Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (15 page)

The desperately cheery music haunted Milton's thoughts.
A balloon…floating…up, up and away.

Treat this whole thing like an algebra problem,
Milton reflected.
X
+
y
+
z
=
escape. A balloon. But how? What were x, y, and z?

Then, after all of the variables wrestled with one another in Milton's mind, he began to see a pattern. A chain of small events, arranged just so, floated to the top of his thoughts. If executed properly—and in the correct sequence—these variables, events, whatever, could lead to something…
big.
The details needed to be worked out, but Milton knew that he not only had an answer, he had
the
answer.

Milton grinned uncontrollably. His heart was filled with music.

Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…

30·TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL

JUST WHEN SHE
thought she understood Heck, something happened to make Marlo thoroughly lose her psychic balance.

“Well, I've got a hammer…”

Here she was in a white floor-length robe with ten other girls on a riser singing while an angel waved her baton in time with the music.

“…All over this land”

The angel, Ms. Von Trapp, grinned and clapped her creased, delicate hands together.

“Vunderbar! Vunderbar!” She beamed with a gleeful flap of her wings.

“Did she just say Wonderbra?” Lyon snickered to Bordeaux, who were both in the back row, totally
not
singing. Lyon noticed Marlo looking over at them.

“Yeah,” replied Bordeaux, “and it's a wonder if Gotharella over there will ever
need
a bra!”

Marlo's face flushed. She had dealt with Lyon and Bordeaux's type before, on the Surface. Popular, cruel…Usually it was just a case of trading barbs before merging back into the shadows. But, down here, she was off her game.

Ms. Von Trapp glided across the floor to the riser. “Zat vas very good!” she said. “The flavors of your voices are blending beautifully, like crisp apple strudel! Now let us try something more fundamental…heavy on zee fun!”

The girls groaned as Ms. Von Trapp tuned her guitar and struggled to get the strap over her left wing.

“Here ve go, girls. Very simple.”

She cleared her throat and out came a voice as clear and pure as a lake of holy water.

“Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.”

The girls grudgingly joined voices. Marlo sang quietly to herself, though perhaps “sing” is overstating it a bit. Sounds came out of her mouth, but they were more like gnarled tangles of sonic barbed wire than melodies.

A pasty girl with jagged chunks cut off of her dark hair stopped singing.

“Hey,” the girl said groggily, stretching the word “hey” out until it was two syllables. “This is, like, that song from the movie. The movie with all the singing and Nazis, where the hills are alive.”

The other girls nodded to one another.

“Yeah,” said a squat girl with mangled orthodontia. “Doe, a deer…”

Half the girls were now singing “…a female deer…”

A small cloud drifted across Ms. Von Trapp's sunny disposition.

“Now, girls, let us…”

“Ray, a drop…”

“Please…”

“…of golden sun…”

“QUIET, OR YOU'LL GET ZHA BUSINESS END OF MY BATON!”

The song was snuffed out like a candle. The girls were petrified.

Ms. Von Trapp was trembling, strangling the neck of her guitar. A lone white feather zigzagged down from her wings. She noted its passage with shame. The wrinkled angel closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in prayer. After a moment of perfect stillness, she wiped a gleaming tear from her cheek and composed herself.

“Girls…
young ladies…,
” she said contritely. “
Entschuldigung.
I must apologize for my outburst. I'm not used to being down here.”

She smoothed her immaculate robes.

“Perhaps ve take a break from zee singing. Do you
schön Mädchens
have any questions?”

Lyon raised her hand. “Yes,” she said tartly, “I don't know who Sean Munchkin is, but I have a question: what is an angel doing here, anyway?”

Murmurs rippled through the choir of dead young women. The angel's smile shone like a miniature sun. The girls collectively winced at its brilliance.

“It's Title VII of zha Eternal Quality Unification Adherence Law, better known as EQUAL,” Ms. Von Trapp said. “It means zat representatives from various otherworldly dominions are allowed to enter other realms as missionaries, to ensure that every soul has a truly balanced supernatural education.”

Bordeaux's already slack, lip-glossed mouth gaped wider.

