Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (27 page)

A mixed herd of cats, dogs, and assorted mammals shot out of the Kennels. The startled Scarecrows flapped their enormous wings and cawed.

Brigid dropped her sign and shrieked, pointing to the courtyard.

“The animals!!” she shouted in near breathless joy. “They’ve been
freed
! We did it!”

Ambulating Abyssinians, bolting bunnies, careening corgis, and dashing dachshunds streamed out of the crackling electric portal. They flowed into the courtyard, most choosing—after a few quick sniffs—to race toward the Really Big Farm. At the heels of the stampede came Milton, Marlo, Noah, Annubis, and the dog god’s family, followed by a blast of vile, wicked wind. Putrid, angry lumps of molten disease poured out of the ravaged shell of Pandora’s Cat Box and into the courtyard, like a team of genies gone bad, flying out of a lamp that was rubbed the wrong way.

“Boys, we’re packing up,” Barbra Seville told her crew as she gazed at the flaming, snot-green energy spewing from the Kennels. “The secret to becoming a successful newscaster is to never, ever
become
the news.”

The news crew collected their gear, dashed toward their van, and drove away as a blast of foul wind ripped the REPEAT signs from the astonished protesters’ hands.

The Badillac’s chauffeur demon stepped out of his vehicle to gape at the noxious gale.

“I’m not insured for this!” the creature grumbled as he ran to the back of the limo and tossed out the video equipment. Scooting back behind the steering wheel, the chauffeur demon punched the gas, swerved the limo in a squealing 180-degree turn, and sped away from the Furafter as fast as his multipoint injection V9 engine would take him.

Van and Inga chased after him.

“But what about
us
?” they yelled in a cloud of upturned dust, just as the cat poop
really
hit the fan.

“QUICK!” NOAH YELLED
to the Scarecrows as biting gales of hurricane-force woe assailed the frightened, freshly freed pets in the fortress courtyard. “Herd them all to the Really Big Farm! Saint Francis—the patron saint of animals—will receive them.”

Milton’s eyes stung with ammonia as he tried to make sense of his chaotic surroundings. His face and arms itched and burned as the hot, creepy-moist wind chafed against them. He looked up at the Scarecrows on the parapets, clutching the bars tight with their talons, their faces impossible to read.

“Why don’t they
do
something?” Milton shouted as the wind gained ferocity, filling his mouth with a blast of putrid fish-diaper smell. “Aren’t they … supposed to … protect this place?” he added between dry heaves.

Noah kneaded his gnarled white beard as he stared up at the normally stalwart stewards of the Furafter.

“Yes, that is their calling. But they have been dazed and confused.”

Noah’s eyes rested on the glittering bauble in Annubis’s paw-hand.

“The necklace. Perhaps I can regain their control.”

Annubis tossed the shiny, mesmerizing necklace to Noah, just as a burning hunk of black goo shot out of the Kennels, heading straight for the old man’s head.

“Watch out!” Marlo bellowed. “Flaming turd at nine o’clock!”

Noah ducked in a swift, surprisingly athletic dip while, simultaneously, snatching the necklace as it raced past, buoyed by a blast of shrieking, sickening wind.

Milton, Marlo, and Annubis stared with dumbfounded awe.

“I work out,” Noah said casually as he approached the fence.

“Scarecrows of the Furafter!” he bellowed, his robes fluttering in the storm, as he swung the necklace in tight arcs over his head. The Scarecrows gazed down at the whirling necklace that threw back light in such a beguiling, irresistible way. “Listen to me! Form a wall protecting the Really Big Farm and flap for all you’re worth!”

The Scarecrows rustled on the parapet, anxious, fluffing and unfluffing their gleaming black feathers
until, as one, they took to the air in an explosion of great flapping wings.

Meanwhile, corrosive bile gusted out of the Kennels, stripping the REPEAT Furrari of its pink fur.

Milton gripped the iron bars of the nine-foot-tall fortress walls and shouted over the howling wind.

