Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (11 page)

21 · SUGAR, SPICE, AND EVERYTHING MEAN

THE FIRST TEN
seconds of freedom Marlo enjoyed after setting off the water alarm were thrilling. Amazing. Exhilarating. Unfortunately, they also happened to be her
last
ten seconds of freedom.

“Guardettes!” Miss Borden bellowed from around the bend.

Marlo had been alone when pulling the alarm. Almost immediately the hallway was full of frantic girls running for their afterlives. Unfortunately, Marlo always had a fascination for seeing how her acts of mischief played out, which often left her rooted to the scene of the crime. Similarly unfortunate for Lyon and Bordeaux, the two girls felt themselves too cool for running. They came sauntering into the hall well after the initial wave of commotion.

Miss Borden stormed around the corner from home ec on her way to the teachers' lounge. Almost immediately upon hearing Miss Borden's shriek, decaying she-demons surrounded the three girls left in the hallway.

“One of you must be guilty,” the teacher accused as she dug her squeaky leather heels into the floor, stopping dead in front of the girls. “Perhaps all of you, in some kind of conspiracy. But when did you find time to hatchet—um, hatch it?”

The girls stared blankly at Miss Borden, which was particularly easy for Bordeaux as that was her usual way of staring. The trio suddenly began accusing each other at once.

“It was Marlo—”

“It was Lyon—”

“It was—”

“I don't have time to split hairs!” the teacher barked, folding her arms against her chest. “Especially when there are parts I would much
prefer
to split. Guardettes, bring these girls to the showers!”

The guardettes promptly herded the trio of sooty girls to their pre-punishment cleaning. Heck may not have graded on a curve, Marlo thought, but it certainly punished on one. Even though she was
way
guilty, the injustice of it all just
bugged
her—of course, not to the point of actually stepping forward and confessing.

But here in the girls' showers she would come clean nonetheless. She could use a good shower, Marlo thought, with clouds of delicious, fragrant steam curling up and around her.

The trio were stripped down and pitchspork-prodded to the shower stalls. A gnarled she-demon turned a corroded metal wheel and a vicious torrent of sand and bitter cold air shot out of the three spigots. The girls screamed as they were rubbed raw by the abrasive arctic blast.

When the frigid sandstorm finally ceased, the girls were thrown stiff, stained towels. They painfully wiped away clots of caked sand from their tender, stinging skin.

At the next stall over, Bordeaux shook a small desert out of her bleached hair. “I am going to need, like,
so
much conditioner,” she whined.

Bordeaux turned toward Marlo and stared like a bored cat that had just spied a twitching mouse. “Hey! No boys allowed in the shower, perv,” she smirked.

Marlo exhumed a clod of grit from her ear.

“What?” she replied.

Lyon, tall, lean, and so flawless that she scarcely looked human, stood just outside the shower stalls.

“You've got a couple of zits on your chest, perv,” she said icily, pointing to Marlo's underdeveloped upper body. “I guess you ran out of room on your face.”

The two girls cackled. Marlo touched her cheek. It felt like chocolate chip cookie dough, heavy on the chips.

Marlo's face turned red. Her blush throbbed. Humiliated, she quickly wrapped herself in a towel and ran off as the cruel blond goddesses laughed at her. Their hoots and howls echoed off the wet tiles.

“Nice try with the water alarm,” Lyon snorted.

“I don't think Miss
Boredom
appreciated it, though,” Bordeaux added.

“But I'm sure you two can bury the hatchet during your detention!”

“Enough!” barked a she-demon from the hallway. “This is a strictly No Joy Zone.”

Marlo wept silently in front of a mirror as her tormentors giggled quietly in the other room. Wiping her puffy, red-rimmed eyes, Marlo caught her reflection. Her face, much to her shock, was covered with pimples that formed the shape of an upside-down star. Marlo clutched her cheeks, feeling so ugly that she half expected her reflection to crack before her very eyes.

Suddenly the mirror shattered into a hundred pieces.

Marlo gasped.

A filthy head peered back through the broken mirror. If this was a demon, Marlo thought, it certainly was one of the lesser demons. Actually, it looked a lot like her brother.

“It's me, Milton!” Her brother extended a dirty hand. “C'mon! We don't have much time!”

Marlo's zit-studded face was slack with shock. “How did you find me?”

“We got a map,” Milton panted. “The girls' and boys' bathrooms share the same plumbing. We're off to find the Secret Toilet.”

“We?” Marlo peered inside the putrid tunnel just beyond the broken mirror. “
The Secret Toilet?
Have you lost your mind?”

“We have to hurry,” Milton whined. “She'll be looking for us…Principal Bubb.”

At the sound of the demoness's name, Marlo clutched her towel around her and carefully crawled through the jagged portal. “And to think, I just took a shower.”

Despite the stench, it was comforting to see her brother's dorky face.

“This better be worth it, short bus,” she complained.

Having a brother was weird, Marlo pondered, unconsciously echoing her brother's earlier thought. It was like having a heart-shaped bruise.

22 · THE FLUSH OF YOUTH

MILTON, MARLO, AND
Virgil trudged through the humid darkness. Milton and Virgil's flashlights flickered before them, with Virgil's beam often resting on Marlo.

Marlo sighed. “A little more light in front and less behind, Supersize,” she grumbled.