“So, like, you're here to, um…show us how good it is to be good or something?”

Ms. Von Trapp smiled affectionately. “Something like zhat, my little frau.”

Lyon put her hands where her hips should have been.

“You're wasting your time,” she said with a sharp voice like a slap. “Being bad is fun. So pack up your stupid guitar, Sister Act, and fly back up to your boring old cloud.”

Throughout Lyon's tirade, Ms. Von Trapp just grinned compassionately.

“
Danke
for your opinion, Miss Sheraton,” the angel replied with a glimmer of pity in her eyes. “It is true, I may indeed be vasting my time…”

The skin around her eyes crinkled as her smile spread wider across her face.
Did she have surgery to shorten her cheek muscles?
Marlo pondered.

“…but I have all zha time in zha world…and then some.”

Lyon looked at Bordeaux confused and subtly deflated.

“In any case,” Ms. Von Trapp continued while returning to her place behind the plywood lectern, “it is a nonissue as I have been…reassigned.”

Figures,
Marlo thought. Whenever she encountered a halfway-decent teacher, they either ended up getting transferred, fired, or, in her ex-hippie art teacher's case, quitting to tour with a rock band as their interpretive dancer.

“Now, before ve end our class,” Ms. Von Trapp said with a lump in her devout throat, “I vould like to teach you a little song that you might find useful ven facing some of the more…
impressionable
demons down here.”

The Austrian angel cleared her throat.

“Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!

O Lord, kum ba yah!”

Slowly the girls—save gifted mouthers Lyon and Bordeaux—joined in. Marlo found the song oddly comforting, despite the fact that she either missed or fatally wounded every note.

The class bell tolled, and the girls filed off the riser to hang their robes on rusty hooks. Lyon and Bordeaux dropped their robes on the floor, assuming some faceless person would pick them up for them, as they always did.

“
Auf wiedersehen,
children,” the angel said sweetly as the girls shuffled past her. “Remember: you cry a little and zen you wait for the sun to come out. It always does.”

“Ooh,” Lyon mocked, “and I forgot to pack my sunscreen before I died.”

Lyon and Bordeaux cackled as they entered the hallway. Marlo straggled behind, her head down so that no one would see her blotchy, tear-streaked face. That's all she needed, she fumed: to have Lyon and Bordeaux see her in a moment of weakness.

Just outside the classroom, gently ruffling in front of her awful Birkenstocks, was a long, perfectly white feather. The sight of it filled Marlo with quiet cheer. She picked it up and rushed back to Ms. Von Trapp's classroom.

“Here,” she said as she burst through the door, “I thought you might want…”

But the room was empty. The only movement came from swirling dust motes that slowly settled to the ground.

There was an overpowering smell in the room: sweet, sour, and comforting. Like rose water, cedar, mothballs, and soap. It smelled like her Grandma Fauster. It was a smell she used to make fun of. But now, it made her feel safe and hopeful. It was the smell of an angel.

Marlo set the feather on the lectern and left the classroom. She sulked down the smoky hallway on her way to the cafeterium. Suddenly it dawned on her: she had found something and
not
pocketed it. And an angel's feather at that. What a score! But the thought of keeping it hadn't even occurred to her. What was happening to her? Being dead she could deal with, but not knowing who she was anymore, that was something else.

31 · LIVER LET DIE

MILTON SNEAKED INTO
the empty cafeterium and leaned his mop against an Automat machine. He had never had any strong feelings regarding mops before. But after spending what felt like hours swabbing—yet was probably “no time at all” in this irritating place—he had developed a strong animosity toward this otherwise useful cleaning tool.

Luckily for Milton, Blackbeard had “hit the head,” whatever that was. He was just glad that, if a head was to be hit, it wasn't going to be his.

He plucked a scrap of paper from the bulletin board. The flyer had a pathetic picture of a sad little Latin boy from Snivel on it pleading for a pen pal. Someone had drawn a mustache and horns on him and written “Cry Baby” across his face. Milton flipped the piece of paper over and dug into his backpack for a pencil.

