Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim)

by Richard Kadrey

  Trees have collapsed on roofs and cars, like the ground simply couldn’t support them anymore. Cracks have ripped homes in half. A deep geologic rumble shakes the ground under my feet and the two broken halves of Gower move a few inches in different directions. Fuck me. These aren’t cracks. They’re fault lines. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate everything?

  On the side streets some of the new faults must have been exposed for a while because locals have strung them together with half-assed rope and plank and bridges. Idiot militias toss rocks and spears across the chasms, fighting to see who gets to take the crossing tolls.

  Sunset Boulevard looks like it was blowtorched from below. As far as I can see everything is gutted, fried, or melted in both directions. The only things still standing are the palm trees. They burn like votive candles in a dark nave, throwing more shadows than light. Smoldering fronds fall like burning snow.

  THERE’S A RIOT on Hollywood Boulevard.

  When I crawled out of Hell eight months ago, I’d been surprised at how the boulevard had become a monochrome wilderness. The street was dead quiet, like someone had dropped a blanket over it. All empty-eyed street kids and vacant storefronts. There’d been plenty of traffic, but even the cars sounded like they were running on cotton candy instead of gas. Something had sucked the life out of the place. Maybe the Kissi. I still don’t know. This version of Hollywood Boulevard is livelier, but I’m already longing for the muffled gray-and-white version.

  The mob is a punch-drunk mix of Hellions and damned souls. This isn’t fun, let’s-turn-the-Dumpster-over rioting. It’s the kind where you go at each other with knives and pipes, fighting over food and water and drugs.

  I’ve only walked a quarter mile from the cemetery and I can already tell that the place is as bad off as Kasabian said. Lucifer would never let this happen. If Mason had any goddamn sense, he wouldn’t either. When you’re riding herd on a kingdom of killer Hellions, the first thing you do is make sure they’re well fed and at least half hammered most of the time. The way this bunch is tearing up butcher shops and stores, they’re neither. (Yes, Hell has stores and bars. It might be Hell, but it’s better than a dry county in Mississippi.) And who let all the damned souls run wild? I saw some crazy shit when I was trapped Downtown, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a soul in Pandemonium that wasn’t tortured, locked up, or on a leash. If this really is Pandemonium. If it’s not, where the fuck am I?

  A couple of hundred Hellion gendarmes take positions at opposite ends of the street, surrounding the crowd. Hell is all about power games and influence. Lucifer didn’t like too much power concentrated in anyone’s hands, so Pandemonium has two police forces with overlapping territories. And they hate each other. Instead of slowing the riot, the cop gangs smash into it like two hundred icebreakers. With their riot guns and heavy body armor, they rip through the crowd to claim as much of the swag as they can for their side.

  I don’t stick around to see which side wins because I couldn’t possibly give less of a fuck. I hope they slaughter each other fast and get out of my way.

  I hunch my shoulders, tug the hood, and head back to Gower. Maybe if I grabbed a cop, I could twist him around in interesting ways until he told me where Eleusis is, but seeing as how there are two hundred of them, that’ll have to wait for later. What I want now is to cut back to Sunset and do an end run around this particular shit storm. If this is really a fucked-up version of L.A., then Max Overdrive isn’t far from here. I can hole up until the riot blows over and figure out a next move.

  “Where you going?”

  A hand shoots out from the alcove of an out-of-business sex-toy shop and latches onto my arm. The Hellion the hand is attached to is dressed in layers of ragged coats, tunics, and greasy shirts. A Hellspawn hobo.

  I don’t say anything. I stare and hope the death glamour holds.

  The bum says, “Got anything from the shops you want to share?”

  “Nothing for you, rummy.”

  He grins and licks his lips, showing off a jumble of craggy gray teeth, like someone hammered broken cement into his gums. Maybe that’s how God keeps Heaven’s other angels in line. A better dental plan.

  “Got a smoke?” he asks.

