“Hello … my name is Damian Ruffino … at least I think it is …”
Necia quickly patted Damian stiffly on the shoulder with her little rat hands.
“There, there,” she cooed. “Here,” Necia said as she shoved a pile of Choco-full of Oinkrageous Flavor-Brand Fudge-Dipped Pork Rinds underneath Damian’s beaky snout. The boy pecked at her palm until it was clean. Audible gasps could be heard off camera. Damian tried to wipe the bits of chocolate-coated pork from his mouth, but due to Necia’s generous slathering of an off-brand Taiwanese pore minimizer and concealer (Derminator X) to cover his chronic acne flare-up, the crumbs and dust were stuck fast to his face.
“Gaming is one of the leading causes of death in America’s video arcades,” Damian continued, “second only to fire, earthquakes, lightning, flash floods, food allergies, high cholesterol, poor posture, and falling meteorites. But there is one game, a terrible game, that made me the way I am today.”
Damian forced his eyes to roll back in his head for effect.
“And that game is Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. I only played it for five minutes. And look at me: I’m a hollow shell of a human being, with fewer motor skills than an all-squirrel drag race.”
Necia took the microphone.
“It’s time for your nap now, Damian,” she said as Damian feigned a mild seizure, punctuated by a trickle of drool. Necia trained her dark, spooky, furnace-in-the-basement-of-an-abandoned-house eyes at the camera. “Are you a kid, under eighteen, who likes video games and is currently watching television? If you answered yes to any of these questions, protect yourself and those you care about from the effects of Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.”
Dale E. Basye held his head in his hands, whimpering, as the television droned on in the background. The situation was getting more complicated by the moment.
The image of Damian—zombielike, staring into the camera—shrank until it became the backdrop of a television news show. The image switched out to that of a sour-faced old woman whose smug smile looked like it had been stretched across her face with Saran Wrap.
“AGHAST leader Agnes Derleth scored a major coup with the emergence of Damian Ruffino,” said the female news anchor, “taking her cause to the next level. Get it: the next level. Just like in a video game.”
Her male counterpart shook his head.
“I don’t know, Varga,” the man tutted. “A video game that renders the player apathetic, monosyllabic, and sullen—sounds like the game turns players into that most loathsome of creatures: a typical teenager.” The male news anchor chuckled. “In any case, former writer-turned-video-game mogul Dale E. Basye has a lot of ’splaining to do tomorrow morning at his press conference. Now, in other Las Vegas news, the Sometimes Zoo Win, Sometimes Zulus casino just got a new blackjack dealer: Jo-Jo the Orangutan.”
Dale switched off his ninety-nine-inch wide-screen television and gazed out the window to the small bandstand he had built for tomorrow’s event.
Agnes Derleth and AGHAST were bad enough, Dale thought. Now they’ve got their new poster boy, Damian Ruffino. What’s the boy’s angle? He could have just sued for plagiarism. He must not have any evidence. Maybe he’s out for …
He drew in a deep breath to calm his nerves.
Money, Dale brooded. The boy’s here for the same reason everybody else comes to Las Vegas. To win. If he won’t listen to reason, he’ll listen to an unreasonably gracious bribe. See, for a winner, Las Vegas is the coolest town on earth. But for a loser …
Dale caught a reflection of his haggard self in the dark television screen.
It’s the cruelest.
Is Tesla insanely brilliant or just insanely insane? Milton thought as he and his friends edged slowly up the spiraling glass ramp. The ramp coiled like a transparent corkscrew through clouds of highly charged steam alive with “sense” fragments: a gush of exaggerated sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations intent on disorienting and distracting Milton and his friends. Has he really found a way of returning to the Surface? And if so, could he actually hold the future of mankind hostage by enslaving a workforce of zombie teens to bring his mad, bad inventions to terrible life?
Milton heard the sound of wet, massive disembodied jaws opening to his left. He quickly urged the Terawatts’ mobile “extrasensory perceptor head” to the opposite direction. Howler Monkey, Sam/Sara, Caterwaul, the Sunshine Sneezer—even Lucky—did likewise, none of them letting on as to what terrible terror they had just averted.
A violent tremor shook the spiral ramp.
