Aloha From Hell (39 page)

“What?”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a pack of regular human cigarettes. Never count on a Kissi to give you what you really want. I light the cigarette with Mason’s lighter and pull the smoke deep into my lungs. It’s better than nothing and it helps cover up Josef’s smell.

“You said there was something else,” Josef says.

“Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel? They had a show on where a colony of little tiny red ants all got together and killed a full-grown wolf. See my point?”

“No.”

“Just because you’re the wolf at the top of the food chain doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. You and your pals might be able to wipe out the Hellions, but they won’t go down easy, and by the time you’re done, you’re going to be blind and crippled. That doesn’t sound like the big win to me.”

Josef takes a deep breath and turns his head to the sounds from the street.

“How much longer are we supposed to wait?”

“Just a few more hours. I need to get up this hill and then get General Semyazah. He’s the one guy who can turn this whole thing around.”

“He’s in Tartarus.”

“I know.”

“You think you can help him? How?”

“I’ll tell them I’m the pizza delivery boy. They’ll never suspect a thing.”

“Don’t be cute. No one’s ever returned from Tartarus.”

“Maybe they were going the wrong way.”

His expression changes to genuine interest.

“You know a secret way out?”

I drag off the cigarette. After Maledictions, regular human cigarettes are like inhaling the steam off a cup of herbal tea.

“If you’re so concerned about winning this thing, why don’t you go and do your job and let me do mine? If I’m not back in Pandemonium in, say, twelve hours, you’ll know I’m stuck in Tartarus and I’m not coming back. After that, you can do what you want, but give me the time to do this the smart way.”

He gets closer, picks a bit of lint off my shoulder, and tosses it away.

“This is the last time. The tide is rising and you can’t hold back the sea. Besides, you’re not an easy man to trust.”

“Yeah, but nobody else wants to play our reindeer games, so we’re stuck with each other.”

Josef fingers my empty coat sleeve.

“How are you going to pull this off with only one arm?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Meaning you’re going to let your ego ruin everything.”

“It’s my plan. It’s mine to blow.”

“No, it’s not.”

It’s easy to forget that Kissi are a kind of angel. A factory-second, thrown-in-the-Dumpster-and-left-in-a-landfill angel, but still an awesomely powerful creature.

When Josef grabs me there isn’t a damned thing I can do to fight back. I’m one-handed, off balance, sick, and dizzy. He throws me onto my knees, pulls off my coat, and takes out the black blade. I try to back away, but he grabs my empty left sleeve and pulls me back like a fish on a reel. He slices through the cauterized stump of my arm, reopening the wound. My knees buckle. I hold on to him with my one good hand, trying to get my fingers around his throat or push him off. Something. Anything. He shrugs me off and pins me against the wall. With the black blade he cuts an
X
on the palm of my right hand and presses my bloody palm to the arm stump.

I’m sicker than ever. Not blacking-out sick or throwing-up sick, but lost in space. Like my body and brain have given up trying to register things like up and down or sane or insane. I keep waiting for the angel in my head to jump in and handle things, but he’s as floored as I am. The stump itches and the nerves that feel like they’re still connected to fingers feel even more li. Aeven moke that. I look to see what’s happening and find something white and pulsating hanging off my body like a giant maggot. Great. Now I’m going to have to change my online dating photo.

The maggot grows veins and arteries. Five twitching tentacle-things wiggle out the end. The maggot shrinks and turns almost black. The veins and arteries toughen until they’re cables within thick dark muscle. Shiny skin glides over and around the growing structures. It shines like metal or a scarab’s carapace. My fingers are delicate but strong, half organic insect and half machine. They flex when I tell them to. I touch each fingertip to thumb, counting one, two, three, four. They move easily. Josef is back by the MINI Cooper wiping my gore off his hands with a white handkerchief.

“That should give you a decent chance of not fucking things up entirely.”

He folds the handkerchief and puts it into a back pocket.

“I could lie and tell you that I can’t make the arm look any more human than that, but we both know I’d be lying. Wear that and don’t forget who your friends are.”

“You’re a Georgia peach.”

The pain and nausea are gone. I stand up. Josef comes over and helps me get my coat back on.

“Get used to your new arm quickly. You have twelve hours from now or we go without you.”

He walks down the ramp and disappears before he reaches the bottom.

