Текст книги "Aloha from Hell"

Автор книги: Richard Kadrey

Соавторы: Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

I go to the door to look out again, and something crunches under my boot. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a little wooden umbrella.

Something has been bugging me ever since we came into this place. I look at the dusty hula girls against the wall and tiki lamps and it finally sinks in that this half-collapsed shit shack is the Bamboo House of Dolls. The roof is down over the bar, but the jukebox is where it belongs. The glass dome in front is broken. Dust lies around the interior in small dunes. The player is cued up to Martin Denny’s cover of “Miserlou.”

“A friend of mine is still in the asylum. Do you think there’s a chance if she’s still in there that she’s alive?”

“I couldn’t say, but it’s my understanding that whatever inmates remain in the asylum are of a more benign nature. The ones with strength and will escaped long ago.”

Something tickles my hands and legs. Drytts. Hell’s sand flies. They’re not dangerous, just disgusting. If they find you and you stay still too long, others will come and you’ll end up buried in them.

“We can’t stay here. You have one hour to get us to Eleusis.”

“One hour or what?”

He sounds defiant, like I hurt his feelings.

“Or I’m going to think you’ve been fucking me around this whole time. Don’t forget. I’m the one with the knife. Let’s start there and let our imaginations go.”

He nods at the back door.

“The quickest way is that rise a hundred yards off. It’s also the steepest and most dangerous.”

“Lead the way.”

“Is that an order?”

“A polite suggestion.”

THE RISE JACK was talking about is a whole intersection that’s been punched up out of the street at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. A couple of restaurants, a small shopping center, and a gas station hang in the air over our heads. The sinkhole below is so full of wrecked cars and motorcycles that it’s nearly level with the street. The junk stews in the same bloody sewage that was in the sinkhole outside Hollywood Forever.

I start climbing, hanging on to gas pumps at the bottom and moving up to the empty garage. When I make it around there, I pull myself up on metal parking-lot crash posts. I turn around to check, and see Jack slowly following me up. I don’t think he’s happy to be around me anymore. His whole theory about fate having a reason for tossing us into the same salad has evaporated. He looks like 1C; looks all he wants is to get through this without ending up in Tartarus with Mammon.

As Jack climbs, cracks form under his handholds. He’s followed me through the garage and is pulling himself up the crash posts. As he puts his weight on each post, the cracks under it widen. The last two posts wiggle like rotten teeth. My arm is wrapped around the solid base of the shopping-center sign. I move up to a newspaper vending machine that’s anchored in the sidewalk. Jack grabs onto the solid foundation of the shopping-center sign before the posts give way.

When he’s secure I crawl into the entrance of a liquor store. If you cut through the place, the back door will take us to the top of the rise.

The liquor store stinks inside. A thousand broken bottles of wine, vodka, beer, scotch, and soda have soaked through a mountain of junk food and the whole mess is piled against the front counter and front wall. The floor is sticky with dried booze and sugar, which is disgusting but helps me keep traction as I climb to the storeroom in back. Jack is right behind, baby-crawling past the empty shelves.

I’m at the back door when the shaking starts again. It’s so subtle that it’s almost not there. It feels like the muscle memory of a nasty dream. I thought it was an earthquake, but I think our climbing has upset the delicate balance that’s kept this slab of L.A. junk wilderness upright.

The shaking turns into a steady vibration. Two heavy bodies scraping against each other. The bottles beneath us clatter together. Softly and then like a truckload of xylophones being pushed down a long flight of stairs. It’s hard to hold on to the shelves as the tremors deepen. Parts of the ceiling fall down on us. There’s a sick liquid moment when the whole intersection shifts. Up ahead, the rear wall cracks and the rest of the ceiling starts coming down. The whole liquor store is sliding forward.

“Move your ass, Jack.”

I scramble past the shelves and kick off the top one, grabbing onto the door frame at the top. I climb to the back of the storeroom and pull on the door. The twisting building has jammed it shut. I grab the doorknob and shove the black blade into the metal lock. It pops out and clatters against the wall like a bell. The door swings open and I pull myself up onto the rear step.

Jack is stumbling over office furniture. Cracks open at my feet. The store is breaking away from this last anchor of ground.

The building growls and creaks like an iron elephant with the bends. It lurches. Slides left and down. Jack is pulling himself up on the door. I grab his wrist as a subterranean shriek of snapping concrete and sheering metal launches the liquor store down the way we came. It crashes into the garage and both structures shatter like hundred-ton dollhouses before disappearing into the sinkhole below. The slab sways like it’s bobbing in a bathtub and begins to fall. I grab Jack and jump to the roof of a dry cleaner’s beyond the edge of the slab.

I tuck and roll as we hit. Jack flops like a sockful of oatmeal thrown from a speeding car. When the section ofo te secti road hits, one of the cleaner’s walls collapses and we slide down the roof like worn-out kids at the worst amusement park in the world.

