He looks at me like he’s trying to teach a few first words to a particularly dumb parrot.
“These are the only safe parts of the city. Thieves and raiders won’t come down here.”
“ ‘Safe’ is a pretty loose term around here.”
“Not for this sad lot. It’s hide here or end up skewered.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m not anxious to go any farther.”
“No one asked you to come this far.”
“Have a wander on a suicide road and you could truly die down here.”
“Are you still here, Jack? I didn’t see you there.”
I put the knife away and head to the parking lot across the street. As soon as I step into the intersection, I see that Jack was telling the truth. The pavement crunches under my boots like an eggshell suspended over quicksand. An image of Alice dead down here and stuck in the Limbo between Heaven and Hell flashes in my head. I hear Medea Bava’s voice: Alice was ours.
No. She wasn’t, you old witch. I would have known.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
I push it all into the dark. Let the angel explain it to her. He’s Mr. Sensitive. Medea will like him.
It’s one thing for me to know that Jack was telling the truth and another for Jack to know I know it. I keep going. If I step lightly, the worst that happens is I sink an inch or so into the road at the weak spots. I don’t look back or acknowledge Jack. The last thing I want is to owe him any more favors. No2" e favort that ignoring him means anything. Halfway across the street, I hear him behind me. It sounds like he’s trying to crush wine out of cornflakes.
“Stay the hell away from me, Jack. This road won’t hold if we bunch up.”
That was the wrong thing to say. He thinks I’m leaving him on the suicide road. I can hear him hurrying to catch up with me.
The road goes snap, crackle, pop and drops a few inches. Cracks shoot out from under us like black lightning. I run for the sidewalk. I sink lower into the road with each step. The lower I sink, the more the sewage muck tries to suck me backward and down into it. By the time I hit the sidewalk, it’s like I’m doing some kind of hick aerobics, stumbling like a pig farmer through shit while trying to get my knees up high for a real Jane Fonda workout. Feel the burn, Jethro.
The corner of the sidewalk crumbles as I jump from the muck, but a couple of steps in, it holds. I finally turn around and there’s Jack. Up to his knees in blood and mud. It’s where he belongs. Still dreaming of knives and all the women no one knows about because he dumped them like fish food into the drink. Fuck him. Let him go.
But I know the look on his face. It’s what I looked like when I fell from the sky into Pandemonium. It’s a feeling way beyond fear because your brain can’t get hold of it enough to be afraid. You want to be afraid. Afraid would be a hundred times better than this. This is total fucking incomprehension at what’s happening and it’s all happening to you. It’s being sane one second and stark raving spiders-tunneling-their-way-out-from-under-your-skin insane the next.
I kneel by the edge of the corner far enough back so I know the ground is solid and I hold out my hand. It’s the least I can do. Literally the least.
Jack scrambles for it in a panicked stumbling slog, sinking faster now that he sees a lifeline. He’s almost up to his waist by the time he reaches the corner.
“Help me!” he yells. I move my hand half an inch closer.
He’s practically swimming when he reaches the corner. Goddammit. He gets close enough to grab a couple of my fingers. I close my hand around his and pull. It’s the very least I can do. I’m amazed and a little pissed off when he swings a leg onto the sidewalk. I let go and let him get out the rest of the way on his own. I look over at the celebrity-center bushes where the asylum refugees have been passed out. They took off. They’re crazy. Not stupid. The street was sinking. I lean back against the low wall around the mall and look up at the black boiling sky. Are you explaining to Candy for the five-hundredth time what an asshole I am, Kasabian? Is she pissed at me for saving this walking, talking piece of shit? Candy wouldn’t have done it. She’d have put her boot on Jack’s head and helped him down under the muck. And I would have loved her for it.
Panting and stinking like sewage and rotten fish, Jack pulls himself onto the sidewalk and collapses. I light a Maledic thht a Mation.
“Stay over there, Jack. You smell like what comes out of Moby-Dick after a truck-stop burrito.”
