“The Azafooms are especially agitated today, by the smell of it,” Principal Bubb noted above, sniffing the air with her dainty nose.
Zip! Zizzle!
The Terawatts crouched on the ground in fear. A riot of clashing odors pricked Milton’s nose, but his sense of smell was so dull that he couldn’t make any sense of them. Grass clippings, moldy cheese, cherry Jell-O, very-used kitty litter. As soon as one muffled odor elbowed its way to the front of the pack, it was overtaken and dragged back into the mob.
“But then again, they always get that way,” the demoness continued, “around feeding time.”
Whoomp!
A honeycomb panel slid open twenty feet away from Milton. Inside was a fat, snarling pustule with a gaping cave of gnashing teeth.
Snarp! Snarp!
Long, bladelike claws twitched along its sides, thrashing blindly at the air around it. The panel slid closed, just as another panel—revealing yet another hungry, boil-like creature—opened.
Whoomp! Whoomp!
The arena’s red panels slid randomly open and closed. The ravenous beasts inside popped out with all the manic ferocity of an especially gruesome game of Whac-A-Mole.
“Awww, they’re so cute when they’re young,” the fake principal said as she flitted through the gate above. “Now, one Azafoom will lead you to freedom with its ever-changing bouquet of sweet fragrances. The others will lead you to the hungry mouths of their young through their pungent, distracting reek,” the shapely principal called out over her gleaming shoulder plate as she dove toward the exit.
Thoop!
The lights went out.
“Your noses know. Let’s just pray they’re up to snuff,” she laughed. “Not that I would know anything about praying …”
Marlo’s shade-self wrestled with the vicious bird shadow along the otherwise placid streets of Generica, Kansas. She could feel the creature’s sharp, ice-cold beak jabbing at her, as if trying to peck away …
My soul! Marlo realized as she rolled along the gutters in a dark, feathery tumble. This spirit is trying to fillet my soul! It’s been hunting me ever since I got to the Surface, and I guess when Mom and Dad started to come to grips with me being dead and all, my grief connection got weak, and this thing swooped in for the kill!
The bird spirit mercilessly poked holes through Marlo’s shadow and kept dragging her to the darkness of the city’s sewer grates. She fought to gain purchase on a sharp patch of sunlight in the street, a place where she could recoup some sense of definition and strength, but Marlo could feel her hold grow slack under the flapping shadow’s unrelenting tug.
“Baron Samedi,” the Grin Reaper shouted from outside Marlo’s chamber. “We losing girl. To Litsowo.”
The dark, slender man in his top hat and tails knelt down before the controls of the Wastrel Projector below.
“The vice principal won’t be likin’ this—turnin’ up the light juice—but he won’t be wantin’ us to be losin’ another timoun to de big shadow zwazo, neither.”
Baron Samedi’s bulging eyes examined a row of fluctuating meters and digital readouts. He sighed.
“Light like likid … like water,” the man mumbled, watching the flow of light. “Is Haitian voodoo belief that the nouvo dead be slippin’ into rivers and streams for a year and a day before they reborn.”
Baron Samedi turned a dial.
“But mebbe some spirits too young and not be knowin’ how to swim … get swallowed up by big mal fish.”
The golden trickle of light coiling up the Wastrel Projector’s network of fiber-optic vines flared with dangerous radiance. He patted his white-gloved hands with satisfaction.
“Yuh did see dat?” he said, grinning beneath the already grinning skull painted on his face. “A dun deal. Nothing to—”
A great blast of blinding honey light surged up the Wastrel Projector’s stalk, engulfing the baron with a sickening sizzle. With his sad, wet-marble eyes, the Grin Reaper peered down from the railing above, considering the pile of hot ash that had, moments ago, answered to the name Baron Samedi. A yellow phone at the base of the machine rang. The Grin Reaper slunk down the stairs to the main level and plucked the oddly glowing phone from its cradle.
“Hello, you reach Shadow Box. This is … yes, Vice Principals. It was machine. The baron turn it up. We were losing another. You want talk to him?”
The Grin Reaper stared at the baron’s smoldering cinders.
“He is on smoking break,” the hooded creature replied as the Wastrel Projector shuddered and spasmed beside him. “May I take message?”