“My flashlight must be, uh, falling off my head or something,” stammered Virgil.

“Yeah, well, your big noggin is going to fall off if you keep staring at my butt.”

“Hey, give him a break,” Milton protested. “His map helped us find the Girls' Unrestrooms. And maybe it can help us find this Secret Toilet.”

“I'll believe it when I see it,” Marlo snorted, shaking her head.

Milton stared at his sister, the beam of his flashlight caressing her fresh crop of acne. “What's that all over your face?”

Marlo went from brash to bashful. “It's, uh, a hormonal thing,” she replied, brushing her hair into her face. “A
girl thing.
If you don't stop bugging me about it, I'll tell you.”

The tunnel echoed with a low grumble. Marlo looked back at Virgil. She scowled at him.

Virgil glanced ahead, worried. “That wasn't me.”

The three children stared down the tunnel into the impenetrable darkness. It rumbled like the irritable bowels of a giant who had just eaten a ton of spicy Chinese takeout.

Milton screamed as several tons of sewage exploded into the tunnel.

23 · FROM MALL RATS TO SEWER RATS

ON THE SURFACE,
Milton thought, people are always talking about how there is a “light at the end of the tunnel.” But the only thing at the end of this particular tunnel was tons of sewage. And every ounce of it had swept him, his sister, and his new friend miles down a subterranean poop chute.

“Wow,” mumbled Virgil, his face slick with stinking muck. “That was one wild ride!”

The surge of sewage had blasted the fugitive threesome through miles and miles of uncharted pipe. They were spun around so much in waves of waste they had no idea which end was up. Marlo clutched her once merely dirty towel with one arm, while the other wrapped around a rusty metal ladder welded to the inside of the pipe. Apart from the appalling smell, she looked as if she had just emerged from a therapeutic mud bath at some expensive spa.

“Second to that church summer camp Mom and Dad made us go to, that was the most disgusting thing I've ever experienced,” Marlo said through clenched teeth.

Milton didn't answer. He was clinging to the ladder, paralyzed by disgust. Virgil was a few rungs below. He wiped away thick globs of crud from his eyes and consulted his map, which was now, basically, a piece of used toilet paper.

“I think we're here,” he said, pointing to a patch of brown on the back of the slimy map that illustrated a dense network of pipes, tubes, and channels.

Marlo knelt beside Virgil, who stared at her, grinning like an idiot.

“Oh yeah,” she said sarcastically, squinting at the map. “We're just a few turds away from home. All we have to do is turn left at the reeking dung heap.”

Virgil snickered. “You're funny.”

Marlo smirked at her rotund traveling companion. She was both highly irritated and strangely touched at being Virgil's crush.

Marlo examined the bottom of the map and scratched away a film of filth with her fingernail, revealing the words “Netherworld Novelty Corp.” She gave a dry, humorless laugh and wiped away a budding tear.

“Figures…a big fat practical joke…on us.”

Virgil gazed at Marlo with a hurt expression. She put her dirty hand on his dirty shoulder.

“Not you. You're just gullible.”

Marlo looked over at her brother, who was still shaky from what would be known from then on only as “the incident.” He seemed like a newborn foal, trembling and swaying and slick with feces.

“Hey, freak show…short bus…
Milton.
”

Milton gasped for air, as if he had risen to the surface of the ocean. Marlo put her hand on his shivering shoulder.

“Whoa, get a grip, geek,” she said while wiping some grime from Milton's one lens. “We'll get you a nice, hot shower and a series of allergy shots when we're outta here. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die again.”

The animal-formerly-known-as-Cerberus, ferreted away in Milton's backpack, sneezed and squirmed. Milton snapped out of his stupor and looked down the putrid pipe.

“Which…way?” he muttered.

“Huh?” Virgil grunted as he tried to right himself in the slick puddles of waste.

Milton opened his mouth, but, instead of words, out came a few half-digested Brussels sprouts and liver lumps.

“Charming.” Marlo grimaced.

“Where the sewage…s-somewhere up there…,” Milton stammered, his quivering finger pointing at the blackness ahead. “If all this…stuff…came from the Surface, the Stage, the place we call home, then it would only make sense to follow the pipe…
upstream.
”

“What about that Secret Toilet of yours?” asked Marlo. “Shouldn't we go back to finding that?”

Milton shook his head.

“We've washed away too…too far.” He coughed. “We'd spend most of our time backtracking to where we came from.”

“And,” said Virgil as he sloshed toward the Fausters. “If all this stuff goes down to…the hot place…to make it even worse, I guess…”

Milton shuddered at the thought.

“…then,” Virgil continued, “we could get washed down to h-e-double-hockey-sticks.”

The three children shared a moment of silence.

“Well,” Marlo said abruptly, “then we'd better hurry and hope we get…wherever…before the next big flush.”

Cerberus poked his nose out of Milton's bag and took in a big, stinky drink of air. His eyes gave off a faint red glimmer as he scanned the pipeway dutifully. Milton reached back and gave what he thought was his ferret a reassuring pat. “What's up, little guy?”

The creature hissed.

“Is he okay?” Virgil asked.

Milton looked around with dread. “I'm not sure. He hasn't been himself lately. Maybe he senses danger.”

“I don't think you have to be a ferret to sense
that,
” Marlo added bleakly.