Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (23 page)

38 · THE BUCKTOOTH
STOPS HERE

MARLO LEANED INTO
a turn out of one escalator and down into the next. Milton gritted his teeth, his hands coiled tightly under the lip of the kayak’s edge.

Soon the kayak thudded loudly onto yet another floor, skidding past the Out of Body Shop before gliding back into another moving staircase, thanks to the expert rudder that was Marlo’s foot.

Milton managed to steal a desperate peek behind him. Clumps of frightened old women fanned themselves outside the escalators. And, in hot pursuit, Damian bounded over the elderly debris just one floor above.

The Fausters slammed into the fourth tier, toppling over a row of wheezing women clutching platinum
walkers. Marlo smirked as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of phantoms coursed out of Mallvana’s luxurious stores, each pack opening up another emergency exit for their comrades outside. Mayhem was spreading quickly.

Marlo pressed her foot into the bejeweled mall floor. The kayak skidded to a stop just outside of Aberzombie & Flinch.

“What are we doing?” Milton asked.

Marlo hopped out of the kayak and tugged it behind her.

“Nope, don’t need any help, thanks for asking,” Marlo grunted. “We’re about to shoot down the mother of indoor escalator rapids.”

Before them lay a majestic helix of escalators lushly upholstered in black velvet, spiraling in near-mechanical free fall to the main concourse below. It made the escalators above seem like bone-dry Slip ’n’ Slides. The plunging chute ahead was Niagara Falls by comparison.

Marlo scooted the kayak into position and took in the breathtaking mallscape. “Ah,” she said with something bordering on contentment. “What a beautiful day to do something really, really stupid.”

Milton ducked his head between his shaking knees while Marlo kicked out behind her like a peevish mule, sending their kayak screaming down the coiling metal slalom.

“Whooo!!” Marlo squealed, waving her arms as if she were back home at the Dunk ’n’ Disorderly water park. The speeding yellow kayak buffeted about the escalator violently before hugging the outermost handrail in centrifugal intensity.

Milton’s eyes were squeezed shut. His entire digestive system was crackling with a sickening electricity. He felt like he was having a grand mall seizure. The kayak slammed into hard, level ground that did nothing to dampen its amazing momentum.

Suddenly, with a great thud, the boat came to a complete, painful stop. Their bodies lurched forward, apparently receiving the news of their abrupt halt a little late. Milton reached out his hand, touching something cold, something metal, something that tingled in a maddening way that filled him with an almost unbearable anxiety, an itchiness inside that nothing could ever satisfactorily scratch.

His eyes slowly opened and crawled up the hulking metal figure before him, from its painted white paws to its pudgy metal belly to its sickly pink nose until finally resting on a pair of long slender ears.

39 · A HOLE LOT OF NOTHiNG

“MILTON, GRABBIT,” MARLO
said, rising to her feet. “Grabbit, Milton.”

Milton stood up and surveyed the haunted, full-metal rabbit before him, perched atop a riser in the back of the concourse behind plush, emerald-green curtains. What confused Milton most, though—besides the rhyming rabbit’s existence in the first place—were the coiling arms that had been soldered onto its sides. He could just make out stenciled letters painted beneath each arm, spelling out
SMASH ’N’ FLASH ATOM CANNON
. He gulped.

“H-hello … Grabbit,” Milton managed.

Marlo’s smile faded. The Grabbit seemed so …
testy
. No interest in how she had gotten the diamonds, her brilliant plan, the amusing anecdotes collected along the way. The hulking hare just wanted to hop right to the finish line.
Well
, Marlo mused,
rabbits
do
love carats
.

She sighed, unzipped her fanny pack, and—with hands trembling under the strain—scooped out one of the Hopeless Diamonds and held it up, supporting her shaky arm with the other so that the Grabbit could see her achievement in all its glittering glory.

Behind the stage, pulsating on one of Mallvana’s massive plasma screens, was Yojuanna, dancing in jerky spasms, clad in a shimmering electric jumpsuit with lasers for suspenders. Her face was dead white, like a clown’s, with black dollar signs painted around her mad eyes. The digital diva’s face loomed large as she gazed down at the diamond and sang:

Milton shot his sister a baffled look. “What’s with all the rhyming?” he asked.

Marlo shrugged. “You get used to it.”

