Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-two: lifted

IN MORE normal circumstances I might have tried to talk my way out of it, not that Candy was going to let me walk away, of course. It was far too late for that. But I would have tried to bullshit him long enough to get some distance between us, then done my best to outrun him. For some reason, though, I had been getting angrier and angrier for most of the last hour. Perhaps getting dumped had something to do with it. Also, I’d just kicked Candy’s partner over a cliff, which meant he probably wasn’t going to listen to me very carefully. So instead of trying to find a less violent way to deal with an elephantine knee in my chest and a gun in my face, I ducked under the gun barrel and yanked the long, curved knife I’d bought at the Night Market out of my boot. I did my best to hamstring him as I pulled it forward, but didn’t spend too long worrying about whether I’d succeeded or not, because the main thing I wanted to do was drive it into his groin, which I did about a quarter second later. Candy screamed and fell across me, fountaining blood, but I was already rolling; I managed to kick my way out from under him, but not before getting covered in sticky red stuff. If he’d sunk his thick fingers into me with his weight on top of me, I’d still be there.

To his credit, when he realized how badly I’d cut him and that I’d slipped out of his grasp, the big fellow didn’t spend a lot of time cursing or shouting in frustration, just levered himself up off the ground and came after me, lumbering like a lame elephant. I was already scrambling sideways, trying to find a less dramatic way down the slope than Cinnamon had taken, but couldn’t see one. Candy still had his gun, and he squeezed off a shot so loud that my ears popped. If he’d hit me, my head would have popped, too. As it was, a tree about two feet from my head exploded into flying, flaming shreds of wood.

I had literally no idea whether his gun was a single-shot or some kind of repeater, and I didn’t know how to find out without letting him fire at me again. Candy’s gray, heavy-boned face, never pretty at the best of times, was now a mask of snarling mouth and smeared blood. He was bleeding heavily from the crotch, but from the way he smashed his way through everything I tried to put between us, he wasn’t going to bleed out until he’d had time to unwind my guts like a tangled yo-yo. As I ran along the edge of the cliff, I scooped up a jagged rock the size of a cantaloupe.

The next time he staggered and slowed for a second, I was ready for him. I didn’t bother to wind up, I just set my feet and pegged it at him hard, like I was making the turn on a double play. I actually have a pretty good throwing arm, and I’ve often wondered whether that and my inexplicable love of baseball are traces of my unknown past, but at that particular moment all I was thinking about was trying to heave a large stone through Candy’s even larger skull. It hit him in the forehead with a godawful loud thud, hard enough that I saw the bones of his skull crunch inward beneath the skin like somebody had dropped a hard-boiled egg on a tile floor. He let go of his gun and fell to his knees, blood now gushing out of him top and bottom as he raised shaking hands to his face.

I could have just kept running—he was going to be in no shape to follow me for at least a few minutes, no matter how fast he healed. I could also have picked up his gun and given him a few rounds in the head or chest, enough to keep him down so long that I could have walked the rest of the way to the bottom in peace, stopping to pick flowers along the way (if any flowers grew on that miserable shitpile of a mountain). But as I said, I was in a crazy, violently angry mood, so instead of doing any of those things, I ran back to him and began to stab him over and over in the neck, face, and chest with that big old demon-sticker. He roared—actually, it sounded more like gargling, which I guess in a way it was—and did his best to get his hands on me, but I kept dancing back out of reach after each stab. When he eventually did get his big hands on me I’d already made a tattered, red, and soggy mess out of his upper body, and because I was behind him all he managed to do was pull me toward him. I jumped up onto his back, wrapped my legs around his neck (which was at least as thick as my waist) and started sawing away at his throat.

It was horrible. I barely remember most of the end, to be honest with you. Every now and then above Candy’s rasping bellows I heard my own voice, and I was making the same kind of incoherent noises, just in a higher register. I wasn’t thinking of those good times when I’d threatened to shoot his dick off, and he’d promised to smash me like an insect on a car grill. I didn’t even realize until it was too late that for long moments he hadn’t been pulling at me with his hands but had been trying to signal his surrender. By that time he had tipped forward until he was on his knees and elbows, and the ground all around him was a churn of mud and pooling scarlet.

“Stop.” It was the only word from him I’d understood, and it was the quietest by far, a mere gurgle, but it came just as I was sawing through the last of his neck. I yanked his head free, and held it up in front of me. It was so heavy I could barely manage, but I saw his filming eyes go wide with surprise, then saw his mouth move, silently this time, forming the word, “You . . . ?” and then I threw his head as far as I could. It bounced heavily down the slope a couple of times, then rolled over into the void and was gone.

