Devil Said Bang (7 page)

There’s a photo of Alice, the girl I left behind
when I was dragged Downtown eleven years ago, off to the side by itself. I take
it down and put it in my pocket. I’m not leaving her here in this madhouse.

There’s a shot of another young girl. I’m ashamed
that it takes me a minute to recognize her. Green hair and pretty eyes. She
isn’t wearing her uniform or ridiculous wire antennae in the shot. I like to
think that’s why I missed her, but the fucked-up thing is that she’d slipped my
mind. She was a counter girl at Donut Universe. Two Kissi murdered her right in
front of me. She hadn’t done anything and wasn’t a threat to anyone. She’s dead
for no other reason than that she happened to sell me coffee. And I forgot about
her.

I take her photo and put it in my pocket with
Alice’s.

Near the photos of the dead are shots of people who
so far have managed to stay out of pine boxes. Candy. Vidocq. Allegra. Mr.
Muninn. Carlos. Even Kasabian and Wells.

What the hell is this? How do a stalker photo album
and a bunch of mutilated soldiers go together? Was Mason stone-cold crazy by the
end, staring at my life while slicing up the only victims who’d willingly come
into Norman Bates’s rec room?

I go over to the blackboard schematic. On a nearby
table are wire cutters, soldering irons, a voltmeter, and other electronic hobby
gear. Something like a computer or an elaborate radio lies gutted on the table,
circuit boards and bits of fiber-optic cable scattered around it. It looks like
someone was scavenging for parts. The device is vaguely familiar but I can’t
place it. I push one of the circuit boards out of the way and find something I
was hoping I’d never see again.

A Golden Vigil logo. It fell off the device when it
was pried open. Now I remember what it is. It’s angelic tech—a psychic
amplifier. I saw a few around the Vigil’s L.A. warehouse. Their Shut Eye
psychics used them to supercharge their powers for interrogations and remote
viewing experiments. As much as I want to be surprised, I’m not. Mason was
working with Aelita, the old head of the Vigil. Maybe she dropped this off with
a basket of blueberry muffins as a housewarming present.

I pick up a curled metal shaving from the table.
Turn it over in my hands. It’s a dull silver and dense. Not like something that
would go into a machine as delicate as the amplifier. There are more shavings
and half-melted ingots on the floor. I kick through them and there, lying by the
toe of my god-awful, shiny dress shoe, is what I’ve been looking for.

I pick up the metal and go back to the chair with
the dead soldier. The metal fits perfectly into the divot behind her head. The
same thing for the holes in the hand- and footrests.

I weigh the key in my hand. It’s heavy and solid
and comforting. I never realized until now that I miss the weight of the key in
my chest. This isn’t like my key. It won’t get anyone out of here but this
possession key has its own charms, and with the psychic amplifier, I bet it’s
how Mason got the thing to work and let him ride people back on Earth like a
voodoo Loa.

I thought Mason’s workshop was upstairs, but the
forge and tools were just for show. This is the real lab. And the dead soldiers
were his first experiments as he tried to make the key work. These aren’t
Lucifer’s clues and none of this gets me any closer to getting out of here, but
it’s still useful. Whoever has the key must also have a working psychic
amplifier, the one Mason was scavenging parts for. That means I don’t
necessarily have to find the key. If I can find and smash the amplifier, it
might kill the key’s power. Better yet, if I can find the key and the amplifier,
I might be able to talk to someone back in L.A.

This is good news. Not
break-out-the-champagne-I’m-coming-home good news. More like
open-a-six-pack-of-malt-liquor-I-didn’t-drop-my-keys-down-the-toilet-at-work
good news. But after the last three months, I’ll take any good news I can
get.

The dissected Hellion is really starting to stink
up the place. I want to go back to my room and sandblast my skin off but there’s
one more thing.

By itself, in the corner of the room, is an ornate
wooden table holding a black lacquered box. The box is perfectly square and
featureless. When I touch the top, I can feel faint vibrations from inside.

