Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (20 page)

34 · UNDERNEATH iT MALL

THE THREE GIRLS
led Milton and the other boys from the stagecoach through a dark, dusty tunnel that smelled of mold and cobwebs. Barely able to make out any light sources through the small tear in his burlap sack, Milton was forced to rely on an endless stream of bickering and chattering to find his way.

“This place is creepy,” Norm commented as she crept cautiously in the dim light.

“And water is wet,” the larger girl, Amandi, answered, in a voice that seemed strangely familiar to Milton. “Thanks for the update.”

The girls tromped through the catacomb. Broken glass crunched beneath their shoes.

Amandi squinted back at Norm. “Nice hair, by the way,” she said. “Where did you get it done, Stupor Cuts?”

“Actually” Norm replied defensively, patting her
fiercely uneven hair, “I was a compulsive hair chewer—
before
. I’d always chomp on the ends of my hair when I was nervous, which was a lot. And, one day in my after-school hairdressing class—”

“Hairdressing class,”
Amandi repeated with disbelief. “That’s priceless! Couldn’t the school afford mirrors? And
scissors?
I’ve heard of bad hair days, but you’re having a bad hair
eternity
!”

“So tell me, Norm,” Takara, the Japanese girl, chirped, wedging herself between the two fuming girls, “how did you die?”

“Like I was saying,”
Norm continued, “one day after class, I just fainted and was taken to the hospital. I kind of went in and out of consciousness, but I heard my doctor talking about how the stomach can’t digest hair and that mine was plugged up, like a big hair clog in a drain. The nurse said the clog looked like a dead rat.”

After a long pause, Takara added soothingly, “That is very interesting way to go, Norm.”

Amandi snorted. “Yeah, fascinating,” she said dryly. “In a ‘hair today, gone tomorrow’ kind of way.”

“Well, then,
Amandi,”
Norm replied in a huff, blowing away strands of nonexistent bangs from her eyes, “I bet I know what killed you.”

“What?”

“Your face … because it’s sure killing me.”

“Shhh,” Takara interrupted. “I hear something.”

Footsteps plodded nearby in the darkness ahead.
Sharp voices, slapping against the stone and mortar walls, filled the stifling air around them.

“That was, like,
so major cool!
The way he just crashed right into the mirror! He must’ve been all, Oh snap!’”

“What did I tell yeh, Bordeaux, ’bout saying ‘snap’?!”

“Whatever
. That demon with the pretty blue feathers, the one driving the stagecoach, reminded me of a blue parakeet I used to have, Papa Smurf”

“Papa Smurf?”

“Yeah, he used to peck at himself in the mirror all day.”

“Lyon, I thought yeh were jess a glaikit skinny dip. How did ye know that daft demon would crash inta the mirror like that?”

“Well, I did a little research, and I knew the driver was, like,
super
vain and would think his reflection was another demon trying to challenge him.”

“Research? But I thought you, like, totally got the idea from that weird note you found on your chair—?”

“Zip it, Bordeaux.”

In the dim light of the tunnel, just beyond a network of large dripping pipes, Milton could see three figures: two looked like skinny blond cheerleaders on their day off, while the other reminded Milton of a brooding storm cloud stuffed into an ugly sweat suit.

“Lyon!” Takara smiled as the three girls walked into view. “You made it!”

“Where’s Marlo?” Lyon said with a scowl. “Did she run away again?”

“Mowlo,”
Milton inadvertently gurgled through his filthy spit-soaked kerchief.
We must be close to Rapacia
, he surmised.

“She’s going to meet us later to help get the diamonds to the Grabbit,” Norm explained.

“I don’t believe it,” Lyon said with disgust and dismay. “Actually I
do
believe it. We’re down here doing all the dirty work while she waits all safe and cozy up in Mallvana to take the credit.”

Bordeaux gestured to the three hooded boys. “Who are they?” she asked.

“Forget them,” Amandi said. “They were on the stagecoach.”

“Oh,” Bordeaux replied with a faraway look. “We just, like, left ours. Whoopsie …
our bad!
Were we supposed to take them? What’ll we do with them?”

