Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  Marlo made her way toward the Sponges, Spoons, and Sporting Goods aisle. Milton followed, as jumpy as a cricket on a hot plate.

  “First off, short bus,” Marlo said, looking her brother up and down, “stop announcing to the whole world that we’re about to steal something. Relax. Your role in our little two-kid play is thus: that of distraction. You just toddle over yonder to the emergency exits and pull. And if I’m right, pandemonium will ensue. Got it?”

  Milton nodded.

  “Then get with it.”

  Milton grimaced, sighed, and skulked away.

  “Milton,” Marlo called.

  Milton turned.

  “What?”

  “I missed you,” she said sweetly. “For real.”

  Milton smiled despite himself.

  “Ditto,” he replied before heading toward Corsets, Cosmetics, and Custards.

  Marlo strained underneath the bright yellow kayak. She looked like a shaved monkey making off with a gargantuan, genetically modified banana. The blare of alarms flooded the aisles like screaming ghosts.

  Milton trotted up next to her, breathing heavily.

  “I did it,” he said with a blend of pride and terror. “I actually opened the emergency exits, even though there were signs that expressly said not to open them!”

  “You’re a true-blue desperado, little brother,” Marlo grunted. “Now how about helping me get this kayak off my back?”

  Milton took the bow of the fiberglass kayak and Marlo the stern.

  “What is it with you and small nautical vessels?” Milton asked as they crept as surreptitiously as possible toward the front of the store.

  “I don’t know.” Marlo shrugged. “Must be the call of the sea. Or tides. You know, a girl thing. Like horses.”

  “And why did I open all of the emergency exits?”

  “Because you’re a good boy and do what you’re told,” Marlo explained. “Plus, pretty soon, if I played my cards right—ugh, poker metaphors!—a whole bunch of homeless phantoms should come trickling in from the alleyway, tired of Dumpster-diving and hungry for some real deals! I know I would if I were a POD.”

  “POD?” Milton asked.

  “PODs,” Marlo clarified without clarifying.

  “PODs!” screamed a girl in a white lab coat, working the cosmetics counter.

  Dozens of gaunt spirits pushed their rusted, overflowing shopping carts through the aisles. A man with a cut underneath his eye wheeled past the Fausters. He furrowed his brow briefly at the sight of two children struggling beneath a bright yellow kayak before squeaking away, scrutinizing the items crowding the aisles.

  “Perfect,” Marlo whispered from beneath the back of the kayak. “Let’s make a run for it.”

  Milton peered out from beneath the boat. He eyed the destitute men and women with awe as they began to form roving packs, cleaning out the shelves with fluid precision.

  “Phantoms,” he murmured.

  “Yeah, Phantoms of the Dispossessed,” Marlo replied. “PODs for short. All right, here we go.”

  The harried shopgirls were so preoccupied by the POD people that Milton and Marlo were able to charge unbothered through the automatic doors and into the mall. The two children stopped by the escalators outside of Salvation Armani as old women cascaded around them on either side, caught in their own ceaseless consumerist flow.

  “So what’s with the kayak?” Milton panted.

  “I’ll tell you after we’ve glided down the spiral escalators to the main floor.”

  “What?!” exclaimed Milton as he set the kayak down. “You’re crazy!”

  Milton looked up. On the eleventh floor, Damian charged out of Hallowed Grounds, slugging down a quintuple-shot venti espressoccino frappé, no foam. He crushed the cup in his hand and unsheathed a pointy scepter from his sweatpants.

  “Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea after all,” Milton gulped, sitting in the front of the kayak.

  “Okay, then,” Marlo said as she stood in the back of the boat, one leg still on the mall floor. “Brace yourself. We’re in for one wild ride.”

  With a sharp kick, Marlo sent the boat careening down the up escalator past dozens of frightened, outraged shoppers. The elderly women pressed against the velvet handrails, clutching their bags as the kayak sliced downward. Behind them, the Fausters left a trail of shock, confusion, and quaint cries of “Good heavens!” “Kids today!” and “Oh my stars and garters!”

