The Dirty Streets of Heaven

thirty-six

So there I was doing what comes naturally, dripping wet on my hands and knees with a gun against my neck, surrounded by the lights of Howlingfell’s nearby boat and the worried shouts of his men, who seemed to be dealing with a fairly large hull breach of their own. Even though my head had slammed into the wall thingy above the steps leading down to the cabin, and now felt like a beachball full of sand and broken glass, I still couldn’t help noticing a weird noise close behind me. Howlingfell noticed it too, and though he still held the gun against the knob of my spine, I felt the pressure ease just a little as he turned to look behind him. I know I should have heroically leaped to my feet and punched his lights out in his moment of distraction, but to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure where my feet were. But I did crane my neck so I could look, too.

A big shape came trudging up the steps from the cabin below, and for a brief, happy moment I thought it was Sam. It wasn’t-it was one of Howlingfell’s men, but he was making a strange gargling sound that didn’t quite form words. As he rose into the light I could see he was struggling with something; one more wobbly step, and I saw the gaff hook through his throat, the long handle banging against his chest as he struggled to pull the barbed metal out of his neck.

“Shit!” was the only comment Howlingfell had time for, then Sam came up the steps behind the gaffed guard and shoved him out onto the deck where he fell beside me and lay twitching, still trying to get that hook out of his neck. It would all have been great, except Sam’s hands were up, and they were both empty of firearms.

Howlingfell swung the gun away from me and pointed it at Sam. Eligor’s men may have wanted me alive, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t true for my buddy, so I did the only thing I could manage while down on my hands and knees-I slammed my thick, useless head right into Howlingfell’s gut. He stumbled back against the rail and the gun flew up as he squeezed the trigger, the bang so close to my face that for a second I thought he’d blown my head off, but the shot hadn’t hit anything. Sam took a step over the dying guy and, because he couldn’t get close enough to do anything else, gave Howlingfell a hard shove in the chest that sent him over the rail and into the estuary.

Sam dragged me to my feet. I spotted my gun and lunged for it just before my buddy climbed over the rail and jumped into the dark water. I could hear Howlingfell thrashing nearby but couldn’t see him. I squeezed a shot off in his direction anyway, and then, just for good measure, shot one of the nearest moving shapes on the brightly lit boat, sending it spinning down to the deck.

“Tell the boss we need back-up!” I heard Howlingfell screech past a mouthful of dirty water and weeds, then I followed Sam over the side toward the shore. How many shots did I have left? Probably two or three, and that was going to be it. My pockets were empty, the loose shells gone now, just so many expensive, shiny pebbles sinking to the estuary mud or rolling across the deck of the ruined cabin cruiser. I hoped that at least one of Howly’s men might step on one and slip and break his neck.

The water was cold and muddy and just disgusting, but in that moment of unexpected freedom it felt like the finest spa treatment ever as we swam and sloshed and splashed toward the bank and its thicket of reeds. We had slipped beyond the glare of their lights, and I could hear the shouts behind us turning to panicky rage as the guards realized their leader was in the water and we were gone. The footing was terrible, slippery mud and tangles of roots, but we pushed and shoved and dug our way forward through the close-packed reeds like we were still swimming. A couple of shots snapped past us, and I realized we were probably creating a visible trail of thrashing stems, so I grabbed at Sam’s collar and whispered for him to slow down. A few more shots cracked the night but none of them came close enough to make me nervous. We hunkered down until only our heads were above the water and kept going.

Something close to half an hour later we abandoned the reeds at last and collapsed in exhaustion on a bare, muddy lump of exposed ground. The moon looked down with its usual magnificent unconcern as we coughed and spat out water and only the Highest knew what other muck, then spent several more minutes just trying to get air back into our lungs. At last I sat up and made a quick inventory. Wet shoes, wet pants, wet jacket. One gun with three bullets in the pipe and a few more that had stuck in my pockets. The rest had fallen out into the ooze during our escape. It took me long moments to make my cold, slippery fingers work well enough to hand-load these extras, but I now had half a dozen fifteen-dollar silver rounds in my gun (it would have been cheaper to throw bottles of Chivas Regal at them) no other weapons and no cellphone-mine had tumbled out of my pocket with the extra bullets. I turned to Sam. “Do you still have your phone?”

He spat. It didn’t make it off his chin. He finally rubbed it away with his muddy arm, which left him looking like a war-painted otter. “No. Fucking thing popped out somewhere along the parade route. My gun, too. You still have that plastic piece of shit you got from Orban?”

I showed him the Five-Seven.

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said. “I got nothing but a flashlight and a headache.”

“Then we’d better start walking. Which way?”

