Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (18 page)

IN A DARK
, restricted hallway behind the Lose-Your-Lunchroom, the boys congregated like starving acolytes at the feet of a savory savior. At the center of the feeding frenzy was Hambone Hank’s Heart Attack Shack: a bright red and yellow corrugated tin shed on wheels. Through vents on all four sides of the mobile hut poured the sweet tang of barbecue, the most mouthwatering that Milton had ever had the pleasure of inhaling. No wonder Dr. Kellogg’s Off the Eaten Path Dusted Double Lentil Trail Mix Biscuits were growing moldy and stale.

Virgil, Hugo, Thaddeus, and Gene had faces smeared with red-brown sauce. Clutched in their hands were baskets overflowing with tender, mouthwatering meat—though Milton couldn’t discern what it was the meat
of
. It didn’t exactly look like brisket, chops, or
links, but rather a composite of all of the above, a delectable dream team comprising only the best, most appetizing cuts. There was also a selection of hot hush puppies and steaming black-eyed peas, but they were mostly ignored by the boys, who went straight for the meat.

“Eat up, boys,” Chef Boyareyookrazee said with a smile extruded upon his sneer-shaped mouth like old, dried-up Play-Doh. “It’s on the house, courtesy of your kindhearted vice principals. But hurry: it’s for a limited time only.”

With the promise of free, delicious food compounded with the threat of it being taken away, the boys gulped down their meals like Super Mario munching Super Mushrooms.

“His secret,” Virgil managed to utter to Milton between bites, “is that he deep-fries the meat after he barbecues it. It locks in the flavor and throws away the key….”

Milton peered inside the cramped cart to get a look at Hambone Hank. All he could really make out from the billowing clouds of burning mesquite and fatty fried fumes was a dark, robed figure with a sauce-and-grease-splotched apron reading
SOUL FOOD WITH
REAL
SOUL.
Occasionally the smoke would clear, and Milton could see that the cook, standing next to several large upturned jars, wore a hairnet and a surgical mask over his long nose. His dark eyes flashed at Milton, holding
him in their gaze for just a fleeting moment, but that time felt like an eternity. It was as if Hambone Hank were reading Milton, judging him, with one short-yet-infinitely-deep stare. The tall, slender man seemed so familiar.

The bell rang.

“That’s weird,” Hugo said as he quickly gnawed a bone clean of any evidence of meat, like wiping a crime scene of fingerprints. “We’re not supposed to be in class for another half hour….”

Several scaly demons brandishing pitchsporks appeared at the end of the hallway.

“Hey, wide-loads,” the darker of the three similarly serpentlike demons called. “Get your butts to the Gymnauseum. And though it will be difficult for you, try to get them there in one trip.”

The demons snickered as they prodded the boys down the hallway.

“Figures,” Milton mumbled as he felt his Pang suit contract with hunger. “I didn’t even get a chance to eat.”

“Here,” Virgil said, offering Milton his last bite of mouthwatering meat with a heroic lack of hesitation.

Milton smiled and gobbled up the tender morsel.

“Thwanks,” he replied with a full mouth.

The taste was so incredible that Milton was temporarily paralyzed. So complex, robust, intense, and oddly …
haunting
. The flavors seemed to somersault in his mouth, each entirely different. It was delicious but,
at the same time, unsettling. Strange, unconnected images flashed into Milton’s mind with each flavor: a plane crashing, a raft bobbing in the middle of a shark-infested ocean, a car spinning out of control…. Milton swallowed and the disturbing images melted away.

He looked back as Hambone Hank growled at a pair of demon guards begging for a sample of his insanely flavorful barbecue.

“That’s weird,” Milton said. “He won’t give the guards any of the food.”

Virgil shot a quick glance over his shoulder. The mysterious cook bared his long white teeth. The demons trotted away, suddenly remembering a pressing engagement.

Virgil shrugged.

“I guess it’s just like Chef Boyareyookrazee said. The Burgermeister and Lady Lactose just want to do something nice for us.”