  Something squirms under his grimy face. It looks like my glamour isn’t the problem. It’s his. Too bad I’m so slow on the uptake. By the time I recognize what he is, he has something very pointy and very sharp against my throat. It’s double-pronged. Probably what on earth they’d call a Heretic’s Fork. This fucker isn’t a regular Hellion. He’s a Malebranche, one of thirteen horned bastards that Lucifer kept as his private gestapo and interrogation squad. Even other Hellions hate the Malebranche. My back still hurts from Rizoel’s sword. The last thing I want is to go one-on-one with a professional flesh ripper.

  I say, “Looks like you’ve hit hard times.”

  “You’ve hit worse unless you have something I want.”

  The riot seethes along in its merry way behind us, but the Malebranche and me are in our own cozy little world in the alcove. A bottle breaks above us and we both reflexively turn our heads to avoid the flying glass, but it was random. Even though no one is paying any attention to us, I keep getting hit from behind, which pushes my throat down onto the fork. I hope not enough to break the skin. Human blood would be a dead giveaway.

  I look at the Malebranche’s dirty face. His skin is bright red under the grime.

  “Which one are you? Rubicante?”

  His laugh is high and a little frantic.

  “Oh my. Am I still that famous?”

  “It’s your pretty face,” I say. “Maybe I have something for you after all.”

  I reach into my pocket, feeling Rubicante push the sharp prongs harder against my neck.

  “Easy, friend. I wouldn’t want to slip.”

  He gives a quick flick of his head at my hand.

  “Bring that hand out slowly and bring out something tasty with it or I’ll have to pop out one of your eyes for a snack.”

  The alcove is a dim place and the riot is reflected clearly in the glass behind Rubicante’s head. I feel around in my pocket for a minute, trying to buy some time.

  “Any day now, friend,” he says.

  I have to do this just right. Or completely wrong. That sometimes works.

  I come out with the half pack of Maledictions and Rubicante’s eyes go wide. I hold them out and he takes his eyes off me. I drop the pack and he watches it fall all the way to the ground. I glance at the reflection in the glass door and throw myself out of the way.

  A riot cop tossed from the crowd smashes into the Malebranche and they go flying through the shop’s glass door.

  I leave Rubicante and the cop playing Twister in the sex shop, grab the Maledictions, and run for Sunset.

  It feels like the fall reopened the wound on my back. I don’t want to smell even vaguely alive, so I whisper a little hoodoo and crank up the fumes from my corpse hoodie until I stink like the Dumpster behind a used-ass store. This is going to be a pleasant way to travel.

  I’m going to have a hell of a time finding Eleusis if the whole place is as twisted as it was back then. Not that that matters if I’ve been napping for twenty years, Mason has already won, and this really is L.A.

  Sunset is as scorched and sterile as a nuke test site. Some of the burning palm fronds fall and others float over the buildings, carried away by weird convection currents.

  I stand on the corner and let the angel out of the attic long enough to expand my senses and do a kind of quick minesweep to see if there’s anything alive or lurking in the burned-out buildings. Sunset is dazzling through the angel’s eyes. The smoldering street with its torched trees is like a line of suns down a glory road of trembling atoms and subatomic particles.

  The first time I saw Hell, it was a very different story. I was dragged down through Mason’s floor and landed in a naked heap on a main street in Pandemonium. I must have been out cold for a while, and when I came to,
the first thing that hit me was the stink. Nothing human smelled like that. It wasn’t just waste. It was filth that had been packed, compressed, and locked away for a million years. Hell is the bottom of the universe and Heaven isn’t going to let Lucifer pollute the rest of existence with Hellion shit and candy wrappers. So they still bury it in the deep, deeper, deepest caverns in their craptacular kingdom, where it sits, cooks, and festers in its own juices until the end of time.

  The angel gives the all clear. I shove it out of the way, but I don’t lock it up. Unfortunately, I’m going to need all of me to get through this, and that includes my divine squatter.

  I head west down Sunset so I can cut up Las Palmas to Max Overdrive. The angel better be right that it’s clear down here. I’m not above self-trepanation.

  I can still see the Hollywood Boulevard riot when I cross Vine Street. And Cahuenga.

