“ROLL OUT THE barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun,” sang the HAHAHA clowns as they transported hundreds of Styrofoam kegs packed tight with baking soda out to the Widow’s Veil machine. They arranged the last load of barrels onto the catwalk.
“Let’s pop off the lids,” Milton instructed as Shirley stepped out onto the crowded catwalk, having just overseen the capture of the ministry guards.
“Now’s the time to roll the barrel …” the clowns sang as two more of them marched out to the Widow’s Veil machine. They had Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette in handcuffs and shoved him out onto the catwalk.
“For the gang’s all here!” Shirley Eujest squealed.
The emperor cast an inscrutable glance down at his stiff, motionless hands bound together at his waist. “Surprise!” he yelled while untucking his arms—his real arms—from behind his back. “I, too, have some tricks up my sleeves. In fact, my sleeves are tricks!”
Holding two William clubs in each of his now-free hands, the emperor whooshed away the clowns holding him with one-two blasts of deadly air. The HAHAHA crusaders toppled into the volcanic abyss below.
The emperor backed slowly away, tucking one of the weapons in his tight gray breeches. He seized Milton by the arm, holding the William club to his head.
“No sudden movements or Monsieur Fauster will have his brains whooshed out of his skull,” Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette hissed between clenched white teeth. He cocked his eyebrows at the barrels of baking soda.
“What gives with zhe barrels?”
Shirley shrugged. “To absorb odors?” she offered.
The emperor spotted his stopwatch on the ground and slowly knelt down to retrieve it.
“Why don’t you just kill me now?” Milton murmured as the emperor tucked his stopwatch into his inside pocket.
“Because it is not time. It does not happen like that,” the emperor replied in his two-tone voice.
The emperor regarded Shirley with his mismatched eyes as he backed into the main control center with Milton. “No funny business, clowns. Or his brains will be on your conscience … not to mention your ridiculous clothes.”
The emperor untied one of his guards, then ushered Milton up a staircase to the third level. The control center quaked as the Earth began to shiver apart. The emperor prodded Milton through a hatchway leading to a small room with an eye-shaped window.
“Sit, s’il vous plaît,” he said as he took out his stopwatch. “You still have a little time. Very little.”
Marlo, Virgil, Lyon, Angelo, and Frances huddled together.
“What do we do, Karate Kid?” Angelo asked Virgil as the swarm of guards drew near.
Virgil looked up at the clock hanging above the doorway. It was nearly midnight, straight up.
“We wait,” Virgil replied.
“We wait?” Lyon gasped. “Until when?”
The clock struck midnight. The two dozen mayfly demon guards fell to the ground, dead.
“Now!”
The Vee-Pees and Kali stared slack-jawed at the mound of expired mayflies surrounding them.
“Hurry! Before new guards hatch!” Marlo shouted.
Frances and Lyon hurled their piping-hot Reheat-a Fajita Fandangos at Kali. The goddess batted one away with her third arm, but the other exploded on her already tender face. “Aaaaaarrrgghhhh!” she bellowed.
“You guys rescue those two kids over there,” Marlo said. “I’m going to grab Milton over at Einstein’s machine.”
“I’m helping you,” Angelo said as he studied Milton’s struggling body with narrowed eyes.
Marlo shrugged. “Whatever floats your dreamboat,” she replied before suddenly catching herself. “I mean boat. A regular one. Not a dream one.”
They dashed toward Dr. Einstein’s turntable machine.
“Armstrong! Patrick Harris!” Napoléon roared, his snooty face flushed with rage. “Seize them!”
The canvas-wrapped creatures doddered toward Marlo and Angelo, their restrictive chains rattling. Marlo flung her Kwik rib at the nearest demon foot servant. The rib slashed across the creature’s chest, breaking his chain. The demon stopped in surprise, gazing upon his unchained self with glowing red eyes. He straightened out to his full height of just over six feet.
“Kneel, Armstrong!” Napoléon yelled. “You are not to exceed your master’s height!”
