Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (10 page)

13 · CAUGHT SHORT

“MARLO!” NORM CRIED
as she saw her friend emerge from Halo/Good Buy. Marlo smiled weakly as she shuffled closer with muffled clatters before collapsing in a heap.

Takara and Norm helped Marlo to a bench where the girls were assessing their collection of amassed booty.

“Thanks,” Marlo replied feverishly. “Uh-oh … I think one of my Bungling Brothers Circus plates cracked,” she added as she shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

“Wow-wee,” Takara said as she took off Marlo’s sopping-wet sweatshirt, “you swiped out. You like walking garage sale. How you make off with all this with no getting caught?”

“The guards must’ve had bigger fish to fry,” Marlo replied groggily “probably all the phantoms …”

Lyon stepped up to Marlo and folded her arms in judgment. She was so padded with concealed stolen underwear that she almost resembled a regularly shaped girl. Her smug face was like smelling salts to Marlo, clearing the fog from her head.

“Okay then,” Marlo said, straightening up. “Put your price tags where your collagen is.”

Lyon, Jordie, and Takara ripped and peeled off price tags and set them down on the bench.

“Takara,” Lyon ordered. “Add them up.”

“Why me?” Takara replied.

“Well,” Lyon said, “you’re Japanese, right? Good with numbers?”

Jordie sighed and scooped up the price tags. “Yeh racist toffee-nosed git,” she snarled. “Let me add ’em up. I’m smashing at maths.”

Jordie pushed aside her stack of pilfered British hip-hop CDs, screwed up her eyes, and within a minute (she was indeed smashing at math), she added the dozen or so price tags in her head.

“Two thousand, one hundred forty dollars,” she said. “One thousand, five hundred fifty-three euros, or one thousand fifty-five British pounds, depending on today’s currency rates.”

Bordeaux rolled her protuberant orbs. “Who cares how much they
weigh
?” she said.

“Okay, Blue Tag Special,” Lyon said, settling her
own negligible weight on one hip, “show us what you’ve got.”

“Here,” Marlo said, handing Jordie a fistful of yanked tags.

Jordie thumbed through the stack quickly yet thoughtfully. She crinkled her nose briefly in thought, before announcing the sum.

“Eighteen hundred dollars,” she said. “One thousand, three hundred seven euros, or eight hundred eighty-seven British …”

“What?!” Marlo yelped, bolting up. “That can’t be right.”

Jordie stiffened, becoming larger and more intimidating. “Are yeh saying I miscounted?” she asked in a smooth rumble that matched the flat darkness of her pupils. “Or that I’m on the fiddle?”

“No,” Marlo replied. “Of course not. It’s just …”

“Would you like me to wrap your latest humiliating experience?” Lyon said in her most annoying, please-hit-me-smack-dab-in-the-nose-job voice possible. “And don’t forget your receipt.”

Receipt
, thought Marlo.
Of course!

“How much time do we have left?” Marlo asked.

Takara looked at one of three different watches she had dangling off her wrists. “Four minutes left,” she replied.

“I’ll be right back,” Marlo said, peeling off her
sweatshirt and stepping out of her sweltering silk mourning gown.

“Are you kidding me?!” Lyon snorted. “There’s no way …”

Marlo fished into the pocket of her sweatpants and reeled in the receipt she had gotten from the garbage can earlier.

One Yellow Canoe: $349

Marlo smiled slyly. This was going to be good.

“Okay then, Blandie,” she said. “How about this: I come out of that store in four minutes with a canoe, making me the queen of thieves. If I don’t, you are the personal, undisputed ruler of
me
for all eternity. I’ll even draft an official document saying as much.”

Lyon’s eyes narrowed. After a moment’s scrutiny, she shrugged her shoulders and smirked. “Whatever,” Lyon said, eyeing her gold Rolex. “You’ve got about two hundred seconds until Poker Alice supersizes your humiliation, anyhow. Go for it.”

Marlo skipped back into Halo/Good Buy, straight toward the Sponges, Spoons, and Sporting Goods aisle.

