Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (19 page)

Annubis scrambled to rearrange the crates to reach his wife, imprisoned across the cramped channel separating the wall of cages. Anput was several stories higher than Kebauet had been, so Annubis climbed upward using a series of meager footholds until he made his way to his wife’s cage.

“My dear,” he said as he took in the shocking image of his wife, a Weimaraner, her pelt a once-lustrous charcoal-blue storm cloud of fur now worn in patches.

The light behind Anput’s amber eyes flared at the sight of her husband.

“I had … nearly given up hope,” she replied, her short tail wagging feebly. Though emaciated, Anput still radiated elegance and nobility. Annubis tucked his paws around her frail form and pulled her to his chest.

“You have lost so much weight,” he said as he draped
his wife across his back and, with great care, inched his way toward his pile of cages.

Anput clutched tightly around Annubis’s neck.

“I would flick whatever stale kibble bit the auto-feeders deigned to give toward our daughter,” she replied with effort. They arrived at the crate tower, with Annubis folding his fragile wife in his arms and climbing down to the concrete floor. He set her beside his daughter, the two gripping each other tightly.

A pungent, curry-dusted musk caught the attention of Annubis’s nostrils, cutting through the sour wash of urine and feces.

“A ferret,” Annubis said as he attempted to zero in on the odor’s source with his keen nose. “Lucky!”

A fierce scrabbling rattled a cage stacked twenty feet high in the corner by the glimmering Globeway entrance.

“You rest there, my treasures,” he said as he dragged crates toward the source of the sound. “I made a promise to a friend.”

Virginia Woof tapped her displeasure into her Speak & Spell.

“Must hurry,” she relayed through the plastic box. “Can’t rescue every creature.”

Annubis doggedly constructed another tower of cages by the Kennels’ entrance. “We’ll see about that,” he panted as he hauled the heavy crates into a jumbled yet sturdy-enough heap. Annubis scaled the pile nimbly
until he was greeted by a pair of glowing red eyes and a blast of anchovy-hiss.

“You must be Lucky,” Annubis said as he noted the pair of dice hanging from the ferret’s collar. “Or as lucky as a creature can be in the Kennels.” Lucky spun about frantically in his cramped cage, a white whir of restlessness. Annubis unlatched the cage, and the ferret spilled out onto his back like a living fur stole.

“Don’t … worry,” Annubis said between clenched teeth as Lucky buried his claws in the dog god’s back, “we’ll be out of here soon, and no one will be the—”

Annubis froze as he turned to descend the jumble of crates, staring straight into a security camera mounted in the corner.

“—wiser.”

The red light blinked mockingly, as if to say “gotcha.” Annubis hurried down to Anput, Kebauet, and Virginia Woof waiting obediently for his return.

“You’re right, Virginia,” he said with haste as he scooped up his family in his arms. “We must make haste, before the Scarecrows come to—”

“Caw!!”

Through the electric blur of the spherical portal, Lucky and the petrified dogs saw three giant crows, their gleaming black wings flapping with menace. At the base of their cruel black talons sat Cerberus, his three mouths panting smugly.

“HEY, GIRLY,” THE
faceless, chain-smoking writer said to Milton the second he walked into Hack: Where the Bad Writers Go. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

The office roared with the incessant clacking of bulky tripewriters and the occasional carriage return and bell.

Milton looked around and noticed that all of the writers, stooped over their desks, looked as if they were wearing sheer pantyhose over their heads, their features dull and nondescript.

“Actually,” Milton replied, cradling a stack of edited scripts, “I just came to drop these—”

“What blood type is deadly to proofreaders?” the writer posed.

Milton shrugged.

“Type O!” the writer blurted out. “Get it? Like a
typo …
a mistake!”

Milton scratched at the waist of his dress, which he had put on backward, accustomed as he was to zippers up front.

“That’s not bad,” he replied nervously as he set the stack of T.H.E.E.N.D. season finale scripts on the writer’s desk. “So, here are Satan’s edits. Mr. Welles wanted them back right away, so if you guys can just smooth out what he wrote and messenger them back—”

The writer flipped through the scripts, examining them closely.

“Wait a second,” he said as he pulled out a large electric magnifying glass that cast a vivid blue-white glow upon the pages. “Just what I thought,” he pronounced, setting the instrument down on his desk. “Not all of these are
his
edits. Some are, but the ones at the end … someone wrote over them in red ink.”

Milton gulped and glanced down at his sister’s ink-stained fingers. He quickly clasped the incriminating digits behind his back, not wanting to be caught red-handed.

“Hmm … are you sure?” he asked, staring down at his sister’s painful black shoes.

The writer smirked, which simply creased his beige, creepy-smooth face.

“Yeah, girly. I’m sure. Look, we were given specific instructions to only make edits where we saw this distinctive writing … inscribed in blood with a quill.”

