Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (24 page)

Snarling, Annubis broke free of his muscular demon-captor’s grasp. The other two headless demons, sensing the dog god despite their being deaf and blind, lunged at him. Annubis bit hard into the hefty arm of the nearest demon, though the creature seemed unfazed as its skin was as unyielding as a fresh rawhide chew.

“Grab him!” Mr. de Hory yelled as hissing cats pounced upon the dog god. Annubis kicked away a spitting calico. It leapt at Mr. de Hory’s face, biting his mouth.

“Mwrghleorff!”
he yelled as he tried to bat the cat away from his face.

“Cat got your tongue?” Annubis roared as he shoved the demon up the hemlock steps.

The headless/heartless demon staggered back into the vat and fell through the billowing film of sparks. The flickering layer flared angrily as the demon passed through, though the creature never emerged on the other side. It disappeared.
Vaporized
. The only remnant an oily white residue dripping down the insides of the vat, a phosphorescent grease that smelled of methane and old Certs, covered with lint, dredged from the bottom of some old lady’s handbag.

“Nulled,”
Annubis panted as he gaped into the vat. “It’s true. Returned to nothing.”

He looked back over his shoulder as a headless/heartless demon seized Anput and Kebauet.

“What happened, Paw-paw?” Kebauet yapped.

“There is life and there is death,” Annubis sighed, his head hung low as the second remaining headless/heartless demon lumbered up the steps of the vat. “But there is also something else. And that something is … 
absolutely nothing
.”

Lucky—coiled protectively around Kebauet’s ankles—stood suddenly erect, panting, gorging on a familiar scent wafting into the Kennels, undetectable to the rest but, to Lucky, the most wonderful scent in the world. The ferret bobbed and weaved but Cerberus matched and bested his every move.

“I won’t be scared, Paw-paw, you’ll see,” Kebauet said, more in hopes of convincing herself than her father. “Will it hurt?”

Mr. de Hory wiped his scratched, cat-spit-soaked face with a starched handkerchief.

“It vill feel like nothing,” the man interjected. “Like sleeping wizzout dreaming … wizzout ever waking. But if your father vould jest be a good doggie …”

Lucky’s pink eyes rolled to the back of his head. He fell to the ground at Annubis’s feet. Cerberus sniffed at the seemingly unconscious ferret with all three snouts. The hound of Heck moved in closer.

Lucky lunged at Cerberus, savaging his middle face, then sprang across the floor of the Kennels, his tiny nails scrabbling across the concrete. Simultaneously whimpering with pain and yowling with rage, the dog bounded after Lucky and out of the Kennels.

Marlo watched the media event she had hatched play out through the fortress bars. She clutched her arms together and trembled. She had been so concerned with meeting Milton in the Furafter that she had no idea what to do next.

“There’s something going on,”
she murmured. “Not only here, but … 
everywhere
. Vice Principal Barnum, Nostradamus—who knows who else—”

Lucky shot out of the Kennels, sniffed the air, and
dove into the freshly dug hole inside the courtyard. The Scarecrows cawed from the parapets, unsettled by the cameras and lights below, and shifted in their roosts.

“Something big is about to happen on the Surface,” Milton said. “We’ll figure it all out once we get Lucky and find Annubis so he can switch us back.”

Lucky emerged from the other end of the hole, hopped up on a stack of old
GYP
newspapers, and caught the scent of his owner.

“Lucky!” Milton cried out as his ferret scrambled toward him. Lucky skidded to a stop, sniffing both Milton and Marlo. Though confused by their muddled scents, Lucky finally settled on Milton, currently inhabiting his sister’s body.

“You escaped!” Milton said as he stooped down to scoop up his pet. Lucky fought the urge to hop into his master’s arms, and—with a full-body twitch—doubled back and headed for the tunnel.

“Where are you going?” Milton shouted as he ran after Lucky, with Marlo close behind. “Where’s Annubis? Wait!”

Milton and Marlo stepped into the mouth of the tunnel after Lucky.

“Marlo?!” Zane called through cupped hands. “Where are you scarpering off to?”