He climbed to his knees, then cautiously lifted himself enough to look around. Other than massive power pylons looming on either side of us and the dark wires that sagged between them like scratches across the face of the moon, there were no landmarks I recognized except the faint, dark outline of Shoreline Park looming out of the bay a short distance south of us. “We’re only a couple of miles from my place,” Sam said. “We can probably get there from here without being spotted, and I’ve got a fuckin’ armory hidden under the floorboards for just this kind of evening’s entertainment.”

“Go.” I didn’t have the energy to wait any longer. I knew if I didn’t get moving soon I’d forget how it all worked. I hadn’t been hit by any bullets, but I felt like someone had taken a piece of pipe to me and shifted a few things around in my torso and head pretty good. “Liked the gaff hook, by the way.”

“I guess the Ralston does fishing charters. Darn nice hotel.”

“Yeah. Well, they won’t be doing any for a while because we just sank both their boats.”

It was a long, slow trek by moonlight over the squelching ground and watery ruts, through pickleweed and salt grass and all kinds of other stuff that naturalists love but which is pure hell to wade through when your body’s covered in bloody scrapes. As we got closer to the end of the nature preserve, I could see a few fluorescents burning in an office complex that backed onto the slough we were currently following. This tiny hint of civilization cheered me, but there was no way I wanted to go near that much light until we were almost at Sam’s front door.

He finally led us over a little bridge that crossed the slough and into a tidy little park. The moonlight picked out picnic tables and a kiddie area with a slide and some swings. “Garcia Park,” Sam said. “We’re close-we won’t even have to go near a main road. There’s a cemetery on the far side of this, then it’s only a hop and a skip across the fields to my place.”

“Do you see me hopping or skipping?” I asked, tired and sore beyond belief, but his mention of the cemetery had reminded me of one of the odder things Fatback had told me about the real Reverend Habari he’d found, and that made me quiet again.

The park was a small one, and before too long we were laboriously climbing over the iron pickets that fenced the cemetery. “I remember this place,” I said as we made our way between the monuments. The graveyard had gone more than a little to seed-it looked like the last time anyone had mowed the grass might have been last fall, and the only flowers were plastic, fake as tinsel, even by moonlight. “You used to hang out here a lot,” I said. “I even came with you a couple of times.”

Sam was silent for a few steps. “Drinking days,” he said at last. “Yeah, I killed a few bottles out here. Helps a man keep things in perspective.”

“Cemeteries or empty bottles?”

“Both.”

I didn’t point out to my buddy that he wasn’t actually a man and hadn’t been one for some time, if ever-none of us earthbound angels likes being reminded. Instead, I was trying to recall exactly what Fatback had told me-southeast corner? As best as I could tell, that seemed to be where we were headed, but it was another reason to miss my phone and all my notes. “Hey, let me have the flashlight, will you?”

Sam gave me a strange look. “What the hell do you want it for? We’re trying to keep a low profile out here.”

“Just something I was thinking about. C’mon, we haven’t heard a whisper of those guys in an hour.”

He reluctantly handed it over. It was a small light and not likely to give us away, but I kept it pointed near the ground anyway, sliding the dim beam across the headstones as we made our way over the untended lawn, much of which was more dirt than grass, a few yellowing strands still holding onto the edges of the bald patches like columns of retreating troops.

“Bobby, the light…you’re worrying me.”

I started to respond but something had caught my eye. I cut left and began walking toward it. Sam called that I was going in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t listening.

He trotted after me. “Bobby? What the hell?”

“Hell is not the location I’m interested in right now.”

“What are you talking about?” he said, but he didn’t sound good. “What-?”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his question because the distant noise that had been building for the last few seconds was now too loud to ignore. “Helicopter!” he said in precisely the way Captain Hook would have said, “Crocodile!” I killed the light, and we both threw ourselves to the ground, huddling face down and hoping, I suppose, that we would look like loose boulders in the middle of the churchyard. The stick-in-the-spokes noise got louder until the thing seemed to be right above our heads. A light stabbed down from it and swept one way across the cemetery grounds, then the other, but it didn’t touch us. I know because I peeked. The helicopter continued on past, and I could see the beam reaching down here and there but farther away each time.

I got up when I couldn’t hear the chopper blades any more and turned the light back on, then found what had caught my eye. After I had been standing there looking at it for long moments without saying anything, Sam clambered to his feet and limped over to stand beside me. “What’s up, Bobby?” he asked, but he sounded like he knew. He sounded like the guy who says, “How long do I have, Doc?” when he already knows the answer is “Not long.”

I let the beam play up and down the headstone. There really wasn’t any need to say anything, or at least I didn’t think so. The words were old and weatherworn but still quite legible, even by the weak beam of Sam’s flashlight.

