Hellhole (27 page)

Max felt as though he'd fallen into another dimension. Three hours ago his mother was cowering, ashamed, in the presence of treasured friends. Then this complete stranger walks in and suddenly she's Miss Congeniality?

The man smiled again. “Well, how could I refuse an offer like that?”

Max's mom nodded firmly and held out her hand. “Wonderful. See you tomorrow, then, Mr. . . .”

“Cobbler,” he said. “Lloyd Cobbler.”

They shook hands, and the man left. The whole encounter lasted less than a minute.

Max warily watched him go, then turned back to his mother. “What . . . was that all about?”

She pulled her hospital gown tighter around her, smiling shyly. “I don't know! He was just so nice, and he really helped us out, and I just—” She laughed and shook her head. “I don't know what came over me.”

“Yeah,” Max said, studying her closely. “Me neither.”

They sat in silence.

“He was just so cute,” she mused after a moment. “He even—okay, this is gonna sound nuts, but don't you think he looked a little like John Cusack?”

Max stiffened.

“I'll be right back,” he said, rushing out of the room and into the hallway.

Lloyd was at the end of it, waiting for the elevator. Max grabbed him by the shoulders and whirled him around.

“Whoa!” Lloyd said with a look of shock. “What's wrong there, sport?”

“Burg!”
Max hissed.

“Who?”

“Knock it off, I know it's you!”

“Sorry, champ, but I don't know what's—”

“Lloyd Cobbler? And you work for ‘the phone company'? Which one?”

“The one . . . you have.”

Max was so mad, he didn't know what to do with his hands, so he just let them free-wheel in the air. “How could you do this to me?”

The aura around Lloyd shimmered and disappeared, leaving nothing but Burg's lumpy, smiling form in its place. “Uh, easily. Cusack's one of my best impressions.”

“No. NO. This date is not happening. I forbid it. Anything else you want, but
not this.
”

Burg gave him a leering smile. “Forbid all you want, kid. And cancel the date if you must, but if you do, I can't promise your mom won't have any more false alarms.”

Max stared at him, ice prickling through his veins. “
You
did that to her?”

The elevator doors opened. Burg sauntered in, turned around, and tipped his hat to Max. “See you tomorrow, Shove. Six o'clock sharp.”

BURG IS BAD. BURG IS BAD. BURG IS BAD.

Those three little words ran through Max's head on a loop as he stalked back home. Of course he'd known all along that Burg was bad. But Lore was right—he'd vastly underestimated the degree of his badness. And now it was too late to turn back.

He burst into the kitchen, forgetting to prepare himself for the projectile cat obsessed with shredding his face. He practically batted Ruckus out of the air and headed straight for the dresser drawer in his bedroom where he kept most of his dinosaur research, away from all the dirty plaster gunk.

Wincing at the already-swollen scratches on his hands inflicted by Ruckus, he dug through his files until he found the one he was looking for: the email from Dr. Cavendish, the professor at Harvard. It was long—three printed-out pages of thinly veiled exuberance at the thought of someone finally showing interest in his work. It was clear that the guy had been a bit nutty. Max had read through the whole thing when it first arrived, but as it was clogged with so much scientific jargon he didn't understand, he hadn't been able to do much with it. At the time, he'd just downloaded the high-res photos and gotten to work on the replica of the specimen.

Now, though, he spread out the pages before him and held his breath. Maybe there was a chance that it would provide something he could work with, maybe not. Probably not a sentence that began with
Dear Max, Here's how to defeat a devil
, but perhaps something about the chemical makeup of the horn, a weakness at the cellular level.

But skimming it now, a wave of helplessness washed over him. The language was just as dense, just as hard to fathom as he'd remembered. And of what he did understand, none of it seemed particularly helpful: the specimen had not come from a particularly healthy organism (not surprising, given devils' terrible diets); it contained scant traces of the bacteria
Bartonella henselae
(also not surprising, given its proximity to the woods and all the ticks therein); and certain odd properties suggested that it might not have come from a dinosaur at all (definitely not surprising, for now-obvious reasons).

Max hurled the pages across the room in a confetti-like display of frustration. He'd never get anything from this. And it wasn't as if he could call the professor and grill him further, either. Pretty hard to get information out of a dead guy.

He melted into bed and stared at the ceiling, almost on the verge of tears. He hoped his mom was okay over at the hospital. He hoped Burg was safely tucked away inside his new home, not out causing trouble. He hoped Lore wasn't too mad at him.

I am lord of the idiots,
he thought, holding his cramping stomach.
I never should have gone along with this. I should have quit while I was ahead, not gotten greedy. Now I've unleashed a juggernaut of unstoppable evil on my mom and my poor little town, and who knows how many people he's going to ruthlessly slaughter and it's all my fault and Mom probably won't live long enough for me to provide her weekly mozzarella allowance . . .

He drifted off to a dreamless sleep.

 

The next morning, Max's woes continued. Because honestly, were there any rational explanations as to how he, who had gone two full school years without so much as breathing the same air as Lore Nedry, could have randomly run into her precisely when he was trying to avoid her the most?

He didn't know whether he was mad at her or in love with her, or some hopeless conglomeration of the two—but he'd felt it best to give it some time, think things through. But a closed-off staircase forced him to board one of the school elevators, a mode of transportation he'd always avoided, if only to escape awkward social situations exactly like the one he was about to encounter.

The crowd parted. Everyone got off at the first floor, revealing Lore's figure reclined against the elevator's back wall, her shirt a peppy display of cavorting rhinestone dolphins. “Oh my dammit,” Max rasped, reflexively hitting the Door Open button, but the elevator gods cruelly dismissed his request and sealed him to his fate, a one-way trip to the bowels of the school basement with Lore and only Lore.

