Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (24 page)

41 · THE GiFT OF GRAB

HERE! MILTON SAID
, pressing the present into his sister’s chest.

Marlo lowered her shaking, diamond-burdened arms and stared at the small package wrapped in deep blue foil, tied with a bright red bow.

“Milton, you shouldn’t have,” she replied. “Really. I’m busy here, and you have yet to give me anything I ever really liked.”

The Grabbit quaked anew.

Marlo leaned into Milton and whispered, “What exactly
is
in the box?”

“No clue,” Milton answered. “But I have a feeling that won’t matter. Give the Grabbit a choice.”

“You can’t be serious,” Marlo countered. “I’ve got one of the most precious gems
ever
. Whatever’s in this box couldn’t possibly be anywhere near as good. It barely weighs
anything.”

“Just ask it,” Milton replied. “Pretend it’s like a game show.”

“Hmm,” Marlo considered.

She cleared her throat.

“What’s in the box, you ask?” she posed to the green metal rabbit before her. “Well, that’s for us to know and you to find out, isn’t it?”

The Grabbit vibrated so hard that it hummed, a high-pitched frequency that made Milton clap his hands over his ears. The group of old women watching through the parted curtain checked their hearing aids.

“So what’s it going to be, bunny?” Marlo taunted. “The diamond or the mysterious secret inside this festively wrapped box?”

The old women pressing against the stage began calling out.

“The diamond!”

“The mysterious box!”

“Diamond!”

“Mysterious box!”

Marlo plunked the Hopeless Diamond back into her fanny pack, grabbed the gift from Milton, and held it up to the Grabbit’s jittery metal limb.

“Now, Grabbit, for your big prize,” she announced,
“the mysterious box!”

Marlo slid the package into the opening of the Grabbit’s Smash ’n’ Flash Atom Cannon arm. The gift fell in silently, a silence that spilled out across the stage and washed over the crowd. After a hushed moment, a faint whirring emanated from the Grabbit’s limbs, gradually gaining momentum, like a washer beginning its spin cycle. The Grabbit began to shake and lurch, as if it were the victim of an unbalanced load, which indeed it was.

The grinning creature wobbled violently as the Hopeless Diamond in its right arm twisted through the Smash ’n’ Flash Atom Cannon’s coils, gaining in
velocity, while the gift in the left arm did likewise, only with less fanfare. Milton and Marlo stepped back.

“Silly Grabbit,” Marlo said. “Tricks are for kids.”

With a mighty shudder, the diamond and small, mysterious, gift-wrapped package were thrust into one another with explosive fury. The Grabbit’s metal hull cracked in two, splitting along its leering Cheshire grin.

“Duck!” Marlo yelled, throwing her brother to the ground and covering him with her arm.

The Grabbit’s metal skin puckered, sucking in from the inside with creaking dents and dimples before exploding outright. The curtain was ripped from the stage and whipped into the air, an angry ghost of flaming velvet.

Yojuanna’s image degraded into a collection of low-definition cubes held together by stuttering static. Her face flattened until it was nothing more than a crude sketch comprised of meaningless letters and numbers, a code that no longer had the energy to decipher itself.

“Snap,” she said just before the screen burst into a shower of sparks and glass.

A scorched, tattered note floated gently to the stage in front of Milton’s outstretched arm, brushing against his hand. He grabbed it and sat down cross-legged on the stage. Hundreds of elderly women and demons screamed, swatting away pieces of flaming metal. Milton
adjusted his glasses and at once identified the familiar loops, slants, and meticulous crossing of
t’s
as those of his mother.

Teardrops splashed onto the note, blurring his mother’s signature. All this time, he had been carrying this empty box around, a gift that—at the same time—had been full of so much. The best present he had ever gotten, despite the unspeakable hardships he had endured to protect it.

“What’s wrong?” Marlo asked, nudging close to him. Milton silently passed her the note. Her dark eyes grew wet. As tears leaked down her cheek, she shook her head and laughed. “No wonder the Grabbit couldn’t stomach the box,” she said, sniffing back snot. “It didn’t have anything in it except love. It gave its fat greedy belly a bad case of indigestion.”

Marlo looked around her at the utter chaos of the
stage, weeping with sadness and with joy. She wiped her eyes with her sweatshirt sleeve.

“It’s weird,” she murmured. “I feel
wonderful
. Like I’ve been, I don’t know …
buried
—which I probably am, somewhere—but now I’m suddenly … not. It’s like I’m free. Totally free. And I didn’t even know I wasn’t.”

Milton grew suddenly feverish. He pressed his face against the cool surface of the stage. His head swirled with vague, dreamlike images. His nose prickled with sharp smells. His ears were like a blender churning with sounds. He was undergoing another attack of “the ferrets.”

Milton sniffed the air and raised his head in alarm. Piercing the hot clouds of lavender, rosewater, and talc was the brutal musk of anger. Sure enough, there was Damian, brandishing the scepter that had once held what smelled like bratwurst. Another smell coiled around Damian’s, like two serpents braided in a single purpose.