“What’s happening?” Caterwaul asked from the front of their roving platform. “I’ve got hold of some bad vibrations.”
Milton could hear the sounds of splintering glass as the ramp beneath their feet trembled and quaked.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Milton urged as he kicked hard beneath their hover-raft.
Suddenly, with a great split and shatter, the ramp collapsed. The Terawatts tumbled up a dozen feet before hitting the ceiling, which was now somehow the floor.
“A door,” Sara murmured through the tingling, electric fog. “I can see it!”
She kicked open a trapdoor with a grunt.
“Um … you guys won’t believe this,” Sara said.
Virtually blind, Milton crawled down through the door and emerged up into Snivel.
Almost immediately, Milton’s senses began to return, one by one. The magnetic locks on his Unity-Tard fell open, as did those on the muscle armor of his friends. They were all just outside of Vice Principal Poe’s tent at the heart of the camp compound. Searing blue lightning bolts shot out of the roiling waters of Lake Rymose. Students and faculty rushed by.
“What’s going on?” Milton asked one of the demon sloth guards as it ambled, wide-eyed with terror, across the campgrounds toward the forest. The creature stopped and briefly considered Milton with its blankly frightened bloodshot stare. It jabbed one of its curved claws up above its head.
“The sky is falling,” the mangy creature murmured through its broken fence of sharp yellow teeth before trotting away, joining the other fleeing students and faculty.
“The sky is falling?” Sara repeated, looking up at the mountains of festering garbage overhead. “But that’s impossible. We’re suspended upside down over the Dumps.”
Milton, his vision returning, gazed up. Millions of miserable tons of toxic trash loomed above. And the Dumps—this piled “blech” yonder of garbage—was tumbling closer.
“If the sky isn’t falling, that means that we’re falling. All of us. And fast.”
SHAFTS OF BLINDING First Fire stabbed through the grim waters of Lake Rymose. Bolts of raw, angry electricity clawed their way out of the turbulent waters roiling around the wobbling Dukkha Wheel and scratched at the shore. A pack of shaggy black dogs ran wild with their tails tucked tight between their hind legs.
“Looks like something is wrong with Tesla’s plan,” Howler Monkey said as he stared, gaping, at the chaos around him.
“Yeah, like the fact that—achoo!—it was stark, raving banana crackers,” the Sunshine Sneezer replied.
“We … gotta … get out of here,” Sam said before his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell into a narcoleptic slumber.
“That must be a pain,” Milton said as Sam snored in Sara’s ear.
She shrugged one of her shoulders.
“It’s not so bad. It’s just like half of your body going to sleep ten times a day. At least I get some peace and quiet.”
Milton and Sara stared at each other until they forgot they weren’t alone.
“Um, this is cute and all,” Caterwaul said, her shiny wet eyes staring at assorted children, adults, and creatures running past Lake Rymose, “but we’ve got to get out of here!”
Milton shook his head clear, though one nagging image held on tight.
Marlo.
He scanned the clumps of people rushing by.
“I’m not leaving without my sister,” Milton said. “You guys go
on ahead.”
Howler Monkey shook his head. “No, like, way. We’re a team.”
“That’s r-r-right,” the Sunshine Sneezer said, trying desperately to stifle a sneeze. “We came here together, and w-we’re going to leave that way, too.”
Milton sifted through the bedlam before him but came up short-sheeted.
“I have no idea where to start looking,” he said miserably. “The only person who knows where she is, is …”
He turned toward Vice Principal Poe’s tent.
“Poe!”
“Be gone, be gone, be gone.”
That creep-tastic, tell-tale heart of Poe’s, Milton thought as he crept into the vice principal’s quarters.
He raced across the room and grabbed the heart. Milton shoved it into his shorts, not wanting Poe to gain the upper hand—or bean-spilling circulatory organ—when confronted.
“Guards!” Poe shouted from the dim gloom.
Too late, Milton thought as a snail demon slithered into the doorway, waggling its stalk eyes. The vice principal glared defiantly from his fainting couch as Caterwaul snuffled back tears.
“Caterwaul!” Milton yelled. “Think of something sad. Really sad!”
