Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (20 page)

“Aaaarrrrggghhh!!” he roared as he hurled the pitchspork with deadly accuracy toward Milton's chest.

Before Milton even had a chance to react, an eight-year-old boy came tumbling down the slide, head over heels, and fell onto the soul balloon. The balloon pitched forward and absorbed the business end of Damian's pitchspork.

Milton and Virgil toppled over into the pool of Ping-Pong balls and garbage, still clutching the belts strapped to their flight-shy balloon.

“Lucky break,” muttered Virgil. He looked over at the stunned boy. He was wearing a torn T-shirt that read “I Nearly Survived Unbalanced Bill's Fork 'n Toaster Roller Coaster!” “Well, for us, anyway,” Virgil added.

Milton looked upward at the hissing ball of stitched-together clothes that he and Virgil held tethered. There was a gash in between a pair of navy blue corduroys and a plaid pajama top. Though the tear was only a few inches wide, white blobs of soul were squirming out of the balloon, causing it to sag slightly on one side.

Milton, too, seemed to sag at the sight. Virgil gazed at the gash, then back at his despondent friend. A sad smile crept across his face.

“If anyone deserves a lucky break, it's you,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “I'm just holding you back.”

Milton cocked his head at his largest and best friend in this or any world.

“What are you talking…?”

Virgil untangled his arm from the line of knotted belts until he held the very end with his fist. He looked over at Damian, who was just inside the gates with a baffled expression plastered across his face.

“You know what?” Virgil asked Damian warmly.

“What?” Damian grudgingly responded.

Virgil smiled. “Chicken butt!”

Virgil let go of the belt. The balloon—and Milton—rushed up through the portal toward the Surface.

“No!!!” yelled Milton as he soared upward.

Tears leaked down Virgil's smiling face.

“Send down a triple cheeseburger!” he hollered as a furious Damian and several demon guards pressed through the gates to seize him.

The whole scene shrank down to a feverish dot of activity as Milton rose up, up and away. The last thing Milton could make out was Marlo's unmistakable voice cutting through the rush of wind.

“Way to go, bro!! What an exit!! Get your nasty meat hooks off me, you overgrown piece of bologna…”

Then it was gone. All Milton could hear was the deafening roar of blowing air. It was like being caught in a vertical wind tunnel, or like skydiving in reverse.

The spiral slide uncoiled both above and below him. Due to his supersonic flight upward, the slide looked like a spinning drill boring through the earth.

Whizzing past were several more children—two little boys and an older girl—racing down the slide. They were wearing the same Fork 'n Toaster Roller Coaster shirt as the little boy below. The three children waved their arms straight up into the air.

“Woo-hoo!” they squealed in delight.

“What a rush!” the oldest boy yelled before disappearing down into the abyss.

After what seemed like hours but was, again, no time at all, Milton rose swiftly toward a bright, ever-expanding opening above him. He felt like a bubble floating to the surface of the ocean. But a bubble's life tends to be short lived, with a nasty habit of popping upon reaching its destination.

43 · BODY SLAM

MILTON SHUT HIS
eyes as he shot out of the portal bridging here and there, up and down, living and dead. With the sudden explosion of noise and light, Milton felt as if he were being born a second time.

He finally got the courage to open his eyes. Beneath him lay the gnarled wreckage of a roller coaster—a five-story chrome toaster, with a looping track going in and out of the structure's smoldering slots. At the center of the twisted, smoldering metal and scattered fork-shaped cars was a small, swirling pinwheel of energy. A crowd of parents and children gawked at the debris, yet no one seemed to notice the churning eddy of crackling light. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

Whizzing upward and outward, Milton noticed a billboard several miles beyond the Fork 'n Toaster Roller Coaster disaster that read
UNBALANCED BILL'S BEMUSEMENT PARK: THE ONLY THEME PARK THAT MAKES YOU SIGN A WAIVER
.

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

The balloon above him rustled and jerked. Gliding above the surface of the world, the soul bits became crazed and restless, making their canvas cage seem like a bag of possessed microwave popcorn.

With several vicious dips, fits, and jerks, the balloon ripped apart. The squirming, speckled souls rushed out in every direction.

Milton's stomach tingled and scurried up into his throat as he tumbled earthward. Then another peculiar sensation overtook him. It felt as if there were invisible electric hooks in Milton's heart and head, tugging him relentlessly toward the horizon. The terrain below his feet was now not only hurtling toward him—or so it seemed—but it was also whooshing away. He was indeed being pulled—or propelled—
somewhere.

