There are impressive cracks in the sides of some buildings. Like the houses, some are supported by power poles. Others by gas-station hydraulic lifts and broken-down backhoes. There are open cesspits on the side streets near piles of trash two stories high. That’s where most of the crazies and the pagans hang out, picking up and pocketing anything they can eat or trade. Cracks in the sidewalk ooze sewagey blood, but I don’t see any big sinkholes. That’s probably why everyone is bunched up in this part of town.
Being crippled like this isn’t going to make getting Alice out of the asylum any easier, but nowhere’s going to be safe when Mason starts his war. There’s no way around it. The trip is a package deal. I have to get Alice and I have to stop Mason. One doesn’t mean a goddamn thing without the other.
I keep touching my left side, looking for my missing arm, wondering if I made a mistake. Maybe I’m still lying on the street where the brick tagged me on the side of the head. Maybe Crab Man hit me with an illusion hex and my arm is still there. I swear I can feel my fingers move. But that’s just phantom limb syndrome. It’ll take a while for all the nerves that went to the arm to realize there’s nothing there and die. Maybe when I get home, Allegra can set me up with a big steel Iron Man mitt. That would scare the ugly off the baddest Lurkers. Sandman Slim, the cyborg nephilim.
The street is full of stalls, and raiders make the place almost look like regular Hell. But it’s not and I still don’t know where I am. It looks like Eleusis’s wall goes all the way around Griffith Park from the 101 on one side and the Golden State Freeway on the other. I can still see the Observatory asylum dead north. If someone around here had a cannon, they could shoot me straight up the hill and I’d be there. I need to find one of the tourist roads. If I tried climbing the damned hill through the trees, I’d still be going an hour after the universe ended. I need some elevation to get my bearings.
A few Kissi wander through the crowd. They trail raiders, making them jittery and paranoid and looking for a fight. They whisper to merchants who start screaming arguments with their customers. There’s one on a side street tossing lit matches into empty windows. Nothing’s caught yet, but give it time. I don’t dare try to scare them off. I don’t want to give myself away and I’m too weak to threaten them.
Right now the hard thing is keeping my head straight and my thoughts focused. Muninn’s egg isn’t going to last forever. I can feel an edge of pain in my arm already. Maybe that’s normal and maybe it’s a sign the egg is wearing off. This is the first time I’ve been dismembered. I’m not an expert. I stumble against a table. Booze, cigarettes, and bottles of potions clatter against each other. A few fall. I bend down like I’m helping pick things up, but I’m really trying to pocket a pack of Maledictions. The owner comes around the stall and yells at me, punctuating his point by kicking me on the left side, where I can’t do anything about it.
I come to a large intersection. Eleusis isn’t burning, but L.A. glows like coal and spits fire into the sky. I duck into a four-story parking garage. The bottom floor is set up like a squatter camp. There are pagans and crazies from up the hill, cook fires and tents. The place stinks from bodies and waste. I go up the ramp to the second floor. There are fewer people and no one bothers me. I keep climbing.
The third floor is trashed, almost like a bomb went off. Every inch is blackened and scorched. It doesn’t look like a bomb. More like a fire, one big enough and hot enough so it didn’t leave anything but half-melted car frames. I’m exhausted after walking from the stadium. I find a spot in the dark back by the elevators and lie down. The cool concrete feels good against my head. I’m glad Alice isn’t here to see me like this. It might shake her confidence in my knight-in-shining armor act.
The air is relatively clean up here, but I still get whiffs of the body stink from down below. One smell doesn’t belong—the overwhelming vinegar reek. I tilt up my head and Josef is standing on the melted frame of a MINI Cooper.
“This isn’t exactly the progress I was hoping to find,” he says.
“Get out of here, man. Someone’s going to see you.”
“So? Do you think any of the mob out there would be willing or able to do anything about it?”
“My point is, I don’t want to find out. No loose ends. Remember?”
I sit up and lean my back against the wall. Josef looks at my empty sleeve and shakes his head.
“You’re ridiculous. Crippled. Locked up by idiots and robbed by a dead psychopath.” He kicks some loose rocks from near his feet and uncovers a pair of crushed reading glasses. “We’re tired of waiting. We’re coming in now.”
“Be my guest.”
He picks up the glasses and holds them over his eyes, squinting through the lenses. They must not be his prescription. He makes a face and tosses them out over the wall.
“Aren’t you going to try and talk me out of it?”
“No. Be my guest. Pandemonium is that way and so are about ninety percent of Hell’s legions. If you and your friends think you can take on a million or so Hellion soldiers all by yourselves, be my guest.”
He leans in close, bringing his stink with him.
“You don’t think we can handle these Hellion idiots?”
“Maybe when there weren’t enough in one place for a decent tailgate party, but these boys have just about put the original rebel angel legions back together.”
“So? They lost their war in Heaven and now even Lucifer is gone. They’re weak.”
“Yeah, but there’s the other thing.”
