Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (22 page)

“Looks like we’re headed off at the pass,” Marlo said. Lyon and Bordeaux looked smugly at one another.

Marlo gulped, then took Milton’s hand.

“Trust me,” she whispered into her brother’s ears.

If Milton had a nickel for every bad thing that happened after Marlo uttered the words “trust me,” he thought, he would have … well …
a whole lot of nickels
.

But even a boy as bright as Milton couldn’t see a way out, so he’d have to trust that his reckless sister had spotted an exit that he had the good sense not to. He squeezed her hand.

Marlo turned, pulling Milton into position next to her. They faced the wreckage of the ersatz Grabbit, at the feet of which Damian was now writhing and moaning.

Marlo leaned into her brother’s ear.

“On the count of three, we run,” she whispered, squeezing her brother’s hand. “One …”

“Where?” Milton asked incredulously.

“… two …”

“Stop!” a demon guard roared as it burst into the office.

“… three!”

Marlo and Milton sprinted straight into the broken hull of the papier-mâché Grabbit, using it as a protective shell as they crashed through the plate-glass wall and tumbled down to the mall below.

36 · FALLiNG AFOUL

“AAAAAAAEEEEYYYYYAAAAHHHHH!!!” MILTON AND
Marlo screamed as they clutched one another inside the free-falling bunny sculpture.

Milton watched the glitter of Mallvana swirl around him, as if someone had filled up a huge washing machine with every possible want and desire and set it on “Heavy Load: Extra Rinse.”
What is this place?
he mused. It made him feel anxious and excited, and he
hated
malls. The fact that his last mall outing had ended in a fiery eruption of molten marshmallow could also have fed this aversion. And—as the dazzling jeweled floor of Mallvana’s twelfth tier rushed to meet them—his latest trip to the mall didn’t bode much better.

The Fausters’ papier-mâché shell exploded into vaporized plaster and newspaper shreds as they hit the floor. They rolled out of the chaotic cloud, spinning
and shrieking, while terrified shoppers gasped and stumbled back out of harm’s way.

Milton and Marlo slammed into the burnished copper railing. The siblings lay panting at the lip of Mallvana’s twelfth tier, hundreds of feet above the concourse.

Milton opened his eyes, looked down below, then nearly lost the last lunch he ever ate alive (a grilled-cheese sandwich with peperoncinos and a tapioca pudding cup). He rolled over and stared up at the breathtaking stained-crystal ceiling.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“You have died and gone to Mallvana,” Marlo explained.

She rose to her feet, leaned over the railing, and peered down at the mall below. Rivers of people flowed through the shopping Shangri-la, spilling down escalators like human water, heading for the concourse.

“We’ve got to boogie down,” Marlo muttered. She looked up at the SkyDeck Lyon, Bordeaux, and Damian peered down through the shattered glass wall.

“And
do the hustle.” She gulped.

“I’m fine, by the way,” Milton mumbled. He stood up, shaky and dizzy, like a poster boy for inner-ear disorders. “Thanks for asking.”

Damian glared at them from above. He ripped off his blond wig, wiped off his smear of bright red lipstick, and then disappeared.

“Uh-oh,” Marlo said. “Something ugly this way comes. C’mon.”

Marlo ran to the escalator between Sole Salvation and Pearly Gate and Barrel. Milton followed, managing to run and sulk at the same time.

“You mean we’re not going to bungee jump without a bungee this time?”

Marlo weaved through the escalator, which was clogged with old women with tiny white wings poking through the backs of their off-white tracksuits and sweaters. Milton, trying to keep up, looked behind him and saw a burly, angry boy in a granny sweatshirt descending the escalator.

Milton swallowed hard. He joined his sister, who had just stumbled off the escalator.

“Damian’s coming,” Milton panted.

Marlo looked over beyond the Transcendental House of Pancakes at the next down escalator. It had a CLOSED FOR REPAIR. PLEASE USE THE STAIRS WAY OVER THERE sign blocking shoppers from entry. Next to it, throngs of old women—some dragging put-upon old men behind them who were paying for their earthly transgressions by being forced to shop with their wives for all eternity—spilled out of the up escalator into the Angel Food Court.

“Looks like we’ve got to take the hard way down,” she said. “But we’re used to swimming against the mainstream, aren’t we?”

She grabbed Milton’s arm and gave a tug.
Is this my role in death as it was in life?
Milton pondered as he was led to the up escalator.
To be dragged behind my sister in a mall?

Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s yellow goat eyes widened in shock.