  Getting down Sunset is harder than the road by the cemetery. The fault lines are wider and the broken pavement is pushed up higher and at steeper angles. Sinkholes have opened around whole blocks, forming skyscraper islands with sewage moats. Maybe that’s why everything feels so wrong. I’ve only gone a couple of blocks but I swear it feels like I’ve been walking for-fucking-ever. Who or whatever built this L.A. got the proportions all wrong. The buildings are right, but some of them are in the wrong place. The Cinerama Dome still looks like a giant golf ball dropped to the earth by aliens, but it’s on the wrong side of the street. Some of the side streets that used to cut across Sunset have twisted around like asphalt taffy and now run parallel.

  That is not good news. It means that even if someone tells me where Eleusis is, I might not be able to find it in these deranged goddamn streets. And I can’t even use maps. Lucifer was such a control freak that most of the maps you find Downtown are wrong. He didn’t want the riffraff knowing exactly which roads led where or which were wide enough to hold rebel troops. That means I’m going to need a tracker who can walk and take me to the doorstep of Alice’s asylum.

  A hell of a quake must have hit the concrete island ahead of me. An entire block of gleaming new office buildings has fallen in on itself and half disappeared down a massive sinkhole. The acres of broken glass and steel reflect the burning street like the last ice floe at the end of the world.

  I check out Hollywood Boulevard at the next corner. It looks clear and there’s no noise that way. I run the whole way.

  Seeing the Boulevard here, it’s easy to understand why the crowd is tearing things up down the street. The place is picked clean. The ground floor of every building is gutted and burned. Bloody Hellions with broken limbs wander through the rubble looking for food, potions, or pills to make the world stop hurting. Damned souls are scattered all over the street staring into space like shell-shocked children. Finding themselves free but still in Hell was too much for their already tortured minds. They don’t react when I walk by, but the Hellions see me and scatter like roaches into the empty buildings. The universe has entered a new level of weirdness when Hellions are the ones afraid to be caught out after dark.

  Half a block ahead is the only intact, well-lit building on the whole street. When I get closer I understand why.

  Praise God and pass the ammunition. Now I understand. Now I know everything.

  Peter Murphy was wrong when he said Bela Lugosi’s dead. He’s not. I just found his retirement home.

  It stands where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre should be. I mean it’s still the Chinese Theatre—all supersaturated reds and golds—but it’s a different version. It’s twice as big as it should be. It’s so wide that it takes up half the block and the golden pagoda roof looks like it’s high enough to rip open stray blimps. A fifty-foot metal electrified fence marked every few yards with lightning-bolt warning signs surrounds the place.

  I know this place. It doesn’t look anything like it looked like in my Downtown. There it was a kind of King Arthur’s castle, but with soft and twisted, almost organic lines, like it hadn’t been carved from the rock but had grown there. This place might not be General Mammon’s palace the way I’m used to seeing it, but his standard is suspended between the pagoda spires so everyone in Hell or L.A. or Mordor or wherever the fuck I am can see it.

  This is what I’ve been looking for. The answer to all of life’s little questions.

  When Mustang Sally said that using the Black Dahlia to cross over was easy but hard, I thought she was talking about the dying part. Now I think she was really talking about this. It’s why I woke up under that strange version of the freeway. Crossing over with the Black Dahlia isn’t a true one-hundred-percent-normal crossing. It’s a Convergence. A psychic melding of the place the traveler left and the place where the traveler is going. It’s a smart work-around to keep Mason from noticing me tiptoeing Downtown, because even though I’m truly in Hell, it’s not exactly the one where he’s expecting me. Yeah, I know. These metaphysical states and dimensions of being give me a headache, too.

  If you know the Convergence is coming, it can be pretty useful. Say you want to travel fast through another city or parallel dimension. You do a Convergence and you can find your way around the new place by following the layout of the city you left. Unless the new place has decided to sprout fault lines, rearrange its streets, and generally fall the fuck apart.

  Right this second I don’t know if being in a Convergence is a help or more bullshit in my way, but I’m sure of one thing. Someone inside knows where Eleusis is and I’ll kill them one by one until someone tells me.

  I get out the na’at and eye a nice shadow at the corner of the palace. Chances are that Mason is expecting me to use the Room to get into Hell and not move around inside it. I’ll know in a minute. I step into the shadow and come out just inside Mammon’s palace.