“Mr. Fauster,” Principal Bubb said with disgust, her mouth contorting around the disagreeable name. “We meet again.”

Cold, liquid dread filled Milton. He tried to stop his shaking, to at least appear that he felt braver than he actually did, but his body, like it had so many times before, betrayed him.

“Don’t worry, bro,” Marlo consoled with a pat on his back. “We’ve been through worse.”

Milton glared at his sister.

“Well, at least as bad,” she added.
“Nearly
. Anyway, there’s always some wriggle room in every situation. It’s just a matter of sniffing it out.”

A parade of sour smells marched through Milton’s nostrils, accompanied by the clang of a hundred shopping carts.

“Over there!” several old ladies screamed, their bony fingers waggling at the spiral escalator.

Cascading down the escalator toward the concourse were hundreds of PODs. Their shopping-cart wheels slammed against the moving stairs in their rush to the concourse.

“Principal Bubb!” one of the security demons called.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb turned angrily, not wanting to take her curdled eyes off her prey, quarry that had escaped before and that she would do anything to capture again.

“What?!”

“We’ve g-g-got a sit-situation,” the security demon stammered. “Look!”

The principal eyed the onslaught of phantoms, intent on making the most of their shopping spree. Her head throbbed, especially around where she had had her horns filed and buffed. She locked eyes with Damian, who had just reached the steps leading to the rostrum.

“Mr. Ruffino,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb barked. “He’s all
yours. But I want him intact, understand? I can’t punish pieces.”

Damian smirked. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, crossing his fingers behind his back. “You can count on me.”

Principal Bubb sighed.

“There’s a first for everything, I suppose,” she said wearily. “Until we meet again, Mr. Fauster,” she called behind her as she turned to join the security squad amassing to deal with the POD invasion. “And I can assure you we will.”

Marlo stood up defiantly. “Hey,
Amandi,”
she shouted as Damian clambered onto the stage. “If you want to just talk things out—”

Marlo sidled up to the wreckage that, until recently, had been the Grabbit and picked up a severed metal ear.

“—I’m all ears.”

Marlo lunged toward Damian, slicing the ear through the air like a sword.

“Now, Milton!” she screamed back at her brother. “Run!”

Milton looked out at the chaotic crowd of terrified old women struggling to get past other terrified old women. Then, in a bright flash of insight, Milton could see a path cutting perfectly through the mob, leading to a stream of PODs rippling out of the Virgin Mary Megastore. He turned to his sister. “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “I promise.”

Marlo smiled as she frantically clashed ear against pointy scepter.

“What part of
run
don’t you understand?!” she shouted.

Gathering up the full force of his fleeting ferret power, Milton leapt from the stage and sprinted down the path as it disappeared behind him.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Damian yelled, rushing toward Milton.

“Have a nice trip!” Marlo shouted, throwing the metal ear at Damian’s legs, sending him tumbling off the stage and into a mosh pit of wrinkles, adult diapers, and plastic hip joints.

Milton rushed to meet the stampede of squealing wheels and tramping work boots. A man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard considered Milton with cloudy blue eyes, pushing his bursting cart toward the concourse exit.

The herd of phantoms pressed onward toward the security vestibule leading to the underground parking garage. Inside the hallway of high-tech surveillance equipment, the security demons panicked, futilely trying to control a situation that had long since passed controllable. As Milton approached the black curtains, something sliced through his left calf. He screamed, toppling to the ground and rolling out of the ceaseless crush of shopping carts just in time to avoid being flattened by thousands of merciless wheels. Above him
stood Damian, glaring down triumphantly. His
A GRANDMA IS A MOM WITH EXTRA FROSTING
sweatshirt swelled and collapsed as he caught his breath. His mouth was a sneering smear of lipstick. His eyes burned dark and dense, like the black hole that had nearly formed moments ago.

“Well, well, well,” Damian clucked. “How clumsy of you.”

Milton clutched his aching leg and brought it close to his chest.

“You promised Principal Bubb that you wouldn’t hurt me,” Milton gasped.

Damian rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“Did I?” he mused facetiously. “I thought it was more of a suggestion than an outright order. Oh well, no use crying over spilt blood, is there?”

Damian steadily pressed the tip of the sharpened scepter down on Milton’s heaving chest.

“Have you ever wondered what happens to dead boys when they die?” he asked.

Frankly, this had never occurred to Milton before. His survival instinct had overridden all of his higher, critical thinking. Still, it was a riddle he was more than happy to never solve.

“What do you say we find out?” Damian continued, squeezing the point gently yet persistently into Milton’s chest. “And by ‘we,’ I
mean you.”

The last time Milton had been on the business end
of a sharp weapon wielded by Damian, he had been able to gain the upper hand by angering him and muddling his thinking.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Milton dared. “You’re too chicken.”

Damian’s eyes creased into cruel, glimmering slits. His nostrils flared so wide that they resembled twin caves leading deep into darkness.