  38 · THE BUCKTOOTH

  STOPS HERE

  MARLO LEANED INTO a turn out of one escalator and down into the next. Milton gritted his teeth, his hands coiled tightly under the lip of the kayak’s edge.

  Soon the kayak thudded loudly onto yet another floor, skidding past the Out of Body Shop before gliding back into another moving staircase, thanks to the expert rudder that was Marlo’s foot.

  Milton managed to steal a desperate peek behind him. Clumps of frightened old women fanned themselves outside the escalators. And, in hot pursuit, Damian bounded over the elderly debris just one floor above.

  The Fausters slammed into the fourth tier, toppling over a row of wheezing women clutching platinum walkers. Marlo smirked as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of phantoms coursed out of Mallvana’s luxurious stores, each pack opening up another emergency exit for their comrades outside. Mayhem was spreading quickly.

  Marlo pressed her foot into the bejeweled mall floor. The kayak skidded to a stop just outside of Aberzombie & Flinch.

  “What are we doing?” Milton asked.

  Marlo hopped out of the kayak and tugged it behind her.

  “Nope, don’t need any help, thanks for asking,” Marlo grunted. “We’re about to shoot down the mother of indoor escalator rapids.”

  Before them lay a majestic helix of escalators lushly upholstered in black velvet, spiraling in near-mechanical free fall to the main concourse below. It made the escalators above seem like bone-dry Slip ’n’ Slides. The plunging chute ahead was Niagara Falls by comparison.

  Marlo scooted the kayak into position and took in the breathtaking mallscape. “Ah,” she said with something bordering on contentment. “What a beautiful day to do something really, really stupid.”

  Milton ducked his head between his shaking knees while Marlo kicked out behind her like a peevish mule, sending their kayak screaming down the coiling metal slalom.

  “Whooo!!” Marlo squealed, waving her arms as if she were back home at the Dunk ’n’ Disorderly water park. The speeding yellow kayak buffeted about the escalator violently before hugging the outermost handrail in centrifugal intensity.

  Milton’s eyes were squeezed shut. His entire digestive system was crackling with a sickening electricity. He felt like he was having a grand mall seizure. The kayak slammed into hard, level ground that did nothing to dampen its amazing momentum.

  Suddenly, with a great thud, the boat came to a complete, painful stop. Their bodies lurched forward, apparently receiving the news of their abrupt halt a little late. Milton reached out his hand, touching something cold, something metal, something that tingled in a maddening way that filled him with an almost unbearable anxiety, an itchiness inside that nothing could ever satisfactorily scratch.

  His eyes slowly opened and crawled up the hulking metal figure before him, from its painted white paws to its pudgy metal belly to its sickly pink nose until finally resting on a pair of long slender ears.

  “Dear Fausters, here at last,

  fulfill your special role.

  Before more time has passed,

  hand over what you stole …

  NOW!”

  39 · A HOLE LOT OF NOTHiNG

  “MILTON, GRABBIT,” MARLO said, rising to her feet. “Grabbit, Milton.”

  Milton stood up and surveyed the haunted, full-metal rabbit before him, perched atop a riser in the back of the concourse behind plush, emerald-green curtains. What confused Milton most, though—besides the rhyming rabbit’s existence in the first place—were the coiling arms that had been so
ldered onto its sides. He could just make out stenciled letters painted beneath each arm, spelling out SMASH ’N’ FLASH ATOM CANNON. He gulped.

  “H-hello … Grabbit,” Milton managed.

  “Hello, Milton F.

  However did you find us?

  Marlo, are you deaf?

  I asked you for the diamonds!”

  Marlo’s smile faded. The Grabbit seemed so … testy. No interest in how she had gotten the diamonds, her brilliant plan, the amusing anecdotes collected along the way. The hulking hare just wanted to hop right to the finish line. Well, Marlo mused, rabbits do love carats.

  She sighed, unzipped her fanny pack, and—with hands trembling under the strain—scooped out one of the Hopeless Diamonds and held it up, supporting her shaky arm with the other so that the Grabbit could see her achievement in all its glittering glory.

