I flatten myself against the wall. As the backwater Sisyphus passes, I get out the black blade and slice through his heavy chains while giving him a little kick in the ass. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to push him into the side hall so that the guards will be the first thing he sees when he realizes he’s free.
At first he stands there, probably feeling off balance with the big load off his back. Then he looks at his empty hands. Sees the dark and gangrenous flesh around the shackles where they’ve been biting into his wrists for who knows how long. The guards aren’t pleased. They want him to keep dragging the stone exactly the way he always has. They don’t want him to improve himself. The boy with the wrist shackles must be picking up on the guards’ negative waves because he heads right at them for a heart-to-heart. I can’t be sure exactly what they’re saying, but I hear a lot of “ows” and “don’ts” along with the kind of crunching I’ve come to associate with smashed bones. The angel reminds me to be patient and wait for the conversation to die down by itself.
In a couple of minutes a still-disoriented giant wanders out of the side hall. He’s covered in blood and other colorful fluids that I don’t want to think about. He stares at his stones, lost and desperate without them. I go over and pick up the end of one of the chains. He looks up when he hears the links rattle against each other. I hold the chain out to him. He eyes me for a full minute. I’m not sure what he sees. I wonder if the insane can see through glamours? I still have Hellion skin plastered on my face, so I’d be pretty confusing to look at if he can see my living body.
Slowly, he puts out a hand. I wrap the chain around his palms and close his fingers over the metal. He leans forward. The weight is different, but familiar enough that he knows what to do. The moment he puts his head down, he forgets about me. He leans into the weight and pulls. The stones scrape reassuringly along the floor behind him.
I go down the side hall, stepping over pieces of the guards, until I come to the door in the back. It’s locked and the sliding viewing panel is welded shut. I can’t be a hundred percent sure what’s on the other side. I slash open the iron padlock with the blade. Before the lock hits the floor, I kick the door open as hard as I can. It swings back and one of the hinges pops as the door swings open and hits the wall.
As I step inside I hear a stifled scream from the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. It sounds awfully human.
“Alice?”
Nothing.
“Alice?”
And a second later there she is. Eleven years I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve lost track of how many beings I’ve killed, and destroyed everything in my way. I’ve been beaten, stabbed, burned, and maimed across two planes of existence to get to this moment. And here I am and here she is and we’re together in the same room maybe a few hours before the end of everything. I want to grab her and kiss her, but I don’t think the feeling is mutual.
She has her back to the far wall and her teeth are bared. She’s holding a wooden stake. It looks like she broke the leg off a chair and sharpened it on the floor. That’s my girl.
“Alice . . .”
“Keep away from me!” she screams, and kicks a metal dish covered with foul-smelling slop at me. Have these pinheads been trying to feed her Hellion food? Even I wouldn’t eat most of that stuff and I didn’t come here on a direct flight from Heaven.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s me. I’ve come to take you out of here.”
She holds the stake higher.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, asshole! Leave me alone!”
There’s only one small oil lamp in the cell. All she can see is my shadowed profile from the light in the hall. I get closer so I’m not a ghost anymore.
“Alice. I’ve come to save you.”
She lunges and jams the stake deep in my chest. I fall back against the wall. A couple of months ago Candy gave me the zombie-bite antidote on the point of a knife and now this. Why do all the women I like end up stabbing me?
In this case the answer is obvious. I got so excited at the idea of finally seeing her that I forgot I’m sporting a robo-bug arm and a Hellion’s face.
I pull the wood out of my chest and toss it into the hall. Even unarmed, Alice looks like she’s ready to go Frazier and Ali with me. She’s always been like that. She was never big on backing down from anything.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
Shut up, Medea. We’re having a moment. And I know you were lying now, so can it.
Getting staked isn’t going to kill me, but it hurts like a rhino giving you a flu shot with its horn. I sit down on a wooden chair Alice didn’t break and push the hoodie back from my head with my new bug arm. My boots are slick with the dead guards’ innards. My coat is covered in blood and smells like the sewer. And then there’s my face. For those few seconds when I first saw her, it felt like I wasn’t Sandman Slim anymore. I was plain old boring James Stark. With the pain the truth comes back. I’m in a Hellion asylum, rank, mangled, and horrible. I’m finally the monster I always said I was.
I have to laugh. There isn’t much else left to do. Go down into the deepest darkest parts of Hell, and you’ll see what I mean. They laugh all the time down there.
I reach into my coat pocket and feel around. For a second I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for. I pull out what Mustang Sally told me to bring through the Black Dahlia. My hands are bloody from my chest wound and I’ve left sticky red fingerprints all over the small plastic rabbit. I wipe it on my coat, but that just smears the blood. Fuck it.
I toss the rabbit over to where Alice is hiding in the corner.
“I was going to bring you a turkey dinner since we missed Christmas, but it wouldn’t fit in my coat, so you’ll have to settle for that.”
I see a hand dart from the blackness and disappear back inside. My chest burns, but the wound is already closing up. My legs are cramping. I want to stand, but I don’t want to spook her. I wish God hadn’t made me put out my cigarette.
