Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (12 page)

24 · PIPE DREAM COME TRUE

AFTER HOURS OF
slogging through filth, Milton had all but given up hope. Heck was creeping into Milton's skin. A sense of despair had taken root within him.

Yet, as they trudged through the sludge, Milton spotted a weak beam of light glimmering ahead. His heart, had it been beating, would surely have stopped at the sight. Perhaps they'd soon be waking from this nightmare, he thought. Although the realist in Milton persisted: maybe this was just another dirty trick.

At the end of the passageway was a ceiling grate. Faint beams of light trickled through.

Virgil grinned like a cat that had just eaten a flock of canaries.

“Wow,” said Marlo. “I'm impressed. You really did it, Superchunk.”

Virgil blushed. “Ladies first,” he said with a sly smile. “Just get on my shoulders and crawl through.”

Marlo stepped forward, clutching the soggy towel wrapped around her, then stopped short. Her eyes squeezed into accusing slits.

“Nice try, perv. Milton,
you
go first.”

“Why me?”

“Because I said so,” Marlo responded matter-of-factly.

“Oh,” Milton replied meekly. Marlo wasn't the most logical person, but she made a strong argument nonetheless.

Desperate to emerge from this long metal intestine, Milton crawled onto Virgil's shoulders. He lifted the grate and peered out.

“So?” Virgil asked. “Did we make it?”

“Yes,” Milton answered with a mixture of delight and suspicion. “Maybe. At least I…think.”

The grate proved to be a manhole in the middle of a vast tunnel clogged with honking cars.

Milton helped pull Virgil through the manhole while Marlo, much to her disgust, pushed. Virgil's face was purple from exertion. He looked like a distant cousin of that annoying purple dinosaur down below…or above…or to the side…or wherever the heck they were. It sure
looked
like they were back home.

“C'mon,” strained Milton as sweat poured down his face. “One more time…One, two,
three
!”

Virgil popped out of the hole like a humongous cork in a champagne bottle of questionable vintage. Marlo struggled upward as Virgil pulled her by her arm.

“Oww,” she whined while planting herself on the asphalt. “You, baby, definitely have
back.
”

Virgil smiled, happy for any acknowledgment, and the three of them rose, steadying themselves against the oversized tires of a gargantuan SUV with a “Looking Out for Me, Myself, and I” sticker on its mangled bumper.

They walked down a seemingly endless row of cars. Behind the wheel of each was an angry, cursing commuter.

“It's like it never ends,” Virgil said while staring at an old woman smashing her fist on the dashboard, knocking over a small plastic Jesus. “And they don't seem to even see us.”

Marlo winced as the woman laid on her horn. “How come we didn't hear any of this in the sewage pipe?”

Milton shrugged. “Maybe there's some kind of sound insulation field or something.”

Marlo shook her head. “I don't know. The whole thing is just weird.”

All the drivers were staring straight ahead at a bright light at the end of the tunnel. It was round, like a spotlight, radiating a pure white beam. There was movement around the edges, indistinct figures. It looked as if they were beckoning the drivers toward them. The three children squinted at the light trying to make sense of it.

“So
that
was the light we saw in the pipe,” Milton said.

They continued onward and passed a dented silver BMW. Inside a businessman fumed.

“Move it! I'm late!!” he screamed. “Where'd you learn how to drive—clown school?”

Virgil chortled. “Good one.”

Milton saw a cell phone on the man's dashboard. “Excuse me, sir? Do you mind if I borrow your phone?” Milton asked.

The businessman ignored him. On his radio a monotone announcer droned.

“This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.”

A piercing tone blasted from the speakers. It streamed from each and every car on this endless stretch of road. Marlo grabbed the phone through the man's half-open window.

“I'll take that as a yes,” she said.

She flipped the phone open and punched in a number. Someone on the other end picked up.

“Mom?!” Marlo said with a blend of desperation and excitement.

“You are trying to place a call way, way out of your cellular phone network,”
replied a flat, prerecorded female voice.
“My, we must think our calling plan grants us the ability to traverse both time and space. Didn't you read your terms and conditions? Apparently not. Please stay on the line. An operator will be with you shortly. Estimated time of wait: forever.”

“Is it her?” Milton asked, trembling.

Marlo sniffed back an unexpected tear. Milton gazed up at her in confused anticipation. Marlo turned away suddenly.

“Allergies,” she snuffled. She wiped away some snot with the back of her hand and tossed the phone back into the grumbling man's car.

Milton tugged on Marlo's towel.

“Well?” he asked, scooting in front of her.

“Out of range,” she continued with a couldn't-careless shrug.

Milton scrutinized his sister. She appeared nonchalant on the outside. But he could tell by how hard she was
trying
to appear nonchalant on the outside that, inside, she must be a mess. A cold chill ran up his spine. Wherever they were, Milton surmised, they were still a long, long way from home.