Armstrong waddled over to Patrick Harris and, with a colossal tug emboldened by freedom, unchained his companion. The newly liberated creature stretched in defiant delight.
“Kneel, Patrick Harris!”
The two creatures came at Napoléon. He pulled out his mobile mind controller from his coat and waved it at his mutinous servants, yet they stalked closer all the same. Dr. Einstein watched the proceedings with a flicker of curiosity. He touched his blinders with confusion, as if slowly waking from a dream.
Kali wiped the spicy fajita from her face and lunged forward, grabbing Armstrong and Patrick Harris’s canvas-covered heads and slamming them together. The two demon foot servants fell to the ground.
Marlo ran to the giant machine, the stone disk spinning in groaning revolutions. Milton hung upside down like a sleeping bat in a dunce cap, almost at the end of the disk’s long, spiraling groove. Angelo stepped back from the machine, slyly pulling a silver blade from the back of his suit and, hunkering down, leapt straight at Milton. Though scarcely off the ground, Kali snatched the boy from the air and threw him hard to the floor.
Marlo noticed a twitching black device about the size of a suitcase next to the rotating turntable. A megaphone jutted out of the machine, trained earnestly upon Milton, the lower part of his face exposed so that Marlo could see her brother’s lips moving. A mechanical hand grasping a quill scribbled furiously upon a slow-turning drum covered with paper.
It’s writing down everything that Milton is mumbling, she thought.
“Dr. Einstein … seize her!” Napoléon shrieked.
“Caesar?” Cleopatra replied, whipping her regal head about. “Here?”
“Grab that grubby girl before she touches the Trance-Scriber!” Napoléon bellowed. “She’ll ruin everything!”
Milton peered out of the big glass eye down into the Hekla volcano. Dozens of freed ministry soldiers overtook the clown commandos.
He noticed a tiny, shimmering blur drop slowly from the sky. Milton wiped his eyes, but the blur—a small bottle, by the looks of it—continued its slow descent, as if it were sinking in a vast, invisible ocean. Whatever was happening, Milton needed to buy a little time.
“Um … tell me more about your brilliant plan,” Milton said. “How does this all help you, exactly?”
Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette studied Milton intently. “Hmm … well, at least you are realizing genius when you see it. Bien, I’ll bite. We—Cleopatra and Napoléon, as vice principals—had physically binding contracts with zhe Powers Zhat Be Evil. And the only way out of them was to eliminate childhood altogether.”
“How?”
“Now, when a young person dies, they have an adult soul—rigid, inflexible, and jaded—and will go either all the way up or all the way down, making Heck obsolete. So with no children and no Heck, there is no contract.”
Milton shivered, despite being only a glass-breadth’s away from an active volcano. Every moment of his afterlife had been spent plotting ways to shut Heck down. And Napoléon and Cleopatra had figured out a way to do it—a brilliant way, actually—yet at the awful expense of childhood. There was no way he was ever going to let that happen.
Milton stared, glassy-eyed, out of the large glass eye. The shimmering bottle floated down, following the coiling tornado of smoke, until it landed gently at the base of the Widow’s Veil machine.
The military base convulsed as if having a seizure.
“What is going on?” the emperor cried.
A mountain of rock and dirt, crowned with what seemed to be a wine cellar, materialized in the mouth of the volcano. The clowns dashed off the catwalk just as the bottles met the barrels of baking soda.
“Nothing at all,” Milton replied. “Why do you ask?”
A pinpoint of laser light grazed Milton’s ticking Pace Taker. Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette drew closer, taking careful, deliberate steps like a panther that didn’t want to startle its next meal.
“Zhe Pace Taker … an incredible invention.”
Milton gulped down the bitter taste of guilt.
“Now every heart beats to zhe same drummer. Everyone is aligned and in step with zhe ministry! And, by controlling a person’s internal rhythm, we control a citizen’s life right down to the second. Now a person knows when their time has run out based on their productivity ratings. The only citizens who must experience the cruel uncertainty of old-fashioned death are prisoners like you and your friends at HAHAHA.…”
Milton gripped his chair with his elderly hands.
