Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (3 page)

The Burgermeister chortled.

“Our plan eez, much like our vaistlines, expanding immensely!”

Virgil caught Lady Lactose’s icy gaze. She rose and smoothed her silky, buttercream gown, scowling.

“Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” she muttered, glaring at the mob of barbecue-sauce-smeared children with disgust.

The French Fried Fool pretended to whistle. The other mimes clapped their hands over their ears, as if
this
pretend whistle was much louder than the
previous
pretend whistle. After shaking their chalk-white heads and straightening their berets, the mimes formed two lines in front of the wide folding metal door behind the stage. They crouched down low and made as if they were tugging at two great ropes in order to raise the door. Surprisingly, the door clattered open, the mimes
heaving as the slatted metal door rolled up into the ceiling on twin rails.

“Goodbye, children,” Lady Lactose declared into the microphone without a trace of fondness or regret. “Congratulations on your good fortune. We look forward to exploiting
… to working with you …
on this momentous project that will serve as a model of innovation for the entire underworld. Now we must return to our rightful thrones above to work out the details. But don’t think that we are looking down on you from our floating castle. Instead, we hope it is an opportunity for all of you to look
up
to us.”

Virgil, his empty stomach jumping up and down with excitement as he neared the front of the line, watched as the Burgermeister, Lady Lactose, and the French Fried Fool strutted through the doors and out to the open commons beyond. In the roofless inner courtyard at the center of Blimpo rested an inflatable, forty-foot-tall, canvas-skinned castle. Fastened to the roofs of the castle’s three cylindrical towers were three hot-air balloons, girdled with brass lattice and cables.

“Here you go, kid,” Chef Boyareyookrazee said as he thrust a basket brimming with delectable meat and sauce into Virgil’s hands. “Now eat and run.” The red-faced man snickered. “I have a feeling you’ll
all
be doing a lot of that from now on.
NEXT!”

Virgil shambled away, transfixed by the vice principals as they entered their inflated castle.

It’s like one of those Grub-a-Dub-Dub fast-food places you see in the middle of nowhere when you’re on a long trip with your family
, Virgil thought as he stood in the open, wide-mouthed doorway.
After a few dozen billboards, you’re counting down the miles, like it’s Christmas on a bun with a side of birthdays. But after you’ve stuffed your face and driven away, you feel kinda sick and sad inside
.

A dozen sandbags were tossed out of the castle’s windows. The blimp kingdom wobbled and gently lifted off the ground, floating up for about a hundred feet until the six slender cables tethering it to the ground grew taut.

“Up, up, and away,”
Virgil mumbled as his mind journeyed back to his time in Limbo, when he, his best friend, Milton, and Milton’s sister, Marlo—the thought of whom made Virgil blush—had attempted to escape using piles of confiscated clothing and jars of buoyant Lost Souls to create a big balloon that would, theoretically, take them back to the Surface, aka the Land of the Living. But their escape had proven only one-third successful. Marlo had been captured by Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Heck’s Principal of Darkness, and Virgil, realizing that the soul balloon had only so much lift, let his skinnier, lighter friend Milton float to freedom—or at least a better place, Virgil hoped.

Dragged back to the present by the heady scent of barbecued meat, Virgil stuffed a handful of Hambone Hank’s succulent food into his mouth. The flavor
assailed Virgil’s senses like a quarry full of Pop Rocks splashed by a tidal wave of ginger ale. The taste was complex, mysterious—haunting, even—and Virgil’s tongue tried valiantly to explore every delicious nuance. It was the most lip-smackingly, finger-lickingly wonderful thing he had ever eaten.

Maybe his selfless act in Limbo came with some reward, Virgil thought as he wolfed down the basket of meat and fresh hush puppies. The only thing that could make this moment any better would be if his friend were here by his side to enjoy it with.
Milton’s probably thousands of miles away
, Virgil thought with a wistful grin,
just chilling somewhere, living the good life. And after his time in Heck, most
any
life would seem good in comparison
.

2 • LOST SHEEP ON THE LAM

MILTON THREW HIS
weight against his customized, tricked-out shopping cart and plummeted down a steep ridge toward a barbed cyclone fence. His stomach felt like it had sprouted wings and was trying to flutter frantically out of his gaping mouth.

“Pick up the tempo, Popsicle!” yelled Jack Kerouac, the lanky, dark-haired leader of the Phantoms of the Dispossessed—or PODs—from his speeding cart below. “Us cats gotta scat and make a mad conga line out of
Squaresville
. To the ultimate scene.”

Jack and dozens of his PODs—Milton’s adopted family—hurtled behind their fortified shopping carts toward the heavily guarded barrier … and their potential undoing.

Milton, still running, felt for his glasses, hidden in the filthy POD disguise he wore to avoid detection by
Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s team of demon spies. He squinted at the guards teeming on both sides of the eighteen-foot-tall fence, oblivious to the oncoming assault due to a thick, clinging mist.

The fence’s gleaming, corkscrew razor wire grinned maliciously back at Milton, like the product of an especially evil orthodontist. The sight shot a wave of electric panic through Milton as he leaned into another switchback on the sloping bank. He joined the phantoms as they drove their shopping cart chariots, sporting corrugated metal shields and barbed spikes, in a line down the bluff, forming a vicious, winding dragon of metal. Milton clutched the handle of his cart so tightly that his pale white knuckles became almost translucent.