Marlo’s shadow seared the sidewalk—sharp, dark, and strong, as if she had been spray-painted in black onto the asphalt with a her-shaped stencil. She kicked the bird spirit as hard as she could, flinging the menacing silhouette across the street under the awning of the All Washed Up Laundromat. Marlo hurled herself to the streaking shadow of a passing SUV.
I’ve got to get to Fragopolis, she thought as she sped down Wicked Wichita Way. I need some of Hans’s grief-stricken devotion to keep my connection strong, or else I’m birdseed.
SOMETHING WRIGGLED AGAINST Milton’s side beneath his Unity-Tard.
Lucky, Milton thought as he reached inside a gash in his armor to free his squirming ferret.
The Sunshine Sneezer, groping around in the dark, latched on to Milton’s arm.
“What are you doing?” the boy asked.
“Feeling Lucky,” Milton replied as he held his flustered pet in his arms.
Sam snorted as he and the other children huddled around Milton.
“Blind optimism isn’t going to get us out of this, Dork Knight,” he said.
“No, but my ferret might,” Milton replied with a grin that no one but the Sunshine Sneezer could hear. “Lucky. He thinks with his nose.”
Zoof! Zun!
The whoosh of darting Azafooms brushed past the Terawatts’ heads. Lucky’s tiny pink nostrils flared as they were assaulted by a blast of intensely pleasant odors: coconut suntan oil, Toll House cookies, pine trees, and Froot Loops. He stretched out his long, slender body and, straining toward the odor, struggled in Milton’s grasp.
“You know seeing-eye dogs?” Milton said as he balanced on his Skimmer Ring. “Well, Lucky will be our smelling-nose ferret. His snout has got hold of something now, I can tell. Quick, let’s form a train, everybody holding on to each other, and I’ll use Lucky like an odor compass to lead us out of here. Grab the three Zetawatts, put them on your boards, and let’s go.”
Thum! Snarp! Snarp!
A hatch opened nearby. Milton could hear the monstrous baby Azafooms, slavering with mindless hunger, their jaws snatching at the air.
“Now. Before we’re grub grub.”
Zoop!
Milton felt the Sunshine Sneezer grab hold of his sides. A flying Azafoom whizzed past, its six tiny wings buzzing like dentists’ drills, and nicked Caterwaul’s ear. She cried out.
Milton kicked at the ground with one foot, propelling the Skimmer Ring forward like a skateboard. The train of Terawatts sped into the darkness.
Thoom!
Lucky strained forward, latching on to the sweet-smelling Azafoom. He stretched out, arching his fuzzy white body toward the smell so that Milton would know which direction to go through the confounding aromatic maze. Suddenly, another odor assailed the ferret’s nose: something sharp and citric, like the smell of a veterinary hospital floor. Lucky shook off the smell as another crossed his path. Milton, feeling his wobbling ferret stiffen in one direction, kicked at the ground, pushing his Skimmer Ring faster.
Ziff!
The ferret struggled to regain hold of the coconut-cookie-pine-Froot-Loops smell. Lucky nipped Milton’s hand.
“Faster!” Milton yelped. “Lucky’s losing the trail!”
Caterwaul screamed from behind. “I almost fell into one of those nasty bug nurseries!”
“Keep close, everybody!” Milton yelled, kicking at the ground with his foot.
A great blast of hot stench hit Milton’s face, as if he had opened the door to an oven broiling Limburger lasagna. Though he could barely smell it, he found that he could taste it in the back of his throat. Milton leaned hard to his right and sped his friends away from the eager jaws of the baby Azafoom.
Zoosh!
A full-grown Azafoom dove from above, leaving behind the smell of freshly mown grass. Lucky twitched, confused as to which trail to take up, until an undercurrent of gasoline and sweat permeated the creature’s wake. Lucky latched on to the original scent and stiffened to his left, with Milton adjusting his course in kind.
Suddenly, the gaming arena of Olfactrix was filled with light. Milton’s stomach rolled over and played dead as he saw, with his failing eyes, that he and his friends had scooted halfway up the sloping side of the sphere and were—due to the Sense-o-Round’s altered physics—nearing the ceiling, skimming the walls of the arena like a roller coaster in slow motion.
Honeycomb panels harboring ravenous baby Azafooms slid open and closed, randomly, around them. Milton could see, sixty or so feet ahead, the gates surrounding the exit portal. A jackal-headed man weighed souls just beyond the gate.
