Aloha From Hell (29 page)

And I’m instantly on fire. I roll off the pile of burning trash and keep rolling until all the flames are out. I get to my feet and look around.

Fuck me.

I’m back in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and it’s on fire. All of L.A. is on fire.

E
VERYTHING IS WRONG
. This is exactly where I was when I crawled out of Hell eight months ago. Now I’m back. Only I’m not. Everything is wrong, from the smells to the sounds to the light.

The cemetery looks like it was worked over by drunk bikers with garbage trucks for feet. Tombstones are knocked over or snapped in two. A lot of them are just dust. Some of the graves are open and spouting fountains of blue flames, like a gas line exploded beneath them. Clothes are strewn across the blackened lawn from bodies nearby that were blown out of the ground when the line broke.

I walk to the cemetery gates but don’t step outside. The last time I walked out of he bued out re, a Beverly Hills crackhead tried to mug me. I mugged him instead. It was quite a welcome-home party. This time I stay put and take in the situation from my own comfy Sheol.

To my right I can see the giant Hollywood sign hanging over everything like a promise to a dead man. The hills and the tops of all the buildings are on fire. Someone must have thrown some hoodoo on the Hollywood sign. It isn’t catching, but the hills behind it are glowing orange ash.

The fires haven’t reached this neighborhood yet, but they’re on the move. From here it looks like the whole horizon is burning. The sky Downtown used to be all bruised purples and bloody reds. A mean perpetual twilight. Now it’s a solid mass of roiling black smoke. Lit from below, it looks like the belly of a black snake the size of the sky crawling over us.

So, where the hell am I? I was pretty crazy the last time I crawled out here. Wasn’t even looking for home this time, but I got it anyway. And it looks like someone broke it when I had my back turned.

How long was I unconscious after the Black Dahlia? Am I Rip van Winkle? Was I semidead for so long that Mason won and the universe thought it would be a hoot to wake me up just in time for the Apocalypse?

I get a fistful of graveyard dirt and scribble runes on my forehead while growling Hellion hoodoo. A death glamour. With any luck, no one will notice that I’m alive. I drop my coat on the ground and grab a corpse’s hoodie dangling from a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I put on the hoodie and the coat over it. I do a last quick check outside the gates for muggers. Satisfied the street’s clear, I pull up the hood, covering as much of my face as I can, and head toward the big cookout.

A
CRACK RUNS
up Gower Street starting at the cemetery. A deep slash, as ragged as a lightning bolt and wide as a bus. What looks like a pool of bright red blood bubbles at the bottom. It smells like sewage but worse. Rotten eggs and dead fish.

I keep moving north, skirting a sinkhole at Fountain Avenue. Hellion bodies bloat at the bottom. Broken clockwork hellhounds writhe and twitch, leaking spinal fluid. I kick in a few pebbles. Watch them sink into the cherry muck.

Trees have collapsed on roofs and cars, like the ground simply couldn’t support them anymore. Cracks have ripped homes in half. A deep geologic rumble shakes the ground under my feet and the two broken halves of Gower move a few inches in different directions. Fuck me. These aren’t cracks. They’re fault lines. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate everything?

On the side streets some of the new faults must have been exposed for a while because locals have strung them together with half-assed rope and plank and bridges. Idiot militias toss rocks and spears across the chasms, fighting to see who gets to take the crossing tolls.

Sunset Boulevard looks like it was blowtorched from below. As far as I can see everything is gutted, fried, or melted in both directions. The only things still standing are the palm trees. They burn like votive candles in 00" candlea dark nave, throwing more shadows than light. Smoldering fronds fall like burning snow.

T
HERE’S A RIOT
on Hollywood Boulevard.

When I crawled out of Hell eight months ago, I’d been surprised at how the boulevard had become a monochrome wilderness. The street was dead quiet, like someone had dropped a blanket over it. All empty-eyed street kids and vacant storefronts. There’d been plenty of traffic, but even the cars sounded like they were running on cotton candy instead of gas. Something had sucked the life out of the place. Maybe the Kissi. I still don’t know. This version of Hollywood Boulevard is livelier, but I’m already longing for the muffled gray-and-white version.

