Aloha From Hell (38 page)

Crab Man keeps on with the blockbuster spells, raining fire and brimstone. If he keeps on tossing the big stuff this fast, all I have to do is keep out of his way and he’ll wear himself out.

I toss a starburst into his face. It starts as a fist-size ball of plasma that explodes into a thousand burning pieces of shrapnel. Crab Man raises his shield to block the hex and I slide in underneath, thrusting the na’at at his gut, going for a kill shot.

The fireballs chew up his face, but he protects his one working eye and brings his shield down at me like a guillotine. I get the na’at into his gut a few inches, but not far enough to finish him. He swings the shield at my head, but I duck it. He raises it high and brings it straight down on the na’at, snapping it in half. That’s not supposed to happen. When a na’at is hit like that, it goes limp and bends in the middle like rubber. Mine shatters like glass. The break is clean and bright like someone’s taken a hacksaw to the thing and cut partway through it. I look at Crab Man. The na’at was rigged and he knew it. In the second it takes me to understand that, he gets my left arm in the Vernalis and closes the pincers. There’s a single white convulsion of pain as he crushes my arm and snaps it off a few inches below my shoulder. It’s a race between the arm and me to see who can hit the ground first. I win.

The crowd is going completely apeshit. For a second, the mad screaming and stomping sounds like I’m back in the real arena. I relax. I don’t want to croak in a backwater Hooverville soccer-mom park, but being back in the real arena, I can die happy.

Crab Man is bowing all the way around the stadium. Me, I just lie there and bleed. I’m done and he knows it. I want to go to sleep and stay that way. The angel in my head starts shouting. He reminds me that if I go out, I’ll die and so will Alice.

I let my mind float away and the pain takes me over completely. The agony of crushed muscles and bones revs my engines nicely. I bark a Hellion combat spell to slow the bleeding and another to suck the blood into the dirt so no one will notice it’s human.

Crab Man is soaking up the love. A few more bows and he’ll come back and finish me.

John Wayne wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, but that’s my favorite target.

I manifest the Gladius and drag myself up. I’m not what you’d call steady on my feet, but I’m close enough that I don’t have to be. I raise the Gladius as high as I can and slice off Crab Man’s Vernalis arm. The crowd goes silent. Crab Man stares at his stump. I take off one of his legs next. He falls on his face, balancing on one arm and one leg. He’s trying to move around to face me so he can attack. He swings his shield blindly, hoping I get too close and he can crush me. I let him close the distance before taking that arm, too. I keep waiting for the armed guards to open up with the shotguns, but they’re watching, as stunned as the drunks in the stands. I stagger around in front of Crab Man. I want him to see this.

He’s got one leg left and I slice that off at the knee. I want him to look in my eyes. I want the crowd to soak up every minute of this. I’m killing all of them. Every portion of pain I bring on Crab Man I’m bringing down on them. Genocide is evil and evil tastes good right now.

I slash Crab Man from right to left, through his chest. Before he comes apart, I swing the Gladius up and over, slicing him neatly from skull to ass. He falls apart in four big cauterized chunks of honey-baked ham.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call showmanship, with love from Sandman Slim.

The stadium is still quiet, like all the air has been sucked out of the place. But all it takes is for someone to drop a bottle and the sound sets everyone off at once. You didn’t see that coming, did you? Some ugly half-dead Hellion foot soldier that could pull out a Gladius. Sleep tight wondering what other secret things us infantry grunts can do.

My left arm has stopped bleeding, but it’s still a big open wound. I bark a pain spell, hold the Gladius to my arm, and burn the wound closed. Then I fall over and drift into a comforting blackness.

I feel a couple of guards drag me back to the holding pens. I don’t go back into the pen with the other prisoners. They toss me incoly toss to one of the blacked-out RVs alone. Even through the half-dead haze I can see they’re scared shitless. Maybe I’m a spy or an officer from Pandemonium come to check up on them and they just tossed me into a death pit with a roid-rage moron. The smell of my burned skin is making me nauseous. Damn I could go for a cigarette right now.

I feel around for the Maledictions. This really is Hell. One cigarette left and it was crushed beyond all recognition in the fight. I toss the pack into the dark. The angel is trying to remind me of something. I reach back into the pocket and find Muninn’s hoodoo healing egg. I bite into it and something soothing and sweet flows down my throat. In a few seconds my head is clear. I’m still weak, but the pain is gone and the world feels firm under my ass.

I let the angel loose. I need to think through this, because unless my new stump has a 007 plan to get us out of here, I’m going to have to call leaving my arm back in the arena a major setback.

I wonder if there’s a way to turn off the antihoodoo cloak around this place. I’m not too proud to crawl into a shadow and whimper in the Room for an eternity or two. Mason’s already putting up wanted posters. He knows I’m here. What do I care if one of his pet magicians detects me using the key? But I’m back in the holding area and the cloak is on, so I can’t throw any hoodoo. And there’s no way I’m fighting my way through all those guards with a wing clipped.

I need to stop for a minute and catch my breath. I don’t know how long Muninn’s egg is going to last. I need to keep moving while it does. I let the angel take over my senses. It can see right through the RV’s tin-can walls.

I expect to see Rommel and the Afrika Corps around the place, but there isn’t a Hellion within a hundred yards of me. I’m Chernobyl in a white-trash pied-à-terre. The angel does a three hundred-and-sixty-degree scan around the place. The few Hellions brave enough to be within eyesight are all on the arena side of the RV. Behind me is an empty field. But the RV is protected by the same Malebranche hex that zapped me good back in the flatbed. I cut a person-size hole in the wall and fall through. If I keep the RV between me and the posse, I just might be able to slink away into the dark with my tail tucked between my legs.

I guess this is Plan B.

J
UST A FEW
blocks away the streets are packed. I’m not sure where I am. I try to look nonchalant with my missing arm and the side of my coat soaked with dried blood and scorched by the Gladius. The crowd makes it easy to disappear. So does the fact that a lot of the losers lying in the street and begging around the food stalls don’t look much better than me.

I wonder if any of the big brains back at the stadium have figured out I’m not in the RV anymore. One of the brave ones is going to check out the arm I left behind, see that it’s human, and eventually figure out who it belongs to. My wanted posters are all over, so knowing the arm is mine doesn’t bother me, but I hate the idea that some Hellion cocksucker is going to stick it on his wall as a trophy.

This is the first crowded patch of land I’ve seen in Eleusis. Hard-core raider country. Instead of hitting the individual corner markets, the enterprising ones have cleared them out and set up their own stalls. It’s a county-fair midway, full of ugly Hellspawn and starving pagans desperate or brave or stupid enough to pick through the gutters and garbage for leftovers. Looking at what’s going on at the stadium and the ruthless bastards picking the city clean out here, I can’t see much difference between the raiders and the posse that followed Jack and me except who pays their salaries. It makes me wonder how many soldiers in Lucifer’s legions were true believers and how many were simple mercenaries. Another nice design job, God. You ate your roughage and shit out an angelic army that could be bought off with beer and Twinkies.

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 andv> straigh 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 ighhat wayso 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.”