Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (42 page)

I considered it for a moment. “You win,” I said at last. But I would be damned if I was going to thank him.

We turned into the wind and walked out onto the footbridge, the long wooden causeway that led across the bay to the abandoned park. The railing was only about waist high. The wind got colder as we neared the middle. I couldn't help remembering a night on this same walkway, with a giant, molten-hot thing running after me and Sam, determined to disconnect my important bits from my other important bits. I tried to cheer up by reminding myself (and Clarence, when he asked what I was moping about) that I hadn't really believed I would make it through that one, either.

“So maybe there's a greater purpose after all, kid. Maybe there's a reason all this shit keeps happening to me.”

“There's nothing sadder,” said Clarence, “than an angel getting religion.”

“Wow, kid, that sounded just like something Sam would say.”

“Thank you.”

We stepped off the bridge and onto the rising ground of the manmade island. The south side of Shoreline Park, which had once been a picnic and hiking spot, and was the original purpose of the landfill island, had gone completely feral in the nearly twenty years since the place had closed. It looked like the Jersey Pines, like the kind of place the Cosa Nostra would dump inconvenient corpses. We cut across the island toward Happy Land, the old amusement park, a collapsing museum of the grotesque that has been involved in more low-budget movies than Roger Corman, usually as the background to some kind of post-apocalyptic zombie/mutant/alien freakout. You could almost hear the screams of overacting extras in the wind.

Crazy Town, the funhouse, was on the far side, looking out over the bay and the ferry lanes. It was amazing to think that just a short time ago, even by California standards, the old Ferris wheel had painted colored circles of light against the sky every night and the place had been full of visitors and music and the excited shrieks of the roller coaster riders. All over now, baby blue.

The funhouse stank like you'd expect with a place that had only been visited in later years by crackheads and the last-stage homeless. We stepped under the pitted aluminum roof, and for a moment I considered hiding my gun there somewhere, since I was pretty sure it wasn't going with me when I journeyed to Kainos but decided against it just in case something nasty jumped out at me from somewhere at the last second.

“Third mirror from the left,” I said to myself, then finished the joke I'd made to Sam the first time. “And straight on 'til morning.”

“What's that?”

“From
Peter Pan
, more or less. The road to Neverland. That's how Sam taught me to know which mirror.”

“Now what do we do?” Clarence was looking at the place a bit nervously. It's one thing to brave almost certain death to help a friend, another thing to wade through broken syringes, shattered bottles, and human excrement at the very beginning of the trip.

“Sam gave me instructions.” I picked up a piece of glass, then spit on the tail of my shirt and started to clean it.

“What are you doing?” The kid's eyes were big.

“I need some blood. Don't worry, I'll use my own.”

“And you're going to do it with
that
filthy thing?”
He was horrified. As I thought about it, I realized it wasn't too smart, really, not if by some odd chance I ever wound up back in this body again. “Here, use this.” Clarence fumbled in his pocket and brought out a little bottle of hand sanitizer gel. “Use a lot. I can get some more.”

“Not where we're going.” But I cleaned the sliver of glass and was secretly grateful that the kid was there. Now that I thought about it, I really should have brought a razor blade or a pocketknife or something clean.

Which did not in any way detract from the neat magnificence of my mall-taxicab-switcheroo, of course.

When I was finished scrubbing, I picked a part of my hand that wouldn't inhibit me too badly, the ball of my left thumb just below my palm, and made a small slice. (“Incision” doesn't feel like the right word when you're using a shard of a Southern Comfort bottle as the scalpel.) When the first drops of red appeared along the cut, I put some on my fingertip and wrote “DOLORIEL” on the third mirror from the left, which was a mirror in name only, because the metal surface was so pitted it looked like Freddy Kruger's backside.

Nothing happened.

After we'd waited a few moments, I had a sudden idea. “It's a mirror,” I said. “It doesn't look like it now, but it's a mirror.”

“So?”

“So maybe I need to write backward.” I dabbed my finger in my blood again, which was beginning to puddle in my palm, and wrote LEIROLOD.

Still nothing.

“Well, this sucks,” I commented.