“Van! Inga! Um …”

He turned to Marlo.

“What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

Marlo slugged Milton in the arm, in the same spot she slugged him earlier: her patented sadistic sister technique.

“Zane is
not
my boyfriend!” she replied before leaning close to Milton.

“Do you think he likes me?”

Milton rolled his eyes and called out through his cupped hands.

“
Zane
! And you protesters … get in here! There’s a hole by that stack of newspapers over there, where the Badillac was. And Van … grab the video camera!
Hurry
!”

The people outside the fortress knelt down, running toward the tunnel entrance as sheets of glowing snot-green rain pelted their backs.

Milton gaped at the bilge surging out of the Kennels. Swirls of radioactive cat litter and clumps of flaming excrement vomited out of the portal, with no sign of abating.

Annubis watched the people outside the fence climb into the tunnel as the storm whipped into a nasty, squalid squall.

A burst of humid wind heaved the fallen REPEAT van across the peeling newspaper ground. Its metal hull screamed as it was picked apart and dragged by the gust. It finally came to rest on top of the tunnel entrance.

“I guess its a one-way tunnel now,” Milton muttered. The bars of the fortress wobbled and whistled as Van, Inga, and Zane emerged from the tunnel. Annubis trotted over to meet them.

“Follow me … now!” he ordered.

The Scarecrows swirled above in the treacherous air, pecking angrily at the smoldering hunks of debris that left trails of oily smoke crisscrossing the sky. They alit in the courtyard outside the portal leading to the Really Big Farm.

Noah gave Mr. de Hory’s crow-controlling necklace a twirl.

“Flap!” he roared at the top of his antediluvian lungs.

Wings extended magnificently from tip to tip, the Scarecrows dug their talons deep into the ground and flapped. The rhythm was slow and labored at first, then gained in tempo, with each synchronized beating of wings becoming more fluid and confident.

The fluttering wall of wings bent the foul, stinging gusts back, squealing, like invisible steel bars at the hands of a circus strongman. Gradually, the wind was diverted
away from the Really Big Farm back to the abandoned Kennels, where the toxic gale threw crates about in a blustery tantrum.

Milton pressed his hand against his sister’s back.

“We should go,” he said as they ducked down and ran for the Really Big Farm.

A spectacular imitation sun streamed down like sweet melted butter. The rich, prickly scent of grass, the dry honey of hay, and the thick sugar tar of pine overwhelmed Milton’s nose, while the sunlight and cool gentle breeze caressed his skin.

Somehow, as he gazed across the ridiculously colorful terrain—the fiercely green trees and grass, the uncompromising blue of the sky—Milton couldn’t help but feel like this beautiful place didn’t want him here. It was subtle, but Milton felt—quite correctly—that the Really Big Farm wasn’t calibrated to contain humans, so everything, while picturesque and pure, seemed a little
off
.

Lucky wriggled out of his arms and bounded across the soft green knoll. The only human Milton could see, besides himself and his sister, was a gaunt man in a thick brown robe, whistling sweetly as he tossed seed to the birds that flocked about his sandaled feet.

Milton joined Marlo beside one of many towering dogwoods. The trunk of the tree, like every tree Milton had encountered so far in the Really Big Farm, was well marked—“signed” by centuries of happy perished pups
and hounds. Each tree was a living yearbook, autographed with dog pee.

Milton settled by a cluster of flowering catnip plants. He and his sister locked eyes, before blurting out at once:

“They’re planning the end of the world!”

Milton tucked his sister’s stubborn blue hair behind his ear. “You go first,” he said, seeing that his sister was about to go first.

Marlo closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.

“Okay,” she began. “First, Fibble’s vice principal, P. T. Barnum—get this, the guy has flaming pants and electric hair.”

“What?”

“Let me finish,” Marlo continued. “So Fibble is this crazy advertising agency, and he—Barnum—uses the kids as his focus group, which is dumb since all the students are compulsive liars. So he unveiled all of these creepy products, like Doomsdanish, Apocalypstick, and Final Judgmints—”

“I’ve heard of those—”

“Shush. And these freaky-deeky products are somehow connected to the end of the world. Armageddon. I even heard him talking to Nordstromdumbus—”

“Nostradamus?”