Marlo turned and gave Zane her widest, brightest smile … only, as she was her grubby runt-of-a-brother, her attempt to dazzle merely puzzled.

“I—” Marlo attempted before Milton jabbed her with his elbow.

“We’ll be right back,” Milton explained. “We’re just scouting locations.”

Van Glorious, rubbing his black eye, gave Marlo a thumbs-up.

“That’s my girl!”
he called out to Milton as he yanked his sister into the hole. On their hands and knees, Milton and Marlo crawled through the tunnel after Lucky. Marlo chuckled.

“That’s my girl?”
she mocked.

“Shut up,”
Milton replied, sweating in the cramped space that felt as if it were strangling his entire body. “I’m sure we have … all
sorts
of dirt on one another. We can come clean once … we find out what … Lucky is freaking out … about.”

Lucky shot out of the tunnel and back through the portal leading to the Kennels. Milton and Marlo pushed themselves up out of the hole and into the fortress courtyard, as pressed-sawdust earth spilled back into the tunnel.

Cerberus came running out of the Kennels just as Lucky whizzed past him. Not a creature built for sudden changes in movement, the three-headed lapdog skidded and rolled on the crow-dropping-encrusted floor as each head gave its hapless body conflicting orders.

“Cerberus?” Milton murmured with alarm as he
scanned the inner courtyard for Lucky. “Here? I hope that doesn’t mean—”

“There’s Lucky!” Marlo yelled, spotting the wispy ferret back in the Kennels rushing down an aisle bisecting a massive pile of crates. “He went through that weird round doorway. C’mon!”

Cerberus righted himself and—his six eyes fixing upon the Fausters—galloped toward them.

Filled with disgust at seeing the horrible, three-headed lapdog that had terrorized her back in Limbo, Marlo sprinted toward Cerberus and punted him full-force into the spherical portal leading to the Really Big Farm.

“Touchdown!” Marlo shrieked as she turned to join her brother rushing toward the Kennels.

“I think you mean a goal,” Milton said as he dove into the portal, his skin prickling with electricity, rushing to keep up with Lucky several yards ahead of them.

“This place is
awful.
” Marlo grimaced as she entered the wretched warehouse of imprisoned pets. “The noise … 
the smell
.”

She pulled the collar of her hair pajama top over her face as she ran alongside her brother, their bare feet slapping against the concrete floor, racing after Lucky toward the back of the Kennels.

They cleared a winding wall of crate towers and skidded to a halt. A group of assorted creatures surrounded
a large tub nestled in a clearing of crates. Ushered up the steps by a gruesome, headless meat-doughnut demon was—

“Annubis!” Milton yelled.

The dog god snapped his head back as a headless/heartless demon shoved him to the rim of the vat.

“Milton! Marlo!” he bayed. “Do something!”

Marlo, never one for thinking a plan through mentally before enacting it physically, instinctively plunged her hand into her satchel, removing the last of the truth bombs. She brought it back over her shoulder.

“What
is
that?!” Milton shouted.

“It’s a bomb,” she said as she pitched it over her head toward the vat.

“A bomb?!” Milton repeated with disbelief.

“Yeah,” Marlo replied as she hit the floor. “No lie.”

THE THREE BLOND
boys walked down Avenue 51 in downtown Topeka, Kansas. The tallest, wearing a
Teenage Jesus
T-shirt, turned back to his friends.

“Just be cool, like TJ, got it?” he said, whispering, as Topeka—which means “a good place to dig potatoes” in the languages of the Kansa and the Ioway peoples—slowly yawned and stretched in the early morning air. “I know it seems wrong, but it’s one of those wrongs that’s right, okay?”

The two shorter boys—one wearing a
Keepin’ It Christian
T-shirt, the other a
There’s a Methodist to My Madness
tee—nodded, their curly hair flopping into their eyes.

“Okay,” the tall boy said as he popped a Final Judgmint in his mouth, wincing as his tongue crackled
briefly with electric yet undeniably minty pain. “Here they are.”