“What did Sam say? I mean, exactly?”

“He said write my name on the mirror in blood.”

Clarence gave me a look that I swear was full of pity. I rethought the don't-hit-Junior decision for a moment. “What?”

“Does Sam ever call you Doloriel?”

I looked at him hard for a couple of seconds, just to let him know I could have figured it out without his help, then went to the bloody inkwell one more time and scrawled “BOBBY” on the pitted metal. The place was beginning to look like Jack the Ripper's washroom, but this time we had only a moment to wait before a glowing line appeared in the air in front of the mirror—a Zipper, or something similar, but foggier and less distinct. I'd seen one like it before.

“Step through,” I said.

“You first, fearless leader,” said Clarence, and so I did.

And stepped out again into a cold, winter forest. But this wasn't anything like what I'd seen the first time I'd come through, when we escaped the museum. When you hear the word “forest,” you usually think of trees, but the only treelike thing about the scorched pillars standing all around us were their half-exposed roots in the black, ruined ground. The devastation extended as far as I could see along the hillside where we stood—devastation, corruption, destruction. From where I stood, I could not see a single living thing.

“Anaita's already been here,” I said. “This isn't good. It's not good
at all
.”

“Damn it, Bobby, I hate when you say things like that.” Clarence turned in slow circles, staring at the ruined forest like a child who has just realized he's alone in a supermarket and his parents have disappeared. He took a step and little puffs of ash rose into the air around his shoes. The sky seemed bleached almost white. We were surrounded by silence. “Because you're usually right.”

I
T WAS
a place I'd barely even seen, a place whose connection to my own life was mostly negative, and yet as we made our way across the devastated landscape of Kainos, I was on the verge of tears.

Oddly enough, part of my reaction came because the destruction was limited: I could still see the unsullied mountains and the pristine sky. Looking at those I had the same sense of wonder, of connection to something deeper and more real than reality itself, something that had struck me so hard on my first, brief visit just a couple of days earlier. It made the destruction seem even more pointless.

But what upset me the most was that it wasn't simply devastation, all the scorched trees and gouged earth, but
fury
. The destruction was vengeful, and it was personal. This was no act of nature, despite the rifts in the land twenty feet wide and unguessably deep, or the burned trunks of huge trees scattered in all directions as if by a hurricane. This was the work of a very, very angry, very powerful being. An enraged goddess, I felt sure—an avenging angel who had thrown off the restraints of Heaven.

Almost swimming in deep black and gray ash, we finally crested the nearest hill and could look down on a valley at the outer edge of the devastation. It was sickening to see the wreckage of the forest on this large a scale, but that wasn't what first caught my eye. On the far side of the field of char that had once been a rolling meadow, bisected by a river that was now only a blasted, empty ditch, stood the house I had seen twice from afar, once in person with Sam and once through the door in the fun house the first time Sam had opened it in my presence. It sat like an unwieldy spacecraft on the top of a hill that could have been the scorched, blast-cracked launch pad of some abandoned ruin of the Soviet space program. But the house itself was completely untouched.

Clarence and I stood staring, surprised into silence. It seemed like a mirage that might shimmer and disappear if we made any noise.

As I stood there, staring at something that shouldn't exist—or at least not looking like it did, like a nice house in the hills in a real estate add—I realized for the first time that something else odd was going on: Clarence looked just like Clarence.

Now, normally when you're standing next a person who looks like that person, it's no big deal. But when you get to Heaven, you always look like an angel. And, as I discovered, when you wind up in Hell, you look like something that belongs in Hell. So why was Clarence standing beside me wearing his button-collar shirt, and his windbreaker that looked like he ironed it, and his suede shoes that always looked like they belonged on the feet of a rich old European man? (I accused him once of wearing Hush Puppies, and he was really insulted. “These are Ferragamos!” he said, I guess the same way I might say, “It's got a 426 Hemi engine!”)

