Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (33 page)

“There he is!” Necia yelped as she ran through the crowd.

Bobbing and weaving like an eel in a fur stole, Lucky skillfully dodged the footfalls of shocked Genericans. Faux marble tiles whizzed beneath his sprightly feet with geometric regularity. His bright pink eyes winced at the gush of light pouring from the exit. Lucky stopped briefly to pant his little weasel pants.

Necia’s patent-leather shoes slapped the mall floor, tapping a steadily quickening rhythm.

Startled shoppers pitched out of Lucky’s way as he made his final push toward the parking lot. Necia dashed through the door, hot on his furious ferret heels.

“Stop!” she shrieked. “You’re going to get yourself—”

Wheels screeched across the asphalt of the parking lot. A Ford FrankenFuel hybrid slammed into the side of a Solar Lexus with a metallic crunch. The drivers rushed out of their vehicles and stared at the lifeless white lump lying prone between their hot, ticking cars.

Fresh tears streamed out of Necia’s dark, quivering eyes.

“Killed.”

Milton and Annubis sprinted across the Waistlands. Milton looked over his shoulder with amused relief at the tumult in the Gorge. Suddenly, some invisible force slammed painfully into Milton’s side.

“Milton?” Annubis exclaimed as the boy keeled over onto the ground. Milton tumbled and rolled in the dust, energy draining from him like water through a sieve.

One moment he had been filled with the surefooted confidence of a superhero dodging raindrops. Now Milton’s temporarily ferret-heightened senses dulled and receded until all was black, and Milton was, for all appearances, dead to the underworld.

31 • D
i
V
i
NE
i
NTERVENT
i
ON

MOTES OF TWINKLING
dust flitted playfully in the artificial sunbeams streaming through the stained-glass windows. The heady, honey-sweet scent of ambrosia filled the spacious cathedral.

A luminous white marble table stood in the middle of the meeting chamber, standing atop ornately carved legs some twenty feet tall. Surrounding the table were seven sleek chairs of equal height. Here, perched atop their towering thrones, the seven archangels held their quarterly meeting.

“Let us tarry not and partake in this most holy of meetings,” Michael said imperiously, flexing his majestic wings just a little farther than any other creature could. “As you all know, the Big Guy Upstairs has been, shall we say,
distracted
as of late, and the bulk of His duties has fallen on our wings….”

“I’m up to my halo with governing paradise as it is,” Zadkiel interjected, sipping from his Heaven’s Best Angel, MDCXII mug.

Raguel scratched beneath the white Nehru collar of his immaculate vestments.

“What I wouldn’t
give
to govern paradise,” he grumbled while rubbing his molting wings on the back of his chair. “Try being the archangel to the infirm and woebegone. I just came back from consoling a pediatric head lice ward. You’ve got paradise, Zadkiel, and I’ve got
parasites.”

“Oh, wherever did I leave my tiny violin?” Zadkiel mocked as he and the other archangels subtly scooted their chairs farther away from Raguel.

Rafael raised his hand.

Michael smiled. “Yes, brother Rafael?”

“Firstly, while the Big Guy Upstairs has his existential crisis or whatever,” Rafael said, “what are
we
supposed to be doing?”

“Doing?” repeated Michael as he swatted away a playful cloud of motes. “What we always do, only more so: show humanity that our gates are always open. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Metaphorically?” Sariel asked, removing one of his earbuds. Harp-driven dance music squawked from the dangling earpiece.

“Yes,” Gabriel answered sarcastically in his crisp British accent. “It’s a big word that means
not really.”

“Technically the gates are locked,” Michael explained. “We sure as heck can’t just let
anyone
in, or it would cease to be exclusive. Speaking of Heck …”

Gabriel and Uriel stiffened as Michael reviewed the bottom of his parchment. Uriel’s forehead beaded with holy perspiration.

“Apparently,” Michael continued, “there has been a series of disturbances that have caught the Galactic Order Department by surprise. And, as an organization that strictly adheres to a Divine Plan, we do not tolerate ‘surprises.’”

Uriel began to twitch. Gabriel glared at him, silently entreating the nervous angel to keep it together.

“A
boy named …
Milton Fauster,”
Michael went on, “was darned for all eternity despite a lack of compelling transgressions to justify such a judgment. Shortly thereafter, said boy
escaped
from Limbo.”

The archangels surrounding the table gasped, save for Gabriel and Uriel, who gaped in feigned surprise.

“But that’s impossible,” Rafael remarked.

“And that’s not all,” Michael went on. “The Fauster boy used lost souls to make good his escape. The Prime Defective is very clear about the reintroduction of unprocessed souls to the Surface. To say that it is frowned upon is to say that the Great Flood was a bit of a drizzle. Then the boy had the audacity to
return
, aiding and abetting his sister in the disruption of a ceremony in Mallvana….”

“Ooh,”
Sariel cooed. “Mallvana.
There’s
a place I’d like to warm my Sacredit Card!”

“The girl is now undergoing an Infernship down under,” Michael continued, “while the boy is still at large.”

Gabriel straightened his white silk tie.

“A
fascinating story, Michael, but what does this have to do with us? Surely this is a matter for the Powers That Be Evil….”

“This has
everything
to do with us,” countered Michael.

The archangel polished his gold Galactic Order Department (GOD) badge—a pair of wings sprouting from a glowing pyramid with a little eye perched at the tip—unconsciously with his thumb.

