Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

forty-one: straight on ’til morning

BY THE time I got out of Five Page Mill, a wet afternoon had become a wet early evening. I didn’t really have much left to do now. Unless Oxana had squeezed out of the boarding ramp and made a run for it, she was on her way back to the land of Scythian warriors. I’d had my last knees-up at the Compasses, and I’d spent pretty much all my money. I’d even put a final check in the mail to George, a bonus, with a note telling him to use it to hire himself a part-time back scratcher (because I was pretty sure it must be itchy living in a pig sty). And I couldn’t take anything where I was going, either, so I gathered up all my stuff and stowed it in one of Caz’s closets, then gave the apartment a cleaning, just in case she came back one day. The Amazons, bless them, had left candy bar wrappers and potato chips bags in some very unexpected places, along with chocolaty fingerprints on several of the expensive draperies, so it took a while before I was satisfied. I don’t like tidying up much, but once I start, I can’t stop until everything is damn well clean.

I also sent a letter to Clarence care of Chico at the bar, thanking him and Wendell for the risks they’d taken on my behalf. I didn’t want to tip the kid off too early.

I took a last look around Caz’s windowless, Arabian Nights apartment. It was so full of memories now that it was harder to leave than anywhere else I’d ever been. I don’t get too attached to places, usually, at least not the places I sleep in. But Caz and I had fallen in love here, and for a few crazy days during the last weeks, with the Amazons and Harrison/Clarence/Junior around, it had begun to feel like a home. I’d never really had one of those, at least not during my afterlife. As to what my earlier, non-angel life had been like . . . well, if I hadn’t been sure I had no future, I would have spent some of it finding out who I used to be. The visions I’d experienced under Anaita’s influence in the museum had seemed more than simply real, they had seemed profound, even crucial in some larger way. I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she’d manufactured them somehow, but in my gut they’d felt genuine. Normally I’d have been fired up to learn more, but I had simply run out of time: Judgement Day was here, and I had pretty much reconciled myself to exiting this afterlife with unanswered questions.

As I took a last turn in the courtyard garden, I heard something fluttering. A moment later a tiny, crooked shadow dropped to the ground in front of me, extended its four wings, then folded them back up. I kneeled beside it.

It was a new nizzic, smaller than the last, kind of a cross between a bald hamster and a dragonfly. What it said was quiet and the message was short—by the time I picked out a few words, it had finished. I had to hold the creepy little thing close to my ear to hear properly when it started again. The voice was Caz’s, but weaker and more distant than before, as if she broadcast from a distant galaxy.

• • •

“This nizzic can’t be reset. This will be the last message, Bobby. I can’t stand it. It’s too hard, waiting to hear from you. These little sips of foolish hope only delay the inevitable. I’m sorry, my love, it’s my fault. If anyone should have known better, it’s me.”

• • •

I left the miserable little thing in the courtyard, locked up the apartment carefully, then climbed into my ugly yellow chariot.

I’d discovered something interesting about the cab while running my errands, another odd-shaped piece in the small puzzle that had been my relationship with Temuel. See, Heaven was definitely trying to keep an eye on me, and they had to know about the taxi, but they didn’t seem to be able to keep a direct trace on it. I knew this because in the few days since my trial, I’d already managed to lose several tail cars. Also: Heaven’s spies didn’t seem to know where the apartment was, either. I’d clocked several suspicious vehicles in the general vicinity of Caz’s place, but they seemed to be unable to narrow down my whereabouts past a good-sized sanctuary. Heaven’s Finest didn’t even seem sure which side of the freeway the place was on. How could that be? I had to admit that it seemed like it might have something to do with Temuel getting me to come all the way across town before he handed me over to Counterstrike.

Heaven may not have known exactly where I started my trip, but they latched onto me within a few minutes after I left the apartment. I was on the Bayshore, a mile or so south of the University Avenue exit, when I spotted the tail car, a nondescript Ford minivan. Actually, it was almost too nondescript, without bumper stickers or even dealer plate-frames. Female driver and male passenger were also wearing sunglasses, although it was now after six at night and the sky was getting dark. I was almost insulted until I decided they were just the obvious tail, the ones who I was meant to concentrate on and maybe even lose while the real tail followed me at a distance.

I took a circuitous route, pretending to try to lose the minivan, but I didn’t really want to lose them, so I didn’t give it my best shot. I took them on a long, irritating ride through the south end of town, up San Antonio Expressway and through a dozen cross-streets, then down Shoreline toward Stone Fruit Mall. It was interesting to see how much more modern the buildings were at this end of the city. The center of San Judas was moving, at least the economic center, leaving the dear old downtown behind. Out here, Silicon Valley’s current wave of well-to-do immigrants were building a big toddler town for themselves, full of zippy restaurants and coffee shops with sidewalk tables and awnings, and office buildings with the fancy, brushed-metal look of expensive bathroom fittings.

How did I get to be such an old man when I’ve only been alive twenty years or so? I must have been a real curmudgeon in my previous existence. But you probably already guessed that.

I pulled into the new parking structure at the Stone Fruit Mall. If you ask an old local, they’ll be happy to tell you that much of this part of San Judas (and the rest of the lower peninsula, too) was once the world’s fruit basket. I’m not sure I’d want that nickname myself, but I guess large rural areas can’t be choosy. Anyway, the massive four-story shopping center was built on the site of what had been one of the biggest apricot orchards in the state, which only survived now in the name, the blossoming branches on the mall logo, and probably expensive dried fruit packages in the mall’s many gift shops.