I feel along the edges and find a subtle seam. Then
others nearby. I push on one and nothing happens. Others move an inch or two.
The damn thing is a puzzle box, but I’m not in a puzzle mood. I take out the
black blade and bring it down hard, slicing off one side. No explosions or
poison gas or snakes with machine guns. That’s a good sign. I hack off the other
side, get my hands inside, and push. A second later, the box rips apart in a
shower of splinters and black velvet lining. It’s kind of a pretty sight. Like
an exploding ventriloquist dummy.

Something heavy and metal hits the floor. I try to
pick it up, and rip the tip of my middle finger. Getting down on one knee, I
slip the blade underneath it, raising it up like balancing an egg. In the light,
I can’t see any sharp edges. Carefully, I rest it in the palm of my hand. It’s
definitely a weapon but I’ve never seen one like it. When I turn it side to
side, something weird happens.

As the light hits it from different angles, the
thing changes shape. It’s a spiked ball the size of a tangerine. It’s a long
silver dart with barbs at each end. It’s a spinning cone of fire. It’s ice
knuckle-dusters. A parang. An elaborate Balisong, with six hinged joints that
move at 180-degree angles to each other. Whatever kind of slice-and-dicer this
is, it wasn’t made for human hands.

Fighters liked to tell tall tales around the arena.
Stories about ultimate weapons they’d heard about that would make them
impossible to kill. Over a few jugs of bitter Hellion wine (our prize for having
survived the day), we came to the consensus that the ultimate weapon would be
the one that killed all your enemies and then flew you away to Heaven or
Valhalla or anyplace where when you said the word Hell the locals would say,
“What’s that?”

One fighter from some Hellion backwater said that
he’d seen the real ultimate weapon. Only archangels had them and only Gabriel
was brave enough to use his.

“No rebel angel could defeat him because each time
he used his weapon it was different. There was no way to attack or defend
yourself against it. Before the battle was over, thousands of our rebel brothers
and sisters lay dead at his feet. These other fools think it was God who
defeated us, but the few of us who survived the battle know it was Gabriel.”

I remember something Alice said before Samael took
her back to Heaven. I’d left her alone with Neshamah, one of the five entities
that have made up God since His nervous breakdown. Alice said that Aelita killed
Neshamah with a weapon Alice had never seen before. I wonder if that’s because
what she saw was really a million different weapons. That would be pretty damn
hard to describe at the best of times and even harder if it was only for a few
seconds while someone gutted God in front of you.

Among the lacquered splinters is a kind of leather
sheath that roughly corresponds to the shape of the weapon when it’s configured
like circular-saw blades. Carefully, I slip the thing into the case and lock the
top flap closed.

I wonder if Aelita left the weapon for Mason to use
on me or if he was just holding it for her while she hunted down the other four
God brothers? Either way it’s mine now. I drop it in my jacket pocket and get
the hell out of Mason’s butcher shop.

I
head
to the bedroom but stop at the library to leave red “get your ass over here now”
signal cards in front of a couple of peepers for Ipos and Merihim.

In the bedroom I strip off the suit and give it a
sniff. The abattoir-fresh aroma all the kids love is deep inside the material.
That’s never coming out. I toss the suit over with the dead motorcycle jacket.
It’s sort of comforting seeing the growing pile of ruined clothes. I’ve killed
off a lot of men’s casual wear while getting shot and stabbed. Now all I have to
do is decapitate someone and I’ll feel like I’m home sweet home.

I grab an overcoat from the closet and toss it on
the bed. I feel enough like me that I put on the leather bike pants and boots I
wore when I came down here. They feel good. A little stiff with dried blood,
most of it mine. I put on my hoodie. It’s blood stiff too and one of the sleeves
is missing from when the red legger relieved me of my left arm. I sliced him in
half like a side of beef with my Gladius, my flaming angelic sword.

I keep the glove on, but leave my prosthetic arm
bare since no one is going to see it under the coat.

Back in the library I smack the gyroscope like
Merihim, making it spin backward. The monster-movie voice chitters like a
groundhog that’s burrowed into a meth lab. I check the peeper images on the
movie screen. Brimborion is prowling his office, smiling at his staff. Trying to
play it cool. He’s almost pulling it off, but if you look hard enough you can
see the wheels whirring in his head. Is one of these fuckers selling me out?
Maybe better to kill them all and let God or the Devil or Oprah sort them
out.

