Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck Read online

  Virgil was momentarily stunned by the sudden pandemonium around him before his stomach complained, in its unique language of spasms and slurps, “Giddyup if you want some grub!”

  So Virgil listened to his gut, pulled up his neon-green suspenders, and tromped down the bleachers. Pitchspork-wielding demons attempted vainly to shape the chaos into something resembling an orderly line. Chef Boyareyookrazee doled out baskets overflowing with meat slathered with rich, red-brown sauce.

  A pale, dark-haired girl with stringy pigtails gasped rapturously as she, the first in line, sampled Hambone Hank’s barbecue.

  “Oh my gawd!!” she exclaimed between her first and second bites. “Even though I’m in Heck, my mouth just went straight to Heaven!”

  The Burgermeister, Lady Lactose, and Chef Boyareyookrazee shared sly, conspiratorial smirks. The cream of the realm leaned into her charbroiled king.

  “See them line up like pigs at a trough, chowing down on every lie we’ve fed them.”

  Virgil, on the outside of the meat-fueled melee, could just hear the vice principals’ voices over the speakers.

  The Burgermeister chortled.

  “Our plan eez, much like our vaistlines, expanding immensely!”

  Virgil caught Lady Lactose’s icy gaze. She rose and smoothed her silky, buttercream gown, scowling.

  “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” she muttered, glaring at the mob of barbecue-sauce-smeared children with disgust.

  The French Fried Fool pretended to whistle. The other mimes clapped their hands over their ears, as if this pretend whistle was much louder than the previous pretend whistle. After shaking their chalk-white heads and straightening their berets, the mimes formed two lines in front of the wide folding metal door behind the stage. They crouched down low and made as if they were tugging at two great ropes in order to raise the door. Surprisingly, the door clattered open, the mimes heaving as the slatted metal door rolled up into the ceiling on twin rails.

  “Goodbye, children,” Lady Lactose declared into the microphone without a trace of fondness or regret. “Congratulations on your good fortune. We look forward to exploiting … to working with you … on this momentous project that will serve as a model of innovation for the entire underworld. Now we must return to our rightful thrones above to work out the details. But don’t think that we are looking down on you from our floating castle. Instead, we hope it is an opportunity for all of you to look up to us.”

  Virgil, his empty stomach jumping up and down with excitement as he neared the front of the line, watched as the Burgermeister, Lady Lactose, and the French Fried Fool strutted through the doors and out to the open commons beyond. In the roofless inner courtyard at the center of Blimpo rested an inflatable, forty-foot-tall, canvas-skinned castle. Fastened to the roofs of the castle’s three cylindrical towers were three hot-air balloons, girdled with brass lattice and cables.

  “Here you go, kid,” Chef Boyareyookrazee said as he thrust a basket brimming with delectable meat and sauce into Virgil’s hands. “Now eat and run.” The red-faced man snickered. “I have a feeling you’ll all be doing a lot of that from now on. NEXT!”

  Virgil shambled away, transfixed by the vice principals as they entered their inflated castle.

  It’s like one of those Grub-a-Dub-Dub fast-food places you see in the middle of nowhere when you’re on a long trip with your family, Virgil thought as he stood in the open, wide-mouthed doorway. After a few dozen billboards, you’re counting down the miles, like it’s Christmas on a bun with a side of birthdays. But after you’ve stuffed your face and driven away, you feel kinda sick and sad inside.

  A dozen sandbags were tossed out of the castle’s windows. The blimp kingdom wobbled and gently lifted off the ground, floating up for about a hundred feet until the six slender cables tethering it to the ground grew taut.

  “Up, up, and away,” Virgil mumbled as his mind journeyed back to his time in Limbo, when he, his best friend, Milton, and Milton’s sister, Marlo—the thought of whom made Virgil blush—had attempted to escape using piles of confiscated clothing and jars of buoyant Lost Souls to create a big balloon that would, theoretically, take them back to the Surface, aka the Land of the Living. But their escape had proven only one-third successful. Marlo had been captured by Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Heck’s Principal of Darkness, and Virgil, realizing that the soul balloon had only so much lift, let his skinnier, lighter friend Milton float to freedom—or at least a better place, Virgil hoped.