“What?”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a pack of regular human cigarettes. Never count on a Kissi to give you what you really want. I light the cigarette with Mason’s lighter and pull the smoke deep into my lungs. It’s better than nothing and it helps cover up Josef’s smell.
“You said there was something else,” Josef says.
“Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel? They had a show on where a colony of little tiny red ants all got together and killed a full-grown wolf. See my point?”
“No.”
“Just because you’re the wolf at the top of the food chain doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. You and your pals might be able to wipe out the Hellions, but they won’t go down easy, and by the time you’re done, you’re going to be blind and crippled. That doesn’t sound like the big win to me.”
Josef takes a deep breath and turns his head to the sounds from the street.
“How much longer are we supposed to wait?”
“Just a few more hours. I need to get up this hill and then get General Semyazah. He’s the one guy who can turn this whole thing around.”
“He’s in Tartarus.”
“I know.”
“You think you can help him? How?”
“I’ll tell them I’m the pizza delivery boy. They’ll never suspect a thing.”
“Don’t be cute. No one’s ever returned from Tartarus.”
“Maybe they were going the wrong way.”
His expression changes to genuine interest.
“You know a secret way out?”
I drag off the cigarette. After Maledictions, regular human cigarettes are like inhaling the steam off a cup of herbal tea.
“If you’re so concerned about winning this thing, why don’t you go and do your job and let me do mine? If I’m not back in Pandemonium in, say, twelve hours, you’ll know I’m stuck in Tartarus and I’m not coming back. After that, you can do what you want, but give me the time to do this the smart way.”
He gets closer, picks a bit of lint off my shoulder, and tosses it away.
“This is the last time. The tide is rising and you can’t hold back the sea. Besides, you’re not an easy man to trust.”
“Yeah, but nobody else wants to play our reindeer games, so we’re stuck with each other.”
Josef fingers my empty coat sleeve.
“How are you going to pull this off with onl
y one arm?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Meaning you’re going to let your ego ruin everything.”
“It’s my plan. It’s mine to blow.”
“No, it’s not.”
It’s easy to forget that Kissi are a kind of angel. A factory-second, thrown-in-the-Dumpster-and-left-in-a-landfill angel, but still an awesomely powerful creature.
When Josef grabs me there isn’t a damned thing I can do to fight back. I’m one-handed, off balance, sick, and dizzy. He throws me onto my knees, pulls off my coat, and takes out the black blade. I try to back away, but he grabs my empty left sleeve and pulls me back like a fish on a reel. He slices through the cauterized stump of my arm, reopening the wound. My knees buckle. I hold on to him with my one good hand, trying to get my fingers around his throat or push him off. Something. Anything. He shrugs me off and pins me against the wall. With the black blade he cuts an X on the palm of my right hand and presses my bloody palm to the arm stump.
I’m sicker than ever. Not blacking-out sick or throwing-up sick, but lost in space. Like my body and brain have given up trying to register things like up and down or sane or insane. I keep waiting for the angel in my head to jump in and handle things, but he’s as floored as I am. The stump itches and the nerves that feel like they’re still connected to fingers feel even more like that. I look to see what’s happening and find something white and pulsating hanging off my body like a giant maggot. Great. Now I’m going to have to change my online dating photo.
The maggot grows veins and arteries. Five twitching tentacle-things wiggle out the end. The maggot shrinks and turns almost black. The veins and arteries toughen until they’re cables within thick dark muscle. Shiny skin glides over and around the growing structures. It shines like metal or a scarab’s carapace. My fingers are delicate but strong, half organic insect and half machine. They flex when I tell them to. I touch each fingertip to thumb, counting one, two, three, four. They move easily. Josef is back by the MINI Cooper wiping my gore off his hands with a white handkerchief.
“That should give you a decent chance of not fucking things up entirely.”
He folds the handkerchief and puts it into a back pocket.
“I could lie and tell you that I can’t make the arm look any more human than that, but we both know I’d be lying. Wear that and don’t forget who your friends are.”
“You’re a Georgia peach.”
The pain and nausea are gone. I stand up. Josef comes over and helps me get my coat back on.
“Get used to your new arm quickly. You have twelve hours from now or we go without you.”
He walks down the ramp and disappears before he reaches the bottom.
I flex and move the arm. Pick up a piece of concrete. Toss it from my good hand to my new one and back again. The biomechanical hand feels pressure, heat, and sharpness, but not like my regular one. It’ll take some getting used to, but it’s better than a burned stump.
The arm isn’t the only thing I have to work out. I don’t know a secret way out of Tartarus. I don’t even know the way in. But I’ll find it, and if hoodoo and bullshit won’t get me out, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue. That always worked on Mom.
I walk up to an open level at the top of the garage and look out over the city. On top of a hill less than a mile away is the asylum. If Eleusis is as weirdly laid out and fucked up as the rest of this L.A., Alice might as well be on the moon. I don’t know if I can even get to her in twelve hours, much less get her and Semyazah. I should have asked Josef for a jet pack instead of an arm.
