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 something—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?”
41 · THE GiFT OF GRAB
HERE! MILTON SAID, pressing the present into his sister’s chest.
Marlo lowered her shaking, diamond-burdened arms and stared at the small package wrapped in deep blue foil, tied with a bright red bow.
“Milton, you shouldn’t have,” she replied. “Really. I’m busy here, and you have yet to give me anything I ever really liked.”
The Grabbit quaked anew.
“Stop all of this tiresome stalling.
There’s no way you can outfox.
Feed my greed; it’s quite appalling,
but first, what’s in the box?”
Marlo leaned into Milton and whispered, “What exactly is in the box?”
“No clue,” Milton answered. “But I have a feeling that won’t matter. Give the Grabbit a choice.”
“You can’t be serious,” Marlo countered. “I’ve got one of the most precious gems ever. Whatever’s in this box couldn’t possibly be anywhere near as good. It barely weighs anything.”
“Just ask it,” Milton replied. “Pretend it’s like a game show.”
“Hmm,” Marlo considered.
She cleared her throat.
“What’s in the box, you ask?” she posed to the green metal rabbit before her. “Well, that’s for us to know and you to find out, isn’t it?”
The Grabbit vibrated so hard that it hummed, a high-pitched frequency that made Milton clap his hands over his ears. The group of old women watching through the parted curtain checked their hearing aids.
“So what’s it going to be, bunny?” Marlo taunted. “The diamond or the mysterious secr
et inside this festively wrapped box?”
The old women pressing against the stage began calling out.
“The diamond!”
“The mysterious box!”
“Diamond!”
“Mysterious box!”
“An exasperating choice you pose.
How I love the precious rocks!
But a mystery I must expose;
show me what’s inside the box!”
Marlo plunked the Hopeless Diamond back into her fanny pack, grabbed the gift from Milton, and held it up to the Grabbit’s jittery metal limb.
“Now, Grabbit, for your big prize,” she announced, “the mysterious box!”
Marlo slid the package into the opening of the Grabbit’s Smash ’n’ Flash Atom Cannon arm. The gift fell in silently, a silence that spilled out across the stage and washed over the crowd. After a hushed moment, a faint whirring emanated from the Grabbit’s limbs, gradually gaining momentum, like a washer beginning its spin cycle. The Grabbit began to shake and lurch, as if it were the victim of an unbalanced load, which indeed it was.
“What have you two done?
Is this some kind of prank?
I’m spinning, spunning, spun,
And feeling very … blank.”
The grinning creature wobbled violently as the Hopeless Diamond in its right arm twisted through the Smash ’n’ Flash Atom Cannon’s coils, gaining in velocity, while the gift in the left arm did likewise, only with less fanfare. Milton and Marlo stepped back.
“Silly Grabbit,” Marlo said. “Tricks are for kids.”
With a mighty shudder, the diamond and small, mysterious, gift-wrapped package were thrust into one another with explosive fury. The Grabbit’s metal hull cracked in two, splitting along its leering Cheshire grin.
“Duck!” Marlo yelled, throwing her brother to the ground and covering him with her arm.
The Grabbit’s metal skin puckered, sucking in from the inside with creaking dents and dimples before exploding outright. The curtain was ripped from the stage and whipped into the air, an angry ghost of flaming velvet.
Yojuanna’s image degraded into a collection of low-definition cubes held together by stuttering static. Her face flattened until it was nothing more than a crude sketch comprised of meaningless letters and numbers, a code that no longer had the energy to decipher itself.
“Snap,” she said just before the screen burst into a shower of sparks and glass.
A scorched, tattered note floated gently to the stage in front of Milton’s outstretched arm, brushing against his hand. He grabbed it and sat down cross-legged on the stage. Hundreds of elderly women and demons screamed, swatting away pieces of flaming metal. Milton adjusted his glasses and at once identified the familiar loops, slants, and meticulous crossing of t’s as those of his mother.
Dearest Milton,
There’s nothing I can possibly say to help you feel any better about your sister’s death or the traumatic experience you had. It was devastating for us all, but especially for you, having been there with her at the time. No one could ever know how you feel—you’re probably having trouble figuring out exactly how you feel yourself—and I won’t patronize you by pretending I know what you’re going through. And believe me, it’s hard to not try. You’re my precious little boy, and it’s my job to protect you against unnecessary pain and suffering. And I’ve failed. There’s nothing I can do to remove the grief and guilt. Nothing.
Which is why I’ve given you this gift. It’s a box full of what you could have done to prevent Marlo’s death. It’s full of the worries you should have, churning that terrible day over and over in your head. It’s full of the resentment your family has toward you for surviving what she didn’t. It’s full of the responsibility you should bear to somehow make things right.
It’s a box full of nothing.
There’s nothing you could have done. There is no amount of worry that will bring her back. There is absolutely no resentment harbored by those who love you, nor is there any responsibility you have to those around you in assuaging our grief.
So this is my gift to you, an empty box. A clean slate. A new beginning. Because sometimes the greatest gift of all is the gift of nothing.
All my love,
Mom
Teardrops splashed onto the note, blurring his mother’s signature. All this time, he had been carrying this empty box around, a gift that—at the same time—had been full of so much. The best present he had ever gotten, despite the unspeakable hardships he had endured to protect it.
