Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (31 page)

MILTON CREPT DOWN
the dark hallway toward the Lose-Your-Lunchroom, lugging two trembling suitcase bombs. The sounds of forced trick-or-treating at spork-point echoed in the distance.

“Stinky maggot cheese with cricket heads!” Milton heard Gene shriek before dissolving into spasms of inconsolable blubbering.

Milton arrived at the end of the hallway, where Hambone Hank’s Heart Attack Shack lay shrouded in ominous shadows. Milton heard a faint rustling.

“Hello?” he whispered.

A loud, metallic smack clanged from beneath the tin cart, followed by a low growl and what sounded like an exclamation of
“Cat gone it!”
Suddenly, Annubis slid out
from beneath the mobile hut on a padded board with wheels. The dog god, his refined features smeared with grease, considered Milton comically. He removed a chewed-up bone from his mouth.

“I didn’t expect you, out of the blue like that,” he said.

Milton set the suitcases down against the shed.

“Looks like you’ve been gnawing on my funny bone, because I ain’t laughing,” Milton chided.

Annubis put the bone he had been chewing on in one pocket, while pulling out the Turnkey drumstick from the other.

“This key should work … but I trust that demon guard about as far as I could throw him—which was about twenty-seven feet.”

Annubis sniffed the air with his wet snout.

“Where’s Virgil?”

Milton stared at his puffy white Smurf feet with sadness.

“He decided to stay and work the system from the inside,” he explained. “If it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have made it here in time.”

Annubis picked up some stray tools that lay strewn about the shack and set them inside the structure.

“I wouldn’t have left without you,” Annubis said as he closed the door to the shed. “Besides, it gave me time to tinker, in case we need an alternate means of escape.”

Milton poked his head into the shack. At the front, beneath the main awning window, was a small steering wheel and a gas pedal.

“I didn’t know this thing was a car,” he said.

Annubis grinned, his mouth a museum of molars, a cathedral of canines.

“It used to be an ice-cream truck,” he explained. “An Ill-Humor Wagon.”

Milton eyed the bright red and yellow corrugated tin cart dubiously.

“Isn’t it a little, well …
conspicuous
?”

Annubis grabbed two of the suitcases with his usual effortless grace.

“As I said, it’s only in case we encounter any—”

“Complications?” boomed Chef Boyareyookrazee from behind.

Annubis and Milton jumped as Chef Boyareyookrazee slapped the hefty leg bone of some butchered creature into his palm.

“And, like my infamous Lamb Shank Redemption, my flavors of pain are
quite
complex.”

Milton hyperventilated inside the constricting confines of his bright blue Pang suit. Annubis stepped in front of the petrified boy.

“Chef, please,” the dignified dog said calmly. “This whole distasteful operation has run its course.”

“We had an agreement!” Chef Boyareyookrazee shouted as he raised the lamb shank above his head.

Trembling, Milton stepped from behind Annubis.

“An agreement as worthless as the parchment it was printed on!” Milton shouted, pulling up the itchy white footy pants that kept threatening to dip past the point of no return.

The chef rubbed one of his jiggling chins.

“Hmm … maybe I’ll put a little Smurf ’n’ Turf on the menu for tonight.”

Annubis, hackles raised, stalked forward. “The best thing to do, before our less-than-legal enterprise is officially sniffed out, is for us to just part ways and—”

“I thought dogs were supposed to be loyal!” the chef seethed.

Chef Boyareyookrazee’s furious scowl melted into a wicked grin. He lowered his leg of lamb and pulled a black remote control from his apron pocket.

“There’s been a change of menu,” he snickered. “The chef’s special is
shockolate mousse …
and lots of it!”

The chef pressed the red button. Reflexively, Annubis whimpered and reached for his throat. The chef’s sneering face collapsed in on itself like a fallen quiche as he doubled over in agony.

“Looks like the chef wore fresh undies today,” Annubis quipped as Chef Boyareyookrazee writhed on the ground, howling.

Milton gazed anxiously past the cart, nested in the dark cul-de-sac. The sound of lumbering footsteps grew louder in the main hallway.

