“Hey, Paul. It’s my turn!” Rand said.
“We’re not taking turns. I found the Antichrist and I get to sacrifice him!” Paul hissed back.
“I’ve always wanted to kill a demon,” Rand said wistfully.
“I know where you can find shit tons of demons,” I said to Rand. “You just have to let me go.”
“Sorry. Not falling for that one again,” Rand said. “Stick him, Paul! What are you waiting for?”
“The Mass needs to reach the proper pitch. And we’re still waiting on one person who absolutely insisted on being here.”
“Fuck that. We got him now! You know how many evil plots get wrecked by waiting?” Rand grabbed Paul and hurled him to the edge of the pulpit, snatching the knife away. The assembled congregation stopped chanting to gasp as one. Rand let out an exultant “Woo!” and kicked away the box Paul had been standing on.
“Wait, you fool!” Paul shouted from the floor.
“No more waiting!” Rand shouted back, holding the knife up high over my chest. “I’ve got a need! A need to bleed!” And the knife came down.
[11]
THE KNIFE STREAKED A QUICKSILVER PATH RIGHT TO MY HEART. Gutted by an insane and drug-addled movie star in service to a dark god. I mean, I always knew I’d go out like this, but I’d hoped for a little more time on this spinning ball of dirt and failure. I think my life actually tried to flash before my eyes, but I ended up mostly regretting not getting to see how Game of Thrones turned out.
The weirdest thing was the booming sound my heart made when the knife plunged through it. I’d always figured on more of a wet pop. Maybe a splooshing sound like throwing a bowling ball into a kiddie pool full of clay. And to be honest, I never expected my heart to speak with a Russian accent.
“You don’t kill him yet!”
I opened my eyes. The dagger was poised less than an inch over my chest, like I was Mia Wallace and Vincent was hopelessly confused about proper resuscitation techniques. I followed the path up the blade, to the upsettingly vascular hand of Rodrick Rand, to the sleeve of his black Armani suit, to his open-collared shiny red shirt, all the way to his face. No longer looking down at me with a crazed gleam in both eyes and teeth, his attention was on the front door. I turned away from my imminent death to have a look.
Oh, Vassily the Whale. Of course.
The Whale stood at the threshold. I don’t think he had changed clothes since I saw him last, though the day had nothing to dim the mirror-like sheen on that suit of his. Bullet holes were torn in sleeves, chest, and legs. His tie was gone, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his enormous gut. His chest, the skin tone of which was more suited to something that lived deep in the ocean where the sun would never see it, was covered in a variety of bandages, some of which were weeping with fresh blood. Not that Vassily noticed his injuries. He was too busy brandishing a pair of gold-plated submachine guns at a room full of Satanists.
“Not without guest of honor,” Vassily said.
“Wait, I know you,” Paul said, standing up. He snapped his tiny fingers. “You’re the gangster. Vlad the Whale!”
“Vassily,” he said. And he pulled the triggers. Paul disappeared in a spray of blood. “Vlad is other guy.”
A moment of silence followed. Not out of respect to Paul, but because no one could believe he was dead. In the back of everyone’s head—including the superstitious part of mine I wasn’t the biggest fan of—there was the sense that should Paul ever die, His Satanic Majesty would do something about it. This thought had legs despite the fact that I’d seen multiple Satanists get taken to that farm upstate where they could run and play all day long, and not a single one ever got a last-second reprieve.
That’s when the screaming started. I will admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude there, as much as I was capable of while still chained to an altar. But watching a bunch of people who until five seconds before had thought of themselves as the black-clad army of the apocalypse start screaming like terrified kids and flinging themselves under pews to hide is hilarious. The pulpit was no exception; Rand dove behind the altar and Paul’s harem hit the deck. Frodo and Yolo went for their guns, but Vassily gently explained that error to them with approximately five pounds of lead apiece.
I could feel Rand huddled against my right arm. He was blubbering something, but I couldn’t make it out.
Vassily began his glacial advance up the center aisle, gesturing at the cowering Satanists with his ostentatious guns. “Now? Now are we all finished shooting?”
