Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (8 page)

Marlo crossed her arms and scanned the screen, a display so large it hurt her neck to take it all in. Norm ambled next to Marlo and gaped at the pixilated pop-music tart on the screen.

“I wish I was that sure of myself,” Norm muttered. “At least I think I do.”

Takara skipped up to the two girls, clapping her hands.

“Yojuanna B. Covetta!” she yelped. “I can’t believe she here!”

“I’ve never heard of her,” Marlo said.

“That’s because she was made in Tokyo,” Takara replied. “She was just about to make the big time before the accident.”

Norm squinted at the display. Yojuanna now had a small keyboard strapped across her perfect abs, her fingers dancing across the keys like nectar-crazed hummingbirds.

“She doesn’t
look
Japanese,” Norm commented slowly. “She looks …
everything-
ese.”

Marlo turned to Takara.

“Made?” she asked. “Accident?”

Takara brushed pink bangs from her twinkling eyes.

“She was made in Tokyo laboratory” she replied.

“You mean like Frankenstein?” Norm asked.

Takara held her small hand to her mouth and giggled.

“No, not like a monster, like a
video game
. Digital. Perfect pop star that can be downloaded anywhere, always ready to sing and dance, never grow old, never have scandal—unless it’s a really cool scandal.”

“So what happened to her …
it
?” Marlo asked.

“She started taking up too much space on Sosumi computers,” Takara continued. “Too demanding. Difficult to contain. Bad influence on other computers. Made other programs lazy, so they only worked after noon. So scientists took a big magnet and erased her.”

“Then why is that bit o’ computerized crumpet here?” asked Jordie, who had been listening in from behind.

“I guess
even fake
greedy people come here when they die,” Marlo declared as Yojuanna dove off the stage. “Isn’t that right, Lyon?”

Lyon glared at Marlo with a disgust one might reserve for a dissected frog in biology class. “You’re just
bitter in the presence of things so cool that everybody likes them,” she sneered.

“Yeah,” added Bordeaux, her scrawny arm pressed into the place her hip should be. “And since no one likes you, you pretend that you don’t
want
to be liked!”

“Wow,” Marlo deadpanned. “You can read me like a book—which is weird, because you two peroxide morons couldn’t read the large-type edition of
Pat the Bunny.”

“Snap!” said Norm with a shy smirk as Bordeaux shivered.

“Daddy’s scratchy beard,”
Bordeaux murmured, disturbed.

Marlo smiled, though her eyes were frowning. Bordeaux was, definitely, a few MP3s short of a playlist, but even in her dumb-as-a-box-of-hair way, she had managed to strike a nerve.

For some reason, the face of the sullen boy that she’d seen checking her out in Rapacia popped into her thoughts like a sly, smirking jack-in-the-box. There was something about him, a kindred spirit who seemed completely familiar, even though he was a stranger.

And despite her fierce independence, the boy’s attention made Marlo feel better about herself somehow.

Poker Alice leaned her smoke-ravaged face into Marlo. It looked as though her bulbous nose had been sculpted hastily out of red clay.

“Now, remember,
substitute,”
Poker Alice seethed
between stained clenched teeth.
“THIRTY MINUTES
or else I sic the guards on you, got me?”

“Fine,” Marlo said, squaring her jaw in defiance. “I can do a lot of damage in thirty minutes.”

Poker Alice clapped her callused hands. “Okay, girls, here are your teams,” she barked. “Miss Sussex, Miss Kitayama, and Miss Sheraton, you take Salvation Armani. Miss Radisson, Miss Fauster, and Miss … um …” The teacher stared at Norm, hoping to recall the visually unremarkable girl’s name.

“Rickett,” Norm said with the calm resignation that comes when a specific humiliation is continually repeated.

“Right,” Poker Alice continued.
“Miss Rickett
. You three take Halo/Good Buy.”

“Halo/Good Buy?” complained Marlo. “That’s a bargain bunker! I’ll have to lift twice as much as them!”

