Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (4 page)

BEA “ELSA” BUBB
straightened a stack of papers on her desk that she had only just straightened. To the untrained eye, they were now as straight as they would ever be. The principal had spent the last hour organizing the top of her massive mahogany desk until everything was as functionally drab as inhumanly possible so that the desk conveyed professionalism, an unwavering sense of duty, and the keen precision of today’s ambitious, career-driven demoness.

But the truth of the matter was that she was procrastinating, avoiding the two official, unopened Pentagrams that lay in her sinbox like two grenades with misplaced pins.

She sipped her piping-hot HostiliTea and summoned
the courage to open the first of the two envelopes, the one delivered just five minutes before the second. She ripped it open with her index talon.

The principal gritted her fangs. They
always
got her name wrong.

Her pulse raced at the name: The Big Guy Downstairs. Lucifer. Satan. Mephistopheles. A hunk by any other name, she thought, is just as …
hunky
.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb allowed herself a grin.

It was a promotion in only the loosest interpretation of the word. Actually, the word—not to mention the definite article “the”—was the only thing about her promotion that was, in fact, an actual promotion. But still she held on to this shred of power tightly in her claws, literally: the Penta-gram was crumpled, and the palms of her claws had five white half-moons pressed into them. Every demon had her day, and today was the first day of the rest of her afterlife: a chance to make everybody pay, and pay dearly. Up front. In cash.

The Principal of Darkness snickered. Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Heck nestled in her hideous lap, stirred awake. His mistress’s breath was like a delectable blend of anchovies and two-day-old garbage. Cerberus considered his owner with his left head, by far the most inquisitive. Bea “Elsa” Bubb patted the red silk bow stapled onto its sleek, vicious skull.

“It’s okay, my pwetty whiddle puffkin,” she cooed. “Mummy’s not hurt; she’s just laughing at everyone else’s expense!”

Cerberus, after discerning that none of this had anything to do with either rat liver pâté or pony giblets, resumed the nap that two-thirds of him was already taking.

Principal Bubb puffed out her chest with pride, stretching her bile-green muumuu past the point of its manufacturer’s suggested level of strain. She felt as if she could take on the whole underworld. The principal eyed the second Penta-gram. She snatched it up and ripped it open with playful vigor, like a feisty cat abruptly ending its playdate with a baby bluebird.

A drop of salty water fell onto the Penta-gram, smudging the postscript somewhat.

“Darned sweaty eyes,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb cursed as someone hammered on the door of her not-so-secret lair.

“’Scuse me, Principal, ma’am,” apologized a birdish demon as it poked its beaked, sparsely feathered head into her chamber. “You asked me to tell you if anything was amiss, miss.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb glared at the twitchy demon through red-rimmed eyes. Her acid reflux, that great prognosticator of impending bad news, lapped against the back of her throat like toxic waste.

“Please tell me that this has nothing to do with the PODs,” she said wearily.

The demon’s down fluffed up.

“Oh no, nothing to do with PODs,” he chirped in reply.

“Good,” the principal sighed.

“It’s the Phantoms of the Dispossessed.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb was suddenly stricken with a case of full-body heartburn.

“PODs
are
phantoms,” she seethed.

The bird demon shrugged.

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” he clucked.

“IT’S THE ONLY WAY OF LOOKING AT IT!” the principal shrieked. “I was supposed to personally inspect the captured herd … flock—whatever you call a grubby group of nomadic phantoms—
today
to see if that pernicious pip-squeak Milton Fauster was still traveling with them!”

“And there’s nothing to stop you from doing that, ma’am.”

“Really?”

“Other than the fact that they just now escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“Yes. Flew the coop.”

While the Disdainment Camp and the Wastelands surrounding it were technically not under her
jurisdiction—the Big Guy Downstairs had subcontracted dominion of this worthless surreal estate to one of his underachieving nephews—there was an aspect of this situation that could very well be her problem.

It was short. It was infuriating. It nagged at her, mocked her, following her close like a piece of toilet paper on her hoof. Two words containing countless irritation.
Milton Fauster
.

She had to nab that little twerp, and the PODs were the only lead she had. The problem was that the Wastelands were, to put it mildly, off-putting. To put it the opposite of mildly,
appallingly treacherous
. Even Bea “Elsa” Bubb had her limits, and trudging across the dismal, dangerous, and deranging Wastelands on her own two hooves was it. Luckily, for an administrator, it was not only possible to pawn off dirty deeds to someone—or something—else, but it was also expected. And so Bea “Elsa” Bubb rose from her chair (sending the lapdog-suddenly-without-a-lap Cerberus to the floor) and decided to delegate this duty to something else. Something even more treacherous than she.