Annubis! Milton thought with a brief burst of joy. Then he realized that his friend the dog god was just another piece of Milton’s afterlife repurposed into some game bent on draining children of their souls. Hope seemed distant, a dream viewed through a telescope. The lights went out.
Ziff! Ziff!
The arena was crisscrossed with puzzling trails of scent: wet cardboard, greasy chicken fingers, nail polish. Lucky drew in frantic lungfuls of smell. An Azafoom shot past Lucky, leaving an overwhelming odor that was keen, electric, and damp. It smelled like his master. The ferret squirmed. Suddenly, Lucky’s nose tickled with the puzzlingly pleasing blend of suntan oil, cookies, pine, and Froot Loops. Lucky latched on to the odor—the smell of freedom—and held on to it with a ferret’s unshakeable will.
Thum! Snarp! Snarp!
The air brushed Milton’s matted hair as he kicked the ground beneath his Skimmer Ring. Mewling baby Azafooms snapped at his sides.
“Almost there … almost there …,” Milton said between gritted teeth as he tried to push his human train forward faster.
Lucky weaved through a tangle of rotten teeth, curdled milk, and soiled laundry odors. A hatch housing a snapping baby Azafoom opened up ahead.
Thum! Snarp! Snarp!
“Watch out!” Milton shouted as the chain of children banked hard. “We’re hanging one heck of a Louie!”
The ferret wriggled, fighting to regain the aroma leading out of this insidious nest of hideous scents. A rich clot of odors commingled at the back of Lucky’s throat—coconut, pine, Froot Loops—a fireworks display of victorious aromas.
Zoof!
Lucky was right on the Azafoom’s tail as it closed in on the gates.
Howler Monkey, the middle car of the runaway train of Terawatts, slammed his shoulder into a snarl of metal bars.
“Oww!” he yelled as the clang reverberated throughout the arena.
Milton stamped down on the tail of his Skimmer Ring. It skidded to a stop. He could hear the Zetawatt boy, Joey, struggling to free himself from the spire as his friends hurtled into the exit portal behind him.
“We’ve got to rescue—” Milton shouted.
“Yeah, yeah, Saint Milton,” Sam grumbled. “The shishke boy. I can sort of see him. We’ll climb up and grab him.”
Milton scritched underneath Lucky’s panting jaw.
“Nice work, fuzz ball,” he cooed in his pet’s tiny flap of an ear. “Thanks to you, we came out of this smelling like a rose.”
Milton tucked Lucky back into his little kerchief pouch and yelled at the coliseum’s ceiling.
“Tesla!” he roared, cupping his oversensitive ear. “We’ve beaten this level and we’re ready for answers!”
Provost Marshal Tesla gazed out of the smoked-glass windows of his penthouse. Arcadia’s vibrant skyline glittered and crackled with frenetic energy. The skinny, agitated man raised his eyebrows suspiciously at the orb of First Fire hanging in the sky. Its usual steady, perpetual blaze was now a mercurial conflagration of flare and sputter. Milton’s voice crackled and squawked through his headset.
“We’ve beaten this level and we’re ready for answers!”
Tesla sat stiffly inside the giant bronze head of his Rumination Nook. He was bathed in a faint blue-white web of electricity.
“I—like society—need children as fuel. If children are too much like zombies, then they can’t contribute. If they are too awake, then they wouldn’t buy into all of zhe unseemly consequences of fueling adult society. Of fueling my plans for zhe future, as opposed to their ridiculous unformed ambitions. Children need to be numbed just so. Goldilocks numb, so zhat they both fuel and feed and do so unquestioningly. Draining children of their souls, yet leaving them with their initial spark of life, does just that: creates an apathetic yet functioning workforce.”
He leaned back as tendrils of energy caressed his twitching face.
“It also gives what me and my machines so desperately crave: power.”
“Power?” Milton said through a sudden flurry of static.
“First Fire is said to be inexhaustible. A ceaseless forge for hammering out man’s ambition. But I have found, by stoking zhe fire beyond its intended specifications, I am able to push it from ‘inexhaustible’ to ‘inconceivable.’ Piercing zhe Transdimensional Power Grid to transport matter from ‘here’ to ‘there’ using zhe ultimate fuel.”