“His howling is going to give us away,” Milton whispered.

Suddenly, Mr. Presley turned the corner.

“Too late,” Annubis growled.

The teacher rubbed his eyes as he stared at Annubis, his mouth gaping open like a freshly caught catfish.

“Good
night!”
he murmured in his smooth, rumbling tone. “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog!!”

Milton stepped forward.

“Look, Mr. Presley, it’s a long story, but please … he and I don’t belong here. I’ve got to go and save my sister down in h-e-double-hockey-sticks, and Annubis here, he’s got to rescue his family from the Kennels. If you could just find it in your heart to let us go …”

Mr. Presley’s lips curled into amused disbelief.

“Serves me right for getting the mad midnight munchies,” he said, shaking his head.

Demon hooves clacked down the hallway.

“Well, I’ve always had a soft spot for his hush puppies,” Mr. Presley replied with a laugh. He flipped his cape over his shoulder and swaggered into the hallway. “Looks like it’s time for an encore … and you two better make like an old dog with worms and scoot … no offense.”

“None taken,” Annubis replied as he yanked open the door to his cart.

“What are you doing?” Milton asked.

Annubis slid behind the steering wheel.

“Our departure is already, unfortunately, conspicuous,” he said. Annubis twisted the key in the ignition and brought the cart to chugging life. “So hop on and strap yourself in. I have a feeling we’re in for a bumpy ride.”

Milton heaved his suitcases into the cart just as Annubis wedged the stick shift into gear. The cart lurched forward, and Milton fell back into several tubs of pilfered lard.

The cart jerked around the corner. Mr. Presley slapped the side of the shuddering vehicle and turned to face the oncoming demon horde. He waved, his hand festooned with glittering rings.

“Thank you very much.”

The tin shed squealed down the hallway toward the main gate. Milton looked behind him to see Mr. Presley swaying his hips, warming himself up for his surprise performance.

The demon guards skidded to a halt, mesmerized by the hypnotic metronome of Mr. Presley’s gyrations. Then, inexplicably, the whole gruesome mob dropped their pitchsporks to the ground and began to dance.

The cart lurched down the hallway like a doddering old man with a walker. A jaunty little ragtime tune—“The Entertainer,” Milton was fairly certain—squawked from several tinny speakers on the side of the traveling shed. Annubis pulled out his bone and gnawed it nervously.

“It’s like a portable torture device,” he said as the bone dangled from his slavering lip like a cigarette stuffed with marrow. “It’s always the same three songs. Maybe our trip will be short enough so we don’t have to hear ‘Turkey in the Straw’ or …”

Annubis shuddered.

“‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’”

Annubis clutched the steering wheel so hard that his paw pads, even the weird one near the elbow, turned white. He chewed the bone to disgusting, slobbery bits, then choked down the shards.

“Are you okay?” Milton asked.

Annubis gave his head a quick nod.

“Driving just makes me nervous,” he replied. “I keep wanting to hang my head out the window.”

After a sharp, albeit painfully slow, turn around the corner, the Heart Attack Shack rolled toward the main gate, leading to the drawbridge.

Annubis brought the cart to a stop. Milton opened the door but was suddenly caught in another full-body Pang contraction, this one squeezing like a vice grip of muscle. He fought the spasm that tried to drag him down to the depths of his borrowed skin. After a few seconds, the contractions stopped and Milton forced himself back up behind the Pang’s face.

Annubis bounded out of the cart and pulled the Turnkey drumstick from his overalls. He thrust the poultry-shaped key into the hole, turned, and …
nothing
. The ten-foot tongue that served as the inner door for Blimpo was motionless yet taunting, as if it were sticking itself out at the two would-be escapees. Annubis gave the now meatless bone a sniff.

“Uh-oh,” he murmured as he patted his stomach.
“Wrong bone.”

A riot of hoof clacks echoed down the hall.

“Looks like Mr. Presley’s little shindig has been broken up,” Annubis growled as he sprang into the cart. He rummaged through a collection of cutlery and emerged, arms laden with soul jars and spatulas.