  No alarms go off. I’m alone in a giant movie-theater lobby. They must buy carpet by the mile to cover this floor. The concession stand is the size of Vegas. I bet the screen is as big as the Rockies. Wish I had time to catch a feature.

  It hits me right about now that even though my old slave master Azazel brought me to Mammon’s tree fort plenty of times, this mutant version might not be laid out exactly the same way. Only one way to find out. This new version is too weird to navigate normally and I don’t feel like going on walkabout. I step back into a shadow. I’ll take my chances with the Room and open the Door of Fire, the door that always leads to chaos and violence.

  I come out behind a pillar in a circular room that looks like what I imagine the Oval Office is like, only bigger and with meaner monsters. Across from me are floor-to-ceiling windows with a Cadillac-size wooden desk between them. There’s a fireplace to the right and expensive-looking couches and coffee tables scattered around the place. I halfway expect Remington cowboy sculptures and a giant flat-screen playing football or wrestling or some other macho backslapping good old boy to inject just a little more testosterone into the place. I don’t know if I’m in Hell or the CEO’s office at Halliburton.

  Mammon and five of his officers are clustered around a worktable in the middle of the room. All of them are in sharp suits, but none of the officers is stupid enough to have a suit sharper than Mammon’s. The general wears a large gold inverted cross on a chain around his neck. It’s probably a war medal, but it makes him look like Sammy Davis Jr. in his late Rat Pack period.

  The worktable in front of them projects a floating 3-D map laying out different routes around the universe from Downtown to Heaven. It looks like a schematic of the coolest ride since Space Mountain.

  I want to go right at them, but I need to lay out a little hoodoo first. Unfortunately, a good hex needs to be spoken out loud. Black juju likes to be mixed in with a little sputter and spit. However, it’s easy to toss off white magic inside your head. Instead of wishing Mammon’s backup band ill will, I do the opposite and throw a protective shield up around the entire room. Aside from saving them from torch-carrying peasants, it’ll soundproof the place and keep any nosy guards from getting in.


  Quiet as I can, I get out the na’at, snap out the business end like a bullwhip, and give it a little twist so it goes rigid. It hits the closest Hellion at the base of his skull and comes out his extremely surprised mouth. The officer next to him goes for his shoulder holster. Bad idea. He’s left his front exposed. I bounce the sharp end of the na’at off the worktable and flick it up, catching him just above his crotch, slicing him open to his chest. He has an excellent view of his Hellion guts spilling onto the floor before he follows them down. I step back into a shadow as the rest of the crew tries to process what just happened. In a brilliant tactical maneuver, the three remaining officers decide to rush the spot where I’m standing just as I’m not there anymore.

  I come out of a shadow behind Mammon, pull the black blade, and pig-stick him in the spine about six inches above his waist. His legs suddenly stop working and he smacks onto the floor like an Easter ham.

  One of Mammon’s brighter officers figured out my shadow trick and stayed close enough to Mammon to jump me.

  She’s a huge red-haired Hulk Hogan beast trying to get the barrel of her .50 pointed anywhere on my body. She gets off a couple of shots as we wrestle, but she can’t hit me without hitting herself, so she’s just blowing holes in the floor. I drive the na’at’s pommel into her temple and knock the gun out of her hand while she’s still cross-eyed.

  Two officers, one in a slick black Hugo Boss and one in a white ice-cream suit, take potshots at us, but they can’t really open up without hitting Mrs. Hogan. She lunges at me. I kick out at her, but she tagged me hard enough that I trip over a pricey antique chair and smack the back of my head into the wall. My brain feels like a Shamrock Shake. Mrs. Hogan is on her hands and knees, pulling a knife the size of a leg of lamb from under her suit jacket. Hugo Boss and the ice-cream man come in behind her, closing the distance so they can shoot me a hundred percent dead. I flick the na’at at the ceiling, knocking out one of the overhead lights. There’s a feeble shadow behind the chair I tripped over. It’s not much, but I dive for it just as a wave of bullets blast fist-size chunks of polished wood and plaster from Mammon’s office wall.