Principal Bubb clacked down the concrete hall of the Unstables, a secret facility just a whip’s crack away from Limbo’s Demonitor Hall (where today’s sniveling demon simps become tomorrow’s only slightly more impressive demon guards).

Bea “Elsa” Bubb had called ahead to make sure that her unannounced appearance didn’t go unnoticed. Still, the only thing that met her at the Unstables’ swinging double doors was the stench of ammonia and fresh “beast patties.” Finally, a stocky demon with a pierced bull’s nose and clad in filthy overalls trotted over to her.

“Principal Bubb!” the creature snorted. “Might I say that this is indeed an honor?”

“I didn’t come here to shoot the bull,” the principal said. The demon beast master winced. “Sorry … nothing personal.”

“Anyway,” Principal Bubb continued as she clasped her claws behind her back and surveyed the stalls with a slow, steady gaze. “I’ve come here because I have a little problem … and I need him solved.”

Her goat eyes settled on an enormous, dark green wolf with a long braided tail.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s a Cusith, ma’am.”

“What does it do?”

“Bays, mostly.”

“Hmmm,” she murmured. “What I need is more of a … bloodhound. Something hardy, made to thrive in hostile conditions—the Wastelands, specifically—that can track someone for me.”

Just then, a tremendous series of
thunks
erupted from the last stall, followed by fits of skittish scrabbling. The principal looked over with interest.

“What was that?” she asked as she strutted toward the stall, the only one walled off with double-ply chicken wire.

“Flicks,” the demon answered with disgust.

The stall reeked of over-roasted coffee beans. The suspended lights of the stall swung as if they had recently been disturbed. Crowded in the stall among broken coffee bean hulls and soiled clumps of straw were five bloated …
flicks
. Massive. Like swollen, waterlogged boars. Their harpoonlike proboscises trembled as they greedily sucked up thick, tarlike coffee grounds from a trough. One of them hopped, startled, hitting the roof with a reverberating
thunk
.

“Half flea, half tick, and
totally
unpredictable,” the beast master clarified.

Principal Bubb was fascinated, both put off and drawn in by the quivering, impossibly large parasites.

“How come they seem so … jumpy?” she inquired.

“That’s because they’re
nervous
flicks,” the demon replied, moving the ring in his nose so that he could better pick his moist snout. “Flicks, as I’m sure you can imagine, suck blood. Well, we don’t really have enough in supply—even the ectoplasmic ‘shadow blood’ we all have pumping through our veins down here—to satisfy their appetites. So, instead, we just feed them a lot of really bad coffee … and there’s no shortage of that down here! It seems to satisfy them, just makes ’em terribly edgy.”

The principal rubbed the hairs on her chinny chin chin.

“So they probably can’t wait to get their snouts on the real thing, then, eh?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb said as she fished out a roll of parchment from her genuine kitten kit bag.

The bull demon nodded.

“Boy howdy! They’d probably travel across Heck and back for a taste!”

She handed him the roll of paper.

“Have them get a whiff of this,” she said with a cruel grin.

The beast master nodded and carefully pushed the scroll through the chicken wire. The flicks held their long, quivering noses up to the parchment before hopping madly, knocking into the hanging lamps above and shattering the bulbs.

“Good golly,” the hulking beast master yelped, pulling the roll back through the wire. “What’s on this thing?”

The principal smirked as she unrolled the parchment.

“Ah,”
the demon observed, “a legally binding covenant—”

He scanned the contract down to the bottom, where the name “Milton Fauster” was scrawled in rusty-brown cursive letters.

“—signed in blood. Now they’ve got a nibble, and they’ll be wanting the main course.”

The principal crossed her pudgy, varicose-veined arms.

“As much as it pains me to say so,” she grunted, “I need the boy in one piece. I need irrefutable
proof
that I captured him.”

“Not a problem.” The demon nodded, winking one of his beady black eyes. “I can rig them with trackers so that when they’re extra agitated, like they get when they’ve cornered something, you’ll know that you’ve got your man … or boy, in this case.”

The demon leaned in close to the principal.

“I can’t guarantee that he’ll be, you know, completely intact,” the beast master whispered. “Due to the unnatural size of the proboscis, I doubt if they’d be able to draw blood from a boy, depending on his size. But
that doesn’t mean they won’t try. It’ll probably hurt like the dickens, and he might wish that they would just finish the job. Of course, considering the Wastelands, something might have already beat them to it.”