Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (2 page)

Next to him, melted in a conical chair, was Lady Lactose, a vision of creamy arrogance, patting the vanilla hair scooped high atop her head in soft spirals.

Virgil wiped his drool-slick lips. Teachers, principals, and most every flavor of authority figure usually filled him with dread. But now, as he stared down at the Burgermeister and Lady Lactose, he was filled with the barely controlled urge to tie a bib around his neck and tuck into his vice principals with a fork and a spoon. It was as if he were at the Gobble ’n’ Hobble back home in Dallas, that all-you-can-eat (and more) place that made you sign a waiver before it granted access to its legendary Bonanza Buffet.

The potent aroma of just-grilled hamburger and just-churned ice cream wafted from the stage. Considering the inedible slop the kids were served in the Cafeterium—or, as the boys had dubbed it, the Lose-Your-Lunchroom—the smell made Virgil ravenous. And, judging from the bellyaching he heard gurgling from his fellow students, he was not alone.

The Burgermeister slicked back his greasy, poppy-seed-flecked hair until it looked like a rearing tidal wave. He leaned into the microphone set before him.

“Guten morgen
, students of Blimpo,” the Burgermeister said as he wiped his oily meat hooks on his checkered lederhosen. “How
geht es
you all? You
wundern vermutlich
why you’re here?”

“More like wondering what you just said,” muttered Hugo DeWitt, a boy with a dark crew cut and massive cheeks that nearly swallowed his nose and mouth, seated next to Virgil.

Lady Lactose scowled at the wave of confusion that spread slowly throughout the crowd like a spill soaked up by a paper towel. She tilted the microphone toward her. The pained squeak of the metal reverberated throughout the Gymnauseum.

“May I?” Lady Lactose asked the meaty monarch.

The Burgermeister nodded.

“Of course, my sweet.”

Lady Lactose glared at the baffled boys and girls.

“The Burgermeister and I are very busy pseudo-people, and we didn’t call this assembly to simply chew the fat. If we had, we’d be here all day, by the looks of it.”

A small drip of milk leaked down Lady Lactose’s forehead. The Burgermeister took her hand.

“Try not to lose your cool,” he cautioned.

Lady Lactose sighed and blotted her forehead with a lace napkin.

“What I meant to say …
children …
is that the Burgermeister and I have a very special announcement that involves all of you … every bit of you, actually.”

She motioned for Dr. Kellogg, a short man just over five feet tall seated nearby, to approach the stage.

Clad completely in white, from his galoshes to his tie, Dr. Kellogg took each step in spry little jumps. Even his hair and goatee gleamed as white and shiny as vanilla Frostee-Freeze. He hopped up onto the stage.

“Children, your beloved health education teacher,” Lady Lactose announced.

Dr. Kellogg raised a megaphone to his whiskery chin. “Good day, students,” he said with elfish vigor. “You are about to become part of a great experiment, a new chapter not only for Blimpo, but also for Heck—perhaps, even, for all of the underworld!”

He clapped his white-gloved hands. The double doors on either side of the Gymnauseum burst open. A team of demons in white laboratory smocks heaved
nine massive objects covered in gray tarps toward the stage.

“Thank you, diligent yet forsaken creatures!” the doctor declared as the demons grumbled and skulked away.

Dr. Kellogg beamed.

“In an attempt to liberate ourselves from the Trans-dimensional Power Grid and from our dependence on fickle paranormal energy sources, we—the vice principals and I—have uncovered a
new
source of power.”

A skinny man in white greasepaint and a black-and-white striped shirt crept from behind the thrones of the Burgermeister and Lady Lactose.

“That must be the vice principals’ flunky, the French Fried Fool,” Hugo muttered to Virgil, licking his lips.

The French Fried Fool smiled, accentuating his expression by framing his face with open, wriggling hands. Golden, deep-fried dreadlocks peeked out from beneath his harlequin cap.

“Yes, Fool,”
Lady Lactose said loudly and slowly, as if the man’s silence was a medical condition that affected his ability to hear and discern. “You may have the honor—”

The French Fried Fool hopped into the air like a flea on a hot plate. Lady Lactose raised her fudge-tinted eyebrows as he put his gloved fingers in his mouth, drew in a deep exaggerated breath, and then pretended to whistle.

