Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim)

by Richard Kadrey

  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 a 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 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 minigo
lf 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.

  I hear cheering voices. There must be a lot of them if they’re loud enough to hear over the Unimog’s rumble and grinding gears. A couple of more blocks down, there’s a stadium. It’s not as big as the L.A. Coliseum. It’s more like the place well-off parents pay for so their sprogs can play soccer on a regulation field that’s not full of beer cans and gopher holes. From the tone of the crowd, they’re not playing in there.

  We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane driveway behind the stadium and roll alongside what looks like a holding area for the posse’s prisoners. Big wire-mesh pens and RVs with blacked-out windows hold dozens of dirty, frightened Hellions. The fact that they’re being held in a stadium tells me that the posse isn’t above having a little fun with their prisoners before they’re shipped back to Pandemonium.

  The truck stops. Six Hellions in SWAT body armor, carrying shotguns and homemade morning stars, hustle us off the flatbed and into the pens, where we have a clear view of the playing field.

  Some people have dreams where they show up for final exams in their underwear or for a course they didn’t know they were taking. Other people wake up in the middle of the ocean. There’s land in the distance, but no matter how hard they swim, they never get any closer. Me, I dream about the arena. Shrinks call these “anxiety dreams.” I call them road maps. They show you where you’ve been and where you’re headed. A dream about being lost at sea doesn’t mean you’re going to end up as an extra on Gilligan’s Island, but it probably means you’ve gone off track somewhere. For me it’s even simpler. I don’t dream in metaphors. When I dream about the arena, I’m really dreaming a dream about the arena.

  In my heart of hearts I’ve always known I wasn’t finished with the place. It’s like a drunk who goes on the wagon but decides to pitch his tent in the Jack Daniel’s parking lot. Yeah, he cleaned up, but he didn’t run very far from what made him a lush in the first place.

  Once I’d killed the other members of my old magic Circle and sent Mason Downtown, I should have walked away from the whole hoodoo world and become just another brain-dead civilian. Take a mail-order course in taxidermy or sell maps of the stars’ homes to tourists. Instead I hung around with Lurkers, renegade angels, and Jades. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to get back here. If the Bamboo House of Dolls didn’t have such a high-quality jukebox and Carlos didn’t make such good tamales, I would have been back here months ago and this would all be over with.

  All those dreams about tests and being lost and being back in the blood and the dust are just lines on a map. The elevation marks reveal that no matter how low you get, there’s always somewhere lower to fall.

  Some of the Hellions from the flatbed go right up to the fence to get a good look at the current fight, trying to convince themselves they’re not seeing what they’re seeing. Others, the ones with a firmer grip on reality, are at the far end of the pen puking and shitting themselves. They’re not in denial about what’s coming.

  The arena isn’t much to see. Just a flat soccer field with semis parked a hundred feet apart to mark the boundaries of the killing floor. Hellions and even a few pagan collaborators fill the stands between the trucks, drinking, cheering, and throwing bottles and rocks at the Hellion prisoners forced to fight each other. I shake my head. Lucifer wouldn’t have put up with the peanut gallery getting his arena floor messy. These small-time bullies have no class.

  I look around the stadium, not really paying attention to the current fight. There’s the unmistakable sound of metal smashing into meat and bone. The crowd cheers. The bone crunch comes again. A cheer. Then a bigger cheer. I go to the fence and look through. It looks like the Hellion who was to be chopped into McNuggets got the other fighter in the throat with a knife when he got too close. They both fall over and disappear. Cue the crowd. People drink and pay off wagers. It’s a party and they take their time about it.

  A few minutes later armored guards grab more prisoners from the pen. Berith is with them. He looks at me like he thinks I’m going
to do something about it. All I do is stay by the fence to watch. The guards walk the group out to the middle of the killing floor and hand them weapons. Every Hellion was a soldier once. They were all part of the rebel legions in Heaven, but that was a long time ago. In the arena the prisoners look at the rusty swords and shields in their hands like they’ve never seen anything like them before. That’s the lousy thing about shock. It makes you look stupid.

  I remember my first time in the arena. It wasn’t like this bumpkin retrofit. The arena in Pandemonium was built for blood sports and nothing else. It was like the Roman Colosseum, but clad in plates of bronze and ivory and hung with sculpted bone chandeliers over each entrance. It was full of false walls that could be moved to change the fighting floor. There were trapdoors and chutes where beasts and fighters could be lifted or shot into the arena in a few seconds. The crowds were connoisseurs of pain.

  My first fight was against a human soul. The arena bookers thought it would be a hoot to put the one living guy in Hell up against one of his dead brethren. The thing is, the guy I was up against was from one of the lowest regions, one reserved for child killers, so I didn’t exactly think of him as one of my brethren.

  I’d been in Hell long enough to have built up a thick skin of fury. I was still a circus attraction back then. The living freak to be passed around and used and gawked at like a pickled punk. And I was sure as shit a long way from being Sandman Slim.

  I went into the fight all teeth and claws and righteous idiot fury. It was the first time I used a na’at and I had no idea what to do with it. I can’t say I was scared going up against a real killer. I was too crazy for that, and when I did think about it, more than anything I was amazed at where my life had taken me. The unreality of Hell became even more unreal. That’s probably what saved me.

  The Kid Killer knew how to use blades and I didn’t. He gave me my first scars. Later they changed me, made me stronger, and I became a kind of living body armor. But that night in the arena, the slashes just hurt.