“That is your playing field.” Poker Alice shrugged. “But if you want to forfeit the game …”

“No, no, no,” Marlo interjected. “We’ll still win. I just wanted to go on record as saying that the playing field was uneven.”

“Agreed,” Poker Alice acknowledged, “and disregarded.”

Lyon swaggered up to Marlo, looking down her surgically perfected nose.

“I’ve made grown shopgirls wet themselves with fear,” she relayed with a malicious grin. “I can make an
assistant manager’s hairline noticeably recede with just one transaction.”

Marlo stood on her tiptoes to look Lyon in the eye.

“Bring it on, Barbie.”

Poker Alice pulled out an antique watch on a chain, attached to her worn vest by a tarnished fob.

“Oooh, two dead little girls squaring off at one another, enough to soil my bloomers—if I were wearin’ any.” She smirked, staring at the small clock’s dusty face. “On your mark, get set …”

The six girls ran off, the group breaking in two as each team rushed toward its assigned destination.

“Go,” Poker Alice muttered, deepening her permanent scowl with a fresh grimace.

Marlo looked back over her shoulder, watching her teacher shove her cigar back between her thin, creased lips and plod toward the Angel Food Court.

Thirty minutes to fill up my pockets with out-of-fashion markdowns
, Marlo thought. But she had to get—and get a lot—while the getting was good.

10 · LOOK WHO’S STALKiNG

MILTON AWOKE ON
an olive-drab army cot in Lester Lobe’s office. Crowded with stacks of old newspapers, the room looked more like a nest built by some obsessive-compulsive bird than an office.

“Welcome back, earthling,” Lester joked while rolling a cigarette.

Milton’s mouth was as dry as a ball of cotton in a bottle of aspirin. “Water,” he rasped.

Lester put down his cigarette and handed Milton a dented canteen. “This should wet your whistle,” he said.

Milton gulped down the liquid and, despite his thirst, nearly spit it out across the room. “Ugh,” he gurgled. “What is this junk?”

Lester smiled a mouthful of brown teeth. “It’s my own special blend,” he explained. “You can’t trust the
water. The government puts all sorts of stuff in it to keep the public passive and easily controlled. So I make my own Turbo Juice. It’s a power drink, with Kombucha mushroom tea, blue-green alga, and NoDoz pills, all mixed up. Keeps me on my toes … and in the head a lot,” he added, gesturing to the toilet in the corner.

Out of his head, more like
, thought Milton as he tried to wipe the terrible taste off his tongue. He desperately wanted to tell Lester Lobe all about his descent to Heck. He knew that, unlike all the other people he had encountered upon his return, Lester wouldn’t just gaze at him with that pitying blank stare after hearing his tale. And that was part of the problem. For as much as Milton needed to talk to someone about his ordeal before it faded into a half-remembered dream, he was worried that Heck would become just another crackpot myth in Lester’s mad museum. Sandwiched between the miniature crop-circle garden and the fossilized Bigfoot droppings, Heck would become a big joke—and Milton a candidate for a padded cell.

He looked up at the
IF YOU AREN’T PARANOID, YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION
clock above Lester’s door-on-cinder-blocks desk.

“Five o’clock?!” Milton yelped, getting up a bit too fast. He sat back down on the side of the cot, waiting for the wooziness to pass. This was getting ridiculous, he thought. At first it was just dizzy spells. But blackouts? He must be getting more and more out of phase.

If he didn’t pull himself together soon, his next phase might be his last. He had to do something quick.

“What’s the rush?” Lester asked.

Milton staggered to his feet. “I’ve got to get back home. My parents think I’m at my therapist’s.”

“Well,” Lester replied, “maybe you are.”

He handed Milton a piece of binder paper with sloppy scribbles and doodles all over it. Milton squinted down at it through his Coke-bottle glasses.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a shopping list and some notes I had about how you might get that energy boost you’ve been looking for,” he replied with a lopsided grin.