For the last few weeks, eleven-year-old Milton had been detained in a refugee camp in some bleak, forgotten badlands on the outskirts of Heck, lying low, waiting for the right opportunity for escape. And, with the last shopping cart fortified and the blanket of mysterious mist tucking itself in around the fence, the time was nigh.
Now
, even.

“It’s just like I wrote in
The Dead Beat Scrolls
!” Jack shouted as Milton caught up with him on the plunging slope. “‘The mad ones are made to move. But even these dispossessed souls, uneasy and noble, will find their day of rest, in a place beyond.’”

Jack had apparently been a big-shot writer years ago up on the Surface. And all the PODs were buzzing about his latest book,
The Dead Beat Scrolls
—his first since his death—one that had come to him in some kind of wild dream.

“Right, the Margins,” Milton replied dubiously. “‘Where nomads and know-mads make their rightful home at the very edge of wrong, and puzzling jigsaw spirits become one glorious whole.’”

Jack, a lunatic grin smeared across his face, let out a bloodcurdling whoop. The demon guards patrolling the fence stopped their drill. They looked up, shocked, as the dragon of carts hurtled toward them, slicing through the mist, unstoppable.

Beyond the fence, the mist thinned, revealing glimpses of the wasteland beyond. Milton saw strange, woolly blobs cantering in the distance. They brayed freakishly in a way that made the flock of goose pimples on Milton’s arms migrate across his whole body.

But Milton couldn’t abandon the PODs now, especially after all they had done for him: harboring a known fugitive and—when they had been captured and put in this awful, barren place—engineering a bold escape before Milton could be processed and identified.

Milton pushed back with his foot, propelling his speeding cart faster, and peered ahead to see an ancient POD named Moondog at the front of the line. Dressed
as a shabby Viking with the wind whipping his long white hair about like an angry ghost, Moondog seemed infinitely brave. Perhaps the fact that he was completely blind had something to do with it. Though unable to see, Moondog was far from sightless. He was endowed with—if not quite a sixth sense—something slightly more than the standard-issue five.

“I hope we didn’t miss our checkout time!” Moondog howled as his shopping cart rammed into the fence.

The twisted chain link screamed as it was torn apart by the carts’ jagged sawtooth fenders. Clouds of thick, sickly yellow grit were upturned into the air as the speeding locomotive of PODs barreled through the fence.

“Brace yourself!” Jack barked against the din of squealing, scraping metal, his dark cowlick dancing above his wild eyes.

Milton hunkered down as he shot through the gaping wound in the fence. Behind him lay gnarled sections of chain link, like a swathe of scar tissue left after a robot’s appendectomy.

He grinned, accidentally getting a mouthful of mist that stank like hard-boiled eggs. Milton swallowed down the sickening, sour taste.

“What a gas!” Jack roared. “Those guards were totally caught
off
guard!”

But, as Milton made out a guard in a nearby tower cradling a bulky walkie-talkie, he realized that soon all of the Netherworld would know of their escape, including Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Heck’s self-serving, evildoing, stomach-churning, and—worst of all—Milton-hating Principal of Darkness.

Jack stood atop his still-speeding cart, extended his arms, and embraced the stale wind rushing past him with abandon.

“Now let’s take this wigged-out riff straight to the Margins!” he shouted to the dozens of ragtag PODs as they charged onward through the stark tundra.

The fierce, fathomless eyes of the phantoms blazed with triumph. They whooped and waved their arms in the air like they just didn’t care, though they did—very much so—perhaps for the first time in their afterlives.

“So you seriously think that the Margins is a real place?” asked Milton, who—even as a wandering soul in an afterlife crowded with phantoms, demons, and assorted dead historical figures—was ever the pragmatist.

Jack caressed a pendant of glittering, silvery liquid that hung from his neck. It burbled faintly at his touch.

“I don’t think,” he said.
“I know
. Some truths hang out in your heart, because your brain won’t let ’em crash, dig?”

Milton shrugged as Jack broke from the line, kicking his way ahead. Milton, wary of being the caboose in
this grim, colorless land, scooted alongside the nervously energetic POD.

“But what if … the Margins is just … a dream you had?” Milton panted.

Jack rubbed the back of his grimy neck with his hand.

“The only diff between our dreams and our lives is, like, the position of our eyelids,” Jack replied with a shrug. “See, all our crazy lives are just stories written on sheets of binder paper, and we PODs are the scribbles in the margins. It’s where those who don’t belong
belong
. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. If you think you belong somewhere, then you do.”

Milton and Jack reached the front of the barreling parade of souped-up shopping carts. Moondog pondered the horizon with vacant eyes.

“Something wicked that way we go,” Moondog howled, his arm pointing ahead into nothing.

Milton turned to Jack.

“What does he mean?” Milton asked.

The PODs’ leader reached for his pendant, gently squeezing it in his hand for comfort.

“Moondog is, like, way ahead of us in many ways,” he said gravely. “He is experiencing something that we have yet to. Something …
wrong.”

Milton looked ahead. He could just make out the indistinct creatures he had seen earlier in the distance. The mist distorted their unnerving brays so that they
sounded both eerily far away and frighteningly close. Milton hoped for the former but knew in his gut that something wicked was coming closer than anyone could have imagined. But wherever he and his adopted family of phantoms belonged, it wasn’t here, in this stinky, dispiriting patch of nothing in the armpit of the afterlife.

3 • CREATURE
D
i
SCOMFORTS