I fell down right on top of Candy’s headless body, my insane rage suddenly gone.

When my brain finally rebooted itself, I sat up and looked around. The light hadn’t changed much, so the last day lamp was still burning. It was never easy to guess how much time had passed in Hell, but other than the corpse of Caz’s bodyguard (made considerably handsomer by the removal of its head) I was still alone. I was very grateful for that, believe me, and not just for the obvious reasons. I’d lost control so completely that I would actually have been ashamed—yes, even in Hell—for anyone to have seen me, especially Caz.

I was completely soaked in blood. I did my best to clean the knife, then slipped it back into my boot. I knew that Candy and Cinnamon’s car had been just a few hundred feet above me, but I didn’t want to risk going back to steal it, which would force Caz to walk all the way back to Flesh Horse by herself through some of the worst parts of the Red City. I didn’t want to put her in that kind of danger. This led to another Bobby Dollar Special Moment: I was actually leaving her the car so she could get home faster and report the disappearance of her bodyguards sooner. And she’d have to, of course. You didn’t just go out for the afternoon, misplace about a half ton’s worth of demon-gorillas, and then not mention it to their employer.

I probably should have tried to find Caz then and take her with me, but I didn’t know how long I could hide her from an angry grand duke and his soldiers. Riprash wasn’t leaving until the next day, and the last thing I wanted was to have them start checking the ports. If she went home now, Eligor would be alerted to what happened to her bodyguards, but I hoped Caz herself wouldn’t be suspected of anything. Of course, it was going to be more difficult now for her to get out to meet me at the temple. (And yes, I know she’d never even hinted she would, but I needed to believe it just to keep myself going.) I had my own bad decisions to blame for that.

My personal situation was a bit more difficult. Even if I could wash off everything that had leaked, dribbled, and spurted out of the beheaded bodyguard, I was sure I was covered with bleeding wounds of my own. I really didn’t want to go back to the Ostrich looking like that and hope nobody noticed. Hellfolk might not care much about stuff like that as a general rule, but they’d sell you out in a hot second if there was a chance of profit.

I was lucky that I hadn’t left anything I really needed there, because the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to go near the place. I was exhausted, shaking, and looked like I’d fought a cage match with a pride of lions. I needed to go somewhere safe, if only to rest. That really only left me one option.

Before I reached Riprash’s ship, I took a few moments to slip into the oily black shallows of the Styx and wash off as much of Candy’s blood as I could, then I climbed quickly back onto the dock just ahead of a flotilla of large, corpse-white eels who had come wriggling toward the smell of diced bodyguard.

The one thing I couldn’t fix was how I felt on the inside, which was pretty fucking awful. I’d never experienced anything like the killing frenzy that overcame me, not even in the worst moments with the Harps, on the most violent and terrifying of missions. And I had to admit something to myself that I’d been ignoring a long time: Hell wasn’t just getting to me; it had already gotten to me.

The realization made me cold all over. By the time I stumbled into Riprash’s loading operation, I was shivering like someone in the final stages of malaria.

The ogre didn’t bother to ask me what had happened. As soon as he saw my bloody, dripping clothes, he just threw me over his shoulder and carried me up the gangplank to his cabin. He and Gob washed out the worst of my wounds, then bandaged me with comparatively soft cloth and gave me water to drink. I had just enough strength to marvel at how much like actual life it was living in Hell. I could bleed here. I could go mad here.

I could also sleep here. I fell into feverish dark.

When I woke up I was alone. I got to my feet, shaky as a junkie just gone through withdrawal, and climbed to Nagging Bitch’s top deck. It was dark except for the distant red glow of the afterlights. Riprash was just sending home the last of his stevedores.

“Good you’re up,” he rumbled, “’cause the boy and I are going out, and I was about to wake you up to tell you. Didn’t want you fretting when you woke up and found us gone.”

“Gone?” I wasn’t crazy with anger any more, but I still had a healthy dose of Hell-induced paranoia. “Gone where?”

Riprash looked around carefully then leaned toward me. “Fellowship meeting,” he said quietly. “It’s our last night in port, so I’d feel bad if I missed it.”