Milton studied the list more closely. Jumper cables, meat thermometer, power drill … it was like supplies for one of his old science-fair experiments.
Science fairs
, Milton reflected. So much had happened since those carefree days where the most important thing in the world to him was a blue ribbon and a good grade. The stakes were so much higher now.

“Thanks,” Milton said as he thrust the list into his pocket and made his way back through the Paranor Mall. He hesitated at the Elvis Abduction Chamber. There was something strangely compelling about the dark booth. Milton picked at a peeling, yellowing picture of Lisa Marie Presley, Michael Jackson, and a chimpanzee dressed as a cowboy lacquered to the booth’s side.

“I’m not surprised you’re drawn to the Psychomanthium,” Lester Lobe said as he followed Milton into the museum.

“Why?” Milton said defensively. “Because I’m a psycho?”

“No,” Lester countered. “I’m the last person to be calling anyone a psycho. A Psychomanthium is a chamber used to communicate with dead spirits.”

Milton’s mind cracked. This freaky box was a connection to the beyond. It was his opportunity to contact the world below, the one that held his thoughts in its frosty grip.

“Supposedly, the spirits can be seen in the reflection of the mirrors,” Lester continued. “You’re supposed to say a fancy little spell and—presto changeo—there the spirits are, trapped in the mirror like the evil dudes in that second
Superman
flick. Not that I’ve ever tried it. The Psychomanthium is one of the few things here that gives even
me
the creeps. It sounded cool on eBay but, boy when I cracked open the box, I got a first-degree case of the willies and gave it the full-on Elvis makeover.”

Milton had a sharp yet mercifully fleeting bout of vertigo. His thoughts were slipping on broken ice and fighting for balance. He held on to the fiberglass extraterrestrial and shook his head clear.

“I’ve g-gotta g-go,” Milton stammered. “I have a feeling I’ll be back, though.”

Lester Lobe followed him to the door. “My doors are always open,” he said. “Seriously I can’t get this darned lock fixed. Be sure to tell me how your experiments in subtle energies turn out. I know how lonely the quest for truth can be. No one wants to follow you, and when you come back, no one wants to hear about it.”

Milton looked over his shoulder and gave the man a nervous smile as he opened the door to the street. “I gotta go. Thanks again.”

Milton walked down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. He stopped by a telephone pole, plastered with a dozen copies of the same flyer:

A lawyer! Exactly what I need!
thought Milton, someone to help crack his confounding contract with the Principal of Darkness. If a lawyer could find some contractual loophole, some ambiguity to render Milton’s contract null and void, perhaps he could find a way to unravel EVERY dead kid’s contract, or at least free his sister and Virgil from eternal darnation.

Milton pulled off the number, printed on perforated tabs beneath the flyer.

The-price is definitely right
, thought Milton,
and Algernon Cole seems open to entertaining …
unusual
cases. But where could I set up a meeting?

“Happy trails, zombie boy” Lester Lobe yelled from down the block.

Milton turned and saw Lester in his doorway, waving, squinting at the setting sun. An idea struck him on and about his tired brain.

“Is it okay if I stop by tomorrow?” Milton called back.

Lester shrugged and rattled his doorknob. “Like I said,” he shouted. “Always open.”

The Topeka/Generica Express pulled up to the curb. Milton waved at Lester and hobbled on. As the bus drove away, Milton saw a girl dart behind a cluster of lilac bushes across the street.

“Necia Alvarado?” Milton mumbled as the bus lurched from the curb, sending him tumbling into a fat man’s newspaper.

“Sorry,” Milton apologized as he fought his way against the g-force of the accelerating bus to find an empty seat. He looked out the back window, but between the bus’s jerks and the dizziness of an oncoming spell, Milton couldn’t make out the figure behind the bush. Maybe he was seeing things, he thought as he scooted into a vacant seat. He seemed to be seeing a
lot
of things recently. But the girl had that same bony, nervous weirdness of Necia. The ghost image of the girl burned into the back of his retinas. She had been dressed like a peppermint candy, all in stripes, and was holding what looked like a small gift-wrapped package.