Jack and I lie on the broken pavement until the dust settles. We only slid a floor, so our asses are spanked and bruised but we’re pretty much intact.

Jack was right. Eleusis is right where he said it would be. There’s a twenty-foot stone wall topped with broken glass across the street. It’s exactly how I pictured it. It wouldn’t be Eleusis without the wall, Heaven’s vision of paradise in the abyss. Hell’s only gated community.

JACK IS STILL on his back when I get up and head for the wall. A couple of minutes later I hear him behind me.

“Thank you for saving me back there.”

“Don’t mention it. Really. Don’t.”

“I still think we were brought together to accomplish something bigger.”

“If everything works out, maybe I’ll get a chance to stop a war. That’s pretty big, don’t you think?”

Jack grunts.

“Anyway it’s all, as the big brains say, academic, Jack. I saved you from Mammon and you got me to Eleusis. We’re even-steven.”

Up ahead, a gutted city bus has jumped the curb and plowed into the stone wall. The damage is mostly blocked by the bus’s body, but through the windshield I can see where part of the wall has collapsed. I glance back at Jack. He looks nervous and a little confused. Is that a good look or a bad look for a serial killer? Whichever, I want to cut this freak show loose. I climb into the driver’s-side window and call back to Jack.

“Take it easy, man, and thanks for the memories.”

He yells something after me, but I don’t stop. I kick open the front door and head into the city.

Finally Eleusis.

Fuck me.

I wonder if Kasabian is watching me through the Codex? Is he eating pizza with Candy and giving her a blow-by-blow? He must be laughing his ass off by now.

Eleusis, God’s city in the Inferno, halfway across Hell from Pandemonium, is part of goddamn North Hollywood. Light Bringer, Lucifer’s biopic, was supposed to be shot in a Burbank soundstage just a couple of miles up the freeway. I’m still in L.A. This whole fucking world is L.A.

I’m almost there, Alice. I think. I hope. Who fucking knows anymore? I could walk a block and e2" block nd up back in Venice or the cemetery. We seem to have come in a big circle from Hollywood back to Hollywood. But it’s not the same Hollywood. And where I am can’t be entirely random. Mammon was taking me somewhere and Jack has been taking me somewhere and I don’t believe Mammon but I do believe Jack. He didn’t have any reason to lie. He thought we were partners, Hope and Crosby on The Road to Zanzibar.

This is what I get for putting my life in the hands of a crazy road spirit. Mustang Sally would love wandering around like I have. More streets, more roads, more crazy-ass tracks in the dirt for her to claim. You’re going to get a lot more salty peanuts than candy the next time we meet, Sally. No more sugar rushes for you.

I hear stones crunch and fall behind me. I’m not scared. I recognize Jack’s footsteps. Don’t get too close, Loony Tune. I really want to punch something right now.

On the other side of the rubble is a big intersection. Malls and parking on one side. A forties-style apartment house on another. The Scientology Celebrity Center nearby. There are bodies curled up under the dead trees and bushes where they’ve turned the celebrity center into a pagan flophouse. Most are dressed in hospital greens and bathrobes. A few are in straitjackets that look like they’ve been gnawed apart. There are even a few demented hellions with them. Refugees from the asylum. Finally something like good news. I’m getting closer.

There’s faint noise in the distance. Yelling. Gunshots. Maybe even engines revving. Someone is having fun somewhere in Eleusis.

I should probably wait and get the lay of the land but one of these Sleeping Beauties knows where to find the asylum. I step down from the rubble and head across the street to the parking lot.

I don’t get ten steps when Jack grabs me. I spin and come up with the knife under his chin.

“Do not even begin to try your Ripper act on me. I’m not one of your scared Whitechapel girlfriends. I’ll teach you what every slash and cut you gave them feels like. I felt them in the arena and they don’t feel good.”

Jack looks past me, shaking his head. He raises his hand and points.

“Look at the street,” he says.

I look over my shoulder, keeping the knife at his throat.

“I don’t see anything.”

“The sidewalks. The buildings. The windows. There are no proper joins. No right angles anywhere.”

“Why would there be? Downtown is getting shaken to death like Lassie with a rat.”

“It’s not the tremors, sir. Look across the street at where the pavement is falling away.”

ight="0" width="12" align="left">“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”

I look to where he’s pointing. The corner by the apartment building is shattered and sinking in the middle. The soil under the street is a mix of black mud and red muck.

“We’re standing on a suicide road,” he says. “The blood tide rises from beneath and eventually everything above drops down into it. This entire street could become a sinkhole at any moment.”

I try to read him to see if he’s bullshitting me. He looks as calm as can be expected with a knife at his throat.

“Then what are all these sleepyheads doing here?”

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.

