Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-nine: isolation row

SELF-PRESERVATION IS the number one rule in Hell, as you’ve probably already figured out, so you can guess how many people leaped out to help as I sprinted through Blindworm’s business district.

Even as I ran, the bizarre sights of what crazy Joseph had called The City of the Selfish jumped out at me, streets and sidewalks as wide as in a fascist capital (so people could avoid each other more easily, I guessed), public spaces segregated by stalls and blinds so that they didn’t have to see each other and the clerks and shopkeepers never had to see more than one customer at the same time. Even the tracks of the central train station, which I followed toward the lifter column, had walls between them, presumably so the passengers in their individual compartments didn’t have to see riders in other trains. And of course, since it was a big city, even in the middle of the night people were out—cleaners, night-shift workers, coffee shop waitresses and their patrons arranged behind plate glass windows like museum exhibits. And none paid attention to anyone but themselves. Tunnels, walls, boxes, hatches, Blindworm had developed a world-class system of separation. I might as well have been in the middle of the Gobi desert, running across a sand dune, hoping for assistance from the lizards. Not that I was expecting help as I fled down Lonely Street (no shit, that really was the name). The only good thing was, if I didn’t get in their way, the citizens of Blindworm weren’t likely to get in mine, either. City of Sociopaths might be a better name, I thought.

The hellhounds’ bronze claws clattered loudly on the pavement, just half a block behind me now. Even the self-absorbed local citizens were beginning to pay attention, not to me but to the horrible rasp and clang of the pursuit: they disappeared from the street like startled mice as the howls echoed down the lonely corridors between buildings.

I looked back as I turned onto a wide thoroughfare called Isolation Row. The first hound was just turning the corner, mouth jutting from the retracting snout in a complicated snarl of teeth. The beast was almost as high at the shoulder as I was, but I could only run on two feet. It was like being chased by Eligor’s ghallu all over again—another ancient evil that had wanted to tear me to pieces, that had been bigger and faster than me, too—but this time I had no silver bullets, no Sam or Chico to help me, nothing. I cocked both my pistols, put my head down, and tried to find a little more speed in my exhausted muscles.

I could see the station beneath the massive lifter tunnel at the end of the wide street, and I dug toward it. Several hellhounds were only yards behind me, a rapid-fire clink of claws on asphalt, but I didn’t dare look back again.

The station doors were open. I leaped through, nearly knocking myself out on the first of a series of switchback barriers. Instead of a vast open space, like anyone would have expected in such a large public building, the whole thing had been turned into a rabbit run of mazy walls. I had no time to try to puzzle it out, but luckily the walls were only a little higher than I was tall, and I could still see the broad bottom of the lifter tunnel at the center of the concourse. Apparently, Blindworm had been built with a more conventional hellish population in mind and only modified later.

Just like The Infernal Fauna of the River Phlegethon, the sociological peculiarities of Blindworm could occupy a team of scholars for decades, but all I wanted to do was to survive the next minute or two. I sprinted through the maze, committing about thirteen or fourteen Blindworm Cardinal Sins by not only overtaking other citizens from behind but literally knocking them over so I could get past. The hounds were right behind me, and the Blindwormers who got in my way didn’t curse me long; I heard an entire train of shrieks and mayhem noises behind me as the locals found out what I was running from.

I burst out of the first set of walls into what had been the center of an old concourse, divided now into a beehive of isolation stalls where the passengers could wait. In a continuation of my run of shitty luck, none of the lifters was signaling, which meant that all the doors were still closed. There were no indicator lights to let me know which ones would be available next, either. For all I knew, the next five lifters to arrive might be on the opposite side of the huge central column.

A deep, reverberating snarl made me leap forward just in time to avoid the hellhound that came barreling out of the passage behind me, an unlucky commuter in his huge jaws. The beast shook the poor, screeching bastard like a terrier with a rat, then dropped the limp body when he spotted me.

I backed toward the lifter column, guns drawn, as the hound came toward me. I had tested Riprash’s pistols enough to know I couldn’t trust any shot much beyond ten paces, so I waited. But as I tried to keep my gun hand steady and the barrel pointed at its sloping forehead, two more hounds scrambled out behind, one of them chewing contemplatively at the tattered remains of a leg wrapped in a bloody dress.

I might have been able to take out one of the monsters with the bullets I had in the crude revolvers. I was a lot less sure about three. And even if I managed to shoot every hellhound dead without having to reload, I still had to deal with Niloch and his huntsmen who must be close behind. I could only see one chance open to me now, so I backed up a little farther, until I was standing beside a wall of partitioned stalls.