A big book rested on the seat next to the man:
Contract Law Made EZ.
There was something about the book that captured Milton's attention. Sure, it was probably pretty boring, but if they hadn't really made it back home—and, judging from how hard Marlo was trying to look casual, that was probably the case—it could very well hold the key to breaking his contract with Bea “Elsa” Bubb. Besides, it was something to read, and when Milton was stressed out (and he thought that dying and being sentenced to eternal torment were valid reasons for feeling stressed) reading anything—old magazines, cereal boxes, the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste, whatever he could get his hands on—had a calming effect on him.

“Hey, mister. Do you mind if…?”

The man, oblivious, was locked tight inside his road rage. Milton grabbed a notebook from his backpack, ripped out a page, and wrote “I.O.U. one law book.”

He folded the page, placed it on the passenger seat, and stuffed the book into his backpack.

“Look!” Virgil yelped.

He pointed toward a wide pile of jagged shadows several hundred feet down the tunnel, where the rows of idle cars seemed to end abruptly. A blazing beam of white light emanated from just beyond it. The light stroked the gloom in slow sweeps. The tunnel grew steadily wider until reaching a massive, darkened barricade.

Milton, Marlo, and Virgil jogged through the traffic jam toward the line of shadows. With each step, it became clearer that this dark blockage was a gnarled hedge of wrecked cars and that the light itself was nothing but a high-powered klieg light with a buzzing bluish white bulb. Squinting, they could make out that the gesturing figures in front of the light were animatronic robots: jerky, humanoid machines dressed as old men and women. It was like they had stumbled upon a movie premiere at a rest home.

The barricade of cars girdled a massive concrete wall, camouflaged by black paint, which seemed to signify the end of the tunnel.

The three children considered the forbidding piles of neglected cars, some with headlights slowly dying into weak yellow-orange embers.

“Here!” Marlo shouted as she opened the door of a mangled '63 T-bird. She crawled through it and came out next to the towering rampart.

After Virgil and Milton followed Marlo through the car, Milton walked up to the wall. It was the side of a massive building that seemed to him both ancient and modern, like it had either been new for thousands of years, or was built old just yesterday. Milton noticed a shabby billboard posted on the wall several yards to his left. Etched in the pockmarked sign—surrounded by smeared graffiti scrawls—were the letters DURBR.

Virgil peered behind the light as Marlo made shadow birds in front with her hands. Her sweeping eagle, in particular, was received with an explosion of honks and screams from the traffic jam.

“I found a door!” Virgil shouted from beneath the DURBR sign, his hand on the tarnished knob of a dull charcoal door.

So the three not-quite children, not-quite teenagers stepped through the door into a place that seemed not-quite home, not-quite Heck.

25 · WAIT WATCHERS

THEY ENTERED A
sprawling gray building. It was a huge square room lined with counters, most of which had little signs that read
CLOSED. TRY NEXT TELLER. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT
. Lines of people with drooped shoulders, shifting their weight restlessly from foot to foot, stood vigilantly in front of the few tellers actually at their post.

The air had that same dead quality that Milton noticed in chemistry class mixed with the odor of old carpet, mildew, dust, and despair. The whole place just
smelled
gray.

Rows of morose adults slumped in folding metal chairs, gazing dismally at the ticket stubs in their hands.

The only feeble splash of atmospheric color in this place came in the form of cheery music squawking through speakers embedded in the crumbling asbestos ceiling.

Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…

A huge, run-down metal sign displaying a long row of numbers clicked loudly. A new number dropped slowly into place like a glob of cold ketchup creeping out of an upended bottle.

NOW SERVING
: 5,769,343,782,312.

One disheveled man in a trench coat held up his ticket in disbelief. “5,769,343,782,312? That's me!”

The man shuffled across the carpet to a lumpy woman behind a counter. She was chewing gum. Gobs of it. Her jaws chomped in listless rhythm and caused her three chins to sway back and forth. She resembled a cow with gray hair and beige stirrup pants. The man knocked on her window just as she flipped her sign to
CLOSED
. She waved her painted, dagger-like nails toward the counter next to her, where several hundred people fidgeted in line.

The sign clicked again:
NOW SERVING
: 5,769,343,782,313.

The second clerk shrugged her padded shoulders. “Sorry, sir. You missed your turn. You'll have to wait.”

The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon…

The man plodded back to his chair in defeat as Milton knocked on the cow lady's window. She ignored him in that “pretending not to notice you” kind of way. Marlo stepped forward.

“Hey! Lady!”

The woman looked up reluctantly. She squinted at Marlo through cat's-eye glasses. A glimmer of recognition flashed in her dull eyes.

“You three look…” She thrummed her stiletto fingernails on the counter. “I'll get my supervisor to help you. Wait here…
Ha,
like you could do anything else.”

She pushed three long sheets of paper across the counter. “In the meantime, please fill out these Capture forms…Be sure to sign the back, people always forget to do that.”

She shut her window and waddled toward a bank of offices behind her.

Marlo noticed an engraved wooden sign above the windows of the counter:
DEPARTMENT OF UNENDURABLE REDUNDANCY
,
BUREAUCRACY
,
AND REDUNDANCY
. She swallowed hard.

Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon…

“We're done here, boys,” Marlo said with a quaver, pushing the forms back across the counter.