The mob is a punch-drunk mix of Hellions and damned souls. This isn’t fun, let’s-turn-the-Dumpster-over rioting. It’s the kind where you go at each other with knives and pipes, fighting over food and water and drugs.

I’ve only walked a quarter mile from the cemetery and I can already tell that the place is as bad off as Kasabian said. Lucifer would never let this happen. If Mason had any goddamn sense, he wouldn’t either. When you’re riding herd on a kingdom of killer Hellions, the first thing you do is make sure they’re well fed and at least half hammered most of the time. The way this bunch is tearing up butcher shops and stores, they’re neither. (Yes, Hell has stores and bars. It might be Hell, but it’s better than a dry county in Mississippi.) And who let all the damned souls run wild? I saw some crazy shit when I was trapped Downtown, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a soul in Pandemonium that wasn’t tortured, locked up, or on a leash. If this really
is
Pandemonium. If it’s not, where the fuck am I?

A couple of hundred Hellion gendarmes take positions at opposite ends of the street, surrounding the crowd. Hell is all about power games and influence. Lucifer didn’t like too much power concentrated in anyone’s hands, so Pandemonium has two police forces with overlapping territories. And they hate each other. Instead of slowing the riot, the cop gangs smash into it like two hundred icebreakers. With their riot guns and heavy body armor, they rip through the crowd to claim as much of the swag as they can for their side.

I don’t stick around to see which side wins because I couldn’t possibly give less of a fuck. I hope they slaughter each other fast and get out of my way.

I hunch my shoulders, tug the hood, and head back to Gower. Maybe if I grabbed a cop, I could twist him around in interesting ways until he told me where Eleusis is, but seeing as how there are two hundred of them, that’ll have to wait for later. What I want now is to cut back to Sunset and do an end run around this particular shit storm. If this is really a fucked-up version of L.A., then Max Overdrive isn’t far from here. I can hole up until the riot blows over and figure out a next move.

“Where you going?”

A hand shoots out from the alcove of an out-of-business sex-toy shop and latches onto my arm. The Hellion the hand is iotthe hanattached to is dressed in layers of ragged coats, tunics, and greasy shirts. A Hellspawn hobo.

I don’t say anything. I stare and hope the death glamour holds.

The bum says, “Got anything from the shops you want to share?”

“Nothing for you, rummy.”

He grins and licks his lips, showing off a jumble of craggy gray teeth, like someone hammered broken cement into his gums. Maybe that’s how God keeps Heaven’s other angels in line. A better dental plan.

“Got a smoke?” he asks.

Something squirms under his grimy face. It looks like my glamour isn’t the problem. It’s his. Too bad I’m so slow on the uptake. By the time I recognize what he is, he has something very pointy and very sharp against my throat. It’s double-pronged. Probably what on earth they’d call a Heretic’s Fork. This fucker isn’t a regular Hellion. He’s a Malebranche, one of thirteen horned bastards that Lucifer kept as his private gestapo and interrogation squad. Even other Hellions hate the Malebranche. My back still hurts from Rizoel’s sword. The last thing I want is to go one-on-one with a professional flesh ripper.

I say, “Looks like you’ve hit hard times.”

“You’ve hit worse unless you have something I want.”

The riot seethes along in its merry way behind us, but the Malebranche and me are in our own cozy little world in the alcove. A bottle breaks above us and we both reflexively turn our heads to avoid the flying glass, but it was random. Even though no one is paying any attention to us, I keep getting hit from behind, which pushes my throat down onto the fork. I hope not enough to break the skin. Human blood would be a dead giveaway.

I look at the Malebranche’s dirty face. His skin is bright red under the grime.

“Which one are you? Rubicante?”

His laugh is high and a little frantic.

“Oh my. Am I still that famous?”

“It’s your pretty face,” I say. “Maybe I have something for you after all.”

I reach into my pocket, feeling Rubicante push the sharp prongs harder against my neck.