Milton's knuckles were white from squeezing hold of the braided belt straps. Now it was like a long, tangled rip cord that led to, instead of a parachute, scraps of mismatched laundry.

Milton looked down. The ground below was strangely
un
strange. Flat, hopeless, monotonous, dreary, devoid of all personality…

He was home. Or close to it. The tugging sensation in his chest and head was fierce. It was as if he were trying to reel in two large, spirited fish.

He plunged faster now, toward a drab collection of gray boxes, with blinking trucks outside…Grizzly Mall! The parking lot was teeming with people, some crying, some gawking, while others simply milled about like stunned ghosts. A dozen or so, Milton could now see, were caked with smoldering marshmallow.

The crowd parted as two men in white wheeled a stretcher toward an ambulance. On the gurney was a figure…a boy…He was wearing khaki pants and a navy blue shirt that were mottled with lumps of molten marshmallow. He wore broken glasses. Milton rushed faster toward the boy, the boy who was deathly still, the boy with the sticky, smoking mop of hair. He could see the boy's face, hidden behind a mask of burnt sugar. Milton felt like he was falling into a mirror. Closer, faster, closer, faster. Milton's ears buzzed with a high-pitched whine. The boy…
the boy…
he could see him perfectly now. The boy was…

Milton's etheric body slammed into his lifeless physical one. The pain was incredible. He could feel each and every sleepy atom roughly shoved aside to make room for bristling energy. The noise was deafening. Harsh, stabbing beams of sunlight pressed through his eyelids. The smell was overpowering. Sweet, sickening, sharp, bitter. He could taste it. The taste! It prickled on his tongue, scrambled up the roof of his mouth, then burrowed down his throat. But most of all, he hurt. Everywhere. Dull throbs, rolling aches, spiky twinges, small patches of searing agony. And a great heaviness. It was like he was swaddled in blankets of lead. He felt thick and complicated. He itched. He burned. He tickled. It was like when your foot falls asleep and slowly comes to, only everywhere, inside and out. But at the bottom of it all, at the very foundation, his core, he felt…
familiar.
His head throbbed, his heart boiled. Small storms of electricity seethed within him, particles rubbing together, chaffing, sparking, until suddenly, there was a great clap of thunder.

44 · A NEW LEASE ON DEATH

MILTON BOLTED UPRIGHT
on the gurney. The medics jumped back with shock. The crowd screamed as one. Some women fainted. Some men, too.

Milton's into-body experience was overwhelming…though that wasn't the right word (and Milton knew most every word). It was beyond the capacity of language to describe.

A great calm gripped the crowd. Suddenly Milton's body reacted to the experience the only way it knew how. It began to weep. Uncontrollably and inconsolably. As oceans of tears gushed out of his eyes, Milton felt as though he would never stop crying. He bawled. He wailed. His body convulsed, wracked with heavy, syrupy sobs.

Through the stinging salt of tears, Milton tried to rein in his emotions with self-analysis. He wasn't crying from grief, he surmised, but from the pure joy of being alive. The air now tasted sweet. The sun caressed his skin with its warmth. The wind felt cool and invigorating…
alive.
His lungs swelled pleasantly in his chest. His heart's beat was a steady, thrumming thrill.

The tense calm of the crowd was broken as another blanketed form was wheeled out into the parking lot. The only sound was the steady squeak and low, gravely rumble of wheels on pavement.

The gurney wheeled closer. The blanket looked like a snow-covered mountain range in miniature. Then Milton looked closer and saw something else. Something terrible. Poking out from between the sheets was a black granny boot. Vintage. Smoldering. And completely still, inanimate, like a doll's shoe.

Though his tear ducts were raw, fresh waves of stinging water leaked out of his eyes. These tears were different. This was sheer, wrenching grief, dredged from deep inside him. This experience had dug a well inside Milton to a place within he never knew existed. A place miles below.
A place…

Milton sniffed back his sorrow and wiped the snot clean from his chin. His descent into Heck. That terrible, confounding, maddening, awful place. Was it real? A dream? Some severe, trauma-induced nightmare? The result of a highly active imagination combined with near-death hypoxia, leeching his young mind of oxygen, starving his brain into conjuring horrifying, outlandish delusions?

As Milton pondered his sanity among a crowd of shaken onlookers, his knapsack—sticky, black, and smoky—rustled beside him.