“What?”
“Zhe children’s souls,” Tesla said matter-of-factly. “Just skimming off zhe top is enough to cause First Fire to blaze like never before.”
Milton felt sick to his stomach. A low-level hum vibrated in the dark around the Terawatts.
“Milton,” Sara said. “I think—”
“But what good does all this do you?” Milton shouted above him.
Tesla’s nervous laugh skittered around the arena.
“In essence, I’ve taken control of human progress—zhe future—away from humanity, who would just squander it. I vill enslave mankind by enslaving childrenkind, to bring my innovations to life.”
“Milton,” Sara repeated. “We’ve got to go. I can see something—”
“The present is for the dim—for same-old-same-olders and nodding-rule-sticker-toers like Edison,” Tesla continued as the hum grew louder and more furious.
Zum. Zum.
“The Azafooms,” Sara yelped just as the lights came on. “They’re swarming.”
“Zhe future,” Tesla said, his voice a rushing river with gravel running along the bottom, “is mine.”
Zip! Zoom! Zaggle!
The adult Azafooms buzzed in angry circles around the exit portal. Their pincer mouths gnashed at the gate as they passed, one creature yanking out a rusted bar and snapping it in two as it darted away. The air itself reeked with delirious rage: a sulfurous soup of jalapeño and kerosene. Sam/Sara tugged at Joey’s torn suit, freeing the squirming Zetawatt from a wrought-iron spike. They tumbled onto the exit portal.
Zot! Zot! Zazzle-zot!
“Hit the deck!” Milton yelled. He and his friends covered their heads as the infuriated Azafooms stormed the gate, buzzing and biting, the gate as bent out of shape as the furious insects themselves.
MILTON AND HIS friends fell headlong into the fifth and final Sense-o-Round level. The damp stone floor slanted downward dramatically, so much so that Milton had to sprawl out on the ground to prevent himself from rolling into the shadowy abyss below. The dank, humid arena was like a massive, medieval seesaw, with something huge resting at the bottom in the darkness.
Clink! Clank! Clunk!
The Skimmer Rings from the last level clattered down the slope and into the murky gloom.
Zoo!
Above their heads buzzed an Azafoom. It darted into the shadow beyond, the insect
’s infuriated hum quickly silenced with a massive wet—
Chomp!
“Ten … nine … eight …,” chanted the unseen demon announcer with his deep, throaty rumble.
The ceiling was spiked with hundreds of dripping stalactites surrounded by patches of glazed eyeballs from the Surface. Only now there were far fewer players, and their collective gaze was so vacuous that Milton felt like he was the judge in a mortuary staring contest. Milton’s Unity-Tard now gave off only a low-level tingle. With each progressive level, the players seemed to exert less control over the Terawatts. They probably felt that they were still playing, rather than being played out.
“What’s that?” Sara asked, pointing to the ground ahead, just before the edge of the wall of shadow.
Milton shrugged. “I don’t know. You and Sam are the only ones who can still see clearly.”
“Seven … six … five …”
“It’s a mega-trail of rainbow slime,” Sam replied. “Like the kind a slug leaves. Wait, there are a couple of adults stuck in it.”
Milton squinted and could see two figures trapped in some kind of sparkly swirl. One looked like an old man in a suit, and the other looked like—
“Blackbeard the Pirate!” Sara yelped. “And Richard Nixon, the ex-American president!”
“Four … three … two …”
“Argh!” bellowed Blackbeard. “That great beluga’s gonna slurp me down its gullet!”
Floom … Splork!
A big, slimy sack shot out of the darkness. It landed with a wet plop next to the struggling, screaming adults.
“Begin Gustatori Sense-o-Round Five,” the announcer ordered.
“I am not a snack!” shouted Mr. Nixon, writhing on the ground.
The sack opened up like a Venus flytrap before snatching up Richard Nixon, then Blackbeard the Pirate in two hungry bites.
Slorp!
The gooey pouch was yanked back into the darkness by its long pink umbilical cord.
“The Nyarlathorp is a creature wound tight with appetite, as tight as the elastic around your tighty-whities,” the fake Principal Bubb purred as she emerged from the wall of shadows dressed in an armored tank top with a smoking turret protruding from her chest. “And though it has just had its noontime nosh, there’s always room for dessert.”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 21