The long-faced girl blubbered until a shallow pool of salt water blocked the doorway. The snail demon shrugged its slimy shoulders.
“Sorry, Vice Principal,” it rasped as it turned to leave. “I’m hyperallergic to salt water. Makes me break out in foam. All over.”
The demon fled—as fast as a snail can flee—while Vice Principal Poe shook his head at the guard’s glistening wake.
“Where is my sister?” Milton yelled at Poe, quaking with fear and rage.
Vice Principal Poe, dark eyes sunken into his cadaverous face like collapsed coal mines, smirked.
“What could possibly pry such privileged information from my lips?” he said, smoothing a loose strand of greasy black hair to his box-shaped head.
Milton scooped the throbbing heart from his Arcadia shorts and held it, pounding, in his hands.
“It’s time we had another heart-to-heart talk,” Milton said. He gave the heart a squeeze.
Poe self-consciously clutched his hollow chest as he glared back at Milton.
“Careful!” he gasped. “You’ll break my heart!”
The Sunshine Sneezer turned to Milton. “Man, I wish I could unsee that. How did you know?”
“You can see his shirt sort of pucker in,” Milton replied, looking at the heart in his hand, which was gasping like a fish on the shore. “It wants to warn us about the rest of him. It’s like his conscience or something.”
“To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart is to take our final lesson from the iron-clasped volume of despair,” Vice Principal Poe said. He tightened the red cravat around his neck. “It muddled my reasoning with painful memories and pointless mawkishness.”
“Then why, like, keep it?” Howler Monkey asked.
The vice principal shrugged.
“Sentimental reasons, I suppose,” he replied with a weary sigh. Poe sulked toward the doorway.
“I was just going to visit your sister, anyway,” the vice principal said, reaching out for his heart. Milton stuffed it back into his shorts. “Lucky for me I’m not the type of person accustomed to following their heart,” Vice Principal Poe mumbled as he brushed past the children to his iron door. “As, in this case, it would only lead to dirty underwear.”
They walked out across the sodden ground of Camp Snivel toward the forest.
Milton noticed a pair of shadows streaking past him on the mud. They rushed across the ground, speeding toward the forest: to the exact point Vice Principal Poe was leading Milton and his friends. Moments after the shadows disappeared into the woods ahead, they returned, darting away from the portal leading back to the Sense-o-Rama to—again—make a mad dash for the forest.
Milton looked up at the sky, but it was empty: the same bleak quilt of toxic garbage.
The shadows streaked past Milton for a third time, cycling faster and faster with each pass. One of them looked like a large predator bird pursuing what appeared to be a girl.
“Marlo!” Milton shouted, knowing in his heart of hearts—the one residing either in his chest or in his shorts, he couldn’t be sure—that the silhouette in peril was his sister. Marlo had a knack for attracting trouble, even as a disembodied shadow, apparently, Milton thought as he ran through the dark fringe of forest and up the mud-slick ridge.
The shadows darted across a sheet of rain-fog to a dilapidated shack choked with unruly tangles of stinging nettle bushes.
It’s like something out of a horror movie, Milton thought as he approached the shack. He tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. There was a keypad panel to the right. Four of the numbers were worn: 3, 5, 6, and 7.
Usually security codes are names, so it’s probably someone close to Poe. A name made from the keypad letters: DEF, JKL, MNO, PQR. But who would be important to a loner like Poe?
“You’ll never guess the code, Mr. Fauster,” Vice Principal Poe said from behind, panting, as he and the others joined Milton outside the shack.
Loner, Milton mused before a grin spread across his face. He wiped the rain from his glasses and jabbed specific numbers on the keypad: 5-3-6-6-7-3 … LENORE. The door unbolted and opened.
The vice principal’s thin-lipped mouth hung open as Milton and his friends stepped inside the shack. Sam tugged Poe inside just as the door whooshed closed behind him.
“Hey, Incredible Sulk,” Sam said with a sneer. “We’re not through with you yet.”
Caterwaul knelt down before the shabby doll in the corner.