“Ah, yes my dear, there you are,” said a voice as rotten as week-old fish. Niloch made a whistling noise and the hounds backed off. The commissar shuffled forward out of the entrance maze, something like a long buggy-whip in one hand, a jagged knifelike blade in the other, his bone-frills fractured and charred. “You’ve led us quite a chase, Snakestaff, but now that silliness is over. I can get on with the important business of making you wish you’d never heard of my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw House.” He turned his bony head toward the soldiers following him out of the maze; they had to kick the torn corpses of several Blindworm citizens aside to force their way onto the open concourse. “Here he is,” Niloch told them. “You wouldn’t think to look at this puny creature that he could be dangerous, but he is, my sweetlings, oh, yes, he is. So look lively. If he does anything silly, cut him down immediately.”

Several of the soldiers had guns, long and impressively trimmed rifles currently pointed at my favorite person in Hell: me. Others had swords and axes. Either way, getting “cut down” was going to be painful.

“And what if I just shoot you before anyone can stop me?” I asked, turning my revolver from the nearest hellhound and pointing it at Niloch himself, aiming right between those shiny little red eyes. “I could live with that result.”

The commissar laughed, a fluting noise like a breathy, delicate sneeze. “Oh, perhaps you could—”

I didn’t bother to let him finish, because I hadn’t meant to start a conversation, just make him think that’s what I wanted. Like most of these lordlings of Hell, Niloch loved the sound of his own voice. I shot him in the face.

It didn’t kill him, of course, or even slow him down much, but I hadn’t thought it would. You don’t get rid of a major demon that way, even on Earth where the physics are against them. I was more interested in distractions: one of the lifters had chimed its arrival, and I knew it was now or never. As Niloch fell back toward his soldiers, his skeletal head temporarily a blossom of shattered bone, I threw myself at the row of lifter stalls as hard as I could.

I wasn’t particularly strong by Hell’s rigorous standards—I doubt I could have stood toe-to-toe with Niloch—but I was just strong enough to rock the flimsy, partitioned wall and start it collapsing. Again, I was lucky that Blindworm had been adapted for isolation rather than constructed that way from the beginning. The stalls were little more than the infernal equivalent of plywood. Even as the first soldiers got clear of flailing Niloch and began to fire their guns in my direction, the stall structure wavered and then collapsed sideways like a row of dominos. I took cover behind the wreckage and began firing back at Niloch’s troops.

As shocked as the waiting passengers were to have the structure fall on them and then find themselves in the middle of a gunfight, they were even more shocked to find themselves face to face with, or even literally tangled up with, their fellow citizens, the very thing they feared and avoided every waking minute. Needless to say, they shrieked and fought like only the terrified insane can fight, and within a few seconds the fracas was spreading through the terminal as customers were confronted by the twin horrors of hellhounds and their neighbors.

I scrambled along the floor toward the lifter column and then stood up and shoved my way through the panicked crowd until I found the open door. There was only one passenger, a tall, scrawny demon with a face like a depressed mortician, frantically palming the wall to get the door to close. I grabbed him and shoved him out to absorb any random bullets flying around, then called out the name of a lifter stop on a level above Blindworm. I needed to go down many levels to get out of Hell, but I didn’t want my pursuers to know that. In fact, since I had no idea if they could trace or even override one of the lifters and imprison me between levels, I didn’t even want them to know which one I was riding.

The door began sliding shut, but then clanged to a grinding halt around the broad neck of a nightmare head—one of the hellhounds. The sheath of its face pulled back as the wet pink snout came out. It didn’t have regular jaws in that awful jack-in-the-box muzzle, just a round, toothy mouth like a lamprey’s. It damn near reached me as I emptied the last of my bullets into it. Foul blood and bits of tissue sprayed back at me, then I put my foot on the beast’s chest, doing my best to avoid the ragged, wounded snout, and shoved so hard that I fell back on my ass. That would have been it for me, but the hellhound stumbled back just far enough for the doors to close, and a moment later I felt the lifter car coughing and vibrating into movement as I headed back up toward Pandaemonium.

Panting, forearm bleeding from a bullet wound that I hadn’t even noticed, I slapped the wall and called out the name of a nearer stop, then quickly reloaded my gun out of the oilskin bag as the car slowed. When the door opened, I stepped out in as relaxed a manner as I could manage, and several other passengers stepped in, clearly oblivious to what had happened just a couple of levels down. A few of them noticed the bloodstains on the floor and the pair of hellhound teeth in the corner, both as big as my thumb, but this being you-know-where, they didn’t seem too upset.

I didn’t even look around the new station, but simply got onto the next open lifter, which was also going up, then got out and went down a couple of times, then up again, making sure that I wasn’t leaving Niloch and his hunters an easy trail to follow. When I thought I’d mixed it up enough, I jumped into an open, empty lifter in Ragged Armpit station and told it to take me to the Abaddon level, far below.

I was exhausted, of course, and skin-crawlingly nervous every time the lifter stopped and new passengers entered, but after I had traveled downward for a good while unhindered, I began to think I really was going to make it.

Then, at the seventh stop, two of Niloch’s soldiers got on.