Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (4 page)

A plastic tube snaked out of his mouth, winding its way to a mechanical bellows that sucked and puffed in a slow, steady rhythm.

Milton gently closed the door and knelt beside Damian. An IV tube was spliced into his wrist, while a heart monitor blipped and blinked like a first-generation
Atari game. He looked so peaceful. But Milton knew better. Damian was a nuclear bomb swaddled in blankets. Beside him, on the nightstand, were cartons of popped popcorn, in various flavors. Actually, boxes and bags of popcorn were piled all over the room.
Damian must have really liked popcorn
, Milton thought.
Who knew?

“Damian,” Milton whispered nervously. Even though Damian was, for all appearances, dead to the world—
this
world, anyway—cold sweat trickled down Milton’s back out of sheer habit.

Milton shook Damian’s sturdy, lifeless arm. “It’s me … Milton. C’mon. Don’t you want to beat me up?” he said.

The comatose bully’s eyes darted about beneath his eyelids.

Ignoring the old adage “Let sleeping thugs lie,” Milton tried shoving Damian awake, but he wouldn’t budge.

Footsteps echoed down the hall. Hard patent-leather shoes slapped against the linoleum floors, getting closer with each step. Milton slammed his fiberglass shoulder against Damian’s side.

“Heck,” he whispered.
“Is there a Heck?”

Damian’s eyes fluttered open. He registered Milton’s presence with flat, dilated pupils.

“B-butter?” he gasped.

Damian’s eyes closed and he fell back into unconsciousness.

The footsteps in the hall drew closer. Milton didn’t have much time. If he wanted proof that he wasn’t crazy, he had to get it now.

With all his might, Milton slammed into Damian’s side. Little did he estimate that his slight build could be amplified by pounds of fiberglass. Damian rolled violently to the wall, then—like a human pendulum—barreled back with such force that he lurched off the bed in a tangle of cords.

The life-support machines came crashing down, yanking out plugs and wires.

Milton gasped. Panic wrapped its fingers around his heart as his mind was dragged back to Heck, to the time that Damian had first entered Limbo.

Milton looked up at the bobbing balloon he held clenched in his trembling fist. A bad taste formed in the back of his mouth before slowly trickling down his
throat.
Milton
was the butter.
He
was the one who had, inadvertently, sent Damian down to Heck, unleashing upon the woebegone children of the Netherworld a demonic force that made the torments before seem like a library puppet show. It was all true:
Heck was real!

Alarms and buzzers sounded. An unwavering tone sliced through the din, the unmistakable sound of a patient flatlining. Milton bolted down the hallway. To his right was a gaggle of nurses and candy stripers.

“Stop that stick of butter!” one of the nurses shrieked.

Milton scrambled toward the stairwell like a frightened animal. Another bout of vertigo spun his internal compass, and he fell down a flight of stairs, a rolling pin of squealing fiberglass and tights. Shaken but unhurt, Milton slammed through the emergency exit and out into the parking lot.

He dove into a thatch of nearby shrubs and wriggled out of the costume like a big sweaty larva abandoning its egg. As he stepped out of his tights, Milton was struck by the feeling that he had forgotten something. Then, as he kicked the gnarled ball of hose away, it hit him: his backpack was still in Damian’s hospital room.

He reviewed the contents of the bag—books, mostly—and relaxed a little. There was nothing in it that connected directly back to Milton, nothing that could possibly identify him…

Milton’s stomach sank down into his sneakers. The “To Milton, From Mom” gift.

Several security guards emerged from the hospital. Milton would have to postpone feeling sorry for himself until he got home. He crouched down and darted through the maze of dense shrubs, hoping that there was something—
anything
—that could make him “feel butter” about his desperate situation.

4 · DEAD GIRL’S BLUFF

A HIGH-PITCHED
peal of piercing whines echoed down the hallway. The squeaky-wheel-of-a-broken-shopping-cart sound burrowed under Marlo’s skin like a sonic porcupine in the throes of death.