In other parts of the palace, people do funny
little square dances when they come around a corner and find a hellhound.
Maintenance guys on break in the basement check out my motorcycle. Staff witches
sort through piles of dried bugs and plants. Outside, a couple of officers are
kicking the shit out of a low-ranking Hellion while another officer uses his
long leather sap to poke the dead bikers in the gibbets. Guess the book club let
out early.

Ipos and Merihim show up a few minutes later. I
tell them about the secret room while taking out my eye. I drop the other
peepers into their saline storage jars so that mine is the only one showing on
the screen. They watch the show like a couple at a drive-in movie. Bored during
the dark part but starting a little when the lights flick on, giving them a full
frontal of Ed Gein’s rumpus room.

“Too bad you can only see the place and not smell
it. It’s memorable.”

“You think this is Mason Faim’s work?” says Merihim
when we come to the first close-up of a dissected brain.

“Unless this is what Hellions call ‘playing
doctor.’ ”

He shoots me a look. I distract him by holding out
the Magic 8 Ball.

“Ever seen one of these before?”

Merihim is too smart to grab things the Devil finds
weird but Ipos is more impulsive. He grabs the ball, turns it, and immediately
gets his hand skewered by a barb.

He curses in lower-class street Hellion, which
sounds even worse than regular Hellion. Like a shop vac sucking up sewer
sludge.

On the screen I’m moving the soldier’s body around
while the pile of body bags forms a pastoral slaughterhouse tableau in the
background.

Merihim bends to look at the ball in Ipos’s
bleeding hand but doesn’t move to take it.

“Whatever this is, it reeks of unnatural power. You
should let me take it and bury it deep in the Tabernacle vaults.”

Everyone is on a power trip here, the church
included.

“Thanks but no thanks. It stays with me.”

“This isn’t something to be left lying around.”

“Which is why it stays with me and not buried
somewhere I can’t see it.”

“And where will it end up if something happens to
you?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. If whoever knows how to
work this gets ahold of it again, my guess is that we’ll all be dead by morning.
Another good reason to keep me on the unkilled team.”

On the screen I’m poking at the psychic amplifier.
I watch them closely. Neither has ever seen one before. Neither reacts to the
Vigil logo either. At least I don’t have to worry about them working with
whoever has the key.

“Either of you come up with any new
information?”

Ipos nods and his church tattoos move like a flag
promising salvation.

“I might have,” he says. “The soldiers who attacked
you were from Wormwood’s legion. There are an unusual number of suicides and
murders among his troops. Apparently it’s been going on for some time, but since
the dead no longer disappear into Tartarus he can’t hide it anymore. My spies in
other legions found that the same thing is starting to happen in other parts of
the legion.”

Merihim says, “Red leggers have been caught
delivering bogus potions to physicians and hospitals. The real ones end up on
the black market.”

“Okay. Maybe bad drugs get them to kill themselves,
but what do they have to do with killing me?”

Merihim shrugs.

“Well, no one likes you very much.”

On the screen I’m examining the weird weapon. Ipos
watches closely, safe from slicing himself open.

He says, “General Semyazah controls the
distribution of vital goods. That gives him access to you and to a lot of power.
There’s a long list of generals who would like to replace him.”

Damn.

“We’re back to generals stabbing generals in the
back? I thought that shit was over with when I killed Mason.”

“In peace or war, there are always men who want
power for its own sake.”

Ipos has given up pretending to look at the peeper
projection and has gone to my desk to fix the wobbly leg.

“You think Semyazah is letting his own trucks get
ripped off?”

From under my desk Ipos says, “It’s possible. Being
smart doesn’t exempt you from corruption.”

He hammers a wooden spacer under one of the desk
legs. Between taps with a small hammer he says, “Of course it could be another
general earning some extra money while making Semyazah look bad.”

“Why not just kill him? That seems to be a quick
way to get promotions down here.”

Merihim shakes his head.

“Murdering Semyazah risks an all-out war among the
generals. Legion against legion. No one wants that.”