Aloha From Hell (30 page)

I check out Hollywood Boulevard at the next corner. It looks clear and there’s no noise that way. I run the whole way.

Seeing the Boulevard here, it’s easy to understand why the crowd is tearing things up down the street. The place is picked clean. The ground floor of every building is gutted and burned. Bloody Hellions with broken limbs wander through the rubble looking for food, potions, or pills to make the world stop hurting. Damned souls are scattered all over the street staring into space like shell-shocked children. Finding themselves free but still in Hell was too much for their already tortured minds. They don’t react when I walk by, but the Hellions see me and scatter like roaches into the empty buildings. The universe has entered a new level of weirdness when Hellions are the ones afraid to be caught out after dark.

Half a block ahead is the only intact, well-lit building on the whole street. When I get closer I understand why.

Praise God and pass the ammunition. Now I understand. Now I know everything.

Peter Murphy was wrong when he said Bela Lugosi’s dead. He’s not. I just found his retirement home.

It stands where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre should be. I mean it’s still the Chinese Theatre—all supersaturated reds and golds—but it’s a different version. It’s twice as big as it should be. It’s r fIt so wide that it takes up half the block and the golden pagoda roof looks like it’s high enough to rip open stray blimps. A fifty-foot metal electrified fence marked every few yards with lightning-bolt warning signs surrounds the place.

I know this place. It doesn’t look anything like it looked like in my Downtown. There it was a kind of King Arthur’s castle, but with soft and twisted, almost organic lines, like it hadn’t been carved from the rock but had grown there. This place might not be General Mammon’s palace the way I’m used to seeing it, but his standard is suspended between the pagoda spires so everyone in Hell or L.A. or Mordor or wherever the fuck I am can see it.

This is what I’ve been looking for. The answer to all of life’s little questions.

When Mustang Sally said that using the Black Dahlia to cross over was easy but hard, I thought she was talking about the dying part. Now I think she was really talking about this. It’s why I woke up under that strange version of the freeway. Crossing over with the Black Dahlia isn’t a true one-hundred-percent-normal crossing. It’s a Convergence. A psychic melding of the place the traveler left and the place where the traveler is going. It’s a smart work-around to keep Mason from noticing me tiptoeing Downtown, because even though I’m truly in Hell, it’s not exactly the one where he’s expecting me. Yeah, I know. These metaphysical states and dimensions of being give me a headache, too.

If you know the Convergence is coming, it can be pretty useful. Say you want to travel fast through another city or parallel dimension. You do a Convergence and you can find your way around the new place by following the layout of the city you left. Unless the new place has decided to sprout fault lines, rearrange its streets, and generally fall the fuck apart.

Right this second I don’t know if being in a Convergence is a help or more bullshit in my way, but I’m sure of one thing. Someone inside knows where Eleusis is and I’ll kill them one by one until someone tells me.

I get out the na’at and eye a nice shadow at the corner of the palace. Chances are that Mason is expecting me to use the Room to get into Hell and not move around inside it. I’ll know in a minute. I step into the shadow and come out just inside Mammon’s palace.

No alarms go off. I’m alone in a giant movie-theater lobby. They must buy carpet by the mile to cover this floor. The concession stand is the size of Vegas. I bet the screen is as big as the Rockies. Wish I had time to catch a feature.

It hits me right about now that even though my old slave master Azazel brought me to Mammon’s tree fort plenty of times, this mutant version might not be laid out exactly the same way. Only one way to find out. This new version is too weird to navigate normally and I don’t feel like going on walkabout. I step back into a shadow. I’ll take my chances with the Room and open the Door of Fire, the door that always leads to chaos and violence.

I come out behind a pillar in a circular room that looks like what I imagine the Oval Office is like, onlycols like, bigger and with meaner monsters. Across from me are floor-to-ceiling windows with a Cadillac-size wooden desk between them. There’s a fireplace to the right and expensive-looking couches and coffee tables scattered around the place. I halfway expect Remington cowboy sculptures and a giant flat-screen playing football or wrestling or some other macho backslapping good old boy to inject just a little more testosterone into the place. I don’t know if I’m in Hell or the CEO’s office at Halliburton.

