Zapple!
“OWWW!!!” Milton was pitched back onto the arena floor. His chest felt like a nursery of freshly hatched electric eels.
“They’ve got some force field around them. We’ll have to figure out—”
Whoosh!
Something swooped above Milton’s head. Caterwaul screamed. Milton strangled his own shriek.
The “bubbles” that Milton had made out earlier were actually large, flying eyeballs: slimy piranha-like creatures about the size of beach balls. They dove at the high-voltage twinkles. There was a blinding, strobing flash as the creatures snatched them up with eyelids lined with jagged teeth.
“Those must, like, be Vizzigorths,” Howler Monkey gasped.
“And it’s their feeding time,” Caterwaul added with a sniffle.
Whenever a Vizzigorth swallowed one of the electric sparkles, there was another horrible flash. Milton shielded his eyes, which seemed to be getting weaker and weaker. He strained to see a round, whitish outline on the floor across the arena by the figure he’d seen earlier. It had a number 2 etched on its middle.
“The way to Sense-o-Round Two is on the other side,” Milton said, rubbing his eyes. “At least, I think … I’m having problems seeing.”
“Me too,” Caterwaul, Howler Monkey, and the Sunshine Sneezer chimed in.
Sam/Sara shook their heads.
“Not me,” Sam said, taking off his glasses. “In fact, I don’t think I even need these anymore.”
Suddenly, Howler Monkey lunged at a clump of twinkles with his blade shield.
“I’m … being … played!” he grunted as he vainly swatted at the sizzling motes. “And my shield … won’t spin.…”
Milton toggled the switch on his arm. Nothing. He tried his fireball mace as well, whipping it toward one of the swooping Vizzigorths, but he couldn’t summon a spark. The creature dove at the lashing chain, seized it with its razor-toothed eyelids, and yanked it out of Milton’s hand. Howler Monkey fought against the pull of his armor and stumbled back to the Terawatts.
“Useless,” he panted as he unstrapped the charred shield and let it fall to the floor with a sad clatter. “Weapons from other levels must not, like, work in—”
Schwaa!
A small portal slid open on the wall twenty feet away from the Terawatts. Out shot five long wands with nooses of looped metal at the ends. Flaming words sizzled above.
WEAPON: ROTO-REEL
The devices skittered at their feet. Milton crouched down and picked one up. It was like a cross between a fishing rod and an eggbeater.
Swoop!
A Vizzigorth darted down from the ceiling and nipped at Howler Monkey’s shoulder. He cried out in pain.
Brushing the hair from his eyes, the Sunshine Sneezer squinted at a Vizzigorth that fluttered in a tight circle several yards away, as if caught in an invisible eddy of energy. He flicked the switch on his weapon. The noose of metal ribbon began spinning. The Sunshine Sneezer cast it like a fishing reel, then snapped the wand back, seizing the squealing Vizzigorth around the midsection.
Snatch!
“I got it!” the Sunshine Sneezer yelled triumphantly. The Vizzigorth screeched—a shrill, wet gurgle of rage—before pulling the boy into the web of floating sparkles. “Or it’s got”—he screamed in agony as each electrified sparkle ricocheted off his body—“me!”
The Sunshine Sneezer let go and the Vizzigorth flitted away—its wings like gauzy fins sprouting out from its sides—with the weapon dangling from its body. The boy staggered back, hitting one more swirling clot of jolting glitter light as he rejoined his friends.
“What good are these, then?!” the Sunshine Sneezer said as he tossed his weapon to the ground.
Clatter!
Milton watched, as if through gauze, the Vizzigorths roosting on the ceiling. The glistening creatures bore their terrible gaze into the children, hungry for eye candy. Milton could see Howler Monkey’s blood staining one of the Vizzigorth’s teeth.
Milton squinted his eyes at the energy sparkles. They fuzzed out into pom-poms of light, like the stars in Mr. van Gogh’s paintings. Milton flicked the switch of his fishing reel weapon on and off, watching its metal noose spin.
“Maybe we can use these things another way,” he said, screwing up his eyes at the nearest twinkle. Milton cast out his Roto-Reel, the noose flying out on a length of metal ribbon. He cinched it tight around the sparkle’s fuzzy halo. Milton opened his eyes wide. The noose seemed to be levitating in the air around the sparkle.
