The Dead Boys

Table of Contents

 

 

Demonkeeper
Goblins! An UnderEarth Adventure

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group. Published by The Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd). Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2010 by Royce Buckingham. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. G. P. Putnam's Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckingham, Royce. The dead boys / Royce Buckingham. p. cm. Summary: Timid
twelve-year-old Teddy Mathews and his mother move to a small, remote desert town in
eastern Washington, where the tree next door, mutated by nuclear waste, eats children
and the friends Teddy makes turn out to be dead. [1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—
Fiction. 3. Trees—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Moving, Household—Fiction.
6. Washington (State)—Fiction. 7. Horror stories.] I. Title. PZ7.B879857Ded 2010
[Fic]—dc22 2010002850

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-19831-5

I'd like to thank my editor, John Rudolph, who cut my first draft in half and believed I could fix it. Thanks, John, I think we've found the story's place.

I'd also like to thank my friend Eric Richey, who has a good idea every once in a while.

Finally, I'd like to thank the federal government for dumping nuclear waste in my water until I was five years old, and without whom the mutant kid-eating tree in my backyard never would have grown . . .

Royce

In its early years, the sycamore tree stretched its branches up toward the light, reaching for the desert sun and its life-giving energy. Beneath the ground, it groped for scarce water and nutrients. Its roots ran far and deep through the dry sand to find what it needed, and when they finally reached the huge Columbia River nearby, it drank heartily.

But it found something else in the water it hadn't expected—warm energy similar to the kind it drew from the sun. The tree soaked up the new radiation directly into its porous wood. It couldn't know that the energy came from the Hanford nuclear plant upriver.

Over time, the tree changed. It grew unnaturally large above the ground and even larger underneath. Before, it had struggled in the arid desert, but now it thrived on the strange nourishment it had discovered, and it grew hungry for more.

Then one day, a twelve-year-old boy climbed the tree's limbs to hide in the large hollow of its trunk. The ravenous tree felt his youthful energy, and it wanted that too.

The boy would not go down while his angry father roamed the yard, screaming for him to come back and take his medicine. As the boy sat tucked away in the tree, the desert heat overcame him. He began to grow weak, dehydrated, and he fainted.

Before long, the boy was dying. But the tree caught him in the place between life and death. It found that it could absorb the boy's vitality as it slowly leaked from his body. It sheltered him and would not let his spark wink out completely, for the boy's life force proved to be as potent as the sun, the earth, and the waterborne radiation. In fact, it was the most powerful energy source of all.

Years later, however, when the boy's energy was almost fully sapped, the tree began to grow hungry again. . . .

Teddy Matthews rolled down the car window, and a wall of hot air blasted him as though he'd just yanked open an oven. He rolled it back up and adjusted the air conditioner to blow directly on his face.

“It must be a zillion degrees out there,” he said.

“Welcome to the desert,” his mother replied with the smile she wore when she was trying to make unpleasant things seem not so bad. It was the same smile she'd used when she first told him they were “relocating” to the middle of nowhere and leaving all his friends behind.

He shifted his feet atop a moving box on the floorboards and stared out at the tan expanse of sand as his mom drove them toward their new home in Richland, Washington.

“I thought that Washington was the Evergreen State,” Teddy said.

“That's the west side of the state,” his mom said. “They don't get much rain over here in southeastern Washington. Almost all of the water comes from the Columbia River.”

“Isn't that where the nuclear plant dumps its waste?”

“Don't be silly,” she replied. “They stopped doing that years ago. The town is completely safe now.”

She was a lab chemist and had a job lined up at the plant, so Teddy didn't argue about the nuclear stuff. Instead he said, “Sure, completely safe, except for the scorpions.”

“Whose venom is no worse than a bee sting,” his mother assured him.

“What about rattlesnakes?” he tried.

“They keep to dark holes mostly, and they're more scared of us than we are of them.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Teddy said.

“It's the black widow spiders that actually get into the houses.” She winked at him. “Watch out for those.”