“And make no mistake, Monsieur Fauster. No matter what happens here”—the emperor’s thumb hovered over the deadly button of his golden stopwatch—“your time runs out.”
Dr. Einstein considered Marlo with soulful brown eyes.
“Vhat am I doing?” he murmured. “Why would I hurt a little girl?”
Napoléon trained what he thought was his mobile mind control device on Dr. Einstein. Marlo leaned into the baffled genius.
“Hey, Doc, just play along … Fun-Size over there has the wrong doohickey, so he can’t do anything to you. But you can’t act like you’re not under control … so grab me.”
Dr. Einstein nodded his wild mane of hair and weakly grabbed Marlo around the wrists.
“Oh … no … please … stop!” Marlo protested while working the old man’s arms up and down, as if he were a seriously outmoded fitness machine. Suddenly, she broke free and bounded up onto the spinning disk.
Marlo tried to balance herself on the revolving platter. Milton murmured above her.
“The laser light … on my Pace Taker. No matter what happens here … the emperor’s stopwatch … your time runs out.”
Marlo patted the pockets in her Power Suit.
I don’t know what he’s yammering about, but the Vee-Pees seem to think it’s important, which means it’s important for me to stop it.…
She pulled out the wool gnome doll she had stolen from St. Nicholas and, jumping, shoved it into Milton’s open mouth.
That should do it until I figure out how to get him down from there, she thought. Marlo revolved away from her brother as he neared the end of his groove.
Summoning all of his strength, Milton hurled the chair through the eye-shaped window. Shards of glass rained down below. Emperor Leo Patrick Napolette pressed down hard on his stopwatch, its laser just missing its mark, as Milton leapt into the mouth of the volcano.…
Kali and Angelo, locked in the throes of fierce struggle, slammed hard against the side of the massive turntable. The long mechanical arm shuddered. Milton, the pendulous needle, skipped in his time groove.
Milton leapt into the mouth of the volcano.… Milton leapt into the mouth of the volcano.… Milton leapt into the mouth of the volcano.…
Kali threw a brutal punch, but Angelo swiftly ducked the blow. Her blue fists pummeled the side of the turntable and knocked Milton back into his groove.
Milton shook the weird déjà vu from his head as he tumbled into the seething, bubbling chaos below. He was blinded by a flash of white and felt a sturdy, tingling caress. When his sight returned, Milton half wished it hadn’t. There he was, jostling atop a column of surging foam rising from the volcano. The walkways twisted and bent like the limbs of a contortionist until they and the Widow’s Veil machine were washed away by the gush of angry froth. Seconds later, the pyramid control center was sheared off the side of the volcano’s throat.
Just like in science class, Milton thought as he was buffeted about by the volatile chemical marriage of tons of baking soda saying “I do” to gallons of vinegar.
The geyser of foam propelled Milton up over Hekla’s crown. A shattered Styrofoam barrel emerged a few yards away from him. He paddled through the cascading froth and clutched onto it for dear life. Up and out, great petals of foam curled around on themselves, with Milton speeding toward the hovering Widow’s Veil above.
“Ooomph!” Milton gasped as he slammed into the dense, soot-dark shroud. With brute force, the eruption punched a hole into the Widow’s Veil, revealing a vibrant riot of stars gleaming and flickering against the deep velvet of night. A luminous yolk-yellow moon shone with an almost salacious clarity.
“Surprise!” Shirley shouted from a flying Styrofoam barrel a hundred feet away. “We did it! Eventually the Widow’s Veil will break apart and humanity can start over again! We won’t be around to see it, but hey, so it goes.…” She spiraled farther and farther away. “You’re always supposed to leave with a joke, so here I go,” she yelled. “Two cannibals are eating a clown and one says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’ ”
With that, Shirley disappeared, her barrel rolling out of sight as she succumbed to the law of gravity: the one law she couldn’t manage to break in her wonderfully ludicrous life. His eyes brimming with tears, Milton looked up. A shimmering rainbow trail slowly faded away to nothing. In the distance, he saw what looked like an angel, blazing with light, tearing up the sky. Milton grew light-headed from cold and lack of oxygen until, with a smile carved deep into his leathery face, he let loose his consciousness and slipped deep inside himself, never to see this world again.…
Angelo grabbed on to the enormous record player and kicked Kali squarely in the chest. The blue goddess was thrown onto her back with the wind knocked out of her. Virgil helped Lyon drag Bordeaux to the wall and then, taking his last weaponized stuffed green pepper, lobbed it at Kali, where it exploded on the Hindu goddess’s face.