“What’s wrong?” Marlo asked, nudging close to him. Milton silently passed her the note. Her dark eyes grew wet. As tears leaked down her cheek, she shook her head and laughed. “No wonder the Grabbit couldn’t stomach the box,” she said, sniffing back snot. “It didn’t have anything in it except love. It gave its fat greedy belly a bad case of indigestion.”
Marlo looked around her at the utter chaos of the stage, weeping with sadness and with joy. She wiped her eyes with her sweatshirt sleeve.
“It’s weird,” she murmured. “I feel wonderful. Like I’ve been, I don’t know … buried—which I probably am, somewhere—but now I’m suddenly … not. It’s like I’m free. Totally free. And I didn’t even know I wasn’t.”
Milton grew suddenly feverish. He pressed his face against the cool surface of the stage. His head swirled with vague, dreamlike images. His nose prickled with sharp smells. His ears were like a blender churning with sounds. He was undergoing another attack of “the ferrets.”
Milton sniffed the air and raised his head in alarm. Piercing the hot clouds of lavender, rosewater, and talc was the brutal musk of anger. Sure enough, there was Damian, brandishing the scepter that had once held what smelled like bratwurst. Another smell coiled around Damian’s, like two serpents braided in a single purpose.
“Mr. Fauster,” Principal Bubb said with disgust, her mouth contorting around the disagreeable name. “We meet again.”
Cold, liquid dread filled Milton. He tried to stop his shaking, to at least appear that he felt braver than he actually did, but his body, like it had so many times before, betrayed him.
“Don’t worry, bro,” Marlo consoled with a pat on his back. “We’ve been through worse.”
Milton glared at his sister.
“Well, at least as bad,” she added. “Nearly. Anyway, there’s always some wriggle room in every situation. It’s just a matter of sniffing it out.”
A parade of sour smells marched through Milton’s nostrils, accompanied by the clang of a hundred shopping carts.
“Over there!” several old ladies screamed, their bony fingers waggling at the spiral escalator.
Cascading down the escalator toward the concourse were hundreds of PODs. Their shopping-cart wheels slammed against the moving stairs in their rush to the concourse.
“Principal Bubb!” one of the security demons called.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb turned angrily, not wanting to take her curdled eyes off her prey, quarry that had escaped before and that she would do anything to capture again.
“What?!”
“We’ve g-g-got a sit-situation,” the security demon stammered. “Look!”
The principal eyed the onslaught of phantoms, intent on making the most of their shopping spree. Her head throbbed, especially around where she had had her horns filed and buffed. She locked eyes with Damian, who had just reached the steps leading to the rostrum.
“Mr. Ruffino,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb barked. “He’s all yours. But I want him intact, understand? I can’t punish pieces.”
Damian smirked. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, crossing his fingers behind his back. “You can count on me.”
Principal Bubb sighed.
“There’s a first for everything, I suppose,” she said wearily. “Until we meet again, Mr. Fauster,” she called behind her as she turned to join the security squad amassing to deal with the POD invasion. “And I can assure you we will.”
Marlo stoo
d up defiantly. “Hey, Amandi,” she shouted as Damian clambered onto the stage. “If you want to just talk things out—”
Marlo sidled up to the wreckage that, until recently, had been the Grabbit and picked up a severed metal ear.
“—I’m all ears.”
Marlo lunged toward Damian, slicing the ear through the air like a sword.
“Now, Milton!” she screamed back at her brother. “Run!”
Milton looked out at the chaotic crowd of terrified old women struggling to get past other terrified old women. Then, in a bright flash of insight, Milton could see a path cutting perfectly through the mob, leading to a stream of PODs rippling out of the Virgin Mary Megastore. He turned to his sister. “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “I promise.”
Marlo smiled as she frantically clashed ear against pointy scepter.
“What part of run don’t you understand?!” she shouted.
Gathering up the full force of his fleeting ferret power, Milton leapt from the stage and sprinted down the path as it disappeared behind him.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Damian yelled, rushing toward Milton.
“Have a nice trip!” Marlo shouted, throwing the metal ear at Damian’s legs, sending him tumbling off the stage and into a mosh pit of wrinkles, adult diapers, and plastic hip joints.
Milton rushed to meet the stampede of squealing wheels and tramping work boots. A man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard considered Milton with cloudy blue eyes, pushing his bursting cart toward the concourse exit.
The herd of phantoms pressed onward toward the security vestibule leading to the underground parking garage. Inside the hallway of high-tech surveillance equipment, the security demons panicked, futilely trying to control a situation that had long since passed controllable. As Milton approached the black curtains, something sliced through his left calf. He screamed, toppling to the ground and rolling out of the ceaseless crush of shopping carts just in time to avoid being flattened by thousands of merciless wheels. Above him stood Damian, glaring down triumphantly. His A GRANDMA IS A MOM WITH EXTRA FROSTING sweatshirt swelled and collapsed as he caught his breath. His mouth was a sneering smear of lipstick. His eyes burned dark and dense, like the black hole that had nearly formed moments ago.
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck Page 21