“Oww!!” Milton yelped. He sucked his bleeding finger. Cerberus, disguised as Lucky, popped his head out of Milton's bag and spat out a wicked hiss, fresh blood staining his muzzle red.

“What's the deal?” Milton sniffed. “You've never done that before…You must be hungry.”

Lucky strained to escape the tightly secured knapsack.

“Don't be a fuzzy little fool,” Milton scolded. “The way you've been acting lately, you'd just get caught and fed to that ugly, three-headed dog.”

Lucky growled viciously at Milton. His contact lens cameras flared red like a hot spark before fading back into the creature's angry stare.

“I'll get you something to eat in just a second,” Milton soothed while trying to quell an uneasiness he'd never had before with his usually faithful pet.

Milton cased out the cafeterium nervously. It was empty. He took the pencil and scrawled a quick message to Marlo.

He felt good about Operation Up, Up and Away (every mission needed a cool name, Milton thought). Marlo's escape plan that she had hatched when they first arrived had suffered from the fact that it had never, at any point, been
planned.
It was just an act of spontaneous bravado. What it had in spunk and daring, it lacked in foresight and follow-through. Virgil's attempt at freedom actually had a shape. Yet, like its architect, that shape was large, soft, and impossible to wrap your arms around. It depended too much on faith: faith in the map, faith in circumstance, faith in everything just magically falling into place.

Milton still didn't know what to expect if he did break out of Heck, free from Principal Bubb's claws. But it almost didn't matter. The plan itself—specifically the process of solving a problem—gave Milton a purpose. It was the only thing holding him together.

He didn't have the time—or the space—to go into great detail about the plan in his note, just the specifics important to Marlo: to be prepared tonight, to meet in the cafeterium after the big midnight flush, and that he and Marlo would both storm the Assessment Chamber to grab as many jars of buoyant, blobby lost souls as they could hold.

Milton finished his note and opened the compartment containing the undisturbed slab of liver. The fake ferret wriggled through a breach in the knapsack's flap to better smell the rancid meat. The creature's wild eyes again flared red as glowing coals.

         

Bea “Elsa” Bubb's surveillance pod rumbled in her sealskin fanny pack. She rubbed her swollen abdomen.

“Darn spotted owl enchilada,” she grumbled. “You never eat it so much as rent it.”

The pod buzzed again, and the digestively distressed principal finally located the rumble's source.

She fished it out of her pack and flicked it on.

Grainy images flashed across the tiny screen. Cerberus was obviously agitated and the screen was often a trembling blur. But she could make out two key images: one, the words “Marlo” and “escape” written on a note, and two, the slick lump of dark brown meat the note was slid under.

“Liver,” Principal Bubb muttered angrily.
“Liver note.”

She jabbed the device crossly with her thumb to turn it off.

The principal rose, kicked off her taxidermied bunny slippers, and stepped toward the door. She stopped, however, in mid-stride, and looked down at Lucky—the
real
Lucky—twitching irritably in his cage.

“I'm stepping out for a bite to eat, you musky little monster,” she taunted. “Can I get you anything? Perhaps a nice, juicy rodent? Or a heaping bowl of Weasel Chow?”

To a ferret, time is defined as the spaces between meals and naps. Trapped in this tiny cage in this stinky room with the loud, stinky lady, Lucky hadn't had either since…since the last time he had eaten or slept. The point is that it felt like a really long time.

“Cat got your tongue?” the principal teased. “Oh, how I wish. Well, you look like you could use some slimming down anyhow. I have your best interests at heart, you adorable little coat-to-be. So no matter how much you beg, I promise not to break down and feed you.”

She opened the door and trod out into the hallway.
“Ciao!”
Bea “Elsa” Bubb chirped with a blithe wave of her claw before slamming the door behind her.

Lucky circled the cage frantically, as if spiraling down an invisible drain. He pressed his head between the bars of his cage, but—again—only got as far as his belly. He was closer this time, though. He could just puke up the paper he had eaten, but the boy thought it very important, and he must bring it back to him, no matter what. So he kept circling and circling and circling well past the point of exhaustion. Just another ounce to go, and he would be free…or be the smelly old bag's new ferret stole.