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 for
ward. 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?”
Amandi fought to lock eyes with those of the demon’s, whose dull gaze was concealed beneath drooping eyelids.
“Principal Bubb told me to torment them with the splendors of Mallvana before sentencing them to the unspeakable anguish of Sadia,” Amandi declared.
The demon chuckled, which caused his chins to ripple like someone shuffling a deck of cold cuts.
“That Bubb, always taking punishment to the next level,” the demon replied before waving Amandi and her gaggle of prisoners forward.
“Demons are so gullible,” Amandi sneered to herself while shoving the three boys through the curtains.
Lyon, Bordeaux, Norm, Jordie, and Takara had congregated by a towering Madagascar dragon tree just inside the mall. Amandi looked over at Lyon and Bordeaux, whose faces were as green as grass stains on new white jeans.
“Time to cough up the goods,” Amandi ordered. “We’ve got a date with a diamond-hungry bunny.”
Lyon and Bordeaux nodded and waddled into a nearby women’s rest (in peace) room. An assortment of retches, gags, and coughs ricocheted from inside the tiled lavatory.
“I hope those two glaikit chippies wash them diamonds orf before they give ’em to the Grabbit,” Jordie said.
Lyon and Bordeaux emerged, wiping their pouty mouths. Lyon smiled and patted her saddlebag.
“The only thing wrong with this moment,” Lyon gloated, “is that Marlo isn’t here to see it.”
“This way,” Amandi said, striding toward the Express Escalator to the SkyDeck.
“But everyone else is going to concourse,” Takara said with a mystified slant of her eyebrows.
Amandi stopped and turned to Takara. The pink-haired Japanese girl pointed to a snaking line of people boarding the spiral escalator bound for the concourse level.
“The Grabbit wanted us to make the drop at the staging area, up on the SkyDeck,” she answered. “After it gets the diamonds, then it’ll be hop-hop-hoppin’ back down.”
Lyon cocked her eyebrow. “And how do you know so much about the Grabbit’s business?” she asked suspiciously.
Amandi’s mouth curled into a sly smile. “Why Lyon,” she asked, “didn’t you get the memo?”
Lyon’s golden face flushed pink around the edges. “Oh, right. That,” she replied uneasily. “I must have forgotten, what with the excitement of getting both diamonds and all.”
The girls followed Amandi up the Express Escalator, with the three hostages keeping up the rear. A perfumed wind blew in the dazed girls’ hair as they were whizzed at breakneck speed to the SkyDeck.
Milton clutched the handrail tightly as he scanned the bustling mall with one eye for any sign of Marlo.
“I can’t believe Marlo would bail on us like this,” Norm mumbled from behind to Takara, eerily as if reading Milton’s thoughts. “I thought we were friends!”
With a sudden heave, Milton and the other passengers tumbled off the faster-than-necessary escalator and onto the SkyDeck. He slid across the slick, white marble floor until stopping with a painful thud at a brass railing.
The girls rose to their feet, rubbing sore knees and elbows while Milton and the boys—their arms tied behind their backs—staggered and squirmed upright.
“I don’t see—” said Lyon before her observation was cut short by a hollow, booming voice from one of the abandoned offices on the other side of the dizzyingly high span.
“So long I have been waiting
for all you silly fools,
but instead of us debating,
just show me my new jewels.”
35 · FUNNY BUNNY
MILTON STRAINED THROUGH the tear in his hood to discern the source of the odd, toneless voice. The confused girls looked across the SkyBridge, which gleamed in the simulated morning light pouring through the glass ceiling.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Lyon said, folding her golden arms. “It didn’t even really sound like—”
“We don’t have time for this,” Amandi complained in a voice as thick and inelegant as her body. “The Grabbit needs the Hopeless Diamonds before its ceremony.”
“Hey,” Bordeaux said, “look at the funny shadow in that office!”
Through the slats of the venetian blinds that covered the glass wall of a nearby office, Milton could make out a monstrous silhouette—two large ears and twin coiled arms that unfurled like party favors.
“It’s too quiet,” Norm said suspiciously as she cased out the SkyDeck. “Where’s security?”
“The bluebottles must all be downstairs, preparin’ for the big party,” Jordie surmised.
Amandi shoved Milton and the other boys across the SkyBridge to the office. Lyon pushed herself ahead and poked her flawless face into the room.