Hmmm
, Milton pondered as he entered the locker room.
“Nice” like a farmer and his wife filling the pigs’ trough. Nice with some kind of wicked agenda
.

Virgil stepped onto the black iron scale.

“I’m baffled,” Dr. Kellogg declared as the hands of the scale settled on 247 pounds, 6 ounces. “You’ve all actually
gained
weight. Step off the scale, son. No need to
put the machine through any more trauma than it has already suffered.”

Virgil sulked off the scale.

“My system is scientifically proven to thermogenically burn fat, raise metabolism, and cure a host of psychosomatic ills while eradicating disease proneness and resetting the subject to its original weight blueprint!” the teacher said, scratching his white hair.

The boys stared at their teacher glumly.

“I’m flabbergasted!” he said as he raised his skinny white arms in frustration. “If you don’t lose weight, you don’t graduate, and if you don’t graduate, this place will fill up with big-boned boys faster than you can say ‘the buffet is now open’!”

Dr. Kellogg paced across the foam-mat floor.

“Into the DREADmills with you, then,” he exclaimed with a toss of his hand.

“The DREADmills?!” Milton cried with a mixture of disbelief and trepidation: heavy on the trepidation.
“Again?”

Dr. Kellogg glared at Milton and the boys.

“Orders straight from the top, Mr. Grumby,” the teacher said, pointing through the glass ceiling at the balloon kingdom hovering above. “The vice principals are worried about everyone pulling their own weight—in particular, the fact that there is so much of it. So, from now on, every other class will be gym.”

Milton clutched his tightening Pang throat with panic.

Is it my imagination
, Milton wondered with fearful curiosity,
or is the Pang getting tighter and tighter, pushing me down, as if it’s slowly swallowing me?

“Gym dandy!” the teacher exclaimed with a clap of his immaculate white gloves. With that, the demon guards herded the boys into the DREADmills.

Milton was sealed inside the DREADmill’s suffocating blackness. The machine switched on and the wheel began to turn. After a few stumbles, the DREADmill was filled with the cruel, high-definition image of Major Bummer.

“Well, well!” he bellowed in his husky, shout-ravaged voice. “If it isn’t the boy so big he gives the school bus stretch marks!”

The wheel turned faster.

“Now, where were we?” the trainer said as he thrummed his fingers on his chiseled chin. “Oh, that’s right:
Fear Level Four!”

Milton was now in Limbo. He paced the familiar halls, the ones that winded aimlessly but always seemed to lead straight to …

“Mr. Fauster,” a familiar voice hissed behind him.

…
Principal Bubb
.

His heart raced, with his body instinctually chasing after it.

“Where are you going in such a rush?” Bea “Elsa”
Bubb mocked as the hallway echoed with her clacking hooves. “I thought we could have a little chat, just me and …
what’s left of you
!”

A trio of vicious snarls pricked Milton’s ears.

Cerberus
, Milton gasped as he ran faster and faster, trying desperately to fill his mind with frightful things that didn’t scare him.

“Who do you think you are, Mr. Fauster? The Gingerbread Man?” the principal mocked, her wicked rasp of a voice sounding as if it were right beside Milton’s ear. “I assure you that, not only can I catch you, I intend to dunk you in milk and bite your head off!”

Cerberus began licking his three chops with his three tongues. Peanut butter clung to his fangs.

“Or, I’ve got a better idea,” Principal Bubb growled as she plopped crackers dripping with peanut butter into her mouth. They turned down a white hallway, ending at a great door ornately carved with gods rowing children down a river.

“Fear Level Five!” Major Bummer shouted, his tree trunk of a neck bulging with angry veins.

Milton was now in Limbo’s Assessment Chamber, a massive round room of gleaming white marble and gold. He was pulled down the nine descending rings leading to the stage of polished gold. Milton tried desperately to run backward, away from the elaborate scale on the platform. His Pang skin jiggled with exertion.

Principal Bubb’s voice taunted him from behind.

