Aloha From Hell (34 page)

Jack looks at me, trying to figure out how we got here.

“You’re navigating with your eyes,” he says. “To navigate these days, you have to think like a worm or mole. You must know what’s underground. This isn’t a land of right angles or streets anymore. It’s purely geologic. The sand back at the beach was probably used as landfill around here to flatten sections of the hills.”

“I’m lucky I have you, then.”

“Yes you are.” He pauses. “You were telling me about how many people you’ve killed.”

“No. I wasn’t.”

“Back in London, old Inspector Abberline and the rest of the Met think I only took five. I took plenty more than that, believe you me. There were a few in the country, but south by the coast was best. Like the lovely beach we just left. Do a day’s excursion to Brighton or Portsmouth. I’d find saloon trollops and rip them down by the wharfs. Toss their innards to the birds and fill their bodies with stones to weigh them down. They’d slip into the sea like it was waiting for them.”

“20100">nough, you twisted fuck.”

We walk on, Jack staring at his feet. Each step leaves a shallow impression in the thick dust that covers the sidewalk. If the posse is behind us, we’ll be easy to track, but I don’t have time to worry about that now. Each step is a second hand on a clock ticking away the time. Jack said it would take a day to get to Eleusis, but I’ve already lost track of how long we’ve been walking.

“None of this is a coincidence, you know,” says Jack.

“Yeah. You had a great personal ad on Craigslist.”

“Assuming I’m who I say that I am and assuming that you are who you say you are, do you truly believe that two such infamous killers could cross paths through simple happenstance?”

“Are you talking about divine intervention, Jack? Because that kind of blows your no-God theory.”

“Not God. Some other, more subtle force that’s thrown us together toward a higher purpose.”

“Listen, we’re in Hell and there are about fifty billion killers down here, so I was bound to meet someone like you. It could have been the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, or Freddy Krueger, and every one of them would tell me exactly what you’re telling me now. There’s nothing special about our road movie. It’s nothing more than the flip of a coin.”

He slowly shakes his head.

“I don’t believe that. There’s a reason for this. We’re fated to do something together.”

“Yeah. You’re going to take me to Eleusis. When we get there I’m going to shake your hand and we are going to go our separate ways.”

“There has to be more to it than that.”

“Trust me, there doesn’t.”

“Maybe our doing the thing is the payment I need.”

“It won’t work, Jack. Look at our histories. We’re lone wolves. We don’t work with partners. When we get to town we go our separate ways. I’ll be grateful I’m there and you’ll be grateful you’re not still a Hellion’s paperweight.”

A steam vent explodes nearby. The blast of heat and vapor knocks me back. I think I hear a rumbling behind us. There might be a truck coming or it might just be the sound of the vent. I push Jack and we break into a trot.

Jack says, “May I see your knife? I have a great fondness for knives.”

“No.”
gn=201D;

I look back at our tracks in the dust. You could see them from space. Maybe Jack wants us to get caught. We need to get off this street. I take his arm and push him onto a side street that’s clean of dust. The vent spews again and the street moves below us. A palm tree falls and crushes a dusty pickup truck. Jack pulls me back in the other direction.

We run to the street we’d been on before. The air is full of dust and we can’t see where we’re going, but we run anyway. If there are any sinkholes or faults in front of us, we’re fucked. We can barely see each other. But the tremors and the noise die down after a minute and the street goes back to being solid.

Jack looks at me.

“I assume you won’t stray from the path again.”

“You’re the boss, Jack.”

“Well put.”

W
E’RE HEADING FOR
what looks like low hills, but as we get closer, it’s really an area where the streets have buckled wildly, like black icebergs jutting up from the street. Eleusis is on the other side.

We turned off the dusty street twenty minutes earlier. Most of the signs in this neighborhood are in Spanish, but the residents are the same mix of dazed Hellions and lost souls we saw in Hollywood. They sit in cars and wander between strip malls like sleepwalkers.

Where the hell are you, Alice? What are you doing right now, Candy? I’d rather be having the worst time possible with either of you than having the best with my knife-happy tour guide. I know I told Candy to take the blood cure from Allegra, but I wouldn’t mind letting her show Jack here what a Jade looks like. Try to hurt
this
woman, you little shit.

Every couple of minutes a lone man runs across the street. He’s easy to spot when everyone else is going half speed. When he’s settled somewhere he whistles an all clear. Soon a group of eight or ten Hellions comes up the same way. A mix of men and women, they whoop it up, running into stores, busting the places up, and coming out again with stolen wine and food. The ones with working guns take potshots at cars and store windows.

Jack says, “Raiders.”

He starts running for the back of a half-burned building off to our right. I follow. When he can’t get the rear door open, I push him out of the way, jam the black blade into the door frame, and push. Metal pops and wood splinters. I shove Jack inside and we head to the front of the place. The door is open a crack, giving us a good view of the street.

The Hellions stroll by like the street is bought and paid for. Some are still in their uniforms. Others only kept half of their uniforms and replaced the jackets or pants with formal wear or stolen motocross gear.

“Where are the Raiders from?”

“As the war with Heaven grows closer, there are more and more deserters from the armies. They raid the provinces and live on anything they can find. I once drove the master on a mission to arrest a group hiding in Eleusis. That’s why I know where it is.”

The raiders stop in front of the building we’re hiding in. Suddenly I wish I’d brought a shotgun or two. But they’re not looking at us. They’re looking back down the street. When they get a look at what’s coming, they sprint, run, and disappear over the fence behind a convenience store.

Moving lights sweep the street. The posse has grown to several vehicles. How did they get ahead of us? They must know where we’re going.