“Easy, friend. I wouldn’t want to slip.”

He gives a quick flick of his head at my hand.

“Bring that hand out slowly and bring out something tasty with it or I’ll have to pop outcole to po one of your eyes for a snack.”

The alcove is a dim place and the riot is reflected clearly in the glass behind Rubicante’s head. I feel around in my pocket for a minute, trying to buy some time.

“Any day now, friend,” he says.

I have to do this just right. Or completely wrong. That sometimes works.

I come out with the half pack of Maledictions and Rubicante’s eyes go wide. I hold them out and he takes his eyes off me. I drop the pack and he watches it fall all the way to the ground. I glance at the reflection in the glass door and throw myself out of the way.

A riot cop tossed from the crowd smashes into the Malebranche and they go flying through the shop’s glass door.

I leave Rubicante and the cop playing Twister in the sex shop, grab the Maledictions, and run for Sunset.

It feels like the fall reopened the wound on my back. I don’t want to smell even vaguely alive, so I whisper a little hoodoo and crank up the fumes from my corpse hoodie until I stink like the Dumpster behind a used-ass store. This is going to be a pleasant way to travel.

I’m going to have a hell of a time finding Eleusis if the whole place is as twisted as it was back then. Not that that matters if I’ve been napping for twenty years, Mason has already won, and this really is L.A.

Sunset is as scorched and sterile as a nuke test site. Some of the burning palm fronds fall and others float over the buildings, carried away by weird convection currents.

I stand on the corner and let the angel out of the attic long enough to expand my senses and do a kind of quick minesweep to see if there’s anything alive or lurking in the burned-out buildings. Sunset is dazzling through the angel’s eyes. The smoldering street with its torched trees is like a line of suns down a glory road of trembling atoms and subatomic particles.

The first time I saw Hell, it was a very different story. I was dragged down through Mason’s floor and landed in a naked heap on a main street in Pandemonium. I must have been out cold for a while, and when I came to, the first thing that hit me was the stink. Nothing human smelled like that. It wasn’t just waste. It was filth that had been packed, compressed, and locked away for a million years. Hell is the bottom of the universe and Heaven isn’t going to let Lucifer pollute the rest of existence with Hellion shit and candy wrappers. So they still bury it in the deep, deeper, deepest caverns in their craptacular kingdom, where it sits, cooks, and festers in its own juices until the end of time.

The angel gives the all clear. I shove it out of the way, but I don’t lock it up. Unfortunately, I’m going to need all of me to get through this, and that includes my divine squatter.

I head west down Sunset so I can cut up Las Palmas to Max Overdrive. The strrdrive.angel better be right that it’s clear down here. I’m not above self-trepanation.

I can still see the Hollywood Boulevard riot when I cross Vine Street. And Cahuenga.

Getting down Sunset is harder than the road by the cemetery. The fault lines are wider and the broken pavement is pushed up higher and at steeper angles. Sinkholes have opened around whole blocks, forming skyscraper islands with sewage moats. Maybe that’s why everything feels so wrong. I’ve only gone a couple of blocks but I swear it feels like I’ve been walking for-fucking-ever. Who or whatever built this L.A. got the proportions all wrong. The buildings are right, but some of them are in the wrong place. The Cinerama Dome still looks like a giant golf ball dropped to the earth by aliens, but it’s on the wrong side of the street. Some of the side streets that used to cut across Sunset have twisted around like asphalt taffy and now run parallel.

That is not good news. It means that even if someone tells me where Eleusis is, I might not be able to find it in these deranged goddamn streets. And I can’t even use maps. Lucifer was such a control freak that most of the maps you find Downtown are wrong. He didn’t want the riffraff knowing exactly which roads led where or which were wide enough to hold rebel troops. That means I’m going to need a tracker who can walk and take me to the doorstep of Alice’s asylum.

A hell of a quake must have hit the concrete island ahead of me. An entire block of gleaming new office buildings has fallen in on itself and half disappeared down a massive sinkhole. The acres of broken glass and steel reflect the burning street like the last ice floe at the end of the world.