Soon I hear, “Jim?”
I can’t see her, but the angel in my head can. He shows her to me outlined in the deep dark. The atoms that hold her together are the same as the air around her, her clothes, the walls and floor. And me. There’s no difference.
“Jim?”
“Hi, Lucy. I’m home.”
She comes over to me slowly, still afraid it’s a trick. I know the feeling.
“Jim. Are you . . . ?”
“I’m not dead and I’m not a Hellion. I just needed to borrow a face to get here. Trust me. This isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve done since we last saw each other.”
She kneels down and looks into my eyes but keeps some distance between us.
Alice was always the smart one. She read books and thought about what she was going to say before she said it. Sometimes she said the most important things without talking. It was all little physical reactions.
She shakes her head a tiny bit, an almost subliminal movement.
“Is that really you in there?”
“You tell me.”
She looks down at my human hand. I turn it over so she can see the back. It’s like she’s trying to read a secret in the lines. But the hand is so scarred I doubt she’ll find anything familiar about it.
“Whoever you are, you really need to do something about those cuticles,” she says.
“All the beauty parlors down here are closed or on fire.”
She gets up and looks down at me.
“Say something only Jim would say.”
“Oh shit.”
“Nice start. Keep going.”
I try to think, but my brain is freezer-burned.
“Vidocq has our old apartment. He uses a potion that makes it invisible and makes everyone else forget it’s there so he doesn’t have to pay rent. He lives there with a nice girl who’s a hoodoo doctor but originally worked in my video store. Oh yeah. I own a video store. Remember Kasabian? The store us
ed to belong to him, but I cut off his head, so now the store’s mine. Kasabian’s head is my roommate. He steals my cigarettes and drinks my beer. We usually live over the store, but it’s being fixed up, so now we’re in a hotel. I finally met my real father. He was an archangel, but now he’s dead. I really missed you.”
She crosses her arms. Nods at me.
“What happened to your face?”
“I had to get rid of it to get here and this one was available.”
“Put it back on. I want to see the real you.”
I look at the floor, smiling.
“Of course you do. But it’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“Jack the Ripper stole it.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out. I’m never going to get used to seeing the dead breathe. Or mimic the memory of breathing. I don’t know which it is.
“I almost believe you. Say something else.”
“For almost a year I’ve had the strangest dreams about you. I know some were just plain old dreams, but others were different. It’s like you were really talking to me.”
She grunts faintly.
“I had dreams about you, too. Some were like you said. Just dreams. But I think a few were something more. Like we were talking to each other. I saw another girl in one of them. She had an accent.”
“That’s Brigitte. She’s Czech. And a zombie hunter. You’d like her.”
“Sounds fun. Is she your girlfriend?”
I shake my head.
“I almost got her turned into the undead, so it didn’t really work out. But I started seeing someone recently. You’d like her, too. She’s a Lurker, and when she gets mad she eats people.”
Alice gives a little laugh.
“They make me sound so boring.”
“That’s the last thing you were.”
She sits on the table and leans in close, like a scientist examining a new kind of bug.
“We need to find your real face because, seriously, human or not, no girl is going to stick her tongue in that thing.” She sits up. “And for the record, I missed you, too.”
She reaches out to touch my Hellion cheek but her hand goes right through me.
“Damn I was afraid of that,” she says.
“What the fuck just happened?”
She stares at her hand.
“It happens with everything down here. I guess since I was in Heaven, Hell things can’t touch me.”
“How did you get dragged down into this cell?”
“It was that crazy angel, Aelita. She had some interesting things to say about you. She said you aren’t human.”
And Medea Bava said some things about you.
“I’m humanish. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“What happened to you all those years ago? Where were you? I know it had something to do with Mason. He’s been behind every lousy thing that’s happened to us.”
“Like Parker.” Mason’s Sub Rosa attack dog who murdered her.
“Parker.” She nods. “Whatever happened to him?”
“I killed him.”
Alice looks at me and turns away. She’s not sure if I’m kidding or not. I want to ask how Parker did it, but I can’t.
I say, “I know that Mason’s running what’s going on down here. And to answer your question, I spent eleven years right here in Hell.”
She turns halfway back.
“You seem a lot saner than I would be. I’ve only been here a couple of days and I’m starting to lose my mind.”
“You want to know something really funny? I’m the one who sent Mason to Hell in the first place.”
She shakes her head.
“This is officially the worst three-way ever.” She finally looks at me again. “I’m sorry I stabbed you.”
“That’s okay. The nonhuman thing helps me heal fast. Also, I can park in handicapped spaces.”
“So, are you going to rescue me or what? Aelita is going to drag me off to Mason soon.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Our deal was I had three days. And Mason is still waiting for soldiers and arguing strategy.”
“Whatever he’s doing, Aelita made it sound like I’m part of it, so I’d really like to not be here.” Her eyes narrow and she looks out the cell door. “How did you get by all the guards?”
“There were only two.”
Her eyebrows go up a fraction of an inch.