“We must have a bad connection,” she whispered into her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux Phone, “because I thought I just heard you say that you were chasing Marlo
and
Milton Fauster. How is that possible? I would have been alerted the second he passed through the gates, unless …”

Her eyes darted across the Mallvana security cove—where she and several demons were staring at a bank of closed-circuit televisions—at Lilith, in the corner, on the phone as usual.

“… unless that skinny, manipulative whippet in a designer dress screwed up somehow.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb grinned at the thought.

“Whatever,” Damian said. He stopped, huffing, in front of Hot Dog on a Scepter. A man in an impaled sausage costume greeted him.

“Hot diggity dog,” the man said wearily as he waved a sausage pierced by a jeweled staff. “Can I hook you up with an extra-large lanced link?”

Damian grabbed the man’s scepter and ran.

“Hey!” the man yelled, shuffling in hot-dog-costume-hobbled pursuit.

“What’s going on?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb asked.

“Just picking up a little present for my good friend Milton,” Damian said as he sliced through the crowd of senior citizens to the down escalator.

“Why are you wasting time when you should be bringing me my diamonds?” she hissed discreetly, turning away from the other demons in the cloistered cove. “I’ve got that emaciated she-devil on the ropes, and those diamonds could put her out of my misery and
me
right by Lucifer’s side—”

“Is there some trouble, Blubb?” Lilith asked as she sashayed across the security room.

Principal Bubb smiled as sweetly as someone with a face like an open wound can.

“No trouble,” she replied. “Though there soon may be for
you …,”
she whispered under her bad breath.

“Do
try to keep on top of things while I receive Mammon,” Lilith gloated, her flawless, angular face cast in the glow of the flickering monitors.

“Can I go back to doing my job now?” Damian said. “You know, the one that helps you keep
yours.”

“And
no personal phone calls,” Lilith added as she left the room.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb gnashed her fangs together with a squeak.

“Fine,” she sighed into her pinky. “Point taken.”

Damian stomped down the escalator.

“That’s the idea,” he murmured, testing the keen tip of his stolen scepter on the rear of the unfortunate woman in front of him.

“Nice shirt,” an old woman said, pointing at Marlo’s sweatshirt. “Where did you ever—”

“Out of my way, Grandma,” Marlo grunted with a shove as she descended the ascending escalator.

Several steps behind, trudging against the flow of human traffic, Milton followed in her wake.

“Sorry,” he apologized to the flabbergasted biddies. Milton scowled at his sister.

“What if that really
was
our grandma?” he scolded.

Marlo looked back with curiosity at the clot of old women.

“Nah,” she said. “Grandma Fauster died in that stampede at the bingo hall. She’d be …
. flatter.”

They hopped off the escalator and circled toward the next. Galloping near the banister overlooking the mall commons, Milton looked up while Marlo looked down.

“Maybe we … lost …
him,”
Milton wheezed.

“Not likely,” Marlo replied.

She scanned the floor below. Outside of Halo/ Good Buy was a sign:
NO SAIL SALE: ALL CANOES, KAYAKS, ROWBOATS, AND DINGHIES MUST GO!

Marlo smirked as she grabbed the velvet handrail of the next escalator.

“What are we even
doing?”
Milton groused. “We have those diamonds. We should use them to buy our way out of this place or something. Why are we giving them to some weird metal rabbit?”

“Grabbit,”
Marlo corrected. “It said if I stole the Hopeless Diamonds for it, this whole place could be sent into some kind of chaos.”

“It’s hard to imagine this place as anything
but
chaotic,” Milton said desperately as he was buffeted about by countless shoulders and hips.

“It also promised me my own circle of Heck.”

Milton joined his sister on the mall floor. He straightened his glasses and looked at her incredulously.

“You can’t be serious,” he said. “First off, it would never do that. Second, why would you want to have your own circle? That’s like having your own mental hospital and graveyard wrapped up into one.”

“I always wanted to get into management,” she said with a grin. “I am, after all, a people person in the worst way.
I can’t stand them.”

Milton’s jaw went slack as he stared at his sister.

“C’mon,” Marlo ordered, pulling his arm. “A little detour.”

She dragged Milton to Halo/Good Buy.

“One that might save us a lot of time in the long run.”

Milton looked at the no sail sale sign and felt his stomach sink into his shoes.

“Oh no …,” he murmured.

Marlo turned and gave her brother a look like a dark, frozen one-way street. Her fingers flexed at her sides, as if doing warm-up exercises for some Olympic thieving event, like the hundred-yard snatch.

