Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (20 page)

“That was insensitive,” the boy replied stiffly.

The principal snorted.

“Insensitive?! Here that was the equivalent of a high five and a bear hug!”

She stepped closer to the boy.

“Let me guess … BB gun?”

The boy nodded sadly.

“Ouch … lucky it wasn’t a double-barreled air rifle,” the principal said as she wrapped her pudgy arm around the boy, whose face was now—unfortunately for him—at armpit level. “Since I’m not without compassion, I’ll let you in on a little secret. See that delicious, triple-cream-filled maple bar with the candied bacon bits on top in the Automat over there?”

The boy nodded as he, with his good eye, examined the delectable treat tucked away in a compartment behind a little glass door. It was surrounded by compartments containing other mouthwatering treats, several of which also held the hands of screaming boys and girls whose purple meat-hooks were ensnared in the booby-trapped doors.

“Well, I know for a
fact
that that particular compartment isn’t a trap,” Principal Bubb confided. “So go on. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.”

She shoved the boy toward the Automat. Gulping, he shuffled to the compartment, reached out his trembling hand, and then stopped short.

“How do I know this isn’t a trick?” the boy asked.

Principal Bubb shrugged her lumpy shoulders.

“Why would I waste my precious time tricking little milksops when there’s a big, bad underworld to govern?”

The boy slid open the compartment and stuck his hand inside. The door promptly closed, painfully, on the boy’s hand.

“Owwww!!” he screamed. “You said you weren’t tricking me!!”

Principal Bubb stalked past the squirming, one-eyed boy as he writhed in pain on the Cafeterium floor.

“No, I simply posed the question ‘Why would I?’ ” she said as she stuck her claw through the small opening the boy’s hand made in the compartment door. “And the answer is ‘Because I wanted a maple bar.’ ”

The principal snatched the pastry and clacked away. She cast her imposing shadow on a table filled with terrified girls. One of them was reading the latest copy of
GYP
.

“Girls,” Principal Bubb said as she wiped her forked tongue across the part of her mouth usually reserved for lips. “I believe I saw your parents waiting by the gates. This has all been some ghastly mistake.”

The girls squealed with delight as they bolted out of the Cafeterium.

The principal sat down in a recently vacated chair and picked up the open newspaper, flipping to the back page. There was the principal’s ad for her missing Cerberus.

Principal Bubb wiped away a curdlike tear birthed by her hardly-ever-used tear ducts. She turned to the cover.

MILITANT ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUP
WAGES WAR ON FURAFTER:

Founder Vows That Fur Will Fly if Passed-on Pets Are Put Down

By Milton Fauster

The principal nearly choked on a clot of clotted cream as she saw Lucky’s grainy image in the corner of the large photograph, hissing just above the headline.

“That foul, albino rat in the Furafter?!” Principal Bubb sputtered as her claws perforated the paper. “And its owner, Milton Fauster, reporting on its possible nullificaation?!”

The principal’s goat eyes settled on the ancient black-and-white television mounted on the wall. Its image rolling vertically in a near blur, Principal Bubb was able to make out a news reporter.

“This is Barbra Seville with URN News—All Over It Like a Cheap Suit,” the newswoman said as her crew loaded a van behind her with equipment. “My courageous, award-winning news crew and I are off to cover the brewing brouhaha down in the Furafter, the realm of passed-on pets. No one knows what the savage, unrepentant she-wolves of REPEAT are plotting, so we are prepared for anything and everything.…”

Principal Bubb cocked her unruly monobrow so that it resembled a hairy seesaw tilted to one side. She flipped the newspaper over and stared at her precious three-headed hound of Heck, Cerberus.

“Is this why you ran away, my tri-headed prince of pups?” she murmured under her foul breath. “Did you catch a whiff of that awful Fauster ferret, your sworn enemy? Did it drive you mad with vengeance, and force you to take matters into your own paws?”

The principal rose abruptly and shoved the table into a cluster of students, knocking them and their trays of green bean casserole and cod-liver oil to the floor.

“Guards!” she bellowed as she stormed out of the Cafeterium. “I’m rounding up a squad of precision goons for a rescue mission down in the Furafter. We’ll go over that putrid petting zoo with a fine-tooth flea comb.”

She sneered at the crumpled copy of
GYP
in her claws.

“And, if my suspicions are correct, we may be bringing back some … 
old friends
.”

Milton met the Badillac in the alleyway behind the Hack offices. The doors of the extravagant ruby-red SUV popped open. Milton popped his head inside.

“Good, that was quick—”

Inside was Van Glorious, his hot-tempered costar, Inga Hootz—otherwise known as Auntie Christ—and a
load of video equipment that nearly filled the limo’s interior. Van nudged down his Italian sunglasses and gave Milton a wink.

“You can always sit on my lap,” he said in his I’m-used-to-getting-everything-I-want purr.

Milton sighed and wedged his sister’s body in between Van and Inga.

“So, what are we doing here?” the smug actor asked. “Mr. Welles said something about a PR junket?”

“Yeah,” Milton replied, prying himself away from Van with the point of his sister’s elbow. “There’s a big protest down in the Furafter, with REPEAT—”

“REPEAT?” Van asked.

“I said,
‘There’s a big protest down in the—’
 ”

“I heard you,” he clarified. “I just meant, is that some animal rights group?”

Milton nodded.

“This is a great opportunity to publicize the show, by presenting yourself as an ardent supporter.”

Van snickered.