Crackle!
“The force field is actually part of its body,” he said. “We just can’t see it.”
Milton tugged the flickering energy sphere inch by grudging inch.
“If we can just … budge them …,” he said between gritted teeth, “maybe we can make … a path.” With a heave, Milton accidentally flicked the switch. The electrified sparkle spun in a spiral of mesmerizing light. A flock of Vizzigorths shriek-gurgled overhead.
“Uh-oh,” Sam muttered with distress before nodding off, using his padded shoulder as a pillow.
Five Vizzigorths plunged from their perch toward the Terawatts, blinking their rows of jagged white teeth.
Figures, Marlo thought sadly amidst the acres of moldering garbage mounds, their hot, spoiled-milk stench rippling off the heaps in sickly waves. My first date, and it’s with Hans Jovonovic at a garbage dump, and I’m a gloom-inducing shadow cast from the underworld.
Hans swatted away a seagull as he stooped over yet another broken cardboard box. Soiled papers were spewed out everywhere, like corn dog and elephant ear bits on the side of a roller coaster. The late-afternoon sun struck Hans’s red hair, igniting it into a brilliant blaze.
He’s being a trooper, Marlo thought as she traveled along a shaft of waning sunlight. She spread her long shadow at Hans’s sneakered feet like a dare. The boy sighed. His shoulders slumped into a kind of resigned submission. He crossed Marlo’s shadow just like she had taught him.
Any luck, Heat Miser Hair? Marlo thought-texted to Hans’s touch-screen belt-buckle phone. He looked down at his waist.
“No,” he replied vaguely, still not completely convinced that he wasn’t talking to himself. “It seems like everyone in Shawnee County decided to heave boxes full of old papers into the dump on the same day.”
As Marlo stared at the mounds of trash—the castaway remnants of people’s lives—she thought about how her parents’ marriage of twenty years was now just that: a worthless rubbish heap of memories. All because of me …
Hans puzzled over Marlo’s sobbing, trembling shadow, her head hung in her shady hands. Awkwardly, Hans put his hand around Marlo’s heaving shadow back, patting the air softly around her absence.
“There, there,” he said, glancing over his shoulder nervously for any school bullies who happened to be trolling the garbage heap, looking to expand their tetanus collections. “It must be hard being, you know …”
A Pisces?
“Um, no, I meant …”
I know what you meant. You can say the D-word. Dead. If anyone knows I’m dead, it’s me.
Hans and Marlo shared a stretch of silence, like Lady and the Tramp sharing a strand of spaghetti.
You’re still not completely sure I’m me, are you?
Hans jumped as his belt buckle vibrated.
“This will sure make my parents’ monthly phone bill more interesting,” he muttered as he read Marlo’s texted thoughts. “It’s not that I don’t think you’re you, exactly. It’s just, well, far more likely that I’ve lost my mind, thinking my dead soul mate is haunting my belt buckle.”
Soul mate?
Hans stopped short, as if he had been going for his morning jog and suddenly found himself in a minefield.
“I … well … it’s just that …,” Hans faltered, his face now roughly the same color as his hair.
What do you like so much about me, anyway? Marlo thought-texted as Hans stepped into her ever-lengthening shadow.
Hans scratched his temple. The sun began to set over a mound of garbage. His hair was now a controlled burn of redwood twigs.
“Most girls either ignore me, laugh at me, or act like my social awkwardness is a communicable disease. Not you. You would make fun of me, sure, but never in a mean way like the other girls. You were actually funny. And every day it was something different. Like you were making an effort to connect with me somehow. And, of course, the whole ‘being beautiful’ thing …”
Beautiful? Marlo thought reflexively, not intending to text. She wasn’t sure what to do with all of these new revelations. Her mom would have arranged them neatly in a scrapbook. Her father would have jotted them down in his sloppy handwriting, then stored them away in a—
Box! That’s it! Over there, by the oozing medical supplies!
“Which one?” Hans asked, supremely relieved at the change in subject.
The one with the little dials and buttons drawn on the side in Sharpie.
Marlo recognized the box as the “time machine” Milton had made when he was little. He’d climb inside and Marlo would tell him that the box would send him forty-five minutes into the future. She’d then drag the box down the stairs to the basement and lock the door for nearly an hour.