  Behind the stage, pulsating on one of Mallvana’s massive plasma screens, was Yojuanna, dancing in jerky spasms, clad in a shimmering electric jumpsuit with lasers for suspenders. Her face was dead white, like a clown’s, with black dollar signs painted around her mad eyes. The digital diva’s face loomed large as she gazed down at the diamond and sang:

  “Diamonds are this girl’s best friend.

  Gotta, gotta give ’em, give ’em on the double.

  But if you don’t put ’em in the bunny’s hands,

  then there’s gonna, gonna, gonna be some trouble.”

  Milton shot his sister a baffled look. “What’s with all the rhyming?” he asked.

  Marlo shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  She stepped forward to the Grabbit. Milton watched as his sister’s eyes crawled over the metal creature, transfixed. She shifted from foot to foot. It looked almost like her whole body, her whole soul—everything that she was—had to go to the bathroom, really, really bad. Marlo eyed the openings at the tip of each of the Grabbit’s coiling arms.

  “Yes, you’ve got it. That’s the ticket.

  Put the diamonds right in there.

  Then I’ll have it, why, I’ll take it!

  Everything in everywhere.”

  Marlo stood on her tiptoes, just beneath the Grabbit’s right hand, and hoisted up one of the Hopeless Diamonds in her palm. A demon in overalls flicked on a switch, and bright green spotlights flooded the stage. The Grabbit gave off a sickly glow. One of the lights popped, leaving the creature’s face in darkness.

  “Uh-oh, we lost a light,” he shouted to a cohort up on the scaffolding. “And it’s just about showtime. See if you can’t get a replacement to fill in this black hole.”

  As the gorgeously glum jewel sparkled in the stage lights, a terrible thought struck Milton: Atom smasher. Diamonds. Black hole.

  “Wait!” yelped Milton, running to his sister’s side. “Black hole!”

  Startled by the sound of her brother’s yelp, Marlo jumped. The diamond rolled out of her palm and into the maw of the Grabbit’s metal hand, where it dropped with a reverberating thunk. The vibration traveled down the Grabbit’s arm, making it hum all over.

  Marlo was shaking. “What?” she asked. “You scared the bejeebus out of me!”

  Milton stared at the smiling metal monster. The coin had dropped, and he waited for the candy to fall.

  Marlo backed away from the vibrating Grabbit.

  “Black hole? Is that one of your stupid Battlestar Trek sci-fi things? What does it have to do with—”

  “Black holes are real,” Milton said. “They’re a region of space-time where nothing can escape.”

  Marlo cocked her nonexistent eyebrow. “Like family game night?”

  “Sort of,” Milton said. “A black hole is kind of like when you divide by zero. It creates this infinite impossibility that …”

  Marlo’s eyes were dark with incomprehension.

  “… that can suck up and destroy everything around it. And that’s what the Grabbit’s trying to do.”

  Marlo folded her arms and scrutinized the Grabbit’s indecipherable grin.

  “How can a big metal bunny make a black hole out of diamonds?” she asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Some scientists were able to do it back up on the Surface,” Milton replied, pacing in front of the stage. “They took a particle accelerator and slammed atoms together and made tiny black holes that lasted only a few seconds. But if someone—or something—slammed together something as dense as the Hopeless Diamonds, they could possibly make one big enough to swallow up … everything.”

  “But why?” Marlo said with frustration.

  A withered woman with a puffy cloud of white hair piled on top of her head peeked through the curtain. “It’s those terrible children!” she kvetched to a flock of skinny white-haired women grumbling like a cluster of grouchy Q-tips. Milton parted the curtain and peered out into the concourse. The group of old women and assorted demons slowly transformed into, if not quite an angry mob, a decidedly crotchety one.

  The Grabbit’s voice sliced through the din growing beyond the curtain.

  “Don’t listen to the boy.

  He knows not what he’s saying.

  I’ve no plans to destroy.

  Now stop all this delaying!”

  Marlo trembled. What if her brother was right? What if all this had been a trick to help the Grabbit with some evil plot? But why would something, even something that wasn’t truly alive, want to wipe out everything around it, including itself?

  Milton anxiously peered out over the ever-growing crowd. “We’ve got company,” he said.