“Now, now, Mr. Fauster,” she heckled. “Don’t be like this. We just want to rip out your everlasting soul and weigh it, maybe take a few samples. Standard procedure. I’m sure we could get it back to you by, say … how does
never
sound?”

As the principal cackled, Milton moved his legs as fast as was physically possible. Thick, droolish Pang sweat coursed off him. His throat burned with each hungry gulp of air. Thoughts of clinging peanut butter were simply no match for the pure adrenaline of fear.
Real
fear.

The worst feeling Milton had ever experienced in this life or the last was the numb agony of having his soul removed, even just for a moment, upon his initial “appraisal” in Limbo’s Assessment Chamber. As Annubis, the slender dog god that had extracted Milton’s soul, had gently cradled it in his paws, Milton’s sense of self had completely drained away, leaving him with an unendurable emptiness.

As Milton literally jogged his memory, he saw at the corner of his sweat-stung eyes, rows and rows of jars, jars of …

“Lost souls!” Milton gasped, tripping over himself.

“So clumsy,” Principal Bubb mocked. “I’ve heard of having butter
fingers
, but butter legs? Oh dear …”

Milton quickly got up and began to sprint anew. The wheel wobbled with every pounding footfall.

Those jars!
Milton thought, his mind racing as fast as
his feet.
Just like the ones in the kitchen and in Hambone Hank’s shack
.

Major Bummer’s disembodied head pressed itself against Milton’s face.

“You may have won the battle of the bulge, but not the war of the waddle!” he shouted. “You make me sick! Get out of my sight!”

Major Bummer and the Assessment Chamber disappeared, replaced by a delectable paradise for the palate.

“We now join
Lost on a Dessert Island
, already in progress….”

The blond curly-haired boy and the willowy girl walked cautiously down a forest path. The girl fell to her knees and examined a huge moist Hershey’s Kiss.

“We’re close!” she chirped.

They ambled down the path, following a trail of gargantuan Kisses.

The boy stopped suddenly, holding his friend back with an outstretched arm.

“What?” the girl asked.

“Shhh … you’ll scare it,” the boy whispered.

“Jeepers,” the girl murmured as she saw, ahead of them in a clearing, a majestic chocolate moose.

Milton trotted on. While his Pang suit slavishly pursued the virtual Candyland before it, Milton’s mind was on more than his stomach.

Lost souls
, he pondered.
Owners unknown. Souls that
,
throughout eternity, had somehow lost their way. Captured and jarred up tight to be stored for perpetuity in the Assessment Chamber
.

Milton snickered.

That is, unless you steal a bunch of them to make a soul balloon and escape back to the Surface
.

The teenagers on the screen circled the hulking, dark chocolate elk. Tiny Tootsie moles snuffled around its sumptuous hooves. It began to nuzzle them playfully, almost begging them to nibble on its brittle toffee antlers.

But why would Hambone Hank have all those jars?

And then it hit Milton like a ton of Twix.

Soul Food with
Real
Soul
.

18 • D
i
SEMBODY AND SOUL

“HAMBONE HANK’S SOUL
Food
is people! It’s people!”
Milton exclaimed to the boys in the locker room, pacing with galumphing outrage.

“How can you … know that, Jonah?” Hugo puffed while attempting to shed his burlap leggings. “I heard that Hambone … keeps his recipe a closely guarded secret. Locked away in a vault down in … h-e-double-hockey-sticks, in the circle where all the telemarketers are.”

“Exactly!” Milton deduced. “That means he must be hiding something!”

Gene blanched.

“You don’t really mean …
people
, do you? As in
human?”

Thaddeus shrugged. “Maybe Jonah means
Hunan
food,” he said as he pried off his black rubber tube top. “That really spicy Chinese stuff.”

Milton shook his Pang head so hard that it jiggled like a bulldog drying itself off in slow motion.

“I mean
souls. Lost
souls. Tell them, Virgil.”

Virgil held his round head in his hands, rolling it back and forth, as if he were hoping he could physically help his tormented brain to make the right decision.

“But it’s so
good,”
he mumbled.