“We’ll dump them off to Bubb when we’re through,” Amandi interrupted.

Principal Bubb!
Milton groaned to himself. The high spirits he had at the mention of his sister’s name came plummeting down so fast that his nose began to bleed.

Amandi galumphed toward Lyon and Bordeaux across the floor of broken glass. There was something
about the blocky hulk-of-a-girl that made the hair on the back of Milton’s neck do the Wave.

“Do you have it?” Amandi asked.

“If anyone has got it, Wide Load, it’s me,” Lyon replied with a defiant smirk.

After a brief stare down, Lyon relented and held out a dismal yet dazzling gem cupped in both hands, straining to hold it out. “If you mean ‘did we get the diamond,’ ” Lyon said through gritted teeth, “then, yeah, we totally did.”

Amandi leered at the sight of the jewel.

The smile
, Milton thought.
It’s so awful … so familiar. So awfully familiar
.

Lyon narrowed her eyes in the murkiness. She placed the diamond into a leather saddlebag she wore across her chest. “Now it’s your turn to show and tell,” she said.

Amandi took one big, crunchy step toward Lyon. Lyon looked the large, charmless girl up and down with distaste.

“I’ll do more than show you this
sin-sational
diamond,” Amandi smirked. She handed the heavy gem to Lyon. “I’ll give it to you.”

“What?!”
screamed Norm.

“It was not yours to give!” Takara yelped.

Lyon glanced over at the two enraged girls, smiled a wide, nasty grin, and snatched the gem from Amandi’s outstretched hand. Unfortunately, the heavy diamond—
and Lyon with it—tumbled to the floor. With much effort, Lyon lifted the diamond with her skinny trembling arms and placed it in her saddlebag with its mate.

Jordie glared at Amandi suspiciously.

“Now, why would ye pinch yer own mates like that?” she asked.

“Because,” Amandi replied matter-of-factly “I want to be on the winning team. And now we’ve got both Hopeless Diamonds, don’t we,
team?”

Bordeaux, Lyon, and Jordie jumped in the air, whooping and high-fiving one another.

Lyon gave Norm and Takara a look packed tight with mock pity. “Now, now, enough with the long faces,” she said. “You look horsey enough as it is. C’mon … the Grabbit is waiting for us. And I have a feelin’ he’ll be
hoppy
to see us.”

She stared at the expressionless girls.

“Get it?” Lyon asked.

“Yeah, we got it,” Norm said bitterly.

The group of girls and hooded hostages skirted around the leaking pipes into the darkness beyond. The smothering heat clung tight to them until there was no difference between their hot breath and the stale air around them.

Through the labored panting, crunching glass, and echoing drips, new sounds emerged from above: the murmur of a crowd and the thrum of footsteps.

“There!”
Jordie shouted, pointing at a trapdoor in the ceiling. She strained to touch it with the tip of her finger, but the hatch was several inches out of reach.

Amandi’s eyes darted from side to side before settling her creepy, familiar gaze on Milton and the other two boys.
Who
is
this bruiser of a girl?
thought Milton just before Amandi lurched forward, grabbing the other, bigger boys by the scruffs of their necks and throwing them to the ground.

“This whole thing is
so
unfair,” Norm whispered to Takara.

Takara shook her head. Her bangs rippled like pink fringe.

“Marlo is not going to like this,” Takara whispered back, “wherever she is.”

“Marlo will come through,” Norm faltered.
“I hope.”

Amandi looked over at Jordie. “Scary British girls first,” she said, holding out her arms in mock graciousness.

Jordie shrugged, climbed on top of the groaning boys on the floor, then pushed open the trapdoor and clambered through.

One by one, the girls climbed through the trapdoor. At first, it seemed to Milton as if the girls had abandoned the bound boys in the passageway. But Amandi popped her square head back through the portal in the ceiling, grabbed Milton by the shoulders, and hoisted him up through the trapdoor.

Milton tumbled on concrete before stopping himself with his elbow. He rubbed the sack on the ground until the slit again aligned with his lens. It looked as if they were in a huge underground parking structure.