Annubis quickly formed a pyramid of jars in front of the large window to the left of the tongued drawbridge. He tugged on the pair of spatulas until they, oddly, became as long as skis.

“What’s with the spatulas?” Milton asked.

“Telescoping,” Annubis said as he slid back into the driver’s seat. “Chef Boyareyookrazee may be a sauciopathic maniac, but he has the good sense to stay as far away from his recipes as possible. We’re going to use the spatulas to make a little ski ramp. Come on!”

The dog god twisted the ignition as Milton dashed back into the shuddering shack. The bouncy strains of “The Entertainer” took on a creepy, slurpy quality, playing backward as the cart reared back down the hallway. After about fifty feet, Annubis stopped the cart.

“Hang on,” he panted, grinding the stick shift into first gear. “We’re flying coach.”

The music gained in tempo and manic ragtime exuberance.

Milton looked behind him. A squad of demon guards trotted down the hallway almost as slowly as the Heart Attack Shack.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” he asked nervously.

“It’s an ice-cream truck, not a race car,” Annubis said as his foot pressed against the gas pedal.

“But why the window?!” Milton said as he gripped the sides of his seat.

Annubis’s panting grew more frenetic as the truck edged forward, faster and faster. “There’s no way to …
pierce that tongue,”
he replied. “Brace yourself …
here we go!”

The cart bumped up onto the incline of spatulas and soul jars, lurched onward and upward, and slammed into the wide but not-quite-wide-enough window. The shack squeezed through the portal with a grinding squeal of collapsing metal and pulverized stone. Milton shut his eyes and clutched his seat. The cart groaned through the window and into the moat beyond, accompanied by a scream, a howl, and the warped sound of “The Entertainer” winding down, down, down….

30 • LUCKY RUNS OUT

LUCKY LICKED THE
foam from his thin, pink ferret lips and stirred awake. The white, musky animal was used to sleeping eighteen out of the twenty-four available hours in a day. Yet, ever since he had been abducted by the bony, spooky girl with the dark hair and candy perfume smell, he’d been sleeping almost constantly, only coming to for a few bites of food before succumbing to the undertow of slumber.

He twitched and sniffed the air around him, which smelled vaguely of matzo balls. The girl and her friends—the old people in the robes, the ones who smelled sour and sad—weren’t in the room outside the cage.

Lucky’s stomach rumbled. His food dish was overflowing with glistening, succulent cubes and crunchy Weasel Chow. He instinctively lurched toward the dish,
yet, just before his first gobble, he hesitated. Hidden beneath the delicious aromas wafting from the food was that sharp medicine smell that all his meals—even his water—seemed to have lately. His ferret brain turned and clicked like a small gray Rubik’s Cube. If he wanted to escape the creepy clutches of this girl and find his master, Lucky would have to summon the few drops of willpower he possessed and refrain from eating.

He stuck his snout through the bars of his cage and pressed as hard as he could. Unfortunately, while his snout savored freedom, the rest of his body was still imprisoned. The luckless Lucky wedged himself in the small slit surrounding the door. He squeezed until his pink eyes bulged but to no avail. Dust tickled his nose, and Lucky sneezed, his head lurching spasmodically and knocking into the metal latch, secured by a combination lock.

“I’ll only be a second, Mom,” the girl’s voice squeaked from outside the curtains. “Just look around … No, I didn’t know that pigs had knuckles either. Ask Mrs. Smilovitz … she won’t bite. I just need my algebra book.”

Thinking like a ferret always does—quickly—Lucky rolled over onto his back and let his tongue loll out to the side as Necia entered the room.

“Hmm,” she muttered, dressed in a black wool overcoat with white stockings and white leather flats.
“Maybe I left it on the altar, by the sacrificial dagger and bronze blood collection bowl….”

Something caught Necia’s eye. She turned to see Lucky convulsing in his cage.

“Lucky!” she squealed, running to his cage. Necia knelt and worked the combination lock with her spindly fingers.