“Psst! Hey! Rand! Hear me?” I whispered.
He kept up the blubbering. Vassily fired his guns a few times, bullets chattering up pews, shredding the tops into raw wood. “Nicky! So good to see you alive and well. For now.” He was calling to me, but the lion’s share of his attention was on whatever he was shooting at the time.
I ignored him, focusing on Rand. I softened my tone like I was talking to a dog or child. “Hey, buddy, you okay down there?”
Rand whispered something. Then he said it again, and this time I could actually make it out: “He shot Paul.”
“Don’t worry about that now. He’s in Hell, where he’s a lot happier. I need you to unlock me, though.”
“We’re sacrificing you,” he whined.
“I think that plan went out the window when your archbishop got the hard goodbye, wouldn’t you say?”
He didn’t have a good response to that one. It didn’t help that Vassily was accompanying his shooting with a steady stream of trash-talk. Half of it was directed at me, generally insults to my integrity and intelligence, and half was at the Satanists, who he compared to portions of a stripper’s anatomy.
I decided to switch tracks, knowing I didn’t have time to do this again if I crashed and burned. There was one thing I knew about actors, and it was a universal thing, learned over a lifetime spent in the entertainment capital of the world. “I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, when you wanted to hunt me, but I’m a really big fan.”
His voice, hopeful, floated up from below. “You are?”
“Oh yeah. Killing Time is my favorite movie of all time. Fuck Die Hard.” That was practically blasphemy, but I forced myself to say it, knowing I could make it up to Die Hard later if I made it out of this.
“I always thought Die Hard was better.”
“Oh, come on. John McClane could barely kill one terrorist at a time,” I said, continuing to spew awful nonsense. It became abundantly clear to me that I would say anything to stay alive. I hoped Mina would still respect me afterwards.
“I killed whole rooms of guys.”
“With karate.” God, that scene was so dumb. “That scene was amazing.”
“Yeah,” he said, warming to the thought.
“Nicky! I think this is irony, no? You go from dead in the hills to dead in some slightly different hills?” Gunfire choked off Vassily’s laugh, and I didn’t have time to explain irony to him.
“So, Rodrick… can I call you Rodrick? Good. If you could just get me the key to these manacles, you’d not only be saving the Antichrist, you’d be saving a really big fan.”
“The Antichrist likes me?”
“You are the Antichrist’s favorite actor.” I felt like that, at least, was the truth.
I think he heard the sincerity in my voice, because he went to Paul’s tiny corpse and rummaged through what was left of the pockets.
“Hey! I know you,” Vassily said, gesturing with the submachine gun. “You are guy from Adrenaline!”
“Yeah, I...”
Vassily sprayed the front of the pulpit with gunfire, sending Rand to kiss the carpet. I tried to roll away, but I didn’t have much freedom of motion. Bits of wood and carpet fibers flew upward to hit me in the face.
“Is nice to meet you!”
“Rodrick, please tell me you got the key,” I said, spitting out a little red carpet.
“Right here.”
“I can’t look over and see it. Just unlock me, p
lease?”
“Sorry, man. Keep watching.”
He mashed the key into my hand and sprinted for the exit.
“I love Adrenaline!” Vassily yelled, chasing Rand out of the church with bullets. “Is best movie ever!”
I have really good hands. On a normal day, these manacles would already have been open and I’d be following a coked-up movie star at high speeds. This wasn’t a normal day. As he lumbered forward like a constipated bear, Vassily kept hosing the front of the altar down between my left wrist and ankle.
“Aim for the chains!” I shouted at him.
He laughed. “Oh, Nicky. I will miss you little bit when you’re in the ground!”
In my right hand, shielded from Vassily by the altar, I worked the key around into the lock at my wrist. “Why miss me? We were partners once!”
“Partners? Partners? You were employee!” He punctuated that with a solid wall of lead that ripped into curtains, cut candles in half, and probably ruined that wainscoting Rand had been admiring. A member of the harem screamed.
The key was right at the lock, but I couldn’t get it to slide in. Sorry about the imagery there, but it’s literally impossible to describe opening a lock without sounding like you’re losing your virginity to a robot.
