The Alter Boys WELCOME TO ROCKLAND COUNTY! It was a road sign Allie was sure she’d never see again. The last time she had seen it, she was pushed into the Earth, and if it hadn’t been for Lief and Nick, she wouldn’t have made it out. I intuit be crazy coming back here. Well, crazy or not, here she was.
“Johnnie-O!” she called out at the top of her lungs. “I want to talk to you, Johnnie-O!”
Allie knew it wasn’t just bad luck that had brought Johnnie-O and his little team of morons to them that night. The way Allie figured it, any new arrivals in Everlost in this area would follow the main highway, and would pass this way. If Johnnie-O wasn’t here himself, chances are he had a lookout keeping an eye on this very spot, waiting for some poor unsuspecting Greensoul to rest beneath the WELCOME TO ROCKLAND COUNTY! sign.
She figured right. It took a few hours of calling, and making noise, but finally word had been relayed back to Johnnie-O, and he showed up at around noon. This time he came with a dozen kids to back him up, instead of just four. Nothing was going to scare them away this time. The cigarette was still hanging out of the corner of his mouth, smoldering away, and Allie realized that cigarette was going to be stuck there until the end of time.
“Hey—it’s that girl who tricked you!” said the kid with the purple lips, and the lump in his throat.
Johnnie-O hit him. “She didn’t trick me,” he said, and nobody contradicted him.
He assumed a kind of gunslinger posture, like this was a showdown. He looked more comical than anything else, with his huge hands.
“I thought I sent you down,” he said.
“You thought wrong.”
“So what? Did ya come back so’s I could send you down right this time?”
“I’m back with a proposition.”
Johnnie-O looked at her, his expression stony. At first Allie thought he was doing it for effect. Then she realized he didn’t know what “proposition” meant.
“I want your help,” Allie explained.
Raggedy Andy tossed his weird red hair out of his eyes and laughed. “Why would we wanna help you!”
Johnnie-O smacked him, then crossed his heavy arms and said, “Why would we wanna help you!”
“Because I can get you what you want.”
By now even more kids had arrived. Some were real little, others her age, maybe a bit older. They all had menacing scowls—even the little ones.
“We don’t want nothin’ from you!” Johnnie-O said, and his chorus of bullies grumbled their agreement. This was all posturing, Allie knew. He had to be curious—if he wasn’t, he’d already have pushed her down.
“You attack Greensouls for the crumbs in their pockets, and pre-chewed gum.”
Johnnie-O shrugged. “Yeah, so?”
“What if I told you I knew where you could get real food. Not just pocket crumbs, but whole loaves of bread.”
Johnnie-O kept his arms crossed. “And what if I sewed your lying mouth shut?”
“It’s no lie. I know a place where salamis and chickens hang from the ceiling, a place where you can eat all you want, and wash it down with root beer!”
“Root beer,” echoed one of the little kids.
Johnnie-O threw him a warning glance, and the kid looked at his toes.
“There ain’t no such place. Whadaya think I am, stupid?”
Well yes, Allie wanted to say, but that’s beside the point. Instead she said, “Have you ever heard of ‘The Haunter’?”
If the rest of the kids were any indication, they all knew about the Haunter.
There were whispers, a few kids backed away from her, and the lump in Purple-puss’s throat bobbed up and down like a fishing float. For a second Allie even thought she could see fear in Johnnie-O’s eyes, but he covered it with a wide grin that tilted the tip of his nasty little Marlboro to the sky.
“First you tell me the McGill is your friend, and now the Haunter?” His smile turned into a frown, and the cigarette tipped downward. “I’ve had enough a you—you’re going down!”