“Why do I have the feeling that whatever it is you’re planning,” Milton said, “isn’t going to be exactly
covert?”

37 · ROCKiNG THE BOAT

“WHAT AM I
supposed to do?” Milton asked as he scanned the empty store with nervous sweeps of his eyes. “The coast looks clear.”

“Clear?” Marlo said. “Perhaps to the untrained eye, but mine—both of them, in fact—are
highly
trained. An empty store never makes for optimal lifting. On the plus side, though, I don’t see any guards. They must be running around doing the big bunny’s bidding.”

Marlo made her way toward the Sponges, Spoons, and Sporting Goods aisle. Milton followed, as jumpy as a cricket on a hot plate.

“First off, short bus,” Marlo said, looking her brother up and down, “stop announcing to the whole world that we’re about to steal something.
Relax
. Your role in our little two-kid play is thus:
that of distraction
. You just toddle over yonder to the emergency exits
and pull. And if I’m right, pandemonium will ensue. Got it?”

Milton nodded.

“Then get with it.”

Milton grimaced, sighed, and skulked away.

“Milton,” Marlo called.

Milton turned.

“What?”

“I missed you,” she said sweetly. “For real.”

Milton smiled despite himself.

“Ditto,” he replied before heading toward Corsets, Cosmetics, and Custards.

Marlo strained underneath the bright yellow kayak. She looked like a shaved monkey making off with a gargantuan, genetically modified banana. The blare of alarms flooded the aisles like screaming ghosts.

Milton trotted up next to her, breathing heavily.

“I did it,” he said with a blend of pride and terror. “I actually opened the emergency exits, even though there were signs that expressly said
not
to open them!”

“You’re a true-blue desperado, little brother,” Marlo grunted. “Now how about helping me get this kayak off my back?”

Milton took the bow of the fiberglass kayak and Marlo the stern.

“What is it with you and small nautical vessels?”
Milton asked as they crept as surreptitiously as possible toward the front of the store.

“I don’t know.” Marlo shrugged. “Must be the call of the sea. Or tides. You know, a girl thing. Like horses.”

“And why did I open all of the emergency exits?”

“Because you’re a good boy and do what you’re told,” Marlo explained. “Plus, pretty soon, if I played my cards right—ugh,
poker metaphors!
—a whole bunch of homeless phantoms should come trickling in from the alleyway, tired of Dumpster-diving and hungry for some
real
deals! I know
I
would if I were a POD.”

“POD?” Milton asked.

“PODs,”
Marlo clarified without clarifying.

“PODs!” screamed a girl in a white lab coat, working the cosmetics counter.

Dozens of gaunt spirits pushed their rusted, overflowing shopping carts through the aisles. A man with a cut underneath his eye wheeled past the Fausters. He furrowed his brow briefly at the sight of two children struggling beneath a bright yellow kayak before squeaking away, scrutinizing the items crowding the aisles.

“Perfect,” Marlo whispered from beneath the back of the kayak. “Let’s make a run for it.”

Milton peered out from beneath the boat. He eyed the destitute men and women with awe as they began
to form roving packs, cleaning out the shelves with fluid precision.

“Phantoms,” he murmured.

“Yeah, Phantoms of the Dispossessed,” Marlo replied.
“PODs
for short. All right, here we go.”

The harried shopgirls were so preoccupied by the POD people that Milton and Marlo were able to charge unbothered through the automatic doors and into the mall. The two children stopped by the escalators outside of Salvation Armani as old women cascaded around them on either side, caught in their own ceaseless consumerist flow.

“So what’s with the kayak?” Milton panted.

“I’ll tell you after we’ve glided down the spiral escalators to the main floor.”

“What?!” exclaimed Milton as he set the kayak down. “You’re crazy!”

Milton looked up. On the eleventh floor, Damian charged out of Hallowed Grounds, slugging down a quintuple-shot venti espressoccino frappé, no foam. He crushed the cup in his hand and unsheathed a pointy scepter from his sweatpants.

“Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea after all,” Milton gulped, sitting in the front of the kayak.

“Okay, then,” Marlo said as she stood in the back of the boat, one leg still on the mall floor. “Brace yourself. We’re in for one wild ride.”

With a sharp kick, Marlo sent the boat careening down the up escalator past dozens of frightened, outraged shoppers. The elderly women pressed against the velvet handrails, clutching their bags as the kayak sliced downward. Behind them, the Fausters left a trail of shock, confusion, and quaint cries of “Good heavens!” “Kids today!” and “Oh my stars and garters!”