The Getaway God

by Richard Kadrey

  Candy comes up around eleven, bright-­eyed and sweaty from practice. I haven’t seen her this happy in days. The sofa is wobbly from when we broke the leg, so we head for the bedroom, where the furniture is sturdier. The only casualty is a bedside lamp shaped like the Cowboy Bebop spaceship. Personally, I’m not sorry to see it go.

  “I think you did that on purpose,” she says.

  “I’d never do something that underhanded.”

  “Right. Don’t worry. I intend to replace it with something more hideous and embarrassing.”

  “I hope it doesn’t get broken too.”

  “You better. Each new lamp I have to get will be worse than the one before. Trust me. I know where to get more cute kittens, talking robots, and pink monsters than you can shake your ass at.”

  “Understood. I’ll guard future lamps with my very life.”

  “Good boy,” she says, then kisses me and lies down.

  For a while, lying in the dark, it feels like nothing is wrong at all. Then I hear the rain battering the window and I remember that pretty much everything is wrong.

  I don’t remember falling asleep. I’m just lying beside Candy and then I’m somewhere else.

  It’s a strange mix of the Angra subway cavern and the scene at the hospital. The meat chapel is surrounded by rough, raw stone, the bone sigils bright red in the reflected blood light.

  The thirteen crucified bodies writhe on their inverted crosses, crying and gasping for air like they aren’t quite dead.

  I look at the walls, but can’t see the sigils. They jitter like liquid mercury, forming and re-­forming themselves into new shapes. They don’t hold any one long enough to make sense and then I understand that I’m not looking at their symbols, but at the Angra themselves.

  From a spiral of skulls all shattered on one side steps a golden woman. Her skin is patterned like circuit boards and snake scales. On her head is a headdress with swept-­back wings. Half of her face is missing. An empty eye socket above a nonexistent cheek and a jaw stripped of its golden flesh are all that’s left on her right side. Though she’s in pain, with half her skull revealed she’s stuck in a perpetual half smile.

  I say, “I remember you.”

  She nods.

  “We met in the water, as the building fell into the ocean.”

  “Yeah. Kill City. You grabbed my leg. You tried to drown me,” I say.

  The other side of her face smiles. She folds her hands.

  “That was before I knew how special you are.”

  “Are you the Flayed One or the Hand?”

  “Neither,” she says, drawing herself up. “Call me Ten Thousand Shadows. I hear all truths and lies, every whisper and secret told in the dark. There are no mysteries to me among mortals.”

  “Are you all torn up because that’s all of you that can get through to this dimension or because you were always uglier than me?”

  She turns her head giving me a good look at her wounds.

  “The Terrible One did this to me when he threw us out of this universe and into chaos. Your God calls himself a God of love and mercy. See what his mercy looks like.”

  She steps closer. I back up. Even while she’s trying to keep this form, she can’t hold entirely still. Every time she moves, for a split second she blurs into something else. A bird skeleton. A crawling patch of furred fungus. A giant treelike thing, so twisted and knotted it looks like it grew in a hurricane.

  “Trust me, lady. I know all about God’s bad side. I’ve been on it most of my life.”

  “You are Abomination,” she says. “As are we. You owe this God and his pitiful creations nothing.”

  “Yeah, but I like donuts, so what am I going to do?”

  “Join us. Summon us to this realm and we’ll raise you up to be Angra Om Ya. Stark, savior of the true rulers of the universe.”

  “And here I thought you liked me for my boyish charms.”

  “Call us. Bring us through and you can have anything in return.”

  She undoes a clasp on her golden gown and it falls to the floor. She’s beautiful. The half of her that’s covered in skin. The rest looks like Thanksgiving leftovers a ­couple of days past their prime.

  “Even if I wanted to help you, I don’t know how to use the Qomrama.”

  She reaches out her almost meatless hand.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll teach you.”

  “How?”

  The golden woman fades away, replaced by the swirling skeleton-­fungus-­tree thing.

  “We’ll speak again.”

  “Goody.”

  She’s gone.

  I hear a sound and turn to the reliquary. The rubies on the skull are gone and blood pours from the hole in the forehead. It spills onto the floor and pools in the cracks. I turn to go down the tunnel, but there’s no way out. Blood pours from the skull and the sigils on the wall, covering the floor. I climb onto the filthy gurney to get away from it. It dawns on me that this whole thing has been a trap. That the cavern is going to fill with blood and that I’m going to drown. I should have been nicer to Ten Thousand Shadows. Or maybe had less Aqua Regia with the movie last night. Either way, this is a hell of an end to a shitty day. I hold my breath and try to get as close to the ceiling as I can. In a few minutes it won’t make any difference.

  I come awake to Candy shaking me.

  “Wake up, goddammit,” she says.

  I choke on my own spit and gasp for air.

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re thrashing all over.”

  It takes me a ­couple of minutes to get my breath.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just weird dreams.”

  “What kind?”

  I sit up. Rub a hand over my face.

  “I was in a cave with the Angra. They were talking to me. One was. Ten Thousand Shadows. She wanted me to summon them.”

  “Who is she?”

  “The one I saw in Kill City.”