  Dragged back to the present by the heady scent of barbecued meat, Virgil stuffed a handful of Hambone Hank’s succulent food into his mouth. The flavor assailed Virgil’s senses like a quarry full of Pop Rocks splashed by a tidal wave of ginger ale. The taste was complex, mysterious—haunting, even—and Virgil’s tongue tried valiantly to explore every delicious nuance. It was the most lip-smackingly, finger-lickingly wonderful thing he had ever eaten.

  Maybe his selfless act in Limbo came with some reward, Virgil thought as he wolfed down the basket of meat and fresh hush puppies. The only thing that could make this moment any better would be if his friend were here by his side to enjoy it with. Milton’s probably thousands of miles away, Virgil thought with a wistful grin, just chilling somewhere, living the good life. And after his time in Heck, most any life would seem good in comparison.

  2 • LOST SHEEP ON THE LAM

  MILTON THREW HIS weight against his customized, tricked-out shopping cart and plummeted down a steep ridge toward a barbed cyclone fence. His stomach felt like it had sprouted wings and was trying to flutter frantically out of his gaping mouth.

  “Pick up the tempo, Popsicle!” yelled Jack Kerouac, the lanky, dark-haired leader of the Phantoms of the Dispossessed—or PODs—from his speeding cart below. “Us cats gotta scat and make a mad conga line out of Squaresville. To the ultimate scene.”

  Jack and dozens of his PODs—Milton’s adopted family—hurtled behind their fortified shopping carts toward the heavily guarded barrier … and their potential undoing.

  Milton, still running, felt for his glasses, hidden in the filthy POD disguise he wore to avoid detection by Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s team of demon spies. He squinted at the guards teeming on both sides of the eighteen-foot-tall fence, oblivious to the oncoming assault due to a thick, clinging mist.

  The fence’s gleaming, corkscrew razor wire grinned maliciously back at Milton, like the product of an especially evil orthodontist. The sight shot a wave of electric panic through Milton as he leaned into another switchback on the sloping bank. He joined the phantoms as they drove their shopping cart chariots, sporting corrugated metal shields and barbed spikes, in a line down the bluff, forming a vicious, winding dragon of metal. Milton clutched the handle of his cart so tightly that his pale white knuckles became almost translucent.

  For the last few weeks, eleven-year-old Milton had been detained in a refugee camp in some bleak, forgotten badlands on the outskirts of Heck, lying low, waiting for the right opportunity for escape. And, with the last shopping cart fortified and the blanket of mysterious mist tucking itself in around the fence, the time was nigh. Now, even.

  “It’s just like I wrote in The Dead Beat Scrolls!” Jack shouted as Milton caught up with him on the plunging slope. “‘The mad ones are made to move. But even these dispossessed souls, uneasy and noble, will find their day of rest, in a place beyond.’”

  Jack had apparently been a big-shot writer years ago up on the Surface. And all the PODs were buzzing about his latest book, The Dead Beat Scrolls—his first since his death—one that had come to him in some kind of wild dream.

  “Right, the Margins,” Milton replied dubiously. “‘Where nomads and know-mads make their rightful home at the very edge of wrong, and puzzling jigsaw spirits become one glorious whole.’”

  Jack, a lunatic grin smeared across his face, let out a bloodcurdling whoop. The demon guards patrolling the fence stopped their drill. They looked up, shocked, as the dragon of carts hurtled toward them, slicing
through the mist, unstoppable.

  Beyond the fence, the mist thinned, revealing glimpses of the wasteland beyond. Milton saw strange, woolly blobs cantering in the distance. They brayed freakishly in a way that made the flock of goose pimples on Milton’s arms migrate across his whole body.

  But Milton couldn’t abandon the PODs now, especially after all they had done for him: harboring a known fugitive and—when they had been captured and put in this awful, barren place—engineering a bold escape before Milton could be processed and identified.