Milton, Marlo, and Virgil pushed through the lines of people to a revolving door at the back of the room. Through the door was a winding white corridor, like a hospital hallway, with a rainbow of colored bands on the gray linoleum floor that branched out in a dozen directions.

“Well,” Marlo said, beginning to run, “I've always been partial to purple.”

They dashed along the plum-colored line, which veered sharply to the right. Milton looked over his shoulder. Three withered demon guards with matching shocks of gray hair struggled through the revolving doors behind them. Once free, they bounded toward the three children with surprising speed.

If you'll hold my hand, we'll chase your dream across the sky, for we can fly…

“I don't know what's worse,” Marlo said, panting as she galloped down the hallway, “being chased by demons or that awful music…it's everywhere.”

Virgil wheezed. “I…kind of…like it…
sort of…
It's very…
relaxing…
”

Marlo clutched her soiled towel.

“Figures,” she puffed. “It's like a musical lobotomy.”

Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…

The purple line ended at a like-colored double door. Hanging on the twin doorknobs was a cardboard sign on a string, reading
DO NOT DISTURB: TIME-OUT.

Marlo pulled off the sign and threw open the doors.

Milton, Marlo, and Virgil burst into a vast windowless space lined with shiny gray linoleum. Hundreds of agitated young children with cones on their heads twitched in folding metal chairs that faced the walls.

An old woman who looked like a puckered praying mantis paced the room, smacking a yardstick in her palm.

“Now stop all that blubbering!” she scolded. “You only have to stay here until the cows come home, or the place downstairs freezes, whichever comes last!”

Milton, Marlo, and Virgil closed the door behind them as quietly as possible. Unfortunately, they stuck out like three giant, soiled thumbs.

The withered insect lady glared at the three filthy preteens.

“You're a little old for this place, aren't you?”

Marlo stepped forward and cinched her towel tightly beneath her underarms.

“We have overactive thyroids,” Marlo declared. Then, with her usual grace and subtlety, she added, “Tell us where we are.”

“Take a seat,” the teacher spat. “You'll have plenty of time to figure it out.”

Milton walked toward a group of vacant chairs in the middle of the wall opposite them.

“I'm starting to think we might not be home,” whispered Virgil next to him.

I sort of figured that once I saw the battalion of decomposing demons after us,
Milton thought.

He studied the room. There were no other doors, no other way out. The room was still except for the occasional whimper or squirming limb. From down the hall Milton could hear grumbling and doors opening and shutting.

Virgil stared at the double doors.

“This isn't going to work,” he said. “They're going to find us. We've got to find another way out of here.”

“Shhhhh!!” the sour teacher hissed.

“There isn't,” Milton said hopelessly.

Marlo scanned the room like a caged animal.

“Wait,” she yelped. “Up there!”

The ceiling was tiled in big, dingy white squares. One of the tiles was askew. A warm, faint light shone through the gap.

“I smell cookies,” Virgil said, sniffing up great gulps of air.

Marlo scooted a chair underneath it and hopped on top.

“I…can't…quite…reach,” she said, teetering on her tiptoes.

“We'll have to get on top of each other or something,” Milton commented beside her.

He looked over at Virgil and considered his bulk. “Due to our unique…body types, maybe you should be the bottom, while we climb on top.”

The shriveled teacher held a bony finger to her mouth. “Shhhhh!!!” she said with an explosive spray of spit. “Sit down this instant!!”

Marlo looked at Virgil.

“Only problem with that,” she said, “is that we'd have to, somehow, pull him up.”

Virgil shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

“Good point,” Milton said while rubbing his chin in contemplation. “Well, here goes…”

Milton scaled his sister, trying to touch her as little as possible.

“You could at least take off those stupid wooden shoes,” Marlo grumbled.

The teacher glowered at them, dumbfounded, with her withered arms on her hips. “What on earth do you wretched children think you're doing!? Come down from there!”

Marlo groaned as Milton ascended her. “We're not
on
earth,” she grunted. “That's the problem, bone bag.”

Securely on her shoulders, Milton managed to push the tile aside. “Close…Virgil, you're up.”

The teacher was livid. You could see the anger pulsing along her network of bulging blue veins. She stormed at Milton, Marlo, and Virgil, waving her yardstick.

The Fausters moaned in agony as their full-bodied friend climbed to the top of their living totem pole. Finally, after much wheezing and mumbled curses, Virgil made it to the top.

He poked his head in. “Wow,” he murmured, “you're not going to believe this.”

Marlo was sweating under the strain. “And you're not going to believe my chiropractor bill if you don't get off me!”

“Oh,” Virgil mumbled, “sorry.”

The double doors of the classroom rattled open. Several pairs of hard leather jackboots slapped the floor below. Virgil crawled into the ceiling and grabbed Milton's arm.

“Whoa!” Virgil yelled as he suddenly fell
into
the ceiling, pulling both Milton and Marlo in as well.

They fell onto the floor of a child's bedroom. The hole in the ceiling of the room below—or at least it seemed as if it were below—had led to a hole behind a black velvet snowman painting hanging on a wall in
this
room. It defied the laws of physics and gravity. But obviously whoever had made those laws had never spent time down here.