“Hey, look,” she said with a soft smile as she moved to scoop up the doll. “A dolly. Just like Misty Eyes, my doll back—”
“Mama,” the doll cried as the elevator dropped down to the subterranean Shadow Box. Dazed, Milton rose from the floor and noticed another keypad. He looked back at the crumpled figure of Poe, staring back with his unnerving gaze.
“Let me guess,” Milton said as he punched the code. “You seem like the brooding, obsessive type …”
“Lenore,” Poe said miserably as the lead doors slid open. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
“What is this place?” Sara asked, wincing as they entered the dazzling chamber radiating honey-orange light. She stared at the three tiered rows of rectangular panels mounted to the walls. “Are those children?” Sara murmured with horror as she watched the Unhappy Campers twitching in their tanks. Brilliant beams of golden light streamed from the braided stalk of fiber-optic cables and satellite dishes.
The shadows of Marlo and the swooping Litsowo spirit traveled along the floor and up to a tank on the top tier.
“Marlo!” Milton gasped as he bolted up the flights of stairs. He followed the pair of shadows, locked tight in a shady death grip, to the middle tank, where his sister jerked and struggled in some kind of goo. Out from the shadows stepped the Grin Reaper, cinching its charcoal-gray hoodie tight around its neck.
“Let her go!” Milton cried out as his sister’s shadow dove into her tank. It was cast back out behind her tank on a screen before dripping down a duct. The bird shadow followed, milliseconds behind, closing the gap between its beak and Marlo’s feet.
“If you go near that tank, Mr. Reaper,” Vice Principal Poe said from behind, “our deal is null and void, and you shall never have the last—or any—laugh.”
Just then, Lucky wriggled out of the kerchief pouch hooked to Milton’s belt, his jaws clamped down on van Gogh’s severed ear. The Grin Reaper stared at the ferret with its sad, rainwater eyes; then, a few awkward seconds later, the half-frowny, half-smiley face on his chest began to heave and quiver. The creature’s body rattled like an oil well about to blow. A geyser of laughter suddenly gushed from his mouth. The Grin Reaper’s eyes darted frantically to and fro as he watched his laughter take wing around him.
“Is absurd,” he said, his glittering eyes resting on Lucky. “Weasel with human ear. Is funny. Is hilarious.”
A radiant burst of light traveled up the Wastrel Projector, shaking apart the Shadow Box as it pulsed to the ceiling. The lights in the chamber went dark for a split second.
Vice Principal Poe bolted away in the commotion. He ran across the scaffolding and picked up a glowing yellow phone.
“Nikola!” he exclaimed. “Are you there? Our plan is—”
“Perfect,” Tesla replied, dripping wet, as he stepped into the Shadow Box. “I am still quite on schedule, ready to push human progress beyond mankind’s ability to utilize it with compassion—zhe head gaining final dominion over zhe heart!”
The heart, Milton thought as he grabbed Poe’s ticker from his shorts. Looks like we need a little heart attack.
“Vice Principal!” Milton shouted as he held the circulatory pump in his palm, over his shoulder like a shot put. “Have a little heart!”
He pitched Poe’s heart across the scaffolding and straight into the startled vice principal’s chest cavity. Poe clutched his chest, the color returning to his corpselike face, then fell to his knees, weeping.
“What have I done?!” he sobbed. “All I wanted was to be an artist again, to reproduce what my senses perceived in nature through the veil of my soul. But all this … all this misery I’ve unleashed! I turned my morbid imagination into a weapon—a gloomsday device meant to lead mankind by the nose to its ruin. My love turned to pain, my pain turned to anger, my anger to unquenchable revenge.”
Provost Marshal Tesla marched up the steps as the lights in the Shadow Box flickered. His purple neon necktie cast a sinister glow as he ascended the stairs to the third tier. Tesla looked down at the blubbering Poe with disgust.
“You are having a sentimental breakdown, you wretched mess of a man,” he said, his mustache flapping above his sneering mouth. “You said it yourself, Edgar: ‘Zhe true genius shudders at incompleteness … and prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.…’ ”
Tesla spread open his waistcoat, revealing a pair of satellite dishes attached to his hips. With a swift one-two swivel of hips, he shot twin bolts of electricity at Vice Principal Poe. The miserable man collapsed onto the catwalk.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 24