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

bound to be tailing us. Plus we’re low on provisions and can’t, like, afford to gas and groove at the circus for some freak show kicks, dig?”
    A chorus of distressing brays reverberated throughout the grim, gray valley.
    “Wherever we go, we’d better get there in a hurry,” Moondog said, looking yet not looking around him. “We’re disturbing the locals.”
    “We’re
disturbing
them?”
Milton asked with a full-body shiver.
    “Bewilderbeasts,” Jack said in a hoarse whisper. “We’re, like, solid as long as we don’t lamp directly at them.”
    Milton’s unease ratcheted up a notch.
    “You mean not look at them?! That’s like trying not to think of … a banana cream pie.”
    A chorus of “mmm”s rumbled from the famished phantoms.
    A trio of creatures emerged from a bank of mist. The cluster of dark, restless shadows stalked the ground, heads hung low, eyes burning red, then blue with an insistent, dumbfounding pulse. Moondog locked eyes with the creatures, though—since he was blind—that lock was rusty.
    “Bewilderbeasts mean that we must be near the Disorient, by the dried-up At Sea,” he murmured. “A fitting place for a confusement park.”
    Without warning, the herd charged toward the phantoms.
    “They’re attacking!” Milton yelped. “We’ve got to run!”
    “No, Popsicle,
chill,”
Jack said calmly as he put his hand on Milton’s shoulder. “That’s what they want: for us to wig out. That’s how they grease …
how they feed
. First they capture your attention and then they capture everything else.”
    The bewilderbeasts galloped closer, their hoofbeats a syncopated rhythm that lulled Milton into a stupor. The fur of the shaggy creatures twisted and contorted the light into something hypnotic and impossible to describe—and impossible to take your eyes off of. The herd leader leveled its mesmerizing gaze at Milton. Milton, like the proverbial deer in headlights, was caught.
    “Don’t look at it!” Jack barked. Milton tried to look away but, transfixed by the creature’s shimmering fur—swaying back and forth, oozing like fronds of jelly light—he couldn’t. Soon, all Milton could see was the alternating red-blue-red-blue of the creature’s eyes that seemed to lock in time with Milton’s slowing pulse.
    Suddenly, a scream pealed from the mist-shrouded herd of bewilderbeasts. In the blink of an eye, a swooping shape had attached itself to the creature charging toward Milton. The bewilderbeast screeched, the unmistakable shriek of something about to be killed. Nothing was as frightening, Milton thought in the abrupt silence after the creature’s scream, than some terrible creature terrified by something even
more
terrible.
    “We’ve got some nasty party crashers here,” Moondog said solemnly. “Some big, bad bugs that make bewilderbeasts look like My Little Ponies.”
    Milton gasped as a bewilderbeast broke from the herd, wrapped in a tendril of vapor, before something sprang onto the squealing creature’s back, then dragged it back into the cloud.
    Worry crept into Jack’s rugged face.
    “I suggest we make like bananas and split,” he said, stepping up to a large flap in the canvas tent and widening it for his followers. “In here, dig? Do the circus thing, like Popsicle here suggested. And wait out this bad scene.”
    The PODs pushed their carts into the tent in a single-file line.
    Milton looked nervously over his shoulder. From the mist, he saw a bristly, reddish brown creature bound into the air with a swift jerk and land by one of the outlying trailers. In its front legs, it clutched the body of a bewilderbeast that it appeared to be …
sucking the life out of
with its long, tubelike mouth. It was some kind of gargantuan, leaping …
flea
or …
tick
.
    The creature was quickly joined by another. And then another. The mottled creatures quivered and scanned the confusement park with their dull red eyes.
    Moondog grabbed Milton by the shoulders and heaved him