Marlo’s mind grew smooth, cool, and fuzzy around the edges. She looked over at the horizon of rubbish. One lone ray of orange light shone over the heap.
Oh no. In a couple of seconds, I’ll be lost to the shadows.
Hans crouched over the box, shuffling through the papers on top.
“This is it!” he called out. “Now what am I supposed to do with—”
The sun fell below the mountains of garbage, and Marlo’s consciousness was pulled apart by blackness.
Wump! Wump! Wump!
Flapping leather wings stirred Milton’s hair with hot wind. He willed his eyes open. There, hovering around the swirling sparkles, were the Vizzigorths, staring at the corkscrewing whorl, utterly hypnotized.
Sara squinted her eyes at the baffling scene.
“It’s like van Gogh’s Starry Night,” she said with a nervous smile as she watched the deceptively playful swirls and “stars” ablaze with their own drunken luminescence.
The Sunshine Sneezer cast his fishing noose at the nearest sparkle.
Floong!
“More like Scary Night,” he said as he captured one of the twinkles. “And we’re going to lose more than an ear if we don’t follow Milton’s lead.”
He flicked the wand and dragged the spiraling light off toward the side of the Sense-o-Rama. Almost immediately, another flock of Vizzigorths swooped down to be mesmerized.
Whumpada-whumpa-whumpa!
The dazed players above soon caught on to the Terawatts’ strategy, assuming it to be their strategy, and the movements of Milton and his friends became easier and more fluid. Soon, the Terawatts had lassoed dozens of electrified sparkles and sent them spinning, subduing scattered flocks of flapping eyeballs while carving away a narrow path leading to the next level.
Milton edged along sideways like a crab, followed by the other Terawatts, with Sam/Sara—due to their size—at the rear.
A figure clad in muscle-padded armor lay on the ground by the Sense-o-Rama wall.
“It’s one of the Zetawatts!” Milton yell-whispered as he neared the Sense-o-Round Two entrance. “At least I think it is. Everything’s still so fuzzy to me.”
Flumpa-whoosh!
Without warning, a rush of leathery wing flaps erupted from the rafters rimming the ceiling. A Vizzigorth darted down, its eye-mouth blinking away its trance. It gobbled up one of the whirling sparkles with a ravenous wink of teeth.
Skree!!
A small flock of dazed Vizzigorths shrieked in anger as their mesmerizing twinkle was devoured. They attacked the invading Vizzigorth from all sides and ripped it apart with their savage batting eyelashes. Covered in freshly shed gore, the Vizzigorths’ eye-mouths were dilated with bloodlust as they flitted about the Sense-o-Rama in erratic jerks.
“Uh-oh,” the game version of Principal Bubb giggled wickedly. “It looks like we’re shifting from ‘eye see you’ to ‘I.C.U.’ as in, intensive care: STAT!”
Milton made it to the edge of the Level Two portal. He crawled on his hands and knees to the prone body just beyond, careful to avoid a crackling, low-lying sparkle. He rolled the figure over. It was a Zetawatt named Ariel.
“Ariel? Are you okay? What happened?”
Her freckled skin was blanched, her normally dark, mischievous eyes now blank and lost.
“C-can’t see … held them … back …,” she murmured dully before fainting dead away.
Scromp!
Sara screamed as a Vizzigorth tore into her arm. Caterwaul beat the creature back with her rotating fishing wand before another Vizzigorth ripped it out of her hand.
“We’ve got to, like, get out of here!” Howler Monkey yelped as he cleared the sea of sparkles. Caterwaul squealed as a Vizzigorth dive-bombed her head.
“Help me with Ariel,” Milton said to the Sunshine Sneezer.
“But, dude, she’s going to slow us down.”
Milton grabbed Ariel by the hands and heaved her across the floor.
“No child left behind,” he grunted before backing into a painful sparkle jolt. The Sunshine Sneezer sighed and grabbed Ariel’s leg, helping to drag her to the circle etched on the floor.
Flumpatta-whoosh!
The Sense-o-Rama strobed with sparkle death flashes as a school of Vizzigorths—their irises flaring like embers among gnashing teeth—winged their way toward the Terawatts.