She stepped forward to the Grabbit. Milton
watched as his sister’s eyes crawled over the metal creature, transfixed. She shifted from foot to foot. It looked almost like her whole body, her whole soul—everything that she was—had to go to the bathroom, really, really bad. Marlo eyed the openings at the tip of each of the Grabbit’s coiling arms.

Marlo stood on her tiptoes, just beneath the Grabbit’s right hand, and hoisted up one of the Hopeless Diamonds in her palm. A demon in overalls flicked on a switch, and bright green spotlights flooded the stage. The Grabbit gave off a sickly glow. One of the lights popped, leaving the creature’s face in darkness.

“Uh-oh, we lost a light,” he shouted to a cohort up on the scaffolding. “And it’s just about showtime. See if you can’t get a replacement to fill in this black hole.”

As the gorgeously glum jewel sparkled in the stage lights, a terrible thought struck Milton:
Atom smasher. Diamonds. Black hole
.

“Wait!” yelped Milton, running to his sister’s side. “Black hole!”

Startled by the sound of her brother’s yelp, Marlo jumped. The diamond rolled out of her palm and into
the maw of the Grabbit’s metal hand, where it dropped with a reverberating
thunk
. The vibration traveled down the Grabbit’s arm, making it hum all over.

Marlo was shaking. “What?” she asked. “You scared the bejeebus out of me!”

Milton stared at the smiling metal monster. The coin had dropped, and he waited for the candy to fall.

Marlo backed away from the vibrating Grabbit.

“Black hole? Is that one of your stupid
Battlestar Trek
sci-fi things? What does it have to do with—”

“Black holes are
real,”
Milton said. “They’re a region of space-time where nothing can escape.”

Marlo cocked her nonexistent eyebrow. “Like family game night?”

“Sort of,” Milton said. “A black hole is kind of like when you divide by zero. It creates this infinite impossibility that …”

Marlo’s eyes were dark with incomprehension.

“… that can suck up and destroy everything around it. And that’s what the Grabbit’s trying to do.”

Marlo folded her arms and scrutinized the Grabbit’s indecipherable grin.

“How can a big metal bunny make a black hole out of diamonds?” she asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Some scientists were able to do it back up on the Surface,” Milton replied, pacing in front of the stage. “They took a particle accelerator and slammed atoms together and made tiny black holes that lasted only
a few seconds. But if someone—or some
thing
—slammed together something as dense as the Hopeless Diamonds, they could possibly make one big enough to swallow up …
everything.”

“But why?” Marlo said with frustration.

A withered woman with a puffy cloud of white hair piled on top of her head peeked through the curtain. “It’s those terrible children!” she kvetched to a flock of skinny white-haired women grumbling like a cluster of grouchy Q-tips. Milton parted the curtain and peered out into the concourse. The group of old women and assorted demons slowly transformed into, if not quite an angry mob, a decidedly crotchety one.

The Grabbit’s voice sliced through the din growing beyond the curtain.

Marlo trembled. What if her brother was right? What if all this had been a trick to help the Grabbit with some evil plot? But why would something, even something that wasn’t truly alive, want to wipe out everything around it, including itself?

Milton anxiously peered out over the ever-growing crowd. “We’ve got company,” he said.

The woman he had seen in Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s not-so-secret lair snaked through the crowd toward the stage.

“Milton,” Marlo said, joining him to peek through the curtain, “if I don’t give the Grabbit the diamonds, we’ll be taken away and sent …
somewhere worse
. And who knows what would happen to you. You wouldn’t last a second in a place like Sadia, tormented by bullies like—”

“Damian!”
Milton cried, pointing to the rim of the swelling crowd.

Cutting a swath—literally—through the mob was Damian: half boy half girl, and all dangerous, swishing his scepter through the air.

Marlo gazed out at the growing mob and fretfully tucked her blue hair behind her ears.

“I have no choice,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “We can’t run away—there’s nowhere
to
run—and if we stay here, they’ll just lock us away in some extra-terrible place for stealing the jewels. The only hope we have is that the Grabbit’s telling the truth, and it can shake up this place, control the new economy, and make me in charge of a circle where—hopefully—I can pardon you.”

Marlo pardon
him
, Milton thought. It was almost funny.
Almost
. But in this upside-down, topsy-turvy place, it would only seem fitting that his sociopathic sister would be in some position of power, absolving Milton of his crimes of common sense.

