Hellhole (37 page)

Just knocked a few screws loose.

 

Max ran.

He'd arrived at the hospital via ambulance, which left him without a bike. So he had no choice but to sprint. The only sounds breaking the air were of his sneakers pounding against the pavement, his ragged breaths, and the continuous wail of sirens echoing in the hills.

When he arrived at his destination, he didn't need a crowbar. He could have torn the door off his hinges.

But it was unlocked. As if he were expected.

Thick, smoky air stung his nostrils as he stormed into the foyer. A fire roared in the fireplace. Glasses of alcohol dotted various surfaces and end tables, and seated on the plaid sofa, staring into the flames and sipping a brandy, was Burg.

Max stalked up to him. He wanted to rip those horns right out of the guy's skull. He wanted to tear him limb from limb. He wanted to grab a rifle off the wall and shoot him in the gut, throw him over the balcony into the lake, and watch him drown, slowly.

But all he said was, “Why?”

Burg looked at him. Multiple emotions were at war on his face; Max could tell that he was struggling to control them, to banish the kinder, more human ones. Eventually a sneer wormed its way to the surface and stayed there, his eyes gone cold.

“Your mother needed a new heart.” Burg took a sip of the brandy. “I got her one. Shouldn't matter how I did it.”

“You killed innocent people!” Max shouted.

“So did you.”

Max slapped a hand over his mouth; he felt sick, sicker than he ever had before, as if his guts were instantaneously rotting.

“I warned you,” Burg said quietly. “I told you not to get greedy. I warned you not to go down this road. It's not a nice road, Max.”

Max let out a whimper. “But I trusted you.”

“That was your first mistake.”

“I did everything you asked.”

“Second mistake.”

Max forced himself to look Burg in the eye. “How could you do this to me?”

Burg's face tensed. He held Max's gaze, then looked back into the fire.

“A devil doesn't change his horns,” he said softly.

Max sank to the floor. His knobby knees came down hard, pounding like hammers on the bloodstained wood floor. After that, there was nothing but his muffled sobs, the crackling of the fire, and silence.

Until something caught Max's eye. A crumpled-up wad of money sitting next to Burg's brandy.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, standing up to get a better look at the bills. Except they weren't in a clump—they were in the shape of a dinosaur.

Burg picked up the glass without answering.

“No,” said Max. “No, I gave that to Paul—”

The blood drained out of Max's face as it dawned on him. The buzzing in his ears when Paul told him he'd been fired. How they only ever talked about it in private after school, or at the Gas Bag—never in public. And that the real Paul never would have bought gum, not with all those braces.

“
You
were Paul.”

Burg calmly sipped his drink.

“And let me guess,” Max said, his voice hollow. “You didn't fill the hole.”

“Sorry, did you say ‘fill'?” Burg said, tipping the remains of the brandy down his throat. “I heard ‘dig.'”

Just then Max noticed a glint of something outside, a tiny ball of yellow light floating on the balcony.

A lit cigarette.

Max stared into the darkness. The light began to move to the right, traveling toward the hot tub, until it was no longer in view.

He approached the sliding glass door, his brain recycling bits and pieces of what Burg had said to him over the past week and spitting them up in random splotches . . .
any act of evil can bring up a devil . . . the big ones exert the strongest pull . . . murders are very popular . . . the Moneygrubbers have been trying to figure out a way to stay up here for centuries . . .

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.

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 ankles, purring.

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