That writing
, Milton thought as he tried to wipe his
hands on his sides.
Those fussy loops and swirls. It looks so familiar
.

The writer got a glimpse of Milton’s red-tipped fingers.

“Everybody wants to break into this business,” the man said, gesturing at his fellow execrable scribes bent over their tripewriters. “And, while I appreciate a plucky bobby-soxer trying to get her foot in the door, I ain’t going to let your chicken scratch through and incur the wrath of
Old
Scratch, dig?”

Milton did not
dig
, exactly, but gathered that his attempts at softening the apocalyptic endings to all of the T.H.E.E.N.D. finales had been thwarted.

“So you cool your heels, Little Red Writing Hood,” the man croaked as he lifted his bones from his hard metal office chair. “I’ll get the boys to make the
real
edits for you,” he added with a wink—a quick wrinkle where his eye should have been—as he trundled down the row, tossing scripts to the faceless hacks.

Milton hobbled over to the Waiting and Waiting Area. He plopped down on the couch and anxiously bit his sister’s fingernails, listening to the writers grumble and grouse at their latest deadline.

Figures the devil would edit manuscripts in blood
, Milton fumed as he flipped through a copy of
The Hellywood Reporter
left out on the coffee table.
He’s probably
type O,
too
.

Milton stopped at a full-page article, topped with a
photograph of Satan, leering at the camera with a mouthful of capped fangs.

Milton reread the phrase again and again.

What is Satan’s deal
? Milton wondered.
What’s in it for him
?

Milton crumpled inside, like an empty soda can crushed by sucky circumstance. The whole point of switching bodies with his sister had been to protect her, especially considering the weird brainwashed state she had been in as the devil’s Girl Friday the Thirteenth. He had also hoped to use Marlo’s status as an Infern to get to the bottom of whatever the devil was cooking up.

But Milton was realizing, as he held
The Hellywood Reporter
in his sister’s trembling hands, that he was entrenched in a system devised by adults who had centuries of experience working their own system. Milton was just a kid learning the ropes of eternity, and the only thing Milton knew for sure was that he was in over his head, and his head was halfway across the underworld in Fibble. He needed his sister, as much as that pained him to admit. They were like some pop group that squabbled all the time, broke up, and then put out solo albums that no one liked. They were, somehow, better together. And if Milton was to unplug whatever Satan had getting “boffo idiot-box office” on the Surface, he’d need his sister’s help.

He threw
The Hellywood Reporter
on the table. Next to it was the latest copy of
GYP
. The grainy photograph on the cover caught his eye: a grim wall of cages each housing a miserable, dispirited animal. A dog, a cat, a ferret …

A FERRET
.

“Lucky!” Milton yelped as he seized the newspaper and guzzled the cover story with his eyes.

MILITANT ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUP
WAGES WAR ON FURAFTER:

Founder Vows That Fur Will Fly if Passed-on Pets Are Put Down

By Milton Fauster

Milton smiled. It was weird to read a message from yourself
to
yourself, but that’s exactly what this was, he was sure: a message from Marlo, telling him that Lucky was in the Kennels and to meet him there. She had made this protest seem like a huge, must-see media event to make sure he found out, and also—Milton speculated—to create chaos, a diversion to help them to sneak in, meet up with Annubis, rescue Lucky, and slip away … 
somewhere
.

But I have two big problems
, Milton reflected.
One, how to get to the Furafter without arousing suspicions, and two, how to stop whatever Satan or the Man Who Soldeth the World has brewing.…

Milton giggled out loud, despite himself, as he—instantly—solved both problems with one risky, long shot of a solution.

He bolted from the Waiting and Waiting Area toward a writer lingering by the sulfur water cooler.

“Excuse me,” Milton said, “but—”

“Hey, girly,” the faceless hack said with a smile that split his face in two, “would you like to hear a joke?”

“I don’t have time,” Milton continued. “I really need to use the phone.”

The hack shrugged his shoulders.

“Your loss … it was a doozy, too.”

“The phone?”

“Over there,” the hack replied, pointing to an unoccupied desk by the front door.

“Thanks,” Milton said as he dashed over to the desk. He snatched up the phone, then, after puzzling over the big dial and the lack of buttons, recalled from an old movie that you stuck your finger in the holes and spun the dial around to make a call.

“Hello, Mr. Welles?” Milton spoke into the cumbersome, salmon-colored handset. “This is Mil
—Marlo
. Listen, I just came up with a great idea for some, um … 
boffo
publicity for
Teenage Jesus …
to hype the heck out of the finale: LIVE! All I need is Van Glorious, a limo, and a camera with a powerful satellite feed!”

“Hey, cyclops,” Principal Bubb called out to a boy with an eye patch in Limbo’s Cafeterium.

The freckle-faced boy scowled at the principal as he held out his tray of liver and overcooked Brussels sprouts.