One hundred and ninety seconds later, a series of alarms went off throughout the mall. The girls looked around the now-even-noisier mall with apprehension.

“Look!” said Norm, pointing at the Halo/Good Buy entrance.

The automatic doors slid open with a pneumatic whoosh. Out shuffled Marlo. Trailing behind her were two burly security guards, with a large red canoe perched atop their shoulders.

“Uh-oh,” muttered Jordie. “Looks like the bird was nicked by the plod.”

Lyon glowered at Jordie. “Does anything you say
ever
make sense?”

Marlo walked cautiously to the marble bench, with the guards in close pursuit. “I think my grandfather will be
much
happier with red,” she said sweetly.

The guards put the canoe down and glared at Marlo.

“Will that be all?” asked one guard, chewing gum in military time.

“Yes, thank you,” Marlo replied with a girlish titter. “You’ve both been absolute angels!”

The guards shared the briefest of sideways glances before leaving with a sharp, synchronized bow.

“Thank you for shopping at Halo/Good Buy,” they said in unison before making an abrupt about-face and marching back into the store. Tiny white parakeet wings poked through their starched khaki uniforms.

The girls stared at Marlo with a blend of shock and reverence. Even Lyon’s admiration grudgingly shone through, like a zit through concealer.

Norm rushed up to Marlo and grabbed her hands, beaming. “How did you do it?!”

Marlo grinned back. “Trade secret.”

Marlo peered over her shoulder at Lyon, her grin becoming something just short of a sneer.

Anxious shoppers filed by the girls toward the atrium. Marlo unclasped hands with Norm and took in the commotion around them.

“What’s with all the alarms?” she asked.

“We thought it was because of you,” Takara said with a dainty shrug.

Then, on another giant plasma screen in the commons, Yojuanna appeared. The computer-generated creation appeared to be munching a digital carrot. She tossed the carrot top over her shoulder and sang into her gleaming headset.

A group of security guards trotted by, their ears pressed against their squawking walkie-talkies.

Marlo grabbed one of the guards by the sleeve. “Hey, what’s going on?” she asked. The security guard glared at Marlo. “I mean, is there some kind of emergency?” she added. “Something that could result in a lawsuit if me and my friends were to be hurt in any way?”

The security guard gulped. “Um, no, uh …
ma’am,”
he replied. “Just some crazy old woman up on the SkyBridge, chomping on an Adam’s Rib; apparently she saw her reflection below and went crazy jumping off, trying to get the ‘other rib.’”

“Is she okay?” Norm asked.

“Well, she busted more than just her rib, I hear. But it could’ve been worse, if she hadn’t had all those aces stuffed in her blouse. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

The guard trotted away. Marlo and Norm traded looks of excitement.

“Poker Alice!” they squealed together before high-fiving.

Marlo hopped up and down like a terrier after slurping up an espresso.

“Girls,”
Marlo said with her hands on her hips, “any moment, some nasty dead teacher or demon guard is going to come and round us up, so let’s make the most of our day out. The clock is tickin’, and there’s stuff to be pickin’.”

Yojuanna smirked, her slightly bucked teeth grazing her bubblegum lips. She rapped in her trade-marked (literally) helium voice to the accompaniment of what sounded like kettledrums and dueling band saws:

After brushing back dazzling strands of translucent hair away from her face, Yojuanna scratched her diamond-studded ear—an ear that seemed longer and pointier than it had been only moments before. With a shrill giggle like the backfire of a clown car full of laughing gas, the digital diva kicked her feet into the air and resumed her manic hopping.

“C’mon!” Marlo said, beaming, feeling as if she were doing the backstroke in an Olympic-sized bowl of Lucky Charms. For the moment, she was a prisoner in a pretty awesome cage.
Perhaps the only difference between incarceration and vacation is perspective
, Marlo thought as she skipped down the mall, certain that she was soon to become the preferred “pet” of a ginormous jack rabbot with a highly electric personality.

14 · ENERGY CRiSiS

“I THOPE THITH
workth,” Milton said to himself as he held the poultry thermometer underneath his tongue.