I’d already attended one of Riprash’s meetings, and as interesting (and even touching) as it had been, I didn’t need to go to another. Still, I would be waiting by myself on the ship, perhaps for hours, knowing all the time that Eligor’s household must be looking hard for whoever had killed the two bodyguards. I hoped if they had a way to slip them into new bodies, it would at least take a while, because I was pretty sure that Candy had recognized me at the end. No, the more I considered it, the less I wanted to stay anywhere alone.

“I’ll go with you.”

Riprash, like most religious folk, was pleased. “Good. Good! I’ll tell Gob. He’ll be right pleased. He’s really taken to the Lifters, you know.”

Gee, the kid felt drawn to a credo that said there might be something more to his life than an eternity of pain, hopelessness, and utter misery? I couldn’t imagine why.

The meeting was in one of the huge warehouses that fronted on one of the main Stygian channels. The floor of the warehouse was stacked full of sacks and earthenware jars, but the upper levels were less crowded, and on the highest floor there was a room that suited the Lifters’ purpose. It was empty but for black straw on the floor, and had a big window that opened onto the roof. Remember, kids, if you’re going to start a heretical sect, always make sure you have at least two available exits.

At least three or four dozen of the damned were waiting there, and the way they perked up at Riprash’s arrival told me he was just as important to this little coven of malcontents as he had been to his Lifters group back in Cocytus Landing.

“Here, let me tell you about a fellow I heard of,” Riprash began when the crowd had quieted a little. “I said, listen up, you scum!”

Shushing by ten-foot-tall monstrosity is actually pretty effective. In the new silence, I could hear the faint sounds of work gangs shouting a short distance down the dock, and the screams of the whipped slaves whose hard labor drove the crane that lifted and lowered the cargo. Even after weeks in Hell, it didn’t make for a soothing background.

“There was this fella,” Riprash began. “I got no idea whether he’s here with us or in the Other Place, but when he was alive, he had a big idea. His name was Origen and he lived in Alexandria—”

“I lived in Alexandria,” said one of the larger, louder audience members. “I never knew anybody went by that.”

Riprash shook his big head. “Enough with your yapping, Poilos. You said that about Alexander the Great, too. ‘How could he be so great if I never heard of him?’ Just keep your mouth shut for a change, and you might learn something.” He scowled, something that would have stopped the heart of most living humans. Poilos didn’t curl up and die, but he did stop talking. “Good,” said Riprash. “Now let me get on with it . . .”

Having heard the talk about Origen and his ideas before, I admit I phased out a little. I was still wrestling with Temuel’s connection to these poor damned bastards. It wasn’t like Riprash was starting an open rebellion or anything—rather the contrary, as far as I could tell. Instead of urging his infernal fellows to rise up and overthrow their post-angelic overlords he asked them to imagine a better day that might come at some unimaginably far date in the future. How could that be useful to Heaven?

A sudden idea occurred to me. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this had nothing to do with some larger plan, nothing to do with the war between Us and Them, between the Highest and the Adversary. Maybe this was just something that Temuel really believed in. Maybe he actually thought that nobody, not the damned, not even their cursed jailers, was beyond redemption.

That sort of took my breath away. I was suddenly filled with a sense of how big and tragic Hell really was. God, if He was as responsible as my superiors claimed, had built a huge machine to concentrate suffering and institutionalize His punishment. The quid pro quo, as far as I’d ever been able to tell, was, “If you do wrong, even if it is only once for a brief moment, you will be tortured for it forever and ever, amen.” Period. No appeal, no parole. But old Origen of Alexandria hadn’t believed that, and maybe Temuel didn’t either. Could that make any difference in the larger scheme of things?

It could if these damned souls believed it. It would give them something they had never otherwise had—hope. So was my archangel really trying to bring comfort to the most afflicted of all? Or was it, as I had first assumed, just a cynical way to make trouble for the Adversary?

After all the time I’d spent here in the Pit, and despite everyone who had been trying to destroy me, I was having more trouble than ever with the whole idea of Hell. It’s hard to think of the enemy the same way when you’ve seen them at home, met the wife and kids, etc. And I was definitely far into the “etc.” phase, considering that I thought of a female demon as my girlfriend, even if she said she didn’t want to be. Was there still a chance Caz was going to show up tomorrow night? And even if she did, how was I going to get her safely onto Riprash’s ship?