Moses Isaac Habari

Born January 14, 1928-Departed this earth May 20, 2004

Father, Brother, Pastor, Man of Peace

I turned and looked at Sam, but he just stared at the tombstone. “How did you know?” was all he said.

The sound was faint as a whisper, but because it came in the silence after Sam spoke-a silence in which a hundred different things I might say were swirling in my head-it was loud enough to startle. I turned just in time to see a half dozen figures loping toward us from about a hundred yards away across the cemetery.

Discussion time over.

We ran but we were already exhausted, wet, beaten, and bruised; before we had gone ten steps shots were whipcracking all around us. Our pursuers had lights on their guns this time, and every time I swerved at least a couple of them tracked me. I followed Sam, hoping he knew this place well enough to find us an escape route, or at least a place to make a stand, but although we crested a rise and saw we had almost reached the end of the cemetery, this part didn’t have an iron fence but a high memorial wall made of stone. It looked big and strong enough to stop anything short of a grenade launcher, but we were on the wrong side of it for a standoff. In fact it looked a lot more like the kind of place a firing squad takes you just before they offer you the cigarette.

“What the hell…?” I gasped.

“Sorry,” was all Sam said, but we were already stumbling downhill, the wall looming in front of us, and I had to slow down so suddenly I almost ran into the list of carved names of dozens of folk, probably soldiers, who might have faced last moments much like this one. I spun and squeezed off a round-five left-but the men chasing us had already taken protected positions behind the headstones. None of them was more than a dozen yards away, and four or five beams converged on us like the end of a failed prison break from some old comedy film.

“There’s nowhere to go, Dollar!”

“Drop dead, Howly,” I shouted, “you probably said that last time, too.” But I couldn’t muster much bravado while we were making such an attractive, easy target.

“Throw down your gun or I’ll blow the shit out of your friend Sammariel, and you’ll still be in as much trouble as you already were.”

“Don’t do it,” Sam said quietly.

“Not many alternatives as far as I can see.” I held the gun up and showed it to him, then dropped it into the grass. At Howlingfell’s urging I kicked it several yards away. Once he was satisfied he shouted for us to get down with our hands behind our heads and stay that way. I was flat out of ideas so I did what he said, wondering if I would at least get a chance to stick a finger in one of his squinty little eyes before Eligor’s crew started working on me for real. Sam let himself down beside me, heavy and slow.

“You got another gaff hook in that coat?” I whispered.

“Not even a safety pin,” he said. “You shouldn’t have given up your gun, Bobby.”

“Yeah, well, you seriously owe me a bunch of explanations.” I kept it quiet because Howlingfell was moving toward us. “And I’m not going to let anyone shoot you until I get ’em.” But it was all bullshit, of course. We’d managed to catch Howly and his men by surprise once, maybe even twice if you counted going for the boat in the first place, but although we’d proved Eligor’s enforcer could be tricked, he wouldn’t fall for the same trick twice and I was fresh out of new ones. As if to demonstrate his newfound caution Howlingfell came toward us almost crabwise with his gun pointing right at me, and stopped when he was still six feet away. A man’s height. The depth of a grave.

“No more bullshit from you,” he said. “No more smart talk. Thought it was funny shooting me in the nuts that time, did you?”

“Subtle,” I said. “But hilarious, yes.”

“Fuck you, little man. You won’t be laughing much longer. Do you know what Grasswax said, even after we’d cut out half the shit in his body and showed it to him?” Howlingfell made his voice whiny. “‘I can still feel it!’ That’s what he said. Talk about hilarious! ‘Don’t squeeze-it still hurts!’And those guts weren’t even connected to him anymore! That’s what Eligor’s special doctors can do.” He smirked, the gun still pointed at my throat. “The boss promised I could have a front-row seat for your show, and I’m going to enjoy every moment.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone, but the gun never moved, and he was out of my reach anyway. He flipped it open like it was some kind of Star Trek communicator and thumbed a button. While he was waiting, he turned to his men behind the tombstones, who were still pinning us with their lights. “When I’m out of the way you can blow the big one to ribbons,” he called. “Use the darts on the smaller one.” Someone must have picked up on the other end of the call, because he suddenly dropped his voice to something several shades more submissive. “Boss?” he said to the phone. “Yeah, it’s me. Mission accomplished.”

We don’t always get a chance to pick our last words wisely, but I hope when my time comes I’ll have better luck than that. No sooner had Howly snapped the phone shut and begun to back out of the way when something came over the wall from behind us and hopped down like a monstrous black toad, landing in a crouch just in front of me and Sam. I could feel the heat radiating from it immediately, but I had only an instant to see the horribly familiar spreading black horns and the black, alien shagginess of its face as it looked around, blue flames pluming from its nostrils, then someone behind one of the headstones opened fire. I threw myself to the side and hugged the earth as bullets spattered off the memorial wall. Some of them must have hit the ghallu, but I knew already it didn’t give a toss about anything but silver, and it didn’t mind silver much more than I would an uncomfortable sunburn.