“A good employee! I backed you against Markov!”
“Did you kill anybody? Did you beat anybody?”
“I gave you information!”
“I have internet, Nicky. So until you also give me naked girls, you are useless.”
The key slid home and the lock cracked open. I leaned over, opening the lock on my left wrist in one motion.
“Nicky?” Vassily asked, momentarily stunned.
I wanted to say something cool, but I really didn’t want to be shot. Or grabbed. Or shot and grabbed. Vassily might be toying with me now, but he wasn’t known for his patience or restraint. I did a sit-up and had the shackle undone on my left ankle.
“Nicky, stop!”
Right ankle. I heard the gun and hoped he was still shooting to warn. Bullets chewed the front of the altar, spitting out broken bits of wood. I jumped off it, hit the carpet, and ran. The gun barked again and the carpet directly in front of me disappeared into blackened holes.
“Nowhere to go, Nicky!”
I skidded to a stop, every fast-twitch muscle in my body trying to hurl me forward. He fired again, and if there had been a guy in front of me, or at the door Rand had gone through, he would have been so dead. Vassily wanted to prove this point so badly, he kept firing, turning the floor into a mass of bullet holes.
Then: click-click-click.
Vassily cursed in Russian and I sprinted for the door. I hit it and turned the corner. Bullets followed me through into the hall, shredding the portrait of either Genghis Khan or Colonel Sanders, then slamming into the closing door behind me. Vassily was calling after me, switching back and forth between English and Russian before settling on something in between that had never before been used outside of a Kubrick film.
I plunged into the labyrinth of the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist. I could get to the kitchen quickly, and from there get to my car. Losing Vassily in the city would be child’s play. Escape. If I wanted it, I could take it.
Heather was in the dungeon.
Goddamn it. She was a deranged killer, sure. She was hunting me as freelance work for a monstrous super-conspiracy. But I had the ability to get her out of there, and she hadn’t yet attacked me. God, I was a sap. I was going to do this, wasn’t I?
I was annoyed to realize that my feet had already made the decision. I found the stairs down just as I heard a crashing sound from one hall over. “Nicky! Where are you going?” It was muffled, but not muffled enough. Had Vassily just burst through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man? Probably.
I ran downstairs, sprinting along a hallway and down the flight of stone steps into the dungeon. Heather was still where I had left her, chained to the wall. “Jim?” she asked.
“Yep. We’re leaving now.”
Above us, I heard Vassily crashing around. I called him a T-rex before, but that’s not fair. He was King Kong, Godzilla, and the Cloverfield Monster all rolled into one. Sometimes it was smashing sounds, other times the guns were chattering death. He was coming, and I had annoyed him enough to change his mission from detain to delimb.
I picked Heather’s cuffs with the buckle of a leather restraint. “Come on.”
“What’s that sound?”
“I guess you could call it deus ex mafia.”
“What?”
“The Russian Mob showed up.”
“The reds?”
“They’re actually capitalists. A communist mob would make zero sense.”
“Oh Niiiiiiicky…” Somehow his voice was closer. How the hell did he keep finding me? Did he have some kind of me-sense or was he just getting lucky? I should ask him. I ran deeper into the sex dungeon and tried not to see what was all around me.
“Nicky, Nicky. You down here?” His voice was coming from the top of the stairs.
The dungeon kept on going. I would have been impressed by its sheer size, had that not been the thing now trying to kill me.
“Where are we going?” Heather whispered.
I wasn’t sure. All I could think of, apart from how stupid it was to come back for Heather, was Oana’s slick. The tunnel from her kitchen to her hidden garage, the one thing that kept her alive. I couldn’t get the image out of my head. Any smart conspiracy would have something like that in their headquarters. Of course, the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist weren’t exactly smart.
Still, this was a freaking gothic castle in LA. It wasn’t authentic; it was more about what a bunch of Ren Faire people thought looked cool. Secret doors would be practically required. In the corner of the dungeon, I found a cell. It appeared to be a real cell, someplace to lock someone away as opposed to something dedicated to carnal bliss. It was locked, but I picked the door with a small needle-like thing I really hoped hadn’t previously been inserted into anyone.