  She pushes my hair back off my forehead.

  “It was just a dream. How could the Angra be talking to you?”

  “I’ve always had funny dreams that way. And that chop-­shop prick bit me. Maybe we made some kind of connection.”

  “Or maybe it was just a damned dream. You’re all stressed out about work. You get hurt and you remember the one fragment of an Angra you ever saw.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I’m always right.”

  Candy pushes me back down onto the bed and pulls the covers over me.

  “Should I tell the Shonin about it?”

  “Definitely not,” she says. “You said Wells is trying to connect you and Saint Nick. All anyone over there needs to hear is that you’re having pillow talk with an old God.”

  “Good point.”

  “I’ll be back,” she says, and gets out of bed. A minute later I hear her in the bathroom throwing up.

  I’ll call Allegra tomorrow about those goddamn tests.

  IN THE MORNING, the bite is just bruises and a scab. There’s no fieldwork or car chases scheduled for the Vigil today, so Candy heads off to help out at the clinic.

  At Vigil headquarters, instead of the sneers and behind-­the-­back comments I usually hear, there’s dead silence when I walk through. Julie Sola and Vidocq are coming out of the break room. Vidocq has a cup of tea and Sola is carrying a container of yogurt.

  I say, “What’s with the silent treatment around here? Did I suddenly get boring?”

  “Just the opposite,” says Vidocq.

  Sola peels back the lip from the top of the yogurt and sticks in a spoon.

  “Everyone knows about what you did yesterday. The flaming sword.”

  “The Gladius.”

  “You have to understand, even with all the fundamentalists around here, angels are still mostly a
n abstraction. To see something like that right in front of their eyes, well, you blew a few ­people’s minds.”

  Vidocq says, “That silence you hear isn’t boredom. It’s awe.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Sola eats a spoonful of her yogurt.

  “It’s too late now. Even the old-­timers only ever saw Aelita produce the Gladius, so they know you’re at least as powerful as her. The younger ones, the ones who grew up with slasher movies and Ozzy, some of them think you’re the Angel of Death.”

  It’s funny how you get used to things and then when you do them in front of other ­people it doesn’t get exactly the effect you intended. I just want a paycheck from these ­people. The last thing I want is to be put in any category that Aelita is a part of.

  “Maybe I need to shake their faith a little.”

  Sola puts the spoon back into the yogurt.

  “How?”

  “A good, long nose pick might be a good start. Really dig for the mother lode.”

  Vidocq laughs a little.

  “Wait until I have gone home before you implement that strategy, please.”

  I look at Sola.

  “How come you’re not all dazzled by my Heavenly awesomeness?”

  “The first time I met you, you had just abandoned the latest in your long line of stolen cars. Not too angelic, if you ask me.”

  “Good. The last thing I need are a bunch of Bible thumpers expecting me to walk on water or tell them what card they’re thinking of.”

  Sola, stirring her yogurt, and Vidocq start away.

  “Just be your usual charming self,” she says. “The angel thing will wear off soon enough.”

  “Before you go, call me an asshole loud enough for ­people to hear.”

  She half shouts, “You always were an asshole, Stark.”

  I nod a thanks and put my hand on the scanner to get into the Shonin’s room.

  He’s inside with one of yesterday’s captured chop-­shop ­people strapped to a gurney. They’re both over by the 8 Ball. The Shonin glances up when I come in.

  “How was hunting yesterday, fatty? There’s a rumor you got some new scars.”

  He doesn’t have much in the way of lips left, so it’s hard to tell if he’s smiling.

  “I heard one about someone using your skull as a bedpan.”

  The Shonin turns away in disgust.

  “You have a dirty mind.”

  “Then stay out of it.”

  “At least show me your new trick.”

  “The Gladius? It’s not new and it’s not a trick and I’m not your dancing monkey.”

  He turns back to examining the body on the gurney.

  “Too bad. For a few second there, you sounded almost interesting.”

  I watch the Shonin perform some kind of ritual over the chop-­shop guy. He has incense burning and there are a dozen potion bottles open on a nearby table. He moves his hands in a slow, twisting pattern over the dead man’s body, muttering spells. The guy on the table has a nice gash along his cheek, exposing his teeth. It reminds me of Ten Thousand Shadows, but I push her out of my head. He snarls and snaps at the Shonin’s hands. He looks like one of yesterday’s Eaters. Whatever the Shonin is trying to do, I don’t think it’s going well.

  I settle down in a chair across the room and light a Malediction. Yeah, they smell like burning tires, but this place is so full of incense, I can barely breathe. One more layer of stench isn’t going to hurt.

  The Shonin works for a few more minutes, waving his hands like he’s shooing away invisible flies and muttering old spells low in his throat, growling so much it’s almost like he’s speaking Hellion. Another five minutes go by and he drops his bony hands to his sides. Mr. Chop Shop snarls and spits. He’d like to make the Shonin into his personal chew toy.

  The Shonin walks to the table with the potions and drops into a chair. He scribbles some notes on a piece of paper and sniffs the air. He looks at me and goes back to his notes, not bothering to tell me to put out my smoke. He’s not being polite or giving in to my baser instincts. He just knows that whatever it was he was trying, the moment has passed and anything that happens now isn’t going to make it worse.

