“Oww . . . you flippin’ maniac!” Marlo Fauster shrieked. The demon driver, after untying Marlo’s hands, had jabbed his pitchspork in a place just south of cordial. Marlo fell to her knees outside the stagecoach and fumbled to remove her blindfold.

The driver, his shape smudged and cloaked in the murky darkness, stood atop the stagecoach and struck a match across his fangs. The bright flare of light felt like an explosion in Marlo’s eye sockets.

The driver’s nightmarish features burned themselves into the back of Marlo’s retinas. Like most of the demons she had met in Heck, he was a creature turned inside out. But this one was even more inside out somehow: a lanky, walking pizza with everything on it held together by a network of pulsating veins and arteries.

“On second thought”—Marlo gulped—“maybe the blindfold wasn’t so bad.”

A pale horse with shiny pink eyes clomped nervously in place in front of the stagecoach. The demon driver pompously puffed out his disgusting chest.

“Snatched away in beauty’s bloom, on thee shall press no ponderous tomb,” he recited in a wet, snooty tone, like a butler with a bronchial infection.

As if things weren’t bad enough, Marlo reflected, now I have to hear his poetry.

Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw she was in some kind of subterranean tunnel. She stood up, brushing gravel off her baggy, sequined #1 grandma sweatshirt and sagging turquoise stirrup pants.

After her brother Milton’s unprecedented escape at the Gates of Heck, Marlo had been forced at spork-point into this ugly Rapacia uniform, blindfolded, and shoved into the stagecoach of some poetic cadaver.

The next thing Marlo knew, she was here—wherever “here” was. “You are so not getting a tip,” she said.

The demon folded his arms together smugly. The mesh of winding red and blue capillaries made him appear as if he were a living, throbbing road map. Watching the creature’s pulse made Marlo’s own pulse quicken.

“My, aren’t we a brave little girl?” the demon mocked before suddenly leaping to the ground.

Startled, Marlo jumped back, hitting something with a clang. “Dang!” she cursed, rubbing the back of her skull. The demon laughed.

She turned to glare at what had connected with her head so painfully.

unwelcome to rapacia, read a sign atop an ornate metal gate. Twin wrought-iron fleurs-de-lis were welded against a gleaming brass serpent, double curved into a shiny letter “s.” At the side of the gate, attached to a crisscross of iron bars, was a large metal box, with a message etched across it: please leave all valuables and expensive personal effects here so that they can be, um, stored and given back to you at the end of eternity.

Marlo peered down the tunnel past the open gate. The passage grew darker in progressively blacker rings that formed a big, black, fathomless eye. She shivered.

“You’d better pick up the pace,” the demon jeered. “The Grabbit doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Marlo turned back toward the exploded, over-microwaved Hot-Pocket-of-a-man.

“The Grabbit?” she asked. “What’s a Grabbit?”

The demon laughed. “The Grabbit is your new vice principal. It’s what makes Rapacia such an . . . interesting place of torment for greedy, grasping little moppets such as yourself.”

The demon turned toward his stagecoach. The creepy white horse “nayed” with a deranged titter.

A wave of panic washed over Marlo.

“What am I supposed to do, you . . . you . . . freaky carcass thing?” Marlo shouted into the dark, her chest tight with fear.

The demon sneered over his sinewy shoulde

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Excerpted from Rapacia by Dale E. Basye
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.