There are about twenty Hellions on tricked-out ATVs and Unimogs. They have hot-rod flames on the sides and animal skulls mounted on the roofs and hoods. Their spotlights are LAPD issue. When they hit you with one from a helicopter, it’s instant daylight and you better stop and look happy about it. Jack and I duck behind the door as the light moves over the front of the building.

A ticking, whirring sound follows the posse. I don’t need Jack to tell me what that is. A pack of hellhounds. There wasn’t much in Hell that gave me the creeps as much as the metal hounds. Maybe my subconscious really is shaping the place. The hounds are the only things I’ve seen that look just as hard and awful as they do in regular Hell.

The hounds move in packs. They’re clockwork war dogs bigger than a dire wolf and are run by a brain suspended in a glass globe where their heads should be. A hellhound is smart and dangerous on its own. In packs, they’re like a herd of velociraptors driving tanks. The best way to fight them is to run away and hope they die of old age.

The mechanical hounds lope behind the noisy trucks, their gears ticking quietly in the dark.

“Goddammit, Jack, how much longer before we get there?”

“If we cross over to the street behind this one, with luck we can beat them all to Eleusis. I know of a wall with just a little bit of a hole in it.”

“Let’s get moving.”

“On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea to let the raiders or the men following them get there first.”

“Why?”

“You know of the asylum, but do you know that as Pandemonium has fallen apart, so has the asylum. Most of the inmates have escaped and wander the streets. The old pagans to whom the place was a paradise have all been killed or driven into the wilderness. All you’re going to find in Eleusis are madmen, raiders, and thieves hiding from the war.”

I go to the door to look out again, and something crunches under my boot. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a little wooden umbrella.

Something has been bugging me ever since we came into this place. I look at the dusty hula girls against the wall and tiki lamps and it finally sinks in that this half-collapsed shit shack is the Bamboo House of Dolls. The roof is down over the bar, but the jukebox is where it belongs. The glass dome in front is broken. Dust lies around the interior in small dunes. The player is cued up to Martin Denny’s cover of “Miserlou.”

“A friend of mine is still in the asylum. Do you think there’s a chance if she’s still in there that she’s alive?”

“I couldn’t say, but it’s my understanding that whatever inmates remain in the asylum are of a more benign nature. The ones with strength and will escaped long ago.”

Something tickles my hands and legs. Drytts. Hell’s sand flies. They’re not dangerous, just disgusting. If they find you and you stay still too long, others will come and you’ll end up buried in them.

“We can’t stay here. You have one hour to get us to Eleusis.”

“One hour or what?”

He sounds defiant, like I hurt his feelings.

“Or I’m going to think you’ve been fucking me around this whole time. Don’t forget. I’m the one with the knife. Let’s start there and let our imaginations go.”

He nods at the back door.

“The quickest way is that rise a hundred yards off. It’s also the steepest and most dangerous.”

“Lead the way.”

“Is that an order?”

“A polite suggestion.”

T
HE RISE
J
ACK
was talking about is a whole intersection that’s been punched up out of the street at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. A couple of restaurants, a small shopping center, and a gas station hang in the air over our heads. The sinkhole below is so full of wrecked cars and motorcycles that it’s nearly level with the street. The junk stews in the same bloody sewage that was in the sinkhole outside Hollywood Forever.

I start climbing, hanging on to gas pumps at the bottom and moving up to the empty garage. When I make it around there, I pull myself up on metal parking-lot crash posts. I turn around to check, and see Jack slowly following me up. I don’t think he’s happy to be around me anymore. His whole theory about fate having a reason for tossing us into the same salad has evaporated. He looks like 1C; looks all he wants is to get through this without ending up in Tartarus with Mammon.

As Jack climbs, cracks form under his handholds. He’s followed me through the garage and is pulling himself up the crash posts. As he puts his weight on each post, the cracks under it widen. The last two posts wiggle like rotten teeth. My arm is wrapped around the solid base of the shopping-center sign. I move up to a newspaper vending machine that’s anchored in the sidewalk. Jack grabs onto the solid foundation of the shopping-center sign before the posts give way.

When he’s secure I crawl into the entrance of a liquor store. If you cut through the place, the back door will take us to the top of the rise.

The liquor store stinks inside. A thousand broken bottles of wine, vodka, beer, scotch, and soda have soaked through a mountain of junk food and the whole mess is piled against the front counter and front wall. The floor is sticky with dried booze and sugar, which is disgusting but helps me keep traction as I climb to the storeroom in back. Jack is right behind, baby-crawling past the empty shelves.

I’m at the back door when the shaking starts again. It’s so subtle that it’s almost not there. It feels like the muscle memory of a nasty dream. I thought it was an earthquake, but I think our climbing has upset the delicate balance that’s kept this slab of L.A. junk wilderness upright.

The shaking turns into a steady vibration. Two heavy bodies scraping against each other. The bottles beneath us clatter together. Softly and then like a truckload of xylophones being pushed down a long flight of stairs. It’s hard to hold on to the shelves as the tremors deepen. Parts of the ceiling fall down on us. There’s a sick liquid moment when the whole intersection shifts. Up ahead, the rear wall cracks and the rest of the ceiling starts coming down. The whole liquor store is sliding forward.

“Move your ass, Jack.”

I scramble past the shelves and kick off the top one, grabbing onto the door frame at the top. I climb to the back of the storeroom and pull on the door. The twisting building has jammed it shut. I grab the doorknob and shove the black blade into the metal lock. It pops out and clatters against the wall like a bell. The door swings open and I pull myself up onto the rear step.

Jack is stumbling over office furniture. Cracks open at my feet. The store is breaking away from this last anchor of ground.