  Milton pushed back with his foot, propelling his speeding cart faster, and peered ahead to see an ancient POD named Moondog at the front of the line. Dressed as a shabby Viking with the wind whipping his long white hair about like an angry ghost, Moondog seemed infinitely brave. Perhaps the fact that he was completely blind had something to do with it. Though unable to see, Moondog was far from sightless. He was endowed with—if not quite a sixth sense—something slightly more than the standard-issue five.

  “I hope we didn’t miss our checkout time!” Moondog howled as his shopping cart rammed into the fence.

  The twisted chain link screamed as it was torn apart by the carts’ jagged sawtooth fenders. Clouds of thick, sickly yellow grit were upturned into the air as the speeding locomotive of PODs barreled through the fence.

  “Brace yourself!” Jack barked against the din of squealing, scraping metal, his dark cowlick dancing above his wild eyes.

  Milton hunkered down as he shot through the gaping wound in the fence. Behind him lay gnarled sections of chain link, like a swathe of scar tissue left after a robot’s appendectomy.

  He grinned, accidentally getting a mouthful of mist that stank like hard-boiled eggs. Milton swallowed down the sickening, sour taste.

  “What a gas!” Jack roared. “Those guards were totally caught off guard!”

  But, as Milton made out a guard in a nearby tower cradling a bulky walkie-talkie, he realized that soon all of the Netherworld would know of their escape, including Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Heck’s self-serving, evildoing, stomach-churning, and—worst of all—Milton-hating Principal of Darkness.

  Jack stood atop his still-speeding cart, extended his arms, and embraced the stale wind rushing past him with abandon.

  “Now let’s take this wigged-out riff straight to the Margins!” he shouted to the dozens of ragtag PODs as they charged onward through the stark tundra.

  The fierce, fathomless eyes of the phantoms blazed with triumph. They whooped and waved their arms in the air like they just didn’t care, though they did—very much so—perhaps for the first time in their afterlives.

  “So you seriously think that the Margins is a real place?” asked Milton, who—even as a wandering soul in an afterlife crowded with phantoms, demons, and assorted dead historical figures—was ever the pragmatist.

  Jack caressed a pendant of glittering, silvery liquid that hung from his neck. It burbled faintly at his touch.

  “I don’t think,” he said. “I know. Some truths hang out in your heart, because your brain won’t let ’em crash, dig?”

  Milton shrugged as Jack broke from the line, kicking his way ahead. Milton, wary of being the caboose in this grim, colorless land, scooted alongside the nervously energetic POD.

  “But what if … the Margins is just … a dream you had?” Milton panted.

  Jack rubbed the back of his grimy neck with his hand.

  “The only diff between our dreams and our lives is, like, the position of our eyelids,” Jack replied with a shrug. “See, all our crazy lives are just stories written on sheets of binder paper, and we PODs are the scribbles in the margins. It’s where those who don’t belong belong. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. If you think you belong somewhere, then you do.”

  Milton and Jack reached the front of the barreling parade of souped-up shopping carts. Moondog pondered the horizon with vacant eyes.

  “Something wicked that way we go,” Moondog howled, his arm pointing ahead into nothing.

  Milton turned to Jack.

  “What does he mean?” Milton asked.

  The PODs’ leader reached for his pendant, gently squeezing it in his hand for comfort.

  “Moondog is, like, way ahead of us in many ways,” he said gravely. “He is experiencing something that we have yet to. Something … wrong.”

  Milton looked ahead. He could just make out the indistinct creatures he had seen earlier in the distance. The mist distorted their unnerving brays so that they sounded both eerily far away and frighteningly close. Milton hoped for the former but knew in his gut that something wicked was coming closer than anyone could have imagined. But wherever he and his adopted family of phantoms belonged, it wasn’t here, in this stinky, dispiriting patch of nothing in the armpit of the afterlife.

  3 • CREATURE

  DiSCOMFORTS

  BEA “ELSA” BUBB straightened a stack of papers on her desk that she had only just straightened. To the untrained eye, they were now as straight as they would ever be. The principal had spent the last hour organizing the top of her massive mahogany desk until everything was as functionally drab as inhumanly possible so that the desk conveyed professionalism, an unwavering sense of duty, and the keen precision of today’s ambitious, career-driven demoness.

  But the truth of the matter was that she was procrastinating, avoiding the two official, unopened Pentagrams that lay in her sinbox like two grenades with misplaced pins.