Eight men dressed just like the French Fried Fool flounced into the Gymnauseum. Each stopped in front of one of the mysterious concealed objects and walked in place. The French Fried Fool dove off the stage and took his place beside the ninth tarp-covered thingamajig. Dr. Kellogg raised the megaphone to his mouth.

“And this new energy source is …,” he declared with a grand, sweeping gesture as the group of fools yanked off the tarps.

“… you.”

Virgil leaned closer, hoping that a few inches might help him make out what the odd contraptions were. They didn’t.

The gray metal machines resembled human-sized hamster wheels set within huge circular cast-iron enclosures. They opened slowly on either side, their walls like big pie tins, until the sides rested on the Gymnauseum floor. The machines reminded Virgil of the tire-shaped carrying case he used to tote his Hot Wheels around in when he was a little kid, back when he was alive.

“Behold, the DREADmills,” Dr. Kellogg said as one end of his thin mouth curled up with secret amusement. “Dynamic Regenerative Energy Accumulation Devices. The focus of Blimpo’s new
Fatness to Fitness Center
!”

A large dark girl with a kinky orange-brown halo of hair shot her hand up.

“You said that the energy was
you.”

“You
, actually, not me,” Dr. Kellogg clarified. “And, yes, you may ask a question.”

“Whatever.” The girl shrugged. “But what do you mean by you … or
us
?”

Dr. Kellogg smiled and raised himself up on the balls of his feet, growing from short to merely sub-moderate in height.

“An excellent, if disrespectfully posed, question. You, the student body of Blimpo, will supply our circle with its own energy source.”

A demon with a hammerlike head stood up awkwardly from its seat in the bleachers, reading a question from a note card.

“What a brilliant idea,” the demon said stiffly. “Can you tell us about all the fun we’ll have as … um,
students …
in the DREADmills, doing our part to make Heck a better place?”

On the bleacher below Virgil, Thaddeus Papadopoulos, a Greek boy who looked like an overinflated parade float, shook his head.

“That is
so
not a student,” he said. “How lame.”

The demon sat down quickly while Dr. Kellogg pulled out a note card from his vest pocket.

“Wow, I wasn’t prepared for so many great questions!” he replied, looking down his sharp, beaklike nose at the card. “Well, off the top of my head, each DREADmill is like a self-contained mini movie theater,
where you simply take a leisurely stroll on the conveyer belt while delighting in, um, shall we say
customized
entertainment. And, as an advantageous outcome, you’re generating precious electricity in the process. It’s a win-win!”

The girl with the frizzy sunrise for hair raised her hand again. Dr. Kellogg swallowed nervously as he looked out at the boys and girls. He prodded the hammerhead demon with his eyes.

“Are there any more questions?”

The demon stood up suddenly, fumbling for its note card.

“Yes,
you,”
the doctor said.

“Finally, we students can actually
contribute
to the afterlife, instead of just whining and sucking it dry,” the demon said. “So, not that there needs to be any more benefits to the DREADmill program, but if there were, what would they be?”

Dr. Kellogg laughed, which made his bright white whiskers dance the hula.

“Another unexpectedly thoughtful question!” he shouted through his megaphone. “Since the answer is of an administrational nature, I relinquish the floor to our vice principals.”

The doctor bounced off the stage as Lady Lactose nodded demurely. She tapped her dainty ladyfinger on the microphone, not so much to test the microphone’s
functionality, but rather to create a thunderous boom that exploded inside each student’s skull.

“Thank you, Dr. Kellogg, and thank
you
, courteous, engaged-but-not-overly-so student.”

The hammerhead demon bowed stiffly, as if pounding an imaginary nail, and took its seat.

“In addition to the joy of participating in this great experiment,” Lady Lactose continued, “you will also be developing a healthier, less repellent spiritual body. As further incentive, each session spent inside the DREADmills will act as a Metaphysical Fitness credit applied directly toward your Soul Aptitude Tests. Meaning, the more weight you lose watching movies and making energy, the higher your grade and the greater the likelihood of you spending your adult afterlives lazing on clouds and plucking harps, rather than suffering the unspeakable atrocities …
down there.”

A wave of “oohs” spilled out across the auditorium. Virgil frowned as he studied the dozens of children sitting hopefully on the bleachers. The wooden seats sagged beneath them, as if the students were fat birds perched atop power lines.