Max glared furiously at the glowing buttons. He did
not
have room in his brain for this.

“I've never taken the elevator before,” Lore mused, her normal flatlined self.

Max resisted the urge to bang his head against the doors. Of
course
it was her first time, too.
What a magical set of coincidences!
he felt like shouting in hysterics.
Shakespeare himself could not have crafted a more star-crossed rendezvous!

“Mhmph,” he grumbled.

The elevator came to a lurching halt, and the doors opened. She must have been going to the art room, Max reasoned, because the only other room in the cellar was AV storage, and he highly doubted that she, too, had been sent on an errand to claim the school's sole working overhead projector.

“What are you doing?” Max asked when she kept following him.

She showed him a crumpled hall pass. “Mr. Campbell. Overhead projector.”

It was too much. Max let out a booming, feverish laugh that echoed off the concrete walls of the stark basement and reverberated at triple the volume.

“I see,” Lore said calmly, “you've cracked.”

As swiftly as it had burst out of him, Max sucked the laugh back in. “Can you blame me?”

A hint of a whisper of something that might have been compassion snuck into Lore's expression. “No,” she said, glancing at the near-identical hall pass in his hand. “I can't blame you.”

Somewhere, a fan switched on in the innards of the basement ducts. A whooshing noise filled the air.

“I'm sorry about yesterday,” Lore said.

“No,
I'm
sorry,” Max said, wanting to shake her by the shoulders to convey how sorry he was. “
You
were absolutely right. Burg is—” He gave her a hopeless look. “Burg is evil.”

He explained what had happened to his mother the night before. Lore's facial expression did not change even a little.

“So.” She brought her eyes up to his. “What's the next phase of the plan?”

“Excuse me?”

“What did he ask us to do next?”

“Us? Wait, you still want to help me? I thought you hated my guts!”

“I hate all of you, not just your guts,” Lore said. “But I also acknowledge that you are in a pretty big pickle, and since I have prior satanic experience, it would be morally wrong of me not to at least try and help you out of your pickle. Moral turpitude is what forced both of us into devil adoptions in the first place, so it's probably a good idea to cut back on that wherever possible, right?”

“Right. Lore, thank you so—”

“Thank-yous are nice and all, Max, but they don't do much in the realm of defense against the dark arts. So it's date night, right? What's your plan there?”

Max shrugged. “Sit in the hallway, armed with my heaviest femur—uh, baseball bat, and whack the snot out of him if he tries anything?”

“Or,” Lore said, “we keep him in line the fun way.”

“We?”

“You're a smart kid, Max, but you seem to have a great deal of difficulty comprehending plural pronouns. Yes,
we.
I'll come over too. It'll be a”—and at the thought of this, even Lore looked uncomfortable—“a double date.”

“Wow. I—thank you,” he said yet again. “But . . . just to be clear, you need to know that I'm still doing all this in the hopes that he'll fix her. I mean, I'm also doing it to ensure that he doesn't
hurt
her again. And I'm trying to figure out whether that old devil horn fossil might show us some way to fend him off if he tries anything worse. But I'm still pushing for the cure. Otherwise all this will have been for nothing.”

Lore frowned. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“I know it's a lot to ask,” Max said. “But I'm just trying to be up-front about it. You've helped me so much, it's the least I can do. I don't want to lie to you.”

Lore's eyes softened in the way one's eyes do when one is smiling without smiling.

“Throw in the overhead projector,” she said, “and you've got yourself a deal.”

 

If Max had to describe how he drifted through the rest of the day, it would be in one word: numbly. It was sort of similar to the drunken torture of the day before, but this time he was paralyzed more by fear than by the effects of a hangover. As time dragged on, he found that if one simply stopped caring about what happened to oneself, everything became a lot easier. In gym class, he let himself get pelted by dodge balls, blithely defecting from one side to the other, back and forth, back and forth. In English lit, he answered every question on his
Hamlet
quiz with “Denmark.” When Audie tried to apologize for her parents' impromptu visit disaster, he just nodded and nodded, like the bobblehead cat, saying it was no big deal and he'd see her at the pep rally that evening. At lunch, he waved hello to Paul, who gave a knowing wave back. At least it seemed knowing; Paul didn't really have facial expressions like other people, so Max was left to assume.

He got a more concrete update after school, when Paul cornered him by the bike rack. “That's a really big hole up there on Ugly Hill!” he told Max.

Max cringed and looked around, but there was no one in earshot. “Yeah, I know. I told you.”

“I've been filling it and filling it, but the thing doesn't seem to fill.” Paul scratched his hair. “Like it's unfillable.”

“Well, keep at it.”

“Oh, I will! I'll fill that thing until it's filled!”

“Thanks, Paul. And you haven't seen anything strange up there, right?”

“Nope.” Paul made one of his inscrutable faces. “Trust me, I'd recognize strange.”

 

When Max got home, his mother was in the kitchen, looking as out of place as a bald eagle in a hair salon.

“Where do we keep the salad tongs?” she asked, digging through the gadget drawer. “Do we even have salad tongs?”

“I don't think we've ever had
salad,
” said Max. He put a wary hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay? Up and about like this?”

She put a hand on her hip and gave him a wry smile. “You know, it's the weirdest thing—or maybe it's all the drugs they pumped into me—but when I woke up in that hospital this morning, I felt better than I have in ages. Maybe that whole thing last night was just my heart jump-starting itself. Maybe I was touched”—she put a dainty, dramatic hand on her chest—“by an angel.”