Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Butthat 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.”
    The principal stared at the high-strung flicks through the chicken wire. They considered her with their dull, red, hungry eyes.
    “Oh, I don’t mind if the little simp is knocked around a bit,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb said as the vertical slits at the center of her curdled-yellow eyes tightened with purpose.
    “Or a little pale from, shall we say,
an impromptu blood donation.”

4 • SCRAMBLED EX i LE
    MILTON CLUTCHED HIS threadbare coat as another salty gust of wind high-fived his face. The phantoms, just under a hundred of them, pushed onward through the gray, gritty realm.
    Moondog had referred to this bleak tract of despair as the Wastelands. It was like the land that time—and
everything
—forgot.
    “It’s a place where addled, abandoned memories, hopes, and wishes go,” said Moondog, responding to Milton’s thoughts in that eerie way of his, not so much reading his mind as flipping through it like a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room. “Ripped away from the people who originally had them, never to find their way back again, then ground into dust and wind.”
    Another blast of briny, stale wind hit Milton in the face. It was like inhaling the steam from a pot of boiledtears and old-lady perfume. He shuddered at the thought of being struck in the face by someone’s stray remembrance. Jack pushed his shopping cart alongside Milton and Moondog.
    “‘These rootless souls lean forward into the confusion, prowling the dreaming darkness to find their rightful place,’” Jack said, the words flying out of his mouth like a saxophone solo. “‘Yet past the raggedy madness of the senseless nightmare road is a place on the edge of sight, where every sigh goes to die.’”
    Milton wiped the salt—or abandoned memory—from his stinging eyes.
    “Cheery, like a burned-down toy store,” Milton deadpanned. “Let me guess, another inspiring quote from
The Dead Beat Scrolls.”
    Jack smiled his nervous, impish grin.
    “Everything belongs somewhere, Popsicle,” he said. “We’ve all got our fit, dig? You just have to keep on trying on the clothes that fate gives you.”
    The caster wheels of a hundred shopping carts sliced through the coarse gravel and dust.
    “We didn’t belong up there, and we don’t seem to belong down here either,” Moondog said, his blind eyes coated with a white film that made it look like he had tiny onions in his sockets. “It’s like when you take apart a car engine and put it back together again. You always seem to have some stray parts. Society is the engine and we PODs are the leftover bits that no one can find aplace for. With our unique balance of faults and virtues, the Powers That Be and the Powers That Be Evil just couldn’t place us in their tidy little hereafter. So we roam.”
    The front caster wheel of Milton’s cart became stuck in a glob of yolky sludge.
    Here I am, in the middle of nowhere, stuck in someone’s gross, abandoned memory
, Milton groused to himself. He gave it a kick with his sneaker.
    “Memories are just energy, Milton,” Moondog said after casually leafing through Milton’s thoughts. “See, everything has got to go somewhere, whether it’s a person, a memory…. It’s just a question of charge. When it’s all juiced up, it’s on the Surface, alive, making mischief. When it’s spent, it goes … well, down here.”
    Jack stopped his cart and studied the horizon while playing nervously with his cowlick. He turned to his tribe of sullen phantoms.
    “Divining Rod,” he called out over the crowd.
    Rod, a steely-eyed man with a braided beard, stepped forward. He held a Y-shaped branch