“There are a hell of a lot more than two.”
Shit.
I let the angel loose and my senses expand across the floor. The entire ward beyond the hall is filled with Hellion guards. The fuckers were hiding in the locked cells.
“Why don’t they attack?”
“They’re probably waiting for Aelita. She seems to be the one in charge around here.”
There’s no way I can get us past all the guards outside. But we’re only on the third floor.
“Step back. This is going to look strange, but don’t ask any questions. Just jump when I tell you.”
Alice goes back to the wall. I manifest the Gladius and smash it into the floor. It cuts through the stones like a blowtorch through a marshmallow. It doesn’t even make much noise. Just a low sizzle. Three hits and a section of the floor gives way.
“Jump,” I say.
I don’t have to say it twice. She hops into the hole and I follow her. The second-floor crazies are still playing their game. A couple glance at us when we hit the floor, but we’re not nearly as interesting as the game, so they turn away. I hack another hole in the floor and we drop through to the first floor.
There are a few Hellion guards stationed downstairs, but only a couple by the stairs. They’re surprised when Alice and I come falling out of the ceiling, but shocked when they see the Gladius. One of the guards tries to shout, but I take his head off before he can make a sound. Unfortunately, the second guard shouts a Hellion alarm command. I stab him in the heart and he disappears. I try to push Alice into the tunnel, but my hand goes right through her. She’s staring at me. She’s never seen me kill anything before.
“Go,” I shout, and she snaps out of it and jumps into the tunnel. When I get out I pull the door back into place and slash at the tunnel ceiling and walls, knocking down as much debris in front of the door as I can.
I let the Gladius go out and we head back to the manhole. She stops and looks at me a little like she did when I first walked into her cell.
She says, “What the hell was that in your hand?”
“It’s called a Gladius. It’s just something I found I can do.” There’s no goddamn way I’m explaining to her how only angels have them.
“You killed those guys and didn’t even flinch,” she says.
“First off, they weren’t guys, and second, I’ve killed a hell of a lot more than them. How do you think I got here? Do you think I got these scars on the debate team? Killing is what I do down here. And it’s what I still do.”
“But only bad things, right?”
“We’re in Hell. I don’t think Mother Teresa or Johnny Cash are in much danger.”
She has to think about it for a minute. It’ll take her a lot longer than that to make sense of the last few minutes and we don’t have time.
“We need to keep moving.”
“Okay.”
As we go, she tries to take my hand. It goes right through me.
“Shit,” she says.
I lead her back to the manhole and we climb the ladder out.
I WALK ALICE up the garage ramp, skirting the crazies and the squatters. She can’t take her eyes off them. I get the feeling Aelita dropped her straight into the cell, so she hasn’t seen much of Hell. Lucky girl.
Neshamah is on the roof looking through Muninn’s crystal like a jeweler checking a diamond for flaws. He shoves it back in his waistcoat when he sees us.
“The prodigal son returns. I wasn’t sure you had enough fingers and toes to count to three hundred. I see you’ve brought back a friend and tha
t you have a hole in your chest. Just another day at the office,” says Neshamah. He turns to Alice. “Was he this clumsy on earth or is all this blood a Sandman Slim thing?”
“A who?”
“Alice, this is Neshamah. Neshamah, this is Alice. Neshamah is the one who told me how to get into the asylum.”
“Thanks for helping Jim get me out of that place. I would have gone crazy if I’d been in there much longer.”
Neshamah holds out his hand to Alice. She looks at it like he’s holding out a dead squid. But out of a kind of doomed sense of politeness, she puts her hand out, too. She looks at their hands and then at him when they touch. She starts to say something, but Neshamah cuts her off.
“If it’s any comfort, you wouldn’t have been in there much longer. Probably just a few hours. A day at the most. Wouldn’t you say?”
He looks at me.
“If I don’t get to Pandemonium in about seven hours, the Kissi are going to come down hard on the place. The way Josef is acting I don’t know if they’re going to start a war down here or join up with Mason’s boys and make a play for Heaven.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The angel in my head squirms like something is trying to get inside. I think he’s losing.
“I noticed Kissi lurking about. What exactly are they getting out of all this?” Neshamah asks.
“They’ll get what I give them. Nothing more and nothing less.”
His eyes narrow.
“Do you think it was a good idea to ally yourself with such, let’s say, touchy creatures?”
“I knew I was going to need help to stop Mason and I never got anything but the silent treatment from your bunch, so who was I supposed to go to? Besides, Aelita wants you out of the way, and for all I knew, she was the new CEO of Heaven Inc.”
“Boys? I’m new here,” says Alice. “What are Kissi? Why did Mason bring me here?”
I say, “Kissi are like angels, only worse. I’m not sure why you’re here now. I thought it was just to get rid of me, but with what Aelita said to you, there might be something more.” I look at Neshamah. “You want to jump in here with any insights?”
He shrugs.
“Mason wants to get into Heaven. She’s from Heaven. Maybe he thinks she hid a key under a flowerpot.”
Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim) Page 31