Now came the tricky bit. I parked in one of the outermost stalls on the second level, left my phone in the taxi (because let’s face it, we all know it had to have been bugged as hell after the trial) along with my car keys, stashing both under the seat, then made my way into the mall’s vast front atrium. You could look up several stories once you got inside, and the storefronts were nearly all glass—a huge faceted jewel of commerce. People wandered through the place like they were in Oz, some even bobbing their heads to the piped-in music.

Never listen to mall music. It will put you in an apocalyptic mood. But maybe the mood was only mine. The customers seemed happy—modern shopping malls are like a small (and somewhat brainless) world of their own. A guy I know who used to work in the Stone Fruit said that in the summertime, lots of parents just dropped their kids off in the morning with money for food and a movie at the theater, then came back and got them at closing time.

I figured that however many people were tailing me, some would stay outside to keep an eye on the cab while others followed me in. That meant I had to make my move quickly, before the inside tail found me, so I grabbed an elevator and shot up to the third floor, in and out of The Gap, then immediately shuttled back down to the second floor boutiques, up to the fourth, then down to the food court and across the mezzanine to the elevator on the opposite side, which I took down to the underground parking lot, where I was greeted in the elevator lobby with a large “Coming Soon: Target” sign. Dodging up and down that way was how I’d used the lifters in Hell to confuse the demons hunting me, and it had worked pretty well. I was pleased to see it seemed to work on angels, too.

I didn’t go near my own vehicle, of course. The elevators ferried shoppers back and forth to the main building, but at the far end of the garage was a set of stairs that led up to a bus stop and taxi stand next to the parking garage. I climbed the stairs, walked as fast as I could to the main doors, and then hailed the first passing taxi.

Yes, that was my plan in miniature. Leave one cab behind, get another. Everything else was just hand-waving for distraction. It was a lot simpler than trying to lose my surveillance on some breakneck, movie-influenced car chase. In fact, the best plans are usually always simple. Why don’t I remember that more often?

• • •

The driver let me out about a quarter of a mile from the Shoreline Park footbridge. After I paid him I had about twenty dollars left, so I gave it to him for a tip. In return, he warned me not to hang around too long after dark—because, he said, some real weirdos were out in the baylands at night. He clearly didn’t know he was talking to one of them. As he drove off, I pulled up my collar against the stiff bay breeze and started walking.

I thought I’d handled it all very neatly, so I was embarrassed as well as disturbed to see a solitary figure standing beside the beginning of the footbridge across the bay. The only thing I hadn’t got rid of was my gun, so I kept my hand on it as I got closer. The guy didn’t look like he was going to move, so I slowed to check him out.

“Come on, hurry up, would you?” he shouted at me. “It’s freezing out here.”

“Clarence? What are you doing here?” The kid was wearing a long overcoat—playing James Bond in his imagination was my guess—and looked every inch the mysterious contact in a dangerous foreign spot.

“Waiting for you, obviously. And you seem to have forgotten my name again.”

“Yeah, sue me. Why are you here? You couldn’t have got my message yet.”

“What message?”

“Shit.” I stood in front of him for a few seconds, staring. I hate surprises. “It’s been a long month, kid. Why are you here?”

“Because I’m going with you.”

I don’t feel good about this, but I confess that my first thought was to smack him unconscious again like I had last time we’d been out at Shoreline, because I just didn’t need this shit. I knew it was wrong, though, and I also had a suspicion I might not get away with it as easily as I had on the first occasion. The kid had been running and working out, things I should have been doing myself if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to get killed by demons and Nazis, and he was looking pretty fit. “No, seriously, why are you here?”

“Look, Bobby, don’t treat me like an idiot, whether you think I am or not.” He was flushed, and I didn’t think it was just windburn. “You’ve been on your farewell tour for days, anybody with any sense could see that. You slow-danced with Monica Naber right in the middle of the Compasses a couple of nights ago. You got drunk and sang “Carrickfergus,” for goodness’ sake, and you’re not even Irish.”

“I might have been.”

“Yeah, but now you’re just a self-important jerk. A jerk who’s planning to sneak off and do something stupidly heroic, or heroically stupid, probably get charred black like Cajun food, and leave the rest of us in the dark.”

I was mildly impressed by the Cajun cooking reference. The kid was working up better material. “And what if I am? I don’t think I’m under any moral obligation to get you and Wendell killed, too.”

“I agree. Wendell doesn’t need to be involved any more deeply, so I didn’t tell him. But I’m a different story, Bobby. Now, are you going to pistol whip me again, or are we going to go see Sam?”

It finally caught up with me. “But how did you know I was coming here?”

He smiled, clearly pleased. “A lucky but educated guess. When Sam told me what really happened here that night with the ghallu, he also told me about the portal or whatever it’s called. He never mentioned another one until you found Anaita’s in the museum, and I thought it was pretty unlikely you were going back there again. Anyway, I was coming over to your place to talk to you about what we should do next when I saw you leave, so I followed. You were being tailed by a white van . . .”

“I know.”

“. . . and I figured you knew and you’d ditch them somewhere, and probably ditch me too without realizing. I took a chance that you were on your way out of town already, and that meant here.” He grinned. “And I was right!”

“Yeah, congratulations. You win an all-expenses-paid trip to see ‘Revenge of the Bitch Goddess’.” I slumped a little. “So I’m going to have to knock you out to get rid of you, is that right?”

“Hey, it could have been worse. I might have brought G-Man.” He produced his phone. “I could still call him.”

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.”