Between the flaps nudged a pink, wet, twitching nose. Lucky wriggled out into the sunlight. He winced and shivered, looking shaken and exposed, as if he had just been born again, too.

He surged up Milton's limp arm and onto his chest. Milton grinned through his tears. Lucky crawled to Milton's face and licked it frantically with his nimble little tongue, tickling the boy's chin. Milton giggled and stroked his pet so hard that Lucky gave his master's hand gentle nips.

After a series of scratches and strokes, Lucky grew stock-still. He looked imploringly at Milton with bulging pink eyes and started to undulate. His fur rippled in waves. His neck arched and jerked. Several wet heaves later, Lucky had thrown up all over Milton.

Great, just great,
thought Milton.
Just what I need: hot ferret vomit all over me.

Then Milton saw it: wet pieces of paper floating in the bile. Scraps with elegantly written words like “indenture,” “Soul Holder,” and “legally binding covenant.” It was a contract…
his
contract…with that fat, ugly, wretched toad of a she-demon Bea “Elsa” Bubb…Principal Bubb!

Milton just had to laugh. It felt like he was crying with his mouth. He couldn't stop. Everything seemed so…ridiculous and tragic at the same time.

Lucky had smuggled out Milton's contract with the Powers That Be Evil in his own uniquely ferret-like way.

He looked over at the stretcher with Marlo's cloaked body, surrounded by grim paramedics shaking their heads.

His sister was dead, Milton thought. But she was also, somehow, alive. And the thought of Marlo kicking demons with her etheric legs made him smile.

“All true,” he mumbled.

“What was that?” a paramedic with stubble and kind blue eyes asked, leaning closer to him.

Milton stared deeply into his eyes with a hollow sadness.

“You wouldn't understand,” he murmured. “No one on earth would.”

Lucky burped, and that awful fishy smell dragged Milton back to the parking lot, and the crowd, and the questions that were ready to leap from everyone's lips.

He couldn't bother with this right now. It wasn't important. Milton swung his singed legs over the stretcher, overcome with a sense of urgency. That nine-ring circus down south was real, and Milton was the only living person to know,
really
know, that it was there.

He hopped off the gurney and swayed. The paramedic steadied him.

“Son, you need to lie back down. You've been through an incredible ordeal.”

“You don't know the half of it,” Milton said in a spooky whisper while strapping on his backpack.

He staggered across the parking lot as the stunned crowd backed away, making him a path.

Milton could only manage a few steps at a time. He stopped, seized by an incredible vertigo. It was more than dizziness. It was as if he was out of phase with himself. It was like that game where you try to tilt the little steel ball into the hole. Part of Milton was trying to fit back into itself.

“My sentient body,” Milton mumbled.

The weird, electrical glue holding me together,
he mused while patting his body, trying to make himself somehow more real.
It's…gone. Dispersed and absorbed into…what was it? The Transdimensional Power Grid?

Then, as quickly as his etheric body had slid out of his physical one, Milton was whole again. But it was an uneasy feeling. The more Milton concentrated on holding himself together, the more intact he felt. But he knew he couldn't maintain that focus for much longer. He would just have to accept that he would never quite be himself again.

The crowd gawked at Milton as if he were a zombie back from the dead.
An astute observation,
he mused.

Milton shut his eyes in exhaustion as his head swam with sirens, sobs, blurry images, and confounding legal phrases. Cutting through the noise like a cold, blunt knife was Bea “Elsa” Bubb's leathery laugh. It echoed through his consciousness, seeped into his bones, and tormented his very soul.

Just the thought of her made Milton's blood boil. And it actually felt good. It felt real.

And for the first time in his life—and death—Milton enjoyed being different. He felt free: free from caring what people thought, free to choose his own path, free to do something that no boy—dead or alive—had ever done before.

He shuffled past the parking lot and crunched through a playground covered with wood chips toward a swing set. Milton had no idea where to go. He didn't feel like going home. There would need to be too many…explanations. And no one would believe—or want to know, really—the truth. But the truth was all he had.

Lucky climbed out of the backpack and into Milton's arms.
Okay,
Milton smiled.
Maybe I
do
have a little more than just the truth.
He had his ferret, he had himself, and he had a mission.

A smile crept over his face as he settled down on a swing. He gently rocked back and forth, feeling the silky arms of sleep wrap around him.

All our days are numbered,
he thought before drifting off into unconscious bliss,
but that number is infinity.