Marlo walked over to the Grabbit’s coiling right limb. She wrapped her shaking hands around the second
Hopeless Diamond and struggled to lift it out of her fanny pack.

“I’m
. trying, I’m trying!” grumbled Marlo as, with trembling arms, she lifted the diamond up to the Grabbit’s metal paw.

“This isn’t right, Marlo!” Milton shouted against the noise of the agitated crowd. “Please! If we stall, something else is bound to present itself…”

Present
, Milton thought. He patted himself. Tucked into the back of his singed pants was the small present his mom had given him what seemed like—and in a way
was
—a lifetime ago.

Meanwhile, Yojuanna gyrated herself into a digital frenzy outside on the concourse wall, the screen’s plasma cells working hard to keep up with her furious motion. It was as if she were stirring a pot of electricity, with herself as the spoon.

The computer-generated pop star grew warped and distorted. Her once-perfect, expertly coded features were now gruesome and exaggerated. The elderly women in the audience shook their gray heads.

“You call that music?” one woman with painted-on eyebrows said to her friend.

“Shameful,” her friend concurred.

40 · A DiAMOND
iN THE BLUFF

FAITH, HOPE, AND
Charity strode their synchronized runway strut from Hosanna Republic to the crowd’s periphery meeting Lilith at the edge of the swelling, milling mob.

“Has the Grabbit started without us?” Hope asked, stretching the limits of her satin high-heeled pumps to see the stage. “I hear something going on back there….”

A musical ringtone chirruped from Lilith’s thumb. “Excuse me,” she said, turning away to answer her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux Phone. “Hello? Yes, this is …
what? Both
stagecoaches? You’ve got to be kidding … of course, I know your jokes are funnier than that but … you’re sure? No sign of either Hopeless—?” Lilith rubbed her
temples.
“Okay,”
she said fretfully. “I’ll do what I can here.”

Lilith flexed her hand, ending her call, and peered above the murky sea of gray hair. Through a part in the curtain, she saw two children onstage, arguing with one another in front of the Grabbit. The small, twerpy boy with glasses looked familiar.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she mumbled as she surveyed the concourse. Her biting green eyes rested on Bea “Elsa” Bubb, descending the stairs from the security cove next to the Garden of Eatin’ with several security demons. Lilith plunged two of her slender fingers into her mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.

“Blubb!” Lilith shouted. “Over here!”

Principal Bubb grudgingly joined Lilith at the rim of the crowd. “I’m not your dog, by the way,” Principal Bubb protested.

“I know … my dogs all have
pedigrees,”
Lilith said, looking around her nervously and speaking to the principal in hushed tones. “Right now, Fido, I just want to know what you’re going to do about
that.”
Lilith jabbed a finger at the stage.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s nostrils flared with anger. There they were, the Fauster children, flaunting their wretchedness up onstage, at the Grabbit’s feet, no less. She turned her yolky eyes back at Lilith.

“I
am
doing something about it,” she replied. “In fact, I have someone on it right now.”

“Let me guess,” Lilith said. “The deranged boy wearing makeup and waving the scepter.”

Principal Bubb saw Damian, screaming at frightened old women to get out of his way, bounding toward the stage.

“Don’t botch this, Blubb,” Lilith said with breath like a hot blast of cinnamon. “If this doesn’t go down well—”

“—then
you’re
going down,” Principal Bubb hissed. “That nasty bespectacled nerd onstage is
Milton Fauster
. Now, however did he get here without you knowing it?”

Lilith swallowed hard. Her golden face blanched to tarnished tin. “Well,” she continued weakly. “At least Mammon isn’t here yet. We still have a little time.”

Principal Bubb stared across the throbbing concourse at a disturbed clot of old women, screaming as someone—or some
thing
—entered the gray-haired fray.

“Very
little, by the looks of it,” she mumbled with a mixture of awe and unease.

A stooped, hulking figure sliced its way through the gasping crowd, leaving behind it a jagged scarlike swath. The barrel-chested yet elegant creature—perhaps eight feet tall—twitched its pointy ears to note the various sounds surrounding it, while never once taking its cold green eyes from the stage.

“M-m-mammon,” Lilith stammered.