Mammon and five of his officers are clustered around a worktable in the middle of the room. All of them are in sharp suits, but none of the officers is stupid enough to have a suit sharper than Mammon’s. The general wears a large gold inverted cross on a chain around his neck. It’s probably a war medal, but it makes him look like Sammy Davis Jr. in his late Rat Pack period.

The worktable in front of them projects a floating 3-D map laying out different routes around the universe from Downtown to Heaven. It looks like a schematic of the coolest ride since Space Mountain.

I want to go right at them, but I need to lay out a little hoodoo first. Unfortunately, a good hex needs to be spoken out loud. Black juju likes to be mixed in with a little sputter and spit. However, it’s easy to toss off white magic inside your head. Instead of wishing Mammon’s backup band ill will, I do the opposite and throw a protective shield up around the entire room. Aside from saving them from torch-carrying peasants, it’ll soundproof the place and keep any nosy guards from getting in.

Quiet as I can, I get out the na’at, snap out the business end like a bullwhip, and give it a little twist so it goes rigid. It hits the closest Hellion at the base of his skull and comes out his extremely surprised mouth. The officer next to him goes for his shoulder holster. Bad idea. He’s left his front exposed. I bounce the sharp end of the na’at off the worktable and flick it up, catching him just above his crotch, slicing him open to his chest. He has an excellent view of his Hellion guts spilling onto the floor before he follows them down. I step back into a shadow as the rest of the crew tries to process what just happened. In a brilliant tactical maneuver, the three remaining officers decide to rush the spot where I’m standing just as I’m not there anymore.

I come out of a shadow behind Mammon, pull the black blade, and pig-stick him in the spine about six inches above his waist. His legs suddenly stop working and he smacks onto the floor like an Easter ham.

One of Mammon’s brighter officers figured out my shadow trick and stayed close enough to Mammon to jump me.

She’s a huge red-haired Hulk Hogan beast trying to get the barrel of her .50 pointed anywhere on my body. She gets off a couple of shots as we wrestle, but she can’t hit me without hitting herself, so she’s just blowing holes in the floor. I drive the na’at’s pommel into her temple and knock the gun out of her hand while she’s still cross-eyed.

Two officers, one in a slick black Hugo Boss and one in a white ice-cream suit, take potshots at us, but they can’t really open up without hitting Mrs. Hogan. She lunges at me. I kickr, t me. I out at her, but she tagged me hard enough that I trip over a pricey antique chair and smack the back of my head into the wall. My brain feels like a Shamrock Shake. Mrs. Hogan is on her hands and knees, pulling a knife the size of a leg of lamb from under her suit jacket. Hugo Boss and the ice-cream man come in behind her, closing the distance so they can shoot me a hundred percent dead. I flick the na’at at the ceiling, knocking out one of the overhead lights. There’s a feeble shadow behind the chair I tripped over. It’s not much, but I dive for it just as a wave of bullets blast fist-size chunks of polished wood and plaster from Mammon’s office wall.

I stay in the shadow for a minute, letting my head clear, when I hear Mammon say, “The battle plan, lady and gentlemen, is simple: Do better.”

The officers go back-to-back, forming a protective triangle around Mammon, which means they’re stuck there while I can move around. I’m lucky that none of them can manifest a Gladius. Besides Lucifer, only a few of the heavyweight fallen angels still have the power. None of this crew has or they would have used it by now.

I duck into the room, moving from shadow to shadow, swinging the na’at at the overhead lights. I take them out one by one, creating more shadows for me to work from. The white suit shoots at me, but Hugo Boss is busy reloading. I feel two shots go through my coat just above my leg and dive back into the dark.