Escaped lunatics are warming themselves around a fire of old furniture and my wanted posters.
Maybe I should steal a car and take my chances on finding a road to the Observatory somewhere.
“Still trying to get up that hill, eh?”
I look over my left shoulder and then my right. There’s a small round man in a red tailored suit sitting on the edge of the wall with his feet dangling over the edge. I look at him and he glances at me.
“Is he gone?”
“Who?”
“Your pal Josef. Is he gone?”
“He’s not my pal and yes, he’s gone. Who are you?”
“I’ve had my eye out for you and then I see him fitting you out with a bug claw. I just naturally assumed that you two were buddies.”
I circle around behind him, trying to get a better look.
“Who are you?”
He shrugs.
“Who is any of us really?”
“Don’t get cute.”
“I was born cute. You’re the monster.”
I get out the na’at and hold it where he can’t see and walk over until I’m close enough to get a good look.
It’s Mr. Muninn. Only not. It’s one of his brothers. They’re not just twins, they’re the same in every detail including the clothes, except that where Muninn is all black, this one is all red. The angel in my head makes a sound I’ve never heard it make before. I put the na’at back in my coat.
“What’s your name?”
The round man bounces his heels off the side of the building.
“Kid, you couldn’t pronounce my name with three tongues and a million years to practice.”
“Muninn told me his.”
“Did he?”
“Didn’t he?”
The red man holds up his hands, the fingers spread wide.
“Five brothers. Each of our names and consciousness corresponds to a color. Yellow. Blue. Green. I’m red, as you might have noticed. Muninn is black, the sum of us all.” He ticks off each color with a finger. “Now, if you were the literary type or had ever read a book in your life, you might know that the mythical Nordic deity Odin traveled with two black ravens. One was called Huginn. Guess what the other was called?”
“Muninn named himself after a bird?”
“It’s his idea of a joke. Don’t hate him. He’s the youngest.”
The angel in my head stops making the funny noise and finally gets out a single word: Elohim.
The red man is looking at me. I get the feeling he can read me a lot better than I can read him because I can’t read him at all.
“Are you . . . ?”
“Yep.”
“All five of you are?”
“Yep.”
“Mr. Muninn, too?”
“I think we established that when we established that he’s one of us five brothers.”
My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I’m swamped by a fascination and anger that I’ve been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.
“Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust.”
“Calm down. He didn’t lie to you. He just didn’t come up and say, ‘Hi, kid. I’m God. How’s tricks?’ Would you have believed him? I wouldn’t, and I’d know he was telling the truth.”
“At least I can call him Muninn. What am I supposed to call you? Santa Elvis?”
“How about Neshamah? That’s one I think you can pronounce without breaking your jaw.
“What are you doing down here?”
He holds out his hands.
“Surveying my handiwork.”
I lean on the wall with him and look out over the city. Something explodes a few blocks north. A fire starts in a building down the block. I guess the Kissi with the matches got his wish.
“If this was my Erector Set, I’d return it and get my money back,” I say.
Neshamah shakes his head and shrugs.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. Eleusis was a beautiful place once. The whole universe was. We . . . well, it was still I back then . . . were building perfection, but it went wrong.”
“Did you invent understatement back then or did you come up with it later?”
“At least we, I, dreamed big. What do you dream about?”
“You know exactly what I dream about. It’s why I’m here.”
“A dunce on
a white horse tilting at windmills. Very original. You know what my brothers and I did? We invented light. And atoms. And air.”
“If you get the credit for light, you deserve the credit for skin cancer, too, so another bang-up job on that one.”
He puts his head in his hands in an exaggerated gesture.
“Cancer. Damn, you people are a mess.”
“You made us, so what does that make you?”
He watches smoke rising from the nearby fire as it drifts up to meet the burning cloud of the sky.
“We were so sure we got you right the first time. Then there was the whole Eden debacle and it was all downhill from there. But don’t worry, the new ones are a lot better.”
“You’re done with us and on to Humanity 2.0?”
“Oh, we’re way beyond 2.0. The new ones are nearly perfect. Nearly angels. You’d hate them.”
“Fingers crossed I never have to meet one.”
He leans over to me and speaks in a fake conspiratorial whisper.
“You won’t. I put them far, far away from you people. Why do you think space is so big?”
He sits up and laughs, pleased with his vaudeville act. I always wondered if I’d run into him sometime. I’m not sure what I was expecting. A muscle-bound Old Testament Conan Yahweh. Maybe a pothead New Testament love guru. Something. But not Muninn. And especially not a bad Xerox asshole version of Muninn.
“Why did you leave me down here all those years?”
“You mean why do I allow human suffering?”
“No. What I mean is why did you leave me down here?”
“You don’t belong anywhere, so what difference does it make where you are?”
“You really hate me, don’t you? I’m every fucking mistake you ever made all rolled into one.”
Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim) Page 29