Mammon—a large, brooding man-wolf stuffed into
an expensive power suit—stalked closer to the stage in hungry strides. Lilith elbowed her way through the crowd to staunch the pulsing gush of his progress. Bea “Elsa” Bubb followed in the wake of the desperate devil’s advocate, savoring Lilith’s panic as if sipping a rare vintage of champagne—slowly so that the bubbles wouldn’t tickle her snout.

“Chairman!” Lilith yelped as she sprung into the air, waving her bamboo-thin arm like a drowning praying mantis.

Mammon stopped. His head swiveled with a predator’s swift grace. Principal Bubb gulped, yet her throat was so dry that it had nothing to swallow.

The chairman’s face was bare, shaved smooth from the top of his forehead to midway down his neck. His features were dusted with dark stubble, save for his smooth, moist snout and thin black lips.

Mammon briefly considered Lilith with his unreadable emerald eyes, then strode over to her. Frightened old women dove out of his way as if he were helming an invisible tanker that displaced gurgling gray water. He stood before Lilith and the principal with the cold, stony silence of an ancient creature that has long outlived social niceties.

Mammon’s charcoal pinstripe suit with its squared, draping shoulders made the creature’s upper body seem somehow gorilla-like in proportion. The wolf-demon
wore the suit like armor, as if every seam and stitch had been engineered to breed submission and uncertainty on the battlefield of a corporate boardroom.

“M-m-mamm,” Lilith faltered again, sounding like a sputtering outboard motor.

Mammon set down his briefcase with a grunt—only the grunt didn’t come from him. Instead of an elegantly tooled leather attaché case, Mammon sported a living black boar, which the wolf-demon held by a handle attached to leather straps ribbed around the bristly creature’s midsection. Striped down its back, an inch to the left of the swine’s spine, was a long gold zipper stretching from the nape of its neck to its tail.

“Did you just call me ‘ma’am’?” Mammon growled.

This is going to be good
, Bea “Elsa” Bubb thought.

Lilith trembled, her gangly limbs rattling like someone rolling dice in a game of Yahtzee. “No,” she managed. “Of course not. I … I’m just … excited to finally meet you. And cold. But that’s what I get for having virtually no body fat … uh … nice briefcase.” Lilith snickered, a hyena in a designer dress laughing at her own joke.

“Is everything under control, Miss Couture?” Mammon growled.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb exposed every one of her nasty, yellow teeth in a gracious leer. “Chairman Mammon,” the principal said, bolstered by Lilith’s lack of composure.

Lilith nudged the principal sharply with the bony
dagger that was her elbow. “Principal, perhaps you should tend to that …
situation
we were discussing earlier?”

“Yes,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied reluctantly. “I wouldn’t want
your
situation to affect
our
ceremony.”

The principal stormed off toward the stage on an intercept course with Damian, looking over her shoulder to give Lilith one last parting sneer.

“Situation?” Mammon barked. His briefcase sniffed the air with its wet pink snout, then grunted in disapproval. “There, there, my filthy Lucre,” Mammon cooed, scratching the beast behind its stiff, pointy ears. “I smell it, too … something fishy. Like convenience-store sushi.”

Lilith’s face muscles tugged, tied, and tamed her grimace into a bright, confident smile. “Fishy? Of course not! It’s nothing … no big deal. Nothing to concern yourself—”

“No big deal?!” Mammon roared. “I’ve spent
centuries
inflaming the human heart with greed. And why? To ensure that everything is indeed a
big deal.”

“No need to be so grumpy, Mr. Chairman,” Lilith murmured in a tone as sweet and intoxicating as freshly baked rum cake. “Even if something
were
to happen—which it won’t—it’s not like you, with all your assets, would ever be hurting for money if a deal were to—”

“I don’t make deals for the money,” he snorted. “I do it to
do it
. Money is just a way of keeping score.”

Lilith shrunk back, crumpling like a corsage on the morning after prom.

“And while your wiles may work on the Big Guy Downstairs,” the demon man-wolf continued, patting his bulging breast pocket, “I assure you that the closest thing to my heart is my billfold. All I require from you is the assurance that all will go according to plan.”

“Of course,” Lilith replied shakily as she gave a sideways glance toward the stage, where the Fauster children debated with each other before the unfathomable robotic rabbit, where a snorting bull-of-a-boy in drag shoved old women out of his way in a mad rush to intercept the siblings, and where Principal Bubb rushed to intercept the interceptor. “What could possibly go wrong?”