I looked down at myself and saw I was also wearing basically the same thing I'd worn during the trip through Shoreline Park, except now with a layer of ash and dust—my jacket, a black t-shirt, a pair of dark jeans, and the work boots I like because a) they're black, b) they're not half bad to look at, and c) you can kick the shit out of someone with them if you have to. I tell you not to compare my wardrobe to the kid's, but because finding myself wearing
exactly the same clothes
in an entirely different reality was hard to figure. Remembering my gun, I checked my pocket, but it wasn't there. So, same clothes but no other objects.

“Are you wearing a belt?” I asked the kid.

“Yes.”

“And you were wearing it before we got here?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Yeah. Why?”

“We'll talk about it later. Meanwhile, we have to figure out what to do. And I have. We're going to go check out the house.”

Now his expression changed from puzzlement to Seriously Contemplating Mutiny. “No way. You're joking, right? Because if that's the only place around here that doesn't look like a bomb dropped on it, then the person who did this is probably inside.”

“I don't think so.”

“Oh, then let's go, sure. ‘I don't think so' is all the assurance I need to risk whatever we're risking here. What
are
we risking here, by the way? Just our bodies, or our souls, too?”

I laughed, but it wasn't because I found anything very funny just now. “Let's put it this way—if there were such a thing as soul insurance, I'd be calling my agent.”

Clarence looked pale—no, he looked pale green. There's a difference. “And we're going there, why?”

“Because it's there. Because it didn't get blown to shit and matchsticks. And because we're trying to find Sam, and it's the most obvious place he'd leave a message, or at least a clue where he is.”

“But it's so . . .
exposed
.”

“And so are we, standing in the middle of all this nothing. Let's get to getting.”

It would have been an odd house even if it stood in the middle of nice neighborhood instead of the remains of downtown Hiroshima. It was too tall, for one thing, four or five vertical stories in a box only about half as wide as it should have been. From this angle the tower at the top was much more visible, and looked less like a cupola and more like a steeple.

It set me to thinking, but I kept my thoughts to myself because Clarence was like a spooking horse, all nerves and eye-whites. Of course, that was really the only sane reaction to trying to sneak up on an angel, a genuine Warrior Queen of Heaven, with nothing but our bare hands. Hell, my own mouth was so dry that if Anaita had appeared in front of me, I couldn't even have spit at her.

Up close, the ring of devastation looked slightly less complete. I could make out the remains of a couple of paths and the ruins of more than a few outbuildings, although “ruins” was a stretch, because what we really saw were only the scorched outlines and ordered ash where buildings had once been, before the firestorm. A ghost of a grassy verge still fringed the place, like the hair of a dying monk, but the grass had turned gray, and when I reached down to pick some it crumbled to dust in my hands.

“Shit,” said Clarence in a whisper. “She just burned and burned and
burned
.”

I almost warned him to keep quiet, but of course if Anaita was in there and listening, she'd probably heard us long before that. It made me wonder again how much power she had used here and how she managed it. That's one difference between the higher angels and the schmuck angels like me and Clarence: We were limited by the physical fact of our bodies, the bodies that Heaven gave us. (People are limited that way, too—it's called “being mortal.”) But the important angels, as well as bigtime demons like Eligor, could channel a much larger amount of power than I could ever hope to. It still wasn't unlimited, though, and that reminded me of the line from Gustibus that I'd modified:
Follow the power.
Not like now, where we were walking across its effects, but in terms of figuring out how the whole mess worked. Clearly, Anaita was very strong here; as powerful as she'd been on Earth, probably more so. When we'd met on Earth, she hadn't been able to do anything like this, or she would have just grabbed me for my brainwashing, then evaporated everyone who followed me into the museum. Not to mention that she wouldn't have been anywhere near as occupied by the closet full of bugbears I'd dumped on her. But here, maybe second only to Heaven, she could call on the energies of something like a force five hurricane.

That was bad news for us, of course, although it made me feel better about not having a gun. (Because it would have been as useless as a cock ring for a Ken doll, I mean.)

But if the battle plan I had begun percolating, back on Earth, was to have any chance of succeeding, we definitely could not afford to get into a shooting war with the Angel of Moisture—a pretty good joke, now that I thought about it, since I was wading through gray dust and black ash as dry as corn starch. We had to outsmart this superior being. Somehow.