To his credit, Howlingfell was not going to lose his prize without a fight. He stepped toward the thing with his gun raised and started squeezing off shots in quick succession, half a dozen, a dozen, the ejected shells winking in the moonlight as they spun through the air and fell to the sparse grass. Then he took one step too many and, despite all the rounds he had fired at it, the horned thing seemed to notice him for the first time.

Two steaming, slate-black hands big as shovels snapped out and folded around his arms, then jerked him off the ground. For a moment Howlingfell fought back, thrashing and shouting in the creature’s grasp as smoke rose where it clutched him. Then the ghallu’s jaws unhinged-there’s no other word-gaping impossibly, hideously wide, exposing flames like a crematory oven. I only had time for one horrified look before it shoved Howlingfell’s screeching head and then his shoulders into that dreadful fire. His legs kicked pointlessly as the monster sucked the round bit with a face on it right off the end of his spine, then spit the charred lump onto the ground before flinging Howlingfell’s slack, boneless body out into the darkness beyond the lights.

Guns were flashing and cracking now, automatic fire, and even as I scrabbled wildly on the ground for my automatic I saw the ghallu lunge toward the place where all the guns were blazing. My hand closed on something hard, but it was only Howlingfell’s phone. I held onto it and kept groping desperately until I finally found my gun.

Howly’s men probably shouldn’t have fired at the ghallu: apparently it was prone to distraction. The demon-thing was among them in a second, tearing Howlingfell’s enforcers into pieces and flinging those pieces so violently in all directions that I could feel spatters of warm blood even as I smelled burning flesh. I stuck the phone in my pocket so I could hold my gun in both hands, which was necessary because I was shaking like a Chihuahua in the snow. But I didn’t fire. No way was I going to stand and try to shoot it out again with this thing that swallowed even silver bullets like Tic-Tacs. But I couldn’t really think of anything else to do, either.

“Bobby! Here!” Sam was waving frantically from the far end of the wall. I put my head down and ran toward him, more worried about getting hit by a stray shot than by design, because the Terminator from the Tigris was shredding the guards he’d reached, and though the rest were still firing at the monster as they ran away, it was with a distinct lack of conviction, let alone careful aim.

“This way,” Sam called, already in a flat-out sprint and making pretty damn good time if he was as exhausted as I was. “That big fucker doesn’t know what side it’s on, does it? I guess your headless friend didn’t get exactly the kind of back-up he was hoping for.”

“As far as Eligor’s concerned, they’re all disposable,” I panted. “As for Howlingfell, I hope he’s back home roasting on the tiles of hell right now, but he’s no longer our problem. That thing…it isn’t going to stop until it catches me, and once it finishes barbecuing Howly’s men, it’s going to be right behind us.” I wheezed and coughed, staggered and almost fell. Too much talking.

“Yeah, I remember that thing from before. Faster than your fucking car, wasn’t it?”

This deserved no answer, so I continued saving my breath as we sprinted out the memorial park gate and across a winding road. I hadn’t run this much in years, and I hadn’t been to the gym much either. I was in bad shape (for an angel, anyway) and I hoped I’d live to start taking better care of myself. We also seemed to be heading out toward the bay again. From the cemetery I heard one last scream of despair, a ragged sound that might have been someone beating a set of bagpipes to death with a spiked club. “Where…?” I managed to gasp at Sam.

“The only place we have a chance,” he said between breaths, now sparing with the oxygen himself. “Footbridge out to Shoreline Park.” He looked back. I didn’t, but whatever he saw there made him find a new gear he may not even have known he had. I did my best to stay right behind him.

But who was I behind, exactly? The Sam I’d thought I knew, my best friend, would never have kept anything really big from me-and this Habari stuff was bigger than big. Could I even trust him again? More important, could I stay ahead of that smoldering hell-thing long enough to find out?

We reached the footbridge, a narrow span with chest-high railings made for bicyclists and day-hikers that stretched over the marshlands like a yardstick balanced between the island and the shore. Our footsteps made it rumble and quiver. Then something howled in the distance behind us, loud enough to shake down the moon. I suspected my nemesis had just discovered that its quarry had skipped out again. The ghallu bayed once more, a sound that made the air pop in my ears, then I almost lost my footing as the sturdy little bridge began to groan and shake like seven on the Richter scale. The hot thing with horns was coming after us, thundering down the bouncing footbridge like a real freight train on a toy track. The only real question was how far across we’d get before it caught us.