“Now!” Milton screamed to Sam/Sara. The conjoined twins plowed toward a trio of bobbing sparkles, howling in painful glitter shock, and joined their friends.
The floor beneath them opened up, like the aperture of a camera. The Terawatts fell into the next level as the Vizzigorths tore into one another, furious at their prey’s sudden escape.
THE BALD, POINTY-BEARDED Russian man and his bushy-browed American counterpart sang fervently across from Principal Bubb in her Not-So-Secret Lair/Campaign Headquarters.
“Demon sleaze, vote for me.
Let me be your law.
And, demons, please, say to me.
You’ll let me hold your claw!
Now let me hold your claw …
I wanna hold your claw …”
The principal gave a dismissive wave.
“Hmm … it’s catchy, but then again, so is scabies. But it’s just too … I don’t know … needy. I hired you—the infamous and unlikely songwriting duo of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and anti-Communist zealot Joseph McCarthy—to create the definitive campaign jingle. And so far I have yet to hear that toe-tapping Lenin-McCarthy magic.”
“Vee have another!” Mr. Lenin exclaimed. “Is anthem. We save best for last.” He nodded to Mr. McCarthy, who strummed a jaunty tune on his acoustic guitar.
“There’s nothing you can do, so give it up.
Nowhere to run, ill-fated schmuck.
Nothing you can say but just a vote can change the game.
It’s easy.
All you need is Bubb.
All you need is Bubb.
All you need is Bubb, Bubb.
Bubb is all you need.”
A claw rapped against the principal’s chamber door.
“Yes?” she called out with a blast of anchovy-gym-sock breath.
“ ’Scuse me, Principal, ma’am.” A beaked, feathered demon leaned into the room. “Your campaign advertisement is on.”
Principal Bubb rose to her hooves.
“Mr. Lenin, Mr. McCarthy, if you’ll excuse me,” she said as she clacked to her desk. “I’ll be in touch.”
The two singers stood and bowed.
“I’d like to zay thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope vee passed the audition,” Mr. Lenin said before the two men scooted out of the principal’s lair.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb flicked on h
er radio.
“Benito Mussolini … His name sounds like a terrible Italian dish,” said the radio announcer’s deep, cool, sarcastic voice. “But here’s the ‘dish’ about this one-time leader of the Italian Fascist Party: He was once arrested for vagrancy. Do you really want a former hobo to be in charge of h-e-double-you-know? Don’t let him make a ‘Mess-o-lini’ of things. Pass the buck to Bubb.”
The principal’s gruesome features contorted into a wicked gash of a smile.
“Pretty strong meat there from candidate Bea ‘Elsa’ Bubb,” another newscaster noted. “Rancid meat, judging from the tone of her negative campaign ads. But Bubb needs whatever nasty edge she can muster, judging from the latest Gallows Poll that has the principal of Heck and rival Lilith Couture virtually neck and … well, whatever Principal Bubb has that connects her head to her shoulders. Speaking of Ms. Couture, here is her latest campaign ad.”
The put-upon expression carved deep into the principal’s barklike face deepened.
“You’ve all heard of Lilith Couture,” a lilting voice cooed. “Her exquisite face plastered on the cover of the underworld’s most elegant magazines, her lithe form seen draped on the arm or tentacle of the rich and powerful. And, after serving as devil’s advocate for time immemorial, she’s got more chops than a pig with a black belt in karate—”
“ ’Scuse me, again, Principal, ma’am,” the feathered demon interrupted as it fluttered into the room. “I have something for you.”
“What is it?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb barked as she switched off the radio. The twitchy creature goose-stepped to the principal’s desk, holding out a rolled parchment. Principal Bubb snatched it out of his webbed hands.
“A summons, ma’am,” the demon clucked nervously.
Principal Bubb’s eyes shot burning-hot skewers of rage into the poultry excuse for a demon. “If you call me ma’am again, I’ll maim you,” she muttered under her breath as she unfurled the parchment.
ATTENTION PRINCIPAL BLOB:
You have been summoned as a witness in the Trial of the Millennium: the State vs. Satan. You are hereby required to attend the Provincial Court of Res Judicata—a place with literally no appeal—within twenty-four hours of receiving this document. If you are currently in Limbo, then simply count to 86,400, then leave.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 17