Half the room is in shadows and Mammon’s officers are nervous. Mrs. Hogan doesn’t have her gun, so I go for her first. Keeping most of my body in the shadow, I snap out the na’at, leaving it loose until it wraps around her ankle, then I pull it tight like a snare. I fade back into the wall while retracting the na’at and it pulls her across the floor like she’s tied to a freight train. When she hits the wall I grab her lapels and pull her upright. The sight of even just my hands gets Hugo Boss itchy. He blasts away, only I’m back in the shadow and his redheaded teammate is suddenly full of holes. I pull back my hands and let her fall. The ice-cream man checks her body and I get the distinct feeling that he had something going with Mrs. Hogan, because when he sees her back full of smoking craters, he levels his pistol at Hugo Boss and blows his brains out.

Now it’s just the ice-cream man and Mammon. He grabs Mammon by the back of his collar and drags him into the biggest pool of light, shouting for the guards. No one shouts back. He keeps shouting until Mammon backhands him from the floor.

“Stop shouting in my ear. If backup were coming, it would be here by now. You might consider shooting him yourself before he kills us.”

I step out behind the pillar where I first entered the room and shout, “He’s right. No guards get in here without a permission slip from me.”

The ice-cream man blasts into the dark.

“That’s a clever ploy. Use up all your bullets shooting at nothing. Did they teach you that at military school?” says Mammon. But the ice-cream man isn’t listening. He’s not a soldier anymore. He’s an angry f s;s an aboyfriend looking to get back at someone who got his girl killed. Join the club, fucker.

The ice-cream man shouts, “Show yourself!”

“I am,” I say. “Don’t look at the shadows. I’m right out in the open with you. Come and get me.”

He’s pissed enough about Mrs. Hulk that he lets go of Mammon and prowls around the edges of the light, listening, trying to figure out where my voice came from.

“Get back here,” shouts Mammon. “He’s goading you.”

I take out Mason’s lighter from my pocket and toss it onto the nearest couch. The ice-cream man spins and blasts the enemy furniture.

I throw the black blade. He sees it at the last second but can’t get out of the way, and the blade buries itself in his right eye. He’s dead before he hits the floor.

Mammon finally sees me as I step out from behind his floating map of the universe. The room is empty except for us. Mammon’s dead officers have all winked out of existence and are on their way to Tartarus, the Hell below Hell.

I get Mason’s lighter off the couch and put it back in my pocket.

From the floor, Mammon gives the room an expansive wave like he’s addressing the multitudes.

“Lo, the prodigal coward returns. It’s been a long time, assassin. How have you been? Enjoying your life upstairs? That’s a breathtaking tan.”

I take my time getting to him.

“You’ll notice I’m not rushing over. I want you to get used to seeing the world from floor level.”

He looks me over.

“Nice coat. But I hate the shoes.”

“I like what you’ve done with the place. Is that why you threw in with Mason? He got you a good decorator?”

“I’m with Mason because I appreciate winners.”

“Like the five I just slaughtered? Or was it that time when you threw in with Lucifer to take over Heaven. Face it. You’re completely shit in the picking-winners department.”

Mammon’s legs are splayed at funny angles. He’s propped on his elbows, trying to look comfortable. I circle him so half the time he’s talking to empty air.

He shrugs.

“We were young back then and swept up in the excitement that we could throw out the old ways and rebuild the world. I’m older now and understand. Our plans weren’t thorough enough back then. This time they are.”

“I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, doughboy. I have a feeling if you fuck up one more time, there’s nothing left for you but Tartarus. Unless you know somewhere lower than that?”

He keeps smiling, but his lips do a little involuntary micro-twitch. Tartarus is the only thing that truly frightens all these Hellion bastards. Even they don’t know what’s down there. Maybe Lucifer does, but he’s not around to ask.

Mammon manages a little mocking laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. It’s a private joke. You wouldn’t understand. There’s wine and Aqua Regia on my desk. I hear you’re quite the drunkard these days.”

“Did you hear that when Kasabian was still spying for Lucifer? That intel is out-of-date. I’m strictly a social drinker these days.”