After his parents had gone to sleep, Milton had snuck into the garage to conduct his late-night experiments with subtle energy.

Lester Lobe had given him a printout listing the “secret” experiments of Sir Edward Tylor and his Subtle Energies Commission.

Sir Edward’s experiments with complex patterns of electric shock had led him to believe that there was indeed an after-realm, as he put it, a “spirit world crowded with countless detached essences removed from their respective material bodies. These insubstantial images, vapors, films, and shadows are, I believe, the very cause of life and thought, independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of their corporeal owner.”

Easy for him to say
, thought Milton as he bit down on the thermometer and straightened the jumper cables leading from his mouth to the industrial-strength bug zapper (the Insecticide 3000) suspended from the basketball hoop outside. Sir Edward made the “after-realm” seem like a noble place full of freedom and possibility, unlike the vexing bureaucratic freak show Milton had encountered.

Lester Lobe had written some notes—cribbed from various electricians’ manuals, alongside Sir Edward Tylor’s observations—that detailed how to make an etheric energy “trap.” Of course, due to practical considerations such as “where would an eleven-year-old possibly get a two-thousand-volt transformer,” Milton had to make some compromises, the biggest being that under no circumstances was he going to drill a hole to the center of his brain in order to hot-wire his pineal gland.

Sir Edward had used extensive animal testing to achieve his aims. There was even an unconfirmed account that he was able to reanimate a dead man using the life force of a convict facing execution. And while Milton may have accidentally killed his archenemy, he wasn’t going to cause harm to others simply to be “whole,” energy-wise.

Lucky, his faithful ferret, undulated into the garage, sniffed Milton’s sneakers, and looked up at his master with an expression that said, “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Milton scratched Lucky in that prime spot at the top of his neck, and the ferret billowed away out into the night. He had performed some rough calculations and deduced that, if a human conducted an average electrical current of three hundred kiloamperes, then—based on body weight—he would need either several large dogs, a dozen cats, or a hundred mice to get enough captured etheric energy to fuse his physical and sentient bodies together.

Milton could never bring himself to sacrifice an animal. He did, however, have no great love for insects. And, on a late summer night in Kansas, he was pretty sure he could harvest the death energy of countless moths and mosquitoes. He would need a lot, but Milton thought that by sleeping out in the garage with an electrified meat thermometer in his mouth, he should wake up with at least a little more spring in his step.

He plugged in the Insecticide 3000, slipped into his sleeping bag, and waited.

Zzzz
.

Milton tingled at his first, albeit paltry, pulse of etheric energy. He turned and looked out the half-open garage door. A bright star twinkled low on the horizon. He made a wish.

Please make everything be okay
.

Milton’s “star” moved slowly over downtown Generica as it made its descent into Buffalo Bill International Airport. Milton sighed and closed his eyes.

Zzzz
.

As he drifted off to sleep, Milton imagined his soul as a translucent, rainbow-speckled glob (which was easy for him to picture, having actually
seen
his soul) piloting a craft, his body—a plane of existence flying through the night sky—flapping its arms as his soul gently nudged it into playful barrel rolls.

Outside, Lucky had been tracking a leathery flapping noise that made him twitch with frustration. Every so often, he could hear a high-pitched whine bouncing off a tree branch or garden shed, which only drove him crazier. He looked up, and there, streaking across the full moon, swooping jaggedly behind a living cloud, he saw it—a weird, shiny black bird-rat thing.

With his head held high in the air, Lucky followed the creature as it chased a swarm of bugs toward his very home. Such luck!

He had no time to lose. The flapping creature was herding the buzzing cloud to that strange humming lantern his master had hung above the garage. Lucky galloped toward the garage at full speed, then—with all of his keen senses tingling—leapt into the air to seize the odd leather bird just as it flapped into the lantern.

Zzzzz … zzzzz … zzzzzz … zzzzz … ziot … BAP … BAP … kapow … z-zwap … swizz-a-swizz-a-ZAP … zokazlott … sizza … ZORP!!!