  The woman he had seen in Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s not-so-secret lair snaked through the crowd toward the stage.

  “Milton,” Marlo said, joining him to peek through the curtain, “if I don’t give the Grabbit the diamonds, we’ll be taken away and sent … somewhere worse. And who knows what would happen to you. You wouldn’t last a second in a place like Sadia, tormented by bullies like—”

  “Damian!” Milton cried, pointing to the rim of the swelling crowd.

  Cutting a swath—literally—through the mob was Damian: half boy half girl, and all dangerous, swishing his scepter through the air.

  Marlo gazed out at the growing mob and fretfully tucked her blue hair behind her ears.

  “I have no choice,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “We can’t run away—there’s nowhere to run—and if we stay here, they’ll just lock us away in some extra-terrible place for stealing the jewels. The only hope we have is that the Grabbit’s telling the truth, and it can shake up this place, control the new economy, and make me in charge of a circle where—hopefully—I can pardon you.”

  Marlo pardon him, Milton thought. It was almost funny. Almost. But in this upside-down, topsy-turvy place, it would only seem fitting that his sociopathic sister would be in some position of power, absolving Milton of his crimes of common sense.

  Marlo walked over to the Grabbit’s coiling right limb. She wrapped her shaking hands around the second Hopeless Diamond and struggled to lift it out of her fanny pack.

  “At last I’ll sate my greed.

  No longer will things taunt.

  Don’t give me what I need.

  Just give me what I want!”

  “I’m. trying, I’m trying!” grumbled Marlo as, with trembling arms, she lifted the diamond up to the Grabbit’s metal paw.

  “This isn’t right, Marlo!” Milton shouted against the noise of the agitated crowd. “Please! If we stall, something else is bound to present itself…”

  Present, Milton thought. He patted himself. Tucked into the back of his singed pants was the small present his mom had given him what seemed like—and in a way was—a lifetime ago.

  Meanwhile, Yojuanna gyrated herself into a digital frenzy outside on the concourse wall, the screen’s plasma cells working hard to keep up with her furious motion. It was as if she were stirring a pot of electricity, with herself as the spoon.

  “Goody, goody, goody good.

  Give this girl just whatcha should.
<
br />   Love that shiny, flashy bling,

  more than every everything!”

  The computer-generated pop star grew warped and distorted. Her once-perfect, expertly coded features were now gruesome and exaggerated. The elderly women in the audience shook their gray heads.

  “You call that music?” one woman with painted-on eyebrows said to her friend.

  “Shameful,” her friend concurred.

  40 · A DiAMOND

  iN THE BLUFF

  FAITH, HOPE, AND Charity strode their synchronized runway strut from Hosanna Republic to the crowd’s periphery meeting Lilith at the edge of the swelling, milling mob.

  “Has the Grabbit started without us?” Hope asked, stretching the limits of her satin high-heeled pumps to see the stage. “I hear something going on back there….”

  A musical ringtone chirruped from Lilith’s thumb. “Excuse me,” she said, turning away to answer her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux Phone. “Hello? Yes, this is … what? Both stagecoaches? You’ve got to be kidding … of course, I know your jokes are funnier than that but … you’re sure? No sign of either Hopeless—?” Lilith rubbed her temples. “Okay,” she said fretfully. “I’ll do what I can here.”

  Lilith flexed her hand, ending her call, and peered above the murky sea of gray hair. Through a part in the curtain, she saw two children onstage, arguing with one another in front of the Grabbit. The small, twerpy boy with glasses looked familiar.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she mumbled as she surveyed the concourse. Her biting green eyes rested on Bea “Elsa” Bubb, descending the stairs from the security cove next to the Garden of Eatin’ with several security demons. Lilith plunged two of her slender fingers into her mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.

  “Blubb!” Lilith shouted. “Over here!”

  Principal Bubb grudgingly joined Lilith at the rim of the crowd. “I’m not your dog, by the way,” Principal Bubb protested.

  “I know … my dogs all have pedigrees,” Lilith said, looking around her nervously and speaking to the principal in hushed tones. “Right now, Fido, I just want to know what you’re going to do about that.” Lilith jabbed a finger at the stage.