“Hello, Mr. Grabbit?” she asked nervously. “I’ve got … oh gawd.”
In the back of the office was a bulky, hulking shape standing motionless in front of a plate-glass wall, looking down upon the mall concourse below. The creature was dimly illuminated by a small desk lamp, which cast it with a sickly jaundiced glow. Smoky incense filled the room with pungent, sooty tendrils. The effect was disorienting and intimidating, like a school dance.
“Hello, little miss,
so frail, so young.
Is something amiss?
Has a cat got your tongue?”
So that’s a … Grabbit, thought Milton. Looks like a lumpy, overgrown, white chocolate Easter bunny.
Bordeaux and the other girls joined Lyon in the doorway.
“No, I just,” Lyon stammered, “you just seem … different.”
“It sounds like it has a cold,” Norm whispered to Takara.
“Well, Grabbit,” Lyon said as she fumbled through her saddlebag, “before I give you the diamonds—which Bordeaux, Jordie, and I stole, by the way—I want to know what we’re going to get. My team, that is, not Marlo’s, because she totally flaked and—”
“Enough of Marlo Fauster, please,
a girl of grace and expertise.
It just so happens that I was gonna
give your team this place, Mallvana.”
Lyon’s jaw dropped. Bordeaux and Jordie gasped. After a moment of shock, the three girls jumped up and down, squealing with delight. Bordeaux clutched Lyon tight, like a designer handbag. Norm, indignant, stormed up to the Grabbit.
“This is not fair!” she complained. “We stole one of the Hopeless Diamonds; then Amandi double-crossed us and gave it to their stupid team!”
“Now that all the drama’s done,
let’s get back to my own rules.
See, it doesn’t matter which girl won;
just give me now my jewels.”
Norm wiped away her indignant tears and joined Takara at the back of the room. Lyon slipped from Bordeaux’s embrace, straightened her awful WHAT HAPPENS AT GRANDMA’S STAYS AT GRANDMA’S sweatshirt, and marched back to the Grabbit. Lyon took out the two diamonds, one in each trembling hand.
That weird voice, thought Milton. It’s like when you order fast food at a drive-through and struggle to untangle the crackling voice of a fiberglass clown.
“Where … do you … want … them?” Lyon muttered under clenched teeth as she strained to hold the Hopeless Diamonds with her superfici
ally toned arms.
“Perfect, flawless, like a tear,
two sad and glistening charms.
Hurry, while the coast is clear,
and drop them in my, um … swirly arms.”
Lyon nodded as perspiration began to bead on her forehead. She heaved a diamond into a hole at the top of one of the Grabbit’s coiling arms. The dense gem rattled and rocked its way down into the robotic rabbit’s torso, landing with a great plunk. Then, with a pained grunt, she deposited the last Hopeless Diamond into her school’s vice principal.
Lyon squinted through the dim light and thick smoke. “Wait a second,” she muttered. “You’re … disappearing.”
The Grabbit’s cartoonish features and festive colors began to fade, revealing a pale, rabbit-shaped lump underneath. It was as if someone had projected the image of a rabbit onto a mammoth snow-bunny and the projector’s bulb was dying.
“Thank you, miss, for your donation.
Relax, I’m sure you’re tuckered.
But don’t expect your compensation,
because you have been suckered!”
The Grabbit shook furiously until its belly burst in an explosion of canvas and plaster. Milton, his eye bulging beneath the tear in his hood, struggled to make sense of what was happening. The girls surrounding him screamed and stumbled back in shock. Out tumbled a figure, chalky white with dust.
“Didya miss me?” Marlo asked as she rose to her feet, brushing off chunks of papier-mâché and torn pieces of the Grabbit’s vanishing portrait. She grinned so wide it looked as if her face were about to split in two. Marlo’s dark eyes twinkled at Lyon as she patted her bulging fanny pack.
“Oh, and, like, thanks for the diamonds.” She giggled. “You are, like, my bestest friend ever.”
“Marlo!” shrieked Norm as she ran to embrace her. “I knew you hadn’t run away!”
Milton, meanwhile, was dumbstruck at the surreal sight of his sister tumbling out of a jumbo-sized bunny tummy. It was thrilling, disturbing, and surprising in how unsurprising it was—Marlo at the center of some convoluted plot.
“Mlow!” Milton called out through his gag. “Mlow!”
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck Page 18