Fat chance of us kids ever ascending
anywhere, he thought sadly to himself.

The Burgermeister smiled slyly at the children’s subtle shift in attitude. It was time to seal the deal. He grabbed the microphone with his greasy hands.

“Before we say
auf wiedersehen,”
he declared in an oily gush, “zere iz just
eine more thing
!”

The double doors swung open, accompanied by a puff of fragrant smoke. The children gasped.

It was the most succulent smell that had ever passed through Virgil’s nostrils. A bright red shack on wheels parted the gate of rich smoke, bringing with it the folksy, tinny strains of “Turkey in the Straw.” It weaved slowly through the maze of DREADmills, then pulled up to the front of the stage. Welded above the mobile cart’s windshield was a barbecue-sauce-colored sign with HAMBONE HANK’S HEART ATTACK SHACK spelled out in ribs.

An enormous red-faced man wearing a white, sagging chef’s hat emerged from the cart.

“Chef Boyareyookrazee,”
Virgil muttered with contempt. The chef lorded over the Cafeterium with wicked glee. He treated it like his own personal chamber of culinary horrors. He knew that his captive diners would grudgingly consume whatever he made—no matter how disgusting. That morning’s meal of booger-frosted scornflakes, eggs Benedict Arnold, and guinea pork sausage, for example, was still debating how to best escape Virgil’s belly.

Chef Boyareyookrazee can’t possibly have anything to do with that delicious smell
, Virgil reflected, just as another figure stepped out of the cart.

Behind the chef emerged his exact opposite: while
Chef Boyareyookrazee was stubby, round, and dressed completely in white, this figure was tall and lean and wore a black hooded cloak that completely obscured its face. The sleek, imposing creature regarded the crowd with eyes submerged in shadow. It had a collar around its neck that it rubbed with irritation. The only features that Virgil could discern were an occasional flash of moist, black snout and the glint of fangs.

The French Fried Fool hopped up and down, rubbing his belly with his hand. His posse of mute performance artists did likewise.

The Gymnauseum was suffused with sweet, tantalizing smoke. The intoxicating fog was so strong that Virgil wasn’t sure if he was smelling it, tasting it, or dreaming it.

“Danke
, Chef Boyareyookrazee and Hambone Hank,” the Burgermeister said with a nod.

“Hambone Hank?” muttered Thaddeus. “That creepy guy in the robe must be some sort of gourmet ghoul.”

The Burgermeister held out his beefy arms majestically.

“To zelebrate diz great day,” he announced,
“wir haben eine
delicious
mahlzeit
for you all!”

The children, who could barely grasp the fact that they were in a gymnasium in the afterlife lorded over by a talking burger and milk shake, much less understand
German
, whispered to one another in puzzlement.

Lady Lactose sighed and tilted the microphone toward her pursed, cherry-red lips.

“What the Burgermeister means to say is …
come and get it.”

The sound of a dinner bell rang through the speakers in the corners of the Gymnauseum. Although Virgil had been raised in Texas, it was only in this moment that he fully understood the meaning of the word “stampede.” The boys and girls rushed down the bleachers like a cascading waterfall of ravenous want. The scrape of tight corduroy Capri pants and miniskirts (part of the mandatory and fiercely unflattering Blimpo school uniform) was deafening.

Virgil was momentarily stunned by the sudden pandemonium around him before his stomach complained, in its unique language of spasms and slurps, “Giddyup if you want some grub!”

So Virgil listened to his gut, pulled up his neon-green suspenders, and tromped down the bleachers. Pitchspork-wielding demons attempted vainly to shape the chaos into something resembling an orderly line. Chef Boyareyookrazee doled out baskets overflowing with meat slathered with rich, red-brown sauce.

A pale, dark-haired girl with stringy pigtails gasped rapturously as she, the first in line, sampled Hambone Hank’s barbecue.

“Oh my gawd!!”
she exclaimed between her first and
second bites. “Even though I’m in Heck, my mouth just went straight to Heaven!”

The Burgermeister, Lady Lactose, and Chef Boyareyookrazee shared sly, conspiratorial smirks. The cream of the realm leaned into her charbroiled king.

“See them line up like pigs at a trough, chowing down on every lie we’ve fed them.”

Virgil, on the outside of the meat-fueled melee, could
just
hear the vice principals’ voices over the speakers.