Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck by Dale E. Basye

Author:Dale E. Basye
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Adventure, Humour, Childrens
ISBN: 9780375898846
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2012-05-21T14:00:00+00:00

BE THE FIRST TO PLAY HECK: WHERE THE BAD KIDS GO. WE DARE YOU! read a banner hung over the converted Psychomanthiums in Fragopolis. BEFORE YOUR LAME PARENTS SHUT IT DOWN!™

The dazed kids flitted about the booths like drowsy flies around drugged poop.

“Game … awesome,” a boy with headgear mumbled. “Must play. Again.”

“Was … intense … then stopped,” a boy with a clip-on eyebrow piercing gurgled. “But said … back up soon. Not soon … enough.”

Their unblinking eyes were as glazed as honey-baked hams. Like one-way streets leading to abandoned ghost towns.

Why a game? Marlo thought from a shard of bright light spilled across the Fragopolis carpet, framed by a curtain of shadow. Isn’t it bad enough that the souls of the darned must toil in Heck for all eternity, or until they turn eighteen—whichever comes first? Now kids up on the Surface have to endure Heck, too, feeding it attention like some leisure-time-eating virus? And the million-dollar-and-some-change question: What the heck am I doing here? Why do they need me to bum kids out when they have this dumb game here that can do it for them?

The kids traded monosyllabic grunts like verbal Pokémon cards. They stared with hunger at the gaming booths, shaking with withdrawal, wanting more than anything to play again.

A pair of geeky boys walked through Marlo toward a Wii the People game, where kids could virtually manipulate the quills of America’s founding fathers to help sign the Constitution before the colonies were besieged by British “rust-coat” robots armed with boiled-beef bazookas.

One of the boys—a pimple-studded pixie-stick of a boy in a striped ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO YOU sweatshirt—stopped short by Marlo’s spot on the terminally ’80s carpet.

“I don’t know, Hans,” he said, shoulders slumped. “I suddenly don’t feel like playing that game … any of the games. They all seem so lame … except—”

Hans? Marlo thought.

“But, hey, what’s that one?” the boy said, pointing toward a Psychomanthium. “For some reason, I want to play it more than anything!”

Man, even his finger has pimples on it, Marlo thought. The other boy … Hans. He seems super familiar. He’s got to be one of Milton’s friends. Like fate sprayed him with loser cologne. There’s some weird thing that’s like … drawing me to him.

Hans scratched his woolly red hair.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” the boy replied with a resigned squeak of his preadolescent voice box. “I haven’t felt this bummed out since … well … she … you know … but that game does seem really—”

Marlo noticed the boy had a school binder clutched beneath his arm. Plastered across it were pictures of … her. Marlo. Dozens of them. The few gaps between the pictures were decorated with dozens of little black hearts.

That’s it! Marlo thought. Hans Jovonovic. Milton’s friend with the bushy hair so fiery red that you could practically talk to God through it. The geeky matchstick boy always mooning around me—borderline stalking by the looks of it.

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