He just lies there gasping and trembling like a trout tossed on land by a passing boat.
I smoke for a couple of minutes, until Jack stops shaking.
“You scared off all my crazies, you know. I was going to get them to take me to the asylum. Now they’re gone. Do you know where it is? Be very careful how you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it and I’m going to feed you back into the muck face-first.”
He points to a dome on top of a hill that’s mostly mud and dead grass. Huts and lean-tos made of scrap lumber, flattened aluminum cans, and drywall from the asylum flow from the top of the hill and down the sides like junkyard lava. Looks like a lot of the crazies had it together enough to escape, but not enough to cut the apron strings and leave home.
I shake my head. I smoke.
Maybe this jigsaw-puzzle L.A. is God’s payback for burning Eden. In the old days, when I was killing for Azazel down here, I hardly ever thought about the guy. Now I can’t get him out of my head. He’s like the high school sweetheart you moan about whenever you’ve had a few too many highballs. You don’t want to think about her. In fact, you never think about her until you’ve poisoned your brain with umbrella drinks. Then she’s one big whiny question mark in your life. Where did it all go wrong, baby?
Only God and I never went steady. I barely thought of him in the world and only thought of him Downtown because in the brief time Mom sent me to Sunday school, they taught me that he was a God of love and forgiveness. Just what the doctor ordered. Forgive me for all the scams and games and shenanigans and rain down that love on me or at least call me a cab. Even Hitler got to die before climbing into the coal cart. Nothing. Nada. Turns out when I reached into the hat, I didn’t pull out the shiny happy Sunday school God of Love. I got the Old Testament God of wrath. Cities turned to salt. Newborns killed in their cribs. Twin Peaks canceled when it was getting good again. No one came to save my charbroiled ass. Just like Mason. But ever since then I think the big man has had his eye on me, slipping me a rubber cigar every now and then. Like right now.
Where Jack is pointing is the Griffith Park Observatory. James Dean shot part of Rebel Without a Cause there. Any tourist with cab fare can visit the damn place. Back home it would take me an hour to get there and back to the hotel, where Candy and I could break more furniture. But no. I have to dodge sinkholes, earthquakes, Hellions, and serial killers to get somewhere that in any sane universe I could take the bus to. I wish I could say, “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” but the boat sailed on that one a long time ago.
I take a drag on the Malediction.
“Hey, Jack. What were you before you became a monster?”
He pushes himself onto his knees, stands, and tries to wipe the mud and blood off his clothes.
“An upholsterer,” he says.
“Seriously?”
He looks at me.
“Yes.”
“I guess ‘Ripper’ sounds better in the papers than ‘Jack the Ottoman Repairman.’ ”
He ignores me, knocking mud off his feet until you can see his shoes. Maybe he’s right. Who needs Heaven when Hell makes so much more sense?
“Okay, Jack. This is where we part ways. I’m heading straight up that hill. You can go anywhere you like, but I’d stay out of Pandemonium for a while. They’ll have probably noticed they’re down one general.”
“You can’t just abandon me here.”
“I think I just did. You’re in paradise. It’s a world of shit, but it’s better than being in a sardine can for the next million years, isn’t it?”
“Can I at least come with you? You won’t have to take care of me.”
“I just saved you a second time. I don’t care what you do. You want to follow? It’s no skin off my ass, but get in my way once, and I’ll kill you just like I’d kill any Hellion.”
He says, “Understood,” but I’m already moving.
Aloha from Hell
I RUN AT a steady pace, but I don’t sprint. The street is straight, but there’s plenty that can come at me from side streets and the scorched foliage around the old buildings. I let the angel out a little to expand my senses and look for trouble. Even this far off the suicide road, the land under the buildings isn’t stable. Walls sag on old apartment houses and wooden Victorians have their walls held up with tree trunks and wooden power poles cut to length.
The palms that line both sides of the road burn like the ones on Sunset, turning the dark street orange and brighter than streetlights would.