  She sipped her piping-hot HostiliTea and summoned the courage to open the first of the two envelopes, the one delivered just five minutes before the second. She ripped it open with her index talon.

  BEASTERN UNION PENTA–GRAM

  To: Bea “Elsa” Blob, Principal of Darkness, Heck

  The principal gritted her fangs. They always got her name wrong.

  From: The Big Guy Downstairs

  Her pulse raced at the name: The Big Guy Downstairs. Lucifer. Satan. Mephistopheles. A hunk by any other name, she thought, is just as … hunky.

  Defective immediately, you are to be given a promotion for your negligible involvement in thwarting the Grabbit’s attempt to destroy Rapacia and its surrounding realms using the Hopeless Diamonds to create a black hole. Stop. Your official title, Principal of Darkness, will now be, from this moment of eternity onward, The Principal of Darkness. Stop. This promotion will not, in any way, result in an increase in salary, status, or medical benefits. Stop. You will, however, enjoy the privilege of added responsibilities, increased workload, and intensified accountability. Stop.

  Yours, etc., the Big Guy Downstairs

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb allowed herself a grin.

  It was a promotion in only the loosest interpretation of the word. Actually, the word—not to mention the definite article “the”—was the only thing about her promotion that was, in fact, an actual promotion. But still she held on to this shred of power tightly in her claws, literally: the Penta-gram was crumpled, and the palms of her claws had five white half-moons pressed into them. Every demon had her day, and today was the first day of the rest of her afterlife: a chance to make everybody pay, and pay dearly. Up front. In cash.

  The Principal of Darkness snickered. Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Heck nestled in her hideous lap, stirred awake. His mistress’s breath was like a delectable blend of anchovies and two-day-old garbage. Cerberus considered his owner with his left head, by far the most inquisitive. Bea “Elsa” Bubb patted the red silk bow stapled onto its sleek, vicious skull.

  “It’s okay, my pwetty whiddle puffkin,” she cooed. “Mummy’s not hurt; she’s just laughing at everyone else’s expense!”

  Cerberus, after discerning that none of this had anything to do with either rat liver pâté or pony giblets, resumed the nap that two-thirds of him was already taking.

  Principal Bubb puffed out her chest with pride, stretching her bile-green muumuu past the point of its manufacturer’s suggested level of strain. She felt as if she could take on the whole u
nderworld. The principal eyed the second Penta-gram. She snatched it up and ripped it open with playful vigor, like a feisty cat abruptly ending its playdate with a baby bluebird.

  BEASTERN UNION PENTA-GRAM

  To: Bea “Elsa” Blob, The Principal of Darkness, Heck

  From: The Big Guy Downstairs

  Defective immediately, you are to be stripped of your promotion in that one Milton Fauster has—for the second time—eluded your capacity to contain his eternal soul, blah, blah, blah. Stop. His having escaped Limbo using the buoyancy of Lost Souls only to return undetected, then escape again with the help of itinerant phantoms is inexcusable in its nonability to be condoned. In addition to your immediate unpromotion, a copy of this Penta–gram will be added to your permanent file. Stop. We would also appreciate it if you returned your added promotionary “the” in the return envelope provided. Stop.

  Yours, etc., the Big Guy Downstairs

  A drop of salty water fell onto the Penta-gram, smudging the postscript somewhat.

  “Darned sweaty eyes,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb cursed as someone hammered on the door of her not-so-secret lair.

  “’Scuse me, Principal, ma’am,” apologized a birdish demon as it poked its beaked, sparsely feathered head into her chamber. “You asked me to tell you if anything was amiss, miss.”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb glared at the twitchy demon through red-rimmed eyes. Her acid reflux, that great prognosticator of impending bad news, lapped against the back of her throat like toxic waste.

  “Please tell me that this has nothing to do with the PODs,” she said wearily.

  The demon’s down fluffed up.

  “Oh no, nothing to do with PODs,” he chirped in reply.

  “Good,” the principal sighed.

  “It’s the Phantoms of the Dispossessed.”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb was suddenly stricken with a case of full-body heartburn.