“That’s what I said,” Marlo continued, breathlessly caught up in her story. “So they were talking about a way to shoot realistic illusions up to the Surface, using a machine called a Humbugger. It runs on something called
liedocaine so that people are fooled into thinking the illusions are real. And then there’s the Truthador … don’t interrupt—”

“I wasn’t!” Milton replied.

“You just did,” Marlo said, rocking back and forth with nervous energy that had nowhere to go but her mouth. “So the Truthador is this guy that was on this pirate radio station that kept blasting through the PA speakers. His songs were kind of like those songs Dad would listen to—”

“In his den when he was feeling depressed?”

“Yeah, only the Truthador’s songs don’t actually
cause
depression. His lyrics are some kind of code, about a salesman selling humanity out to aliens, fooling us into moving to a drab, awful new home—”

“The Man Who Soldeth the World,”
Milton muttered, his blood turning to ice water despite sitting in a beam of simulated sunlight.

“And how we don’t need a feather to take us where the crow flies—I don’t really get that one,” Marlo continued beneath the canopy of dark pink blooms, “and that we shouldn’t follow cheaters, honesty’s our leader—”

Milton reached into his shabby canvas tote and pulled out a stack of T.H.E.E.N.D. scripts.

“Satan has this new TV network beaming up to the Surface,” he explained as he handed them to Marlo. “It’s called T.H.E.E.N.D.: the Televised Hereafter Evangelistic
Entertainment Network Division. All of the shows pander to a specific religion—”

“Like that show
Eighth Heaven Is Enough
?”

“Worse,”
Milton replied while Marlo shivered. “But all the shows air at the same time and are, somehow, impervious to DVR. So it’s started this religious ratings war. Everything is all tense up on the Surface. And all the shows are heading for these brutal, dismal finales—”

Marlo leafed through the scripts.

“Ugh,” she said. “I may be Goth, but this stuff is even too dark and depressing for
me
. How did you get these?”

“I worked for Satan as a production assistant for the network, though I never met him, and had to deal with actors like Van Glorious, hang out on the sets …”

Marlo glared hard at her brother.

“So
that’s
where I would have ended up if you hadn’t made Annubis switch our souls?” she said. “Instead I was in some cheapo-circus wearing hair pajamas infested with little white lice?!”

“Um, well … it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Milton replied as a stray crow feather wafted by. Marlo snickered.

“Madame Pompadour had me pretty messed up,” she reflected. “I probably would have made things even
worse.
”

“And there was this surreal reality show but with cool special effects about some unseen man or creature who was going to clean off the Earth so he could sell it,”
Milton continued, spooked. “It sounds just like what your Truthador was talking about: someone’s end game being the
End Times
.”

“But why go through all this trouble?” Marlo asked. “I mean, destroying the world is one thing, but running a TV network—dealing with writers, actors, producers, directors, and sponsors—I mean, what a pain! Surely there are easier ways to wipe us out.…”

Milton shrugged as Lucky ran back across the grass and leapt into his arms.

“Maybe Satan is working with this guy—or actually
is
the Man Who Soldeth the World,” Milton speculated. “Making it seem like humanity is wiping itself out all on its own, not like the Apocalypse is being … I don’t know,
orchestrated
. Maybe he’d get in trouble with the Galactic Order Department.”

Marlo flipped the pages of the scripts on her lap, stopping suddenly. Her eyes—even though they were
his
, Milton thought—burned with a fervor that was thoroughly
Marlo
.

“What if we rewrote these scripts so that they all had happy, non-end-of-the-world-for-no-good-reason endings?” she said with a mischievous grin.

“I tried that,” Milton replied, shaking his head. “Only Satan can edit the scripts, and he apparently uses blood and a crow’s quill and has really unusual handwriting—”