There are more pagan souls on the street as I go deeper into Eleusis, away from the wall and the suicide road. They duck under cars and cower in burned-out buildings when they see me coming and I remember that I’m wearing alef;m wear Hellion face. Thanks for reminding me. It still burns a little and it’s starting to itch as it heals. One more level of bullshit to deal with, but at least it’s clearing the streets.
A block ahead, one of the big apartment buildings has collapsed across the road. I slow down as I get closer. Plenty of places to hide in all that rubble. A Hellion dressed in army-issue pants and a red leather jacket sprints around the corner, sees me, and hauls ass my way. I grab the na’at from my coat. Alice is right up the hill and I’m not stopping now for anyone. I twist my wrist so the blade pops out at the na’at’s tip. The Hellion is female, soon to be a dead female. As she gets closer she barks at me in frantic Hellion. She’s out of breath and her voice is rough. It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s saying and then I get it.
“Run, asshole!”
A second later more of them come tearing ass into the street. Maybe twenty of them. Like the woman in half a uniform, they’re deserters, though they don’t look like they have enough gear or sense to be raiders. Just a bunch of noncoms who’d rather live on what they can steal from empty homes and liquor stores than get stomped by God’s golden hordes. I can sympathize. They’re running straight at me, but from the looks on their faces, they’re not stopping anytime soon.
I sprint toward them, the na’at up and out. I’m not letting a few purse snatchers and shoplifters get in my way. They part like the Red Sea when they see me coming. I pick up speed. If there are more raiders on the other side, they won’t be expecting me. I can see Griffith Observatory from here, so I’m not heading down any streets so God can get his rocks off by dumping me in Malibu or Disneyland.
A metallic roar fills the air and echoes off the buildings. Telltale mechanical clicking after that, like a thousand clocks ticking out of time. A few last deserters make it around the collapsed house just long enough to see freedom before being snatched back by steel claws like a fistful of butcher knives.
They’re bunched together when they make it around the building. All the light shows is a mass of gracefully moving shoulders and flexible backs so they look like a clockwork flood. A Hellion dressed in priest’s robes gives up and stops running. The hellhounds don’t even slow down. The Hellion disappears into a wet spray of bones and thick, clear blood.
Like on a synchronized mechanical cue, half the hellhound pack rears up and attacks the raiders from the back. Ambush predators. They get their steel teeth into the prey’s throat and choke them or drive them headfirst into the ground and snap their necks. Hellhounds are strange and beautiful things. Candy would dig them. I’d love them more if I were seeing them from a little farther away. Like, say, France. The part of the pack not having thieves for lunch breaks from the larger pack and heads down my way. I look like a Hellion. To their bottled peanut brains I’m part of the gang they’re turning to chum. The strategy in this situation is simple. Run the other way.
I keep the na’at open. Waving it at these clockwork poodles would be like trying to scare King Kt">scare Kong with a lit cigarette, but it’ll clear the street of slow Hellions if they get in my way.
Jack’s been following me after all. He’s in the middle of the street a block down. I think he’s hypnotized by the hounds. He’s probably never seen them at work before. When he sees me coming, it snaps him out of it and he starts running. He’s not fast enough. I pass him easily, thinking of the old joke. When you’re running from a bear, you don’t have to be the fastest runner. You just have to be faster than the guy behind you.
I hear Jack behind me whining and shouting something. I don’t look back. I can hear the hounds’ clockwork legs and jaws closing in. They’re too fast. I’m not going to make it.
I cut from the street and onto the sidewalk. We’re not back to the suicide road, but maybe we can make our own killer road right here.
I slow down just a hair. Let the hounds get a bead on me and close in. I hold out the na’at. If I’m wrong, this is going to be a messy way to go, but it’s better than old age or being poisoned by bad clams.
We’re near a block of half-collapsed houses. As the hounds close in, I hold out the na’at and let it rip through the support poles holding the walls up. At first nothing happens, but then there’s a crash behind me, followed by another and another. It sounds like the whole block is coming down, but I’m not slowing down to look.