Amandi brusquely and with undisguised relish pulled the other boys through the portal. She surveyed the gargantuan garage crowded with every imaginable make and model of car.

“We’ve got a problem,” Amandi said, pointing at the front of a snaking line of people and demons.

“What?” Lyon asked, joining the thick-featured girl.

“They’ve got a booty-load of security up there,” Amandi said grimly. “I don’t see how we could sneak past something as … as—”

“—conspicuously heavy?” offered Norm.

“Yeah,
conspicuously heavy
as the Hopeless Diamonds.”

“What do we do?” asked Bordeaux.

“If only there was some way to smuggle them past security,” Amandi mused, rubbing her chin and giving a sideways glance at Lyon and Bordeaux. “But the detector would be bound to pick up extra weight, you know, from a heavier-than-normal girl.”

“I got it!” Lyon declared with her fists balled up against her hips.

Amandi smiled furtively.

“I was counting on it,” Milton heard the linebacker-sized girl murmur darkly to herself.

Lyon held Bordeaux’s hand. “Remember, at Bart Hammond’s big party, where you did that really cool trick?” Lyon said, her pale blue eyes locked on the pale blue eyes of her best friend.

“The one with the cell phone?” Bordeaux replied.

“Yes!” Lyon gushed. “You swallowed it and I called, pretending to be your stomach: ‘Hello, I’m Bordeaux’s stomach and I’d really like a Triple Bypass Burger, no bun, and a Diet Mountain Don’t.’”

“Right!” Bordeaux giggled, her eyes bugging out. “That was totally funny! But what does it have to do with—”

“Everything,”
Lyon interrupted. “You’re, like, the totally skinniest person here … maybe anywhere.”

Bordeaux blushed. “You’re, like, so sweet! Like Splenda!” she said, clutching her friend’s hand tightly.

“If we did that cell-phone trick, only with the Hopeless Diamonds, we could
totally
get past security,” Lyon said. “They’d just think we were, like”—Lyon’s face soured, as if she were chewing aspirin—
“average
girls.”

Bordeaux and Lyon scowled as one.

The line crept forward as security demons fed the anxious spectators through a battery of detection machines.

Lyon lifted one of the Hopeless Diamonds out of her saddlebag, her arm trembling under the strain, and handed it to her friend. Bordeaux tucked her gleaming
platinum hair behind her ears and took the diamond with both hands. She sighed and closed her eyes.

“First, I have to clear my mind,” Bordeaux said. “Okay, done.”

She tilted her head back and swallowed the diamond. The small yet dense gem traveled down Bordeaux’s slender throat. She looked like an anaconda digesting a baby caribou.

“Ugh,” Bordeaux complained as the Hopeless Diamond settled into her stomach. “I feel so fat!”

Lyon hoisted the other diamond out of her saddlebag, set the gem on her tongue, gagged until her eyes bulged, then gulped it down.

She grimaced and clutched her throat. “It’s going down wrong,” Lyon whined. “It’s like swallowing a tiny bowling ball.”

Lyon coughed and the diamond fell into her stomach. The girl doubled over. “Oh my gawd!” she yelped. “That, like, hurt so much!”

Several old women and demons ahead of them in line looked back suspiciously. A security demon with a long crooked neck that jutted out like a bent knee beckoned the girls with a curl of its claw.

“Next!” he called to Lyon.

Lyon parted the black drapes and stared at the huge security machine, an enclosed electronic vestibule with a conveyor belt walkway. She shuffled forward. Each step was a painful lurch as she struggled to maintain her
balance, her body now nearly twenty pounds heavier right around the stomach region. The security tunnel buzzed and hummed. A demon resembling a plump, slimy leech helped her off the moving sidewalk, holding out a claw encased in a rubber glove.

“What about Buffy here?” the obese demon wheezed.

“Average,” the scrawny demon answered.

Lyon winced.

“As if,”
she muttered under her breath as she staggered through the curtains into Mallvana.

One by one, the girls passed through the curtain. Amandi herded Milton and the two other hooded boys along.

“Wait,” the fat demon gurgled. “What’s the deal with the three little-dead-riding-hoods here?”