Plastered across the plywood wall of a boarded-up lot were dozens of posters touting the season finale of
Allah in the Family
. The tall boy handed his friends some black T.H.E.E.N.D.-branded Sharpies.

“Like the ads on T.H.E.E.N.D. say,” he explained as he uncapped his pen, “if we want our favorite shows back next season, then they have to win the ratings war, all right? And the website gave us all those great ideas how to make that happen, even if it comes to defacing public property, which is totally against the law. But we have to obey a higher power:
television
. So let’s be quick.”

The boys nodded and proceeded to scrawl the word “sucks” to the posters.

“This one’s out of ink,” one of the boys muttered as someone behind him offered a red T.H.E.E.N.D. Sharpie. “Wow, cool. Red. Where’d you get this …?”

The boys turned to find three dark-skinned boys—wearing
Allah in the Family, Wholly Shiite
, and
Malibu Mosque
T-shirts—standing behind them, glaring, biting into freshly unwrapped Doomsdanishes. The leader, a boy with black close-cropped hair and big ears, pointed over his shoulder, across the street, with his thumb.

On the other side of the avenue, against a boarded-up Liquid Paper Depot store, were dozens of
Teenage Jesus
posters, with the word “sucks” scrawled upon each one in red.

“Why, you … !”
the tall blond boy said as he set himself upon the leader of the rival gang. A little boy with a shaved head walked past in his
Peek-a-Buddha
T-shirt.

“Hey, guys,” the boy said with a peaceful smile. “Free yourself from this cycle of conditioned existence and suffering … 
oww
!”

The boys dragged the peace-loving passerby into their brawl. As the seven boys exchanged blows, Lester Lobe—owner of the area’s only metaphysical museum, the Paranor Mall—shuffled out onto the sidewalk to put out his extraterrestrial-shaped sandwich board.

“Hey,
not cool
!” the wild-eyed man yelled, straightening his red fez.

The kids stopped brawling and stared at the crazy old man in the pink-and-green camouflage Bermuda shorts and combat boots.

“I ain’t no friend of ‘the man,’ but I’ll yell ‘sooie’ and bring the pigs out here so fast, your heads’ll spin around like in
The Exorcist
!”

The boys had no idea what the man was shrieking about, but rightly assumed that his rant had something to do with calling the police. They scattered.

Lester shook his head and muttered.

“Man, I’m on edge,” he said as he drained his second cup of chewing tobacco juice, espresso, and blue-green VitaMold powder. “It’s those KOOK tenants of mine. I feel like a stranger in my own strange land.”

He pushed open the door—his entrance announced
by the five tones from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind—
and stepped into his crowded, cockeyed cathedral of curiosities.

The Paranor Mall was an 800-square-foot collection of supernatural-themed ephemera, including a big rhinestone-encrusted Psychomanthium, otherwise known as the Elvis Abduction Chamber.

But, due to the recession—which had been murder on the fringe phenomena industry—Lester had been forced to sublet half of his museum to the KOOKs, otherwise known as the Knights of the Omniversalist Order Kinship, to make ends meet.

As a condition of their lease agreement, Lester had made the KOOKs part of his Krazy Kultz exhibit just so that the Paranor Mall wouldn’t lose its “flow.” Puzzlingly, the new exhibit was drawing better crowds than all of his other displays combined.

I suppose it makes
some
sense
, Lester thought as he flipped the sign in the window from
CLOSED MIND
to
OPEN MIND
,
with all the wackiness, paranoia, and tension in the world lately—especially with all of those weird new TV shows—people are confused, seeking answers in unlikely places.…

Lester Lobe shivered as twelve-year-old Damian Ruffino emerged from his tent. He was a living exhibit, the preadolescent “prophet” of the KOOKs’ religion, their bratty “Bridge to the Other Side.”

The big-boned bruiser stretched, farted, then spat out a moist clump of sunflower seed husks, tinted in a rainbow of artificial colors due to a mouthful of Gummi Worms.

That boy puts the “mess” in “messiah,
” Lester thought with disgust.

“Aren’t you going to clean that up?” Lester said as he glared at the shells scattered about the floor.