All of those unanswered questions made me restless, so I got up to walk around. That didn’t last long, since the room was full of hideous hell-creatures annoyed with me for creaking the floor while they were trying to listen to Riprash, so I wandered out into the open corridor that crossed the upper level. Most of the storage rooms were empty and their doors were open. For a moment I thought I saw a disturbingly familiar shape, gray and hunched, in one of the doorways. After a moment’s stunned surprise, I pulled my knife out of my belt and cautiously approached the door. When I stepped through, the room was empty of even the piles of black straw that I expected, and the window at the far end was open, the shutter still propped up.

Could it really have been Smyler? But if it had been, why would he run? Was he afraid of all of the others in the nearby room? Somehow that didn’t seem quite what I expected of him. Maybe he was just waiting for a better opportunity to get me alone.

Rattled, I hurried back to the greater security of Riprash’s Lifter meeting, but I had barely slipped back inside when I was startled by a crash and harsh voices from downstairs. I wasn’t the only one: eyes widened in the near darkness all around the room, then a second later our quiet gathering of damned turned into a cockroach party suddenly exposed to light, malformed shapes scuttling in all directions as the first of the Murderers Sect guards burst through the door with whips and torches and nets.

Had Smyler been spying on us for the authorities? It didn’t really make sense, but it was hard to believe his being here was a coincidence, either.

I struggled through the chaos looking for Riprash, but the ogre appeared as if from nowhere, picked me up by the back of my neck like a stray puppy, and carried me toward the window. He held Gob in his other massive hand, and before I could even make sense of his plan, Riprash had leaned so far out of the window that the boy and I were dangling in midair, nothing beneath us until the hard stone cobbles nearly a hundred feet below. I didn’t have much time to think, however, because a moment later I felt a massive yank and Gob and I were flying through the air with everything spinning around us like the view in a kaleidoscope. It took me a panicked half-second or more before we crashed and rolled and slid to a halt, and I realized that Riprash hadn’t flung us down, but all the way up onto the roof of the warehouse. After that, I was too busy to think about anything much, trying to find my weapons and dodge the shrieking Lifters who had found their way to the roof.

I quickly got separated from Gob in the mad skirmish. It was no longer just the other Lifters on the tiled roof now—the Murderers Sect bullies had arrived, climbing up after us, and they were wading into the nearest of the squealing heretics, dealing out what looked like serious pain, tearing flesh from backs with their bladed whips, crushing limbs and skulls with heavy maces. Those they had beaten down were hauled away in nets, trussed, and left at the corner of the roof while the guards concentrated on those of us who were still free.

As I staggered toward the edge of the roof, waving my boot knife and trying to put as much space between the guards and myself as possible, I heard a scraping, rasping crash and then thunder from just below us. I looked over the edge and saw that Riprash had taken the easiest way out of the room downstairs, smashing his way through the constricting windowframe, taking a lot of the surrounding wall with him as he jumped to the distant ground. He had apparently landed safely and now stood in the middle of a pile of debris and shattered paving, looking up.

“Jump down!” the ogre bellowed when he saw me. “I’ll catch you! Don’t be afraid!” He held out his massive paws. I hesitated, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I still didn’t know where Gob was, and I couldn’t just leave the kid behind. He never would have been in Pandaemonium if it hadn’t been for me.

I saw him at last, struggling like a wet cat in the arms of a guard. Gob’s captor had leathery skin and lips that stuck out in bony, beaklike plates, as if to demonstrate how a real life mutant ninja turtle would be anything but cute. Gamely as he was fighting, Gob clearly didn’t stand a chance; his assailant had already all but immobilized him and was only a moment from getting him into the net with a bunch of others.

I dove on the guard from behind, jabbing my blade deep into where his kidneys should be. I was slowed down by the chain-mail stuff he was wearing, but the demon-cutter was a big knife, and I slammed it into his back with both hands. He made a surprised, croaking noise and let Gob drop. I didn’t bother trying to retrieve the knife, but snatched the kid up and dodged through the chaos of guards and Lifters on my way to the edge of the roof. Down below, Riprash was fighting with three guards, but he was winning, and when I screamed his name he looked up, then made quick work of his enemies, literally knocking the head off one of them with his fist.

I threw Gob down to him. I had a second or two to watch the boy tumble into Riprash’s massive hands, then I was snatched back from the edge of the roof by a couple of Murderer Sectarians. Two or three more joined them, fell on me like thick men on a rugby ball, and that was about it. The last I remembered was someone beating the thoughts out of my skull with some kind of club. It was the worst drum solo ever, and for me, that’s saying something, but fortunately I didn’t have to experience it for long.