“I’ve got a feeling that this goes deeper than
down there,”
Michael continued. “It upsets the whole scheme of things. On its own, this Heck business is inconsequential. But if it set some kind of precedent, it could unravel the very fabric of creation!”

“The Academy Award for Best Actor goes to …,” Sariel scoffed.

“Listen here, you
cupid
fool …”

As the two archangels argued, Gabriel scribbled a quick note on the torn corner of his parchment, plucked out one of his feathers, attached the note with a dab of saliva, then put it in his palm and blew it surreptitiously over to Uriel.

The feather floated gently into Uriel’s coffee mug. The angel fished the small note out with his fingers.

CALL ME.
NOW
. THEN HANG UP.

Uriel shot Gabriel a sideways glance before scratching behind his ear, causing the gleaming gold band crowning his head to hum ever so slightly. Immediately, Gabriel’s halo began to ring and hover. The other archangels frowned at him.

“Whoops,” Gabriel apologized. “I must have accidentally left it on.”

He tilted the rim of his halo down to his ear.

“Hello, this is … oh …
sir …
yes, of course!”

Gabriel mouthed “It’s Him” to his fellow seraphs. The angels’ eyes widened. Michael’s perfect features soured with jealousy.

“Immediately, sir. We’re just wrapping up … Uriel, too? Yes, we’ll tend to it. Godspeed.”

Gabriel fingered his headpiece, causing it to settle back onto his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Well, apparently
He
is planning an act of Himself and wants me and Uriel to chip in on some of the details….”

Gabriel nodded to Uriel and the two scooted back their chairs.

“Michael, I’d like to say it’s been lovely,” Gabriel said with a smile. “But I, in good conscience, can’t. So, until next quarter, fare thee well … Come on, Uriel.”

The two angels fluttered down to the white marble
floor. Gabriel led Uriel across the basilica to the relative privacy of an ornately carved marble column.

Uriel nervously chewed his nails, which, with each nibble, grew back to their original length.

“I can’t take much more of this,” Uriel whined.

“It’s not up to us,” Gabriel asserted. “It’s what the Big Guy Upstairs wants. He
believes
in us. That’s why he picked you and me
specifically
to head His most righteous covert operation.”

Uriel leaned against the column and sighed.

“I don’t know …”

“We can’t just clasp our hands together and pray that this will all go away,” Gabriel replied.

Uriel looked up with a hopeful smile.

“Well, if you think about it, we
could
—”

Gabriel shook his head.

“He’s testing our faith. And, by the looks of it, this isn’t some open-book pop quiz. He’s getting ready for the final exam.”

Uriel stared back at the imposing table of bickering angels.

“Everything is moving
so fast,”
he said nervously. “Why start with Heck?”

Gabriel shrugged his wings.

“GOD works in mysterious, patent-pending ways,” he replied. “Until He contacts us, we simply need to shut our angel-food-cake holes and take everything on faith value.”

Up above, Michael eyed Gabriel and Uriel with suspicion. He leaned close to his remaining archangels.

“I’
d
like to propose an emergency measure,” Michael whispered.

Raguel scratched his feather-bare wing.

“But we need all seven present to—”

“Drastic times call for drastic measures,” Michael muttered spookily. “And this is one drastic measure.”

Zadkiel wrinkled his perfect nose.

“Does this come from upstairs?” he asked.

Michael smiled. His brilliant white teeth were so blinding that they obscured both his face and his motives.

“We are His instruments, tasked with acting on His behalf, which is what I intend to do,” Michael replied coolly. “Act upon His implied meaning, the Good Word unuttered. See, sometimes you have to engineer something really, really bad for the greater good. Something so bad it could—and will, if all goes according to plan—give even the devil nightmares.”

32 • WAK
i
NG THE DEAD

“HEY, POPSICLE,” JACK
Kerouac murmured through Milton’s mental fog. “You done catching cups?”

Milton stirred awake. Jack, Annubis, and Moondog were looking down at him like understudies from the
Wizard of Odd
.

“Welcome back to the land of the once living!” Moondog exclaimed, staring at him with sightless eyes.

Milton leaned up on his elbows and blinked awake. “What … happened?” he asked.

Annubis patted Milton on the top of the head. “You were unconscious for seven hours.”

“Seven hours!”
Milton yelped, bolting up to his full, upright position.

The dog god shook his head until his velvety, chocolate-brown ears flapped.

“Sorry,” Annubis apologized. “For me it was seven hours … for
you
it was only one. I always forget that.”

Milton looked beyond his small group of friends. Judging from the bleak, desolate tundra of salt dunes and barbed-wire brambles, they were still in the Wastelands. Yet just beyond, in the distance, the smooth, barren landscape slammed abruptly into a steep, rocky crag. At the bottom of the rugged cliff was the mouth of a large dark cave that stared back at Milton like a dead crow’s eye. He looked up into Annubis’s soulful, hangdog face.

“But we were running really fast and then suddenly—”

Milton gasped.

“Lucky!”

Milton’s friends shared the same look of sympathetic knowing.

Finally, Moondog spoke up. “Your energetic connection with your pet … your ferret,” he said, scratching the thick white hair that billowed out from beneath his horned helmet. “For it to cause this kind of reaction must mean that it was abruptly …
severed
. The connection.”

Milton gazed back and forth between the three faces.

“What do you mean by
severed?”

Moondog prodded Jack with eyes that, while
incapable of sight, were more than effective at passing the proverbial buck. Jack sighed and ran his fingers through his slicked-back hair.