Angelo clambered onto the turntable and swung up onto the long metal arm extending above the revolving platter. He scrambled across to Milton. “This assignment has gone on for way too long,” Angelo muttered.
Angelo drew his blade and reached down for Milton’s neck. Suddenly, the laboratory shook with a massive shock wave as one of the stone disks, spinning madly out of control, broke free of the colossal now-unbalanced turntable. It crashed onto the floor, breaking into fractured pieces. The blade fell from Angelo’s hands.
“Look out!” Virgil cried as he and Frances dragged a frail boy away from one of the machines.
Another stone platter broke free of its groaning mechanical turntable and shattered onto the floor.
Marlo tried to keep her balance as the spiral-grooved disk revolved back to her brother. The glint of something shiny caught her thieving magpie eyes.
“Cool,” she said, snatching up Angelo’s feather-shaped blade. “I can use this to cut Milton down.”
Angelo glared down at Marlo from the machine’s thick metal arm. “Throw that to me, Margot,” he said testily. “I’ll deal with your brother.”
There was something about Angelo’s tone and the coldness in his ice-blue eyes that disturbed Marlo.
“I wanna do it,” she said, hopping up on the arm and scooting toward her brother. “And it’s Marlo.”
“Right … I was just kidding,” Angelo said. “Now give it here … you’ll hurt yourself.”
As Angelo reached for the blade, the turntable shook and he tumbled off the arm and revolved away. Kali had hopped up onto the disk and was tromping closer. The disk only had a few yards of groove left, so Marlo went to work slicing through Milton’s bonds.
“Gotta do it … quick or he’s … zombie toast,” she said between gritted teeth as she sawed through the thick cable binding his feet. Then, with only a foot of groove left before the record ended, Marlo cut her brother free. He fell onto the stone platter. Angelo stalked toward him and grabbed Milton by the neck. Marlo hopped down off the arm, the disk wobbling as it spun faster.
Angelo whispered into Milton’s ear. “I’ll be quick. You won’t feel a—”
The disk broke apart, and they were hurled off the spinning platter and onto the laboratory floor. Marlo was flung alongside Kali, with huge shards of stone smashing to the ground around them.
Angelo rose woozily to his feet, his muscular arm still wrapped tightly around Milton’s neck. Dozens of newly hatched mayfly demons swarmed into the laboratory around him and the other fugitive children.
Marlo ran up to Angelo. “Let go!” she shouted.
The brawny boy sighed as the demon guards converged.
“Milton!” Marlo shrieked as she wrested her brother from Angelo’s strong grip. “Are you okay?”
Milton blinked, his sister’s face plastered with that rarest of expressions—genuine concern—slowly coming into focus.
“Mmmmrmmphrlooooog,” he replied, his mouth stuffed with a wool gnome.
“Oh, sorry,” Marlo replied as she plucked the spit-soaked dwarf from Milton’s mouth.
Milton tilted his groggy head to the side, the floor soothingly cool and solid under his cheek. There, blurry yet intimidating all the same, were Napoléon and Cleopatra, studying him closely. Between the vice principals and a pile of large broken stone disks was a machine—a quill attached to a sort of extendable metal arm—writing down every word that was said. Milton returned his bleary gaze to his sister, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and his eyes rolling back into his head.
“How may I serve?” Milton said as drool trickled down his chin.
Marlo hid her tear-streaked face in her hands. “We were too late!” she sobbed. “My brother’s a zombie!”