“Wait,” one of the demon guards said to the other as they herded Marlo, Norm, and Takara to their first class. “She’s doing it again. It’s a hoot!”

The demons followed the shrill sounds to a pair of green metal doors labeled
GIMME.
Snickering, they set their pitchsporks against the wall and pressed their snouts against the doors’ inset windows.

Marlo elbowed her way to one of the smudgy panes of glass. It was reinforced by embedded chicken wire.
Probably so it won’t shatter due to the screeches
, Marlo thought. She peered inside.

The room was lined with elevated shelves stuffed
with shiny new toys and candy. At the center was a human pyramid of raging toddlers mewling with want, their faces slick with a mixture of tears, drool, and snot. One little boy with a look of righteous entitlement teetered at the top with his trembling hand outstretched toward a glass jar brimming with fresh-baked cookies. The delicious odor was so powerfully enticing that Marlo could smell it even through the thick metal door.

Just as the furious boy was about to touch the jar, it was yanked away, suspended by fishing line. Marlo followed the translucent cord up to the ceiling, where it coiled through a pulley, then stretched across the room to a long pole manipulated by a chuckling demoness wearing a tiara. The creature reeled the line in with the teasing, expert hand of an old Greek fisherman, until the pyramid of whining children collapsed.

As the bruised, undeterred children clambered over one another to start their futile efforts anew, a herd of deep voices and clomping footfalls thundered from an intersecting hallway.

“I ken not wait to show you boys ze expensive, state-of-ze-art arcade we have just sealed up,” a snooty Frenchman sneered, tugging his flowing red velvet robe along the floor. The man was followed by ten miserable-looking teenage boys who shambled along behind their teacher, staring at their shabby penny loafers.

“Yes, Cardinal Richelieu,” they chanted dejectedly.

Norm stared at the group and blushed. “Boys,” she
mumbled while attempting to fix her hair, despite it being past the point of repair.

Hmm … Rapacia for boys
, Marlo reasoned.
Girls and boys -pried apart, then locked away in their own gender-specific torment. Just like in Limbo and European boarding schools. Brutal
.

One of the boys gave Marlo a quick once-over from the corner of his deep brown eyes. He shuffled down the hall with cool charisma, his hands thrust deep inside his pants pockets, giving him a permanent shrug.

Marlo smirked to herself.
A fellow klepto, no doubt
, she thought as she watched the intriguing, pale—almost translucent—boy disappear down the hall.
He even has to steal a
look.

The bell rang. The demon guards grumbled as they grabbed their pitchsporks.

“Looks like you girls are already tardy,” one of the guards said while picking its snout. “On your first day, no less.”

“That’s not fair!” Norm complained.

The other demon guard jabbed Norm in the bottom. “Neither is having corns on your toes the size of …
corn …
and sentenced to spend eternity on your feet,” it spat. “So just deal with it!”

The girls were prodded, poked, and nudged down the hall toward their first class.

The smoke in the classroom was thick and acrid. It curled Marlo’s nose so much she felt like her nose hair was getting a perm.

At the eye of this stinky, swirling cloud was a glowing orange ember—the tip of a foul cigar that flared and cooled in tireless rhythm. As Marlo groped for her seat in the carcinogenic fog, her movement fanned the smoke clear. At the desk was a wrinkled, jowly old woman puffing away at a small tobacco-filled log. She wore a mans work shirt, a khaki skirt, a frayed straw hat, and an expression like a rusty bear trap. The woman’s desk was covered in green felt with a deck of cards fanned out before her. Marlo’s breeze had caused the cigar to burn like a fuse, rapidly turning half of it to ash.

The woman leveled her cold eyes at Marlo. “Do you know how hard it is to get a Cohiba down here?” the woman rasped.

Marlo sat down at the only unoccupied desk, which was, unfortunately, right up front.

“I can’t say that I do,” she replied flatly.