“You’re a smart cookie, Marlo,” he replied in his slick, oily way. “Like an Oreo with brains in the middle. I’ll have to ditch my leather kicks, but hey, I’m up for it. I like animals … especially when my personal chef prepares them properly.”

He slapped Milton on the back, knocking him into Inga.

“You bigheaded celebristars, mistaking arrogance for artistry!” Inga spat.

“Whose character happens to be
the name of the freakin’
show?!” Van replied.

“I cannot
wait
to lay into you for the finale, you insufferable brat!”

“Bring it on,
has-been …
actually,
never-was
!”

As Van Glorious and Inga Hootz came to blows across Milton, he leaned forward and tapped on the chauffeur’s window. The three-armed driving demon turned and rolled down the glass.

“Where to, miss?” he asked.

“To the Furafter,” Milton replied anxiously. “And hurry—this is a race against prime time!”

ZANE AND MARLO
stepped over the convulsing chameleons as the demons’ multicolored skin danced and swirled like a jumbo set of Crayola crayons frying in a skillet.

“What happened to those poor blokes?” Zane asked, still half-awake as he and Marlo tiptoed in the dead of night to the R & D lab.

“One of the side effects of Dr. Brinkley’s full-spectrum kaleidoscopic color pills,” Marlo replied as she grasped the copper handle to the laboratory. “If symptoms persist—or if you are super allergic to drastic swings in pigment—please consult your quack of a doctor.”

Marlo cracked open the door.

“Milton,” Zane asked in his smooth as British fog voice, “are you sure this Brinkley gent won’t mind me tagging along?”

“Of course not,” Marlo assured him as she pressed
open the door, softly, with her palms. “The more, the … 
escapier.
”

They stepped into the dark, still room. Marlo’s nose prickled at a caustic bouquet of chemical odors. Beneath was the reassuring scent of the liquid silver: a mixture of fresh laundry, baked bread, and summer rain.

“Dr. Brinkley?” Marlo called out as quietly as possible. She could hear a faint rustling amidst the clinks and gurgles of the laboratory. Suddenly, the room was filled with the stinging flicker of white-blue fluorescent lights.

“What’s
he
doing with you?!” Dr. Brinkley quacked as he waddled out from behind a table loaded with brass funnels, graduated cylinders, an aluminum canister, a pair of bulky metal goggles, and what looked like a beaker full of slugs.

Marlo grabbed Zane by the forearm and pulled him inside the laboratory, then kicked the door shut.

“I invited him along. He’s a good guy. He deserves better than this place.”

The doctor’s white feathers relaxed.

“
Fine, then
. I was able to distill more liquid silver than I had previously anticipated, resulting in a third truth bomb, so we could use another set of hands.
Human
hands.”

The doctor ducked down behind the table.

“Truth bomb?” Zane asked nervously. “I don’t know about this, Milton.…”

Dr. Brinkley emerged with three devices, each like a large roll of foil (if those particular rolls of foil were designed to detonate upon impact with a blast radius of approximately thirty-seven feet, that is).

He set the bombs—steel canisters with copper tube-ways, gauges, and red sprinkler handles welded to them—on the table.

“Rapid-fire liquid truth dispersion devices,” the doctor drawled cockily, “employing the naturally antagonistic properties of little white lice and liquid silver. When the two are forcibly introduced, an explosion occurs, discharging truth shrapnel in all directions.”

“So it’s a bomb, right?” clarified Marlo. “It’ll help us get out?”

“Yes, young man,” Dr. Brinkley said through a gritted orange bill,
“a bomb.”

“Awesome!” Marlo said as she tromped over and grabbed one of the crude-looking devices and tossed it back and forth between her hands.

“Careful!” the doctor sputtered as he took back the bomb and hid it away in his satchel. “I’m still not sure if they will be powerful enough to destroy Fibble’s support crutches. And, in the case that they actually
are
, we may be—ourselves—destroyed as we plummet to the ice below.”

“Not to worry, doc,” Marlo said as she strutted confidently toward the door in her hair pajamas. “I’ve got
it all figured out. We’re as ‘out’ as culottes and wedgie sandals!”

Dr. Brinkley and Zane stared, mute and confounded, at Marlo.

“It’s something my, um, way-cool sister told me. Anyway, c’mon! Time’s a wastin’ and freedom we should be tastin’!”

Marlo stepped out of the door with Zane, nervously, close behind.

“Wait one moment,” the doctor said as he swiped the metal goggles Marlo had noticed on the counter and handed them to her.

“What are these?” she asked as she examined the goggles. They reminded her of those old ViewMaster thingies her dad had in his garage, only bronzed, and with two spring-hinged temples to fit over the ears.

The doctor’s beak twisted into a smirk.

“Electric Smell-O-Vision goggles,” he explained with pride. “To help us find our way to the Furafter.”

Dr. Brinkley grabbed an aluminum canister and tucked it in his shoulder bag along with the truth bombs.

“And a can of highly concentrated liedocaine, just in case.”

The doctor slung the satchel over his shoulder, then reached for the beaker of slugs.

“What is that, another weapon?” Zane asked with a quizzical squint.

Dr. Brinkley tilted his head back and emptied the beaker of slugs into his gaping bill, after which he replied, rubbing his belly, “Yes, a weapon against hunger. Let us migrate to the Big Top!”

The luxury Badillac sped through the Distressway Tunnel, zooming in the fast lane on the roof of the asphalt passage. Milton swallowed as he looked out the window at the traffic jam below.

“May the centrifugal force be with us,”
he muttered as he pulled out the videocassette from his purse and slid it into the limo’s VCR.