I hear a hound right behind me. It’s scraping and clattering like it’s taken heavy damage, but it’s gaining on me. I cut to the side, hoping the huge thing’s momentum will carry it past. It does and it runs right into a support post on the side of a house. I see it just before it happens and cut back into the street so I don’t get crushed. I outrun the wall. Too bad I can’t outrun the falling debris. Something clips me right above my left ear and that’s all she wrote. Hello pavement. I love you, pavement. I think I’ll stay here a while.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes a billowing black snake is crawling over me. Its belly is a furnace and its body is the whole sky and it will take the rest of eternity to pass. I can wait. If this universe burns, I have the other one that Muninn gave me in my pocket. Let the show roll on.

I WAKE UP flat on my back and moving. I’m on a flatbed with heavy wire mesh over the top. It’s being towed by a Unimog. Someone shifts and grinds the truck’s gears. There are maybe eighteen Hellions back here with me. Some sitting up. Some on their backs. Others are leaking clear blood where they were ripped open by big hellhound jaws. I recognize some of them. They’re the Hellions that were running from the hounds.

The Unimog hits a bump and one of the leaking Hellions blips out of existence.

Someone says, “That was a good trick back there with your na’at.”

I turn my head so I’m looking up. There’s a smiling Hellion looking down at me.

“So good I coldcocked myself with a brick,” I say.

Like a lot of Hellions, he looks like a spiky horned toad after some Hollywood plastic surgery. Slim down the cheeks and neck. A chin implant that gives him a long horse face. He’s bruised and battered. It looks like the beat-down took his stubby horns, too. But his big white canines are still there. Those really hurt when they dig into you. Trying to get a Hellion off when he’s got a good hold of you with his choppers is like trying to coax a moray eel into a round of minigolf with knock-knock jokes.

I rub the side of my head. There’s sticky blood in my hair. I pull the hood back up, covering up the blood. I touch my face. Good. Mammon’s skin is still there.

I lean on my elbows and look up front. The flame job and animal skulls wired to the front of the truck look familiar. This is the same damned posse that’s been chasing Jack and me since Pandemonium. The saps caught me and they don’t even know it. If I wasn’t flat on my back being hauled around suicide roads in a wire-mesh chicken coop to who the fuck knows where, I’d feel like a real winner right now.

“Where’s the guy I was with? A damned soul.”

“Oh, him,” the Hellion snickers. “He seemed like a nice guy. When you were out cold, he stole your bag and ran off.”

I feel around for the leather satchel with my face in it. It’s gone.

“A real nice guy,” snickers the Hellion.

I reach into my coat for Mammon’s flask of Aqua Regia, but it’s not there. The little prick even stole my booze. Now he really has to die.

I should have cut Jack loose the moment we saw Eleusis. I should have let the sinkhole take him. The goddamn angel in my head softens me up at those moments. Every time I think we’ve found a balance point, it shifts its weight one sneaky gram at a time until it’s standing straight and I’m flailing around like a blind man on black ice. I will not let God’s little bootlicker win. I’m a nephilim, you haloed fuck. You’re part of me and you better learn to take the bad, me, with the good, you, or I swear I’ll put a double barrel to my head and do a Hemingway. Then we’ll see which one of us is left to Mr. Clean the wall.

“I’m Berith,” says the Hellion. “Who are you?”

Shit. For fifty points, name a Hellion I haven’t killed.

“Ruax,” I say. I wait to hear “Ruax is dead” or “He’s my brother-in-law,” but Berith just nods.

I sit up and lean against the wire-mesh enclosure.

“Where are we headed?”

“No idea. Jail I suppose.”

A Hellion with a mangled arm pipes up.

“Then back to Pandemonium. We’re so fucked.”

Berith looks out at the road.

“I don’t want to think about that.”

The truck rolls steadily, but it’s not in a rush to get anywhere. The posse up front is passing bottles around. I don’t suppose they’d be too keen on sharing with us prisoners. Maybe I can put my fist through the mesh and ask one nicely with my boot on his throat.

I get up and grab hold of a section of the fence. And promptly land on my back, feeling like someone just handed me a glass of whiskey with a thousand-volt chaser.

Berith laughs.

“Neat trick, eh? One of the Malebranche’s hexes. You can touch the walls of your cell all you want, but the moment you come at it with attitude, well, you see what happens.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“We’re all going to be dead soon. We need to have a few laughs along the way.”

I put my hand on the fence. Nothing happens. Holding on to it, I pull myself to my feet. We’re past all the houses and apartments and into a wider main street. Somewhere around Western maybe. Lots of burned-out buildings, but with a little something extra. My face.

Wanted posters offering a hefty reward cover every building, signpost, and bus kiosk still standing.

I guess someone figured out that Mammon and his staff are missing. Mason will know who did it, but that’s still goddamn fast to get posters plastered all over the place. Even with all the map games this place has been playing on me, the angel, who’s better at these things than I am, is sure we haven’t been here more than a day. And how does Mason even know I’m heading for Eleusis and not wandering the streets of Pandemonium like the Flying Dutchman? Jack couldn’t have made it back yet and ratted me out. With my face in a bag he can claim he killed me and get the reward. The bastard will be drinking mai tais and eating prime rib before I get near the asylum.