Behind her, Bordeaux coughed. It was like the thin wheeze of a balloon animal.

“Aren’t there, like … laws against … smoking in a … classroom or … something?” Bordeaux managed between petite hacks.

The woman smiled around her cigar. “That must be
why it tastes so dern good,” she said, her voice rippling like liquid tar paper.

“Don’t worry,” Lyon whispered to Bordeaux. “Secondhand smoke is a totally awesome appetite suppressant. Plus, coughing is great for the abs.”

A display screen lowered behind the teacher. The lights in the room automatically dimmed, and the old woman rested her head on her desk, using her swollen hands as a pillow.

The lights came up, and the screen slid back into the ceiling. Marlo trembled. It didn’t matter that the store itself seemed kind of lame, she thought as she bit her nails. The hypnotic commercial had stoked the flames of desire burning within her to such a degree that beads of sweat formed on her greedy brow. She took a deep breath, clutched the sides of her desk, and looked around her. Norm, Lyon, Bordeaux—all of the girls—were gazing imploringly at one another with the pained look of QVC addicts who hadn’t paid their phone bills.

What was it the Grabbit said?
Marlo reflected.
“So
much for you to long for; the rub is you can’t have it”? That must be the whole point of this place. Rubbing our faces, day and night, in things we don’t have or need but somehow
need to have.

The teacher yawned deeply. From Marlo’s unfortunate vantage point, she could see that the inside of the teacher’s mouth was coated pitch-black. The old woman chomped back down on her cigar, pushed back from her desk, and lumbered toward the chalkboard. She wrote her name in quick squeaks and scrapes: “Ms. Tubbs: Consumer Math.”

The teacher turned to face the group of choking girls, all of whom were rubbing their bloodshot eyes.

“But y’all can call me Poker Alice,” she said, scooping up the deck of cards on her table and absentmindedly shuffling them in her wrinkled hands. “Welcome to Consumer Math. Here you’ll be learnin’ the essential skills necess’ry to fueling a capitalistic society: establishin’ credit, abusing credit, and vital debt accrual strategies…”

Bordeaux’s bony, bronzed arm shot into the air.

Poker Alice gazed down at her seating chart. “Yes, Miss …
Radisson?”

“Well, like, what’s there to know?” Bordeaux said. “I mean, like, all you need is to make sure Daddy gives you several major credit cards, in case the magnetic stripey thingy gets all worn on one. And also maybe, like, to have his assistant give you some of that paper
stuff in case you’re in a trendy boutique in a weird part of town that doesn’t take cards.”

The teacher took a long drag of her cigar and flicked the ash away with a weary wave.

“Well, Miss Radisson, firstly you can put your arm down.”

Bordeaux looked up at her slender hand and giggled. “I, like,
so
forgot!”

“Secondly,” Poker Alice continued, “not all of us are lucky enough to be havin’ yer assets.”

Bordeaux smiled smugly. “I work out a lot.”

The teacher chomped down on her cigar irritably. “The important thing is that there are many roads to financial ruin. After all, it’s not what yer economy can do fer you, but what you can do fer yer economy.”

Marlo had had enough. She waved her hand in the air. “What has this got to do with anything?” she said impatiently. “This just in:
We’re all dead
. What’s the point of money here? I thought you
couldn’t
take it with you?”

Lyon and Bordeaux tittered. Poker Alice scowled at Marlo, glanced down at her seating chart, and exhaled a puff of stinky smoke. “Yes, Miss Fauster. Did you have a question?”

Marlo sighed. “I just don’t understand why we’re wasting our time in a classroom when the coolest mall to end all malls is right above us, taunting us, just crying out to be exploited.”

Norm mumbled from her seat in the back row. “It
is
kind of mean,” she said in a voice that seemed incongruously deep for her body. “Considering why we’re here, and all.”

Lyon leaned into Bordeaux and whispered just softly enough for her voice to still, technically, be a whisper. “She probably wants to see if there’s a sale on wigs.”