“Wow. You sure know how to pick a place, Nicky,” Vassily called. “I should bring girls here.”
“Why is he calling you Nicky?” Heather whispered.
“Do you really want to have this conversation now?” I hissed back.
I went into the cell and touched the walls. Cool stone. They had carved some things into the walls, mostly Satanic prayers and Metallica lyrics, but someone had put a little—well, I hesitate to call it a poem, but:
I was here
Here I was
Was I here
Yes I was.
I stared at it. It was right at the foot of the little cot. In the sea of self-conscious evil of the late teenage years, it was out of place. It was almost cute in its way, and Satanists were many things, but cute wasn’t one of them. I traced the words with my finger.
“Oh, Nicky…?”
“We need to go! That monster is almost here and I don’t have my gun!” Heather whispered.
Crouching by the words, I poked the brick. With a masticating grind, the brick moved. “Huh,” I said.
And fell through the floor.
[12]
IT WAS A PIPE, WET AND SLIMY, canted at about a 45-degree angle. I couldn’t be sure exactly: I had left my level in my other pants, and I was screaming. Later, if I ever spoke about this again, I would have to amend that to bellowing, yawping, or some other, more manly vocalization. But let’s face it, I was screaming. That’s what happens when you’re suddenly zooming through the wet, throatlike darkness, hurtling toward an unknown that’s practically guaranteed to be unpleasant.
The nice part was this chute was way too small for Vassily, and I couldn’t even hear his voice over the sound of my screaming and the rapidly increasing distance between us. The pipe slowly leveled out and I lost a little bit of speed, and then it opened up and I went sliding across a slick concrete surface, coming to a stop... somewhere in the pitch dark. All I know was my ass made litt
le echoing sounds when it zoomed across the wet floor.
A hiss followed me, getting louder and louder. I tried not to have a heart attack as I went for my phone. I hit a couple buttons and a light shone from one end. I pointed it in the direction of the hiss in time to see Heather shoot out from the pipe about thirty feet away and slide across the floor on her butt. She bumped into me, most of her momentum gone by that time. Only then did she open her eyes.
“Jim?”
“Yep.”
“Where are we?”
I shined the light around the room. The phone’s glow was brighter than might be expected, but a real flashlight would beat the pants off it any day of the week. We were in a large concrete room. The fishy aroma of algae permeated pretty much everything, and I knew I would have to air myself out afterwards to be remotely presentable. An open doorway led out, though not to anywhere I’d want to go on a normal day. Things skittered away from the beam of the flashlight. For the time being, I planned to ignore them. I got to my feet and helped Heather to hers.
“Storm sewers, by the looks of things.”
“What was that?” she asked, nodding into the dark in the vague direction of the waterslide.
“Escape hatch. Means there’s probably a way out of here that won’t kill us.”
“Probably?”
“Satanists, remember?”
Dimly, I heard the echo of crashes and pops above. The geologic sounds of Vassily having a tantrum in the sex dungeon, filtering down through the slick to our ears. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for anyone topside. I moved gingerly across the floor, trying not to slide my feet at all. Heather slipped on a patch of algae, windmilled her arms, and I caught her without thinking.
“Thank you,” she said, holding onto my arm.
I smiled to myself. I remembered meeting Mina a year ago; I had been convinced that there was no way someone that hot wasn’t out to get me. I had been braced for the inevitable betrayal the whole time, ignoring the fact that Mina took a little while to warm up to me, if I want to put it mildly. Had she actually been out to get me, she’d have thrown “do me” vibes at me the whole time. Like Heather was doing right at that moment, holding on even though she had long since gotten her balance back. Heather was a killer, probably her cult’s favorite one, and she had done that Satanist back at the courthouse with her bare hands. Or possibly the sink, or the paper towel dispenser, or the handle of the flush toilet. I hate my imagination sometimes, but it was doing a good job reminding me that I wasn’t holding some ingénue with a few crow’s feet.
Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) Page 15