Clarence hung back a little as we got near the house, but I had already decided that if Anaita was around she'd know we were here, so I decided on the direct course. I walked up the steps, leaving little ashy outlines of my shoes on the otherwise unblemished wood. The house wasn't painted, but it didn't look like it ever had been, and the ruination all around didn't seem to have touched it: the wood was the color of Philippine mahogany, healthy and solid, with no sign of damage. It gave me a mental picture straight out of
The
Wizard of Oz
, with Anaita as Wicked Witch, standing on the roof and spraying death all around.

“Bobby . . .” Clarence said nervously, but I ignored him. I mean, I know people say I charge into things without thinking, but what difference was that going to make here? Should I have stood on the porch in the middle of that lunar landscape and called, “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?”

I pushed the door open and found myself in the middle of what was clearly the main room, a large, high-ceilinged hall with several doors leading off it, like something that had once been a barn but had been converted into a family room for a very large family. The furniture was beyond rustic, rough and tied together with cords, not nailed, no paint or stain on anything. One wall was mostly taken up by a huge medieval fireplace. At the opposite end of the room stood a closed cabinet, simple but unlike the handmade objects everywhere else. In fact, it looked a bit like something that, in the old days, used to hide a television set, although I doubted they got cable here, or even satellite. There were also lots of tables and rough benches, but no sign of any people. To continue the children's stories theme, it looked like the Three Bears' had built a casino in the middle of the forest, and then gone out for one of their long walks before opening it.

“I don't think anyone's here,” I called back to Clarence. My voice echoed. A furious, fiery angel made of broken shards of glass and pottery did not appear. I walked over to the big, square cabinet and pulled open its hinged doors. Light leaped out, startling me, but it was not the bright beams of a psychotic angel about to burn me to charcoal but the cool, misty light of Heaven, or at least as much of it as we ever saw outside of the real place, Upstairs.

What was inside the out-of-place cabinet was a cube of solid, shifting light—something I'd seen before. We had one in the advocate's office downtown, where it was kept under lock, key, and the grumpy, watchful eyes of Alice the dispatcher. The cube looked like it was made from a single piece of crystal, but it was a lot more powerful than even the wildest New Age imagination could grasp. It was used to communicate directly with Heaven. Sam called that, “Going to Mecca.” I've never been the reverent type myself, so I only used the one downtown when I absolutely had to.

The problem with this particular cube was that it was almost certainly linked not to Heaven but to Anaita, and
only
to Anaita. I immediately shut the cabinet doors and moved away from it.

Continuing the investigation, I poked my head briefly into a large side room that appeared to be a kitchen, except the only appliance was a huge, beehive clay oven built into one wall. The ash in front of it was undisturbed. Whatever had destroyed the outside hadn't even shaken the floor in here. I headed upstairs to the next level. The stairs, like the walls and roof, were very, very solid. I was beginning to think the house had been brought here—or created here—as a whole, and then the cruder furniture had been added by Sam's Third Way souls as part of their new life.

But where were all those Soul Family Robinsons? And where was Sam? A nasty thought kept whispering that if I went outside and looked carefully, I might find ash outlines of more than just buildings—maybe even of something Sam-shaped—but I kept pushing that thought away.

The upstairs floors seemed to be mostly bedrooms, although that word is stretching it a bit. They were a lot more like the barracks at Camp Zion, with wall-to-wall bunk beds made in the same Tom Sawyer Island style as the rest of the furniture. These, at least, gave some sign of being slept in, the thin wool (and, again, very handmade) blankets tossed in disarray. It had clearly been something less expected than a military reveille that had got this group moving.

I was inspecting the dorms on the next floor up, trying to get a rough idea of how many people had lived here, when I heard Clarence call me from down below. He sounded a bit uptight, but why shouldn't he be? “Be there in a second.”

“No, I think you should come.
Now
.”

Oh, shit,
was my first thought.
He's found a body.
I reached into my pocket out of habit, but there was no gun to be drawn. Usually I hate carrying them, because then I keep having to use them, but I hate it even more when I need one, and I don't have one. My gun control dilemma in a nutshell.