fire? To give me a good shove into—OH MY STARS AND GARTERS, your nickname is Shove! It works on EVERY SINGLE LEVEL!” He exploded with a new burst of laughter, his cries carrying into the clear night sky.

  Max bent down and unzipped his backpack.

  Burg was now doing laps around the perimeter of the fire. “Not as soothing as the hot tub. No bubble jets. But it’ll do in a pinch. Care to join me?” He swam up to the lip of the hole and propped his elbows on the ground to hold himself up. “You know—”

  He abruptly broke off. It was hard for Max to see, since the flames raged behind Burg, throwing his face into shadow, but he knew that Burg’s eyes had gone wide.

  Wide with terror. Riveted on what came out of the backpack.

  Max dropped it to the ground. It darted out from between his legs and began weaving through the piles of dirt, tearing back and forth, zigzagging, an orange blur—

  Into the fire it flew, landing right on Burg’s face.

  “Aaaaaggwwwwmmmfff!” Burg let out a shout, which turned into a muffled growl, which turned into a gargled groan. Which turned into a piercing scream.

  Eventually he managed to maneuver his hands into the gap between Ruckus’s razor-sharp claws and his shredded face, tossing him like a basketball into the air. Ruckus landed on his feet and sat on his haunches, daintily wrapping his tail around him. He licked his front paw, uninterested in the entire spectacle.

  Burg’s face, now crisscrossed with red, raised bites and scratches, was furious. “What the fuck, Max?” he said in a raspy voice.

  “Bartonella henselae. Found it in the Super Fossil, which—remind me again? Belonged to a devil, correct?”

  Burg said nothing. The point of his beard began to sizzle.

  “And when Lore and I checked out Vermillion’s old trailer, there was a cat in there, too. Verm’s vacation was cut shorter than he expected, wasn’t it?”

  Ruckus took another swipe at Burg’s face. He let out another howl.

  “Guess you were right,” Max said with a grin. “Cats are evil.”

  Burg’s wounds got redder, puffier, angrier. They began to split, spilling beams of a blood-hued light into the sky like a horrific laser show. Then, suddenly, they went out.

  Burg shot Max a grumpy, resigned look. “Aw, hell.”

  And with that, he dropped into the hole.

  The fire disappeared.

  All was silent.

  Max inched up to the rim of the hole but saw nothing inside except dirt. He tossed a rock into it and started to count how long it took for it to hit bottom.

  But he didn’t get very far. The rock fell only about ten feet.

  Max raked his hands through his hair and looked out on the town of Eastville. It sat below, glittering and quiet, an occasional siren breaking the silence. The football field was still lit up.

  Max hugged himself tight. The night had gotten cold.

  Ruckus rubbed up against his ankl
es, purring.

  “Good kitty,” Max said, giving him a pat.

  Epilogue

  MAX TIED HIS SHOE, then double knotted it. His mom was always reminding him of stuff like that now, the little things she’d neglected in her motherly duties for so long. “Don’t trip and fall down the stairs and require a heart transplant,” she’d say. “They hurt like hell.”

  “But they work,” he’d remind her, patting his chest.

  She’d pat hers back.

  He cracked his knuckles, the way Audie would before creaming him at Madden. She’d probably obliterate him even more epically now that she’d had a couple of months to hone her skills. Recuperating from a crushed pelvis, it turned out, scored you a lot of quality video game time.

  Then he pulled the fishing rod out of the whale’s flipper. He affixed to the end of the line a briefcase conspicuously overflowing with dollar bills and walked around to the front of the house, placing the bait atop a prominent mound of snow.

  Finally he returned to the backyard, took his place behind the whale, and waited.

  A few minutes later he spotted Lore jogging down the street. Vapor was puffing out of her mouth, and money was streaming out of her bag. She darted into the backyard and plopped down next to Max.

  “Ready?” she asked, out of breath.

  Max nodded and handed her the pole. “Ready.”

  “Same as last time, okay? I’ll reel him in, you drop the payload.”

  “I know, I know. I’m getting pretty good at this, remember?”

  She leaned in and kissed him. He kissed back—a passionate, artless thing. It had become a sort of tradition of theirs to kiss right before bagging their prey.

  Also, they just really liked kissing.

  They finished up, wiped off the slobber, and nodded to each other. Lore removed Russell Crowebar from her waistband. Max pulled out the secret weapon.

  The Moneygrubber came sniffing around the corner, picking up each bill that Lore had dropped. As soon as he came into view, she began to reel in the fishing line. He sniffed after the briefcase, ratlike, following it all the way to the whale and scuttling inside with a thump.

  Max took a moment to grin at Lore, then dropped Ruckus through the blowhole. She slammed the port shut and jammed the crowbar into its handles to lock it, grinning back at him.

  “I’m so glad we found a common interest,” she said.

  They flopped back into the snow, their fingers entwining as the whale rocked fiercely back and forth, the devil’s wails echoing in the clear winter sky.

  About the Author

  GINA DAMICO is the author of Croak, Scorch, and Rogue, the grim-reapers-gone-wild books of the Croak trilogy. She has also dabbled as a tour guide, transcriptionist, theater house manager, scenic artist, movie extra, office troll, retail monkey, and breadmonger. A native of Syracuse, New York, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband, two cats, and one dog, and while she has never visited hell in person, she has spent countless waking hours at the Albany Regional Bus Terminal, which is pretty darn close.

  Visit her website at www.ginadami.co.