  I drop the last half inch of the Malediction into a cup full of cold tea.

  “What exactly were you trying over there?”

  “Anything,” he says. “This is an Angra construct. I thought bringing it in close proximity to the Qomrama might have some effect on it.”

  “I didn’t see anything happening.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “How long have you been trying?”

  He glances up at a Naval Clock on the wall.

  “All night apparently. Ever since the marshals brought the bodies back.”

  He leans back and pulls a loose strip of dried black skin from the back of his hand and drops it on the floor. It’s not the only skin down there. I wonder if it’s something to do with the poison book. First Candy and now him. Is everyone getting sick?

  “What have you learned about the 8 Ball from your killer book?”

  He flips through a notebook covered with long scribbled lines of kanji.

  “Lots and lots. But the book is philosophical and theoretical. Not geared toward practicality. I can tell you the Qomrama’s history, but not how to use it to attack or summon.”

  “Your book doesn’t sound like it’s worth a damn.”

  “It hasn’t all been bad.”

  He looks at the 8 Ball rotating in the magnetic field.

  “I got it to reverse direction for a few seconds once.”

  “I for one feel better knowing that you might have the power to make the Angra dizzy.”

  He flips through pages of his notebook.

  “What am I not seeing?”

  “That poison book is probably fucking with your mind. If it hasn’t told you anything useful by now, why don’t you stop drinking it?”

  “Because what if it reveals something tomorrow? The answers we need might be in the next bottle. Or the one after that.”

  I walk over to the 8 Ball. Mr. Chop Shop bares his teeth at me. I want to knock them out.

  “You keep drinking that stuff and the gristle holding you together is going to fall off. You know the old joke, a guy goes into his doctor’s office and says, ‘Doc, it hurts when I do this,’ and the doctor says, ‘So don’t do that.’ That’s you. Stop doing that.”

  The Shonin sits up.

  “That’s your way,” he says. “You can’t conquer it with your fists or your gun, you give up. I meditated in my tomb for centuries. I will find the answer.”

  “We don’t have centuries, Jack Skellington. We need something now.”

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  I touch the glass chamber where the 8 Ball floats.

  “You’re trying to use all these potions and rituals, but the only time I saw the 8 Ball do anything is when someone was touching it.”

  The Shonin sets down his notebook.

  “Yes, you told me about that. The Qomrama killed a group of soldiers in a market in Hell. Later, your Sub Rosa inquisitor used it to kill Aelita, an angel of considerable strength.”

  He shakes his head.

  “What you’re saying is it’s too dangerous. No one is to touch the Qomrama until I understand it more thoroughly.”

  I take off my glove, revealing my Kissi hand. The Shonin stands up when he sees it. I wonder what the Vigil clowns outside would think if they got a look at it. Would they still think I’m an angel or something even worse?

  The Kissi hand is like an insect appendage, but it’s also like skeletal machinery. The Terminator’s arm crossed with a praying mantis. I think it’s the ugliest thing on the planet. Still, sometimes it comes in handy.

  “I’ve nev
er seen one of those before. Only block prints. I wasn’t sure they were even real,” says the Shonin. “You’re more of a monster than I thought, fatty.”

  “That’s nothing,” I say. “Watch this.”

  I open the lock on the magnetic chamber. There’s a whoosh as air rushes in to fill the vacuum.

  “What are you doing?” shouts the Shonin. “Stop that.”

  I reach inside and pull the 8 Ball out of the field. It takes a ­couple of tries. The field doesn’t want to let go. But with a little twisting, I work it out. And that’s why the Kissi hand is so useful. In all the twisting and turning from a sphere covered in diamond plate to an egg covered in an intersecting pattern of serrated blades the 8 Ball doesn’t do any damage. The Kissi hand is just too tough to cut and there’s nothing to bleed.

  “Put it back,” says the Shonin. He backs away across the room.

  I bring the saw-­toothed 8 Ball over to Mr. Chop Shop. Instead of snarling and biting, he calms right down. The only sounds he makes are the ragged breaths through his torn mouth.

  The Shonin slowly comes over to us.

  “You’re not entirely stupid after all,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s of much value, but it’s a little impressive.”

  “What do you mean it’s not valuable? I calmed this fucker right down. That’s more than you’ve done.”

  “It’s a nice trick,” he says, “but I caused the Qomrama to change rotation once. Is that any more useful than this?”

  “Of course this is more useful. I’m controlling a Qliphoth. How is that not helpful?”

  The Shonin looks at the 8 Ball and then at Mr. Chop Shop.

  “All that power to control one little demon. I would think that with your experience you’d see the absurdity.”

  “You’re just pissed because your holy books and snake oil got you nothing with a capital zero. Look. I can even touch the thing.”

  “Don’t you dare,” says the Shonin. “We don’t know what might happen. Continue in this manner and I’ll be forced to call Marshal Wells.”

  “That’s right. Run home to daddy when things get a little intense. I thought you’d have bigger balls than that, muertita, or did those shrivel up and drop off too?”

  “Put the Qomrama back in its chamber.”