I flex and move the arm. Pick up a piece of concrete. Toss it from my good hand to my new one and back again. The biomechanical hand feels pressure, heat, and sharpness, but not like my regular one. It’ll take some getting used to, but it’s better than a burned stump.

The arm isn’t the only thing I have to work out. I don’t know a secret way out of Tartarus. I don’t even know the way in. But I’ll find it, and if hoodoo and bullshit won’t get me out, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue. That always worked on Mom.

I walk up to an open level at the top of the garage and look out over the city. On top of a hill less than a mile away is the asylum. If Eleusis is as weirdly laid out and fucked up as the rest of this L.A., Alice might as well be on the moon. I don’t know if I can even get to her in twelve hours, much less get her and Semyazah. I should have asked Josef for a jet pack instead of an arm.

Escaped lunatics are warming themselves around a fire of old furniture and my wanted posters.

Maybe I should steal a car and take my chances on finding a road to the Observatory somewhere.

“Still trying to get up that hill, eh?”

I look over my left shoulderI heft sho and then my right. There’s a small round man in a red tailored suit sitting on the edge of the wall with his feet dangling over the edge. I look at him and he glances at me.

“Is he gone?”

“Who?”

“Your pal Josef. Is he gone?”

“He’s not my pal and yes, he’s gone. Who are you?”

“I’ve had my eye out for you and then I see him fitting you out with a bug claw. I just naturally assumed that you two were buddies.”

I circle around behind him, trying to get a better look.

“Who are you?”

He shrugs.

“Who is any of us really?”

“Don’t get cute.”

“I was born cute. You’re the monster.”

I get out the na’at and hold it where he can’t see and walk over until I’m close enough to get a good look.

It’s Mr. Muninn. Only not. It’s one of his brothers. They’re not just twins, they’re the same in every detail including the clothes, except that where Muninn is all black, this one is all red. The angel in my head makes a sound I’ve never heard it make before. I put the na’at back in my coat.

“What’s your name?”

The round man bounces his heels off the side of the building.

“Kid, you couldn’t pronounce my name with three tongues and a million years to practice.”

“Muninn told me his.”

“Did he?”

“Didn’t he?”

The red man holds up his hands, the fingers spread wide.

“Five brothers. Each of our names and consciousness corresponds to a color. Yellow. Blue. Green. I’m red, as you might have noticed. Muninn is black, the sum of us all.” He ticks off each color with a finger. “Now, if you were the literary type or had ever read a book in your life, you might know that the mythical Nordic deity Odin traveled with two black ravens. One was called Huginn. Guess what the other was called?”

“Muninn nng.01C;Munamed himself after a bird?”

“It’s his idea of a joke. Don’t hate him. He’s the youngest.”

The angel in my head stops making the funny noise and finally gets out a single word:
Elohim
.

The red man is looking at me. I get the feeling he can read me a lot better than I can read him because I can’t read him at all.

“Are you . . . ?”

“Yep.”

“All five of you are?”

“Yep.”

“Mr. Muninn, too?”

“I think we established that when we established that he’s one of us five brothers.”

My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I’m swamped by a fascination and anger that I’ve been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.

“Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust.”

“Calm down. He didn’t lie to you. He just didn’t come up and say, ‘Hi, kid. I’m God. How’s tricks?’ Would you have believed him? I wouldn’t, and I’d know he was telling the truth.”

“At least I can call him Muninn. What am I supposed to call you? Santa Elvis?”

“How about Neshamah? That’s one I think you can pronounce without breaking your jaw.

“What are you doing down here?”

He holds out his hands.

“Surveying my handiwork.”

I lean on the wall with him and look out over the city. Something explodes a few blocks north. A fire starts in a building down the block. I guess the Kissi with the matches got his wish.

“If this was my Erector Set, I’d return it and get my money back,” I say.

Neshamah shakes his head and shrugs.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. Eleusis was a beautiful place once. The whole universe was. We . . . well, it was still
I
back then . . . were building perfection, but it went wrong.”

"0"r="#000“Did you invent understatement back then or did you come up with it later?”

“At least we, I, dreamed big. What do you dream about?”

“You know exactly what I dream about. It’s why I’m here.”

“A dunce on a white horse tilting at windmills. Very original. You know what my brothers and I did? We invented light. And atoms. And air.”

“If you get the credit for light, you deserve the credit for skin cancer, too, so another bang-up job on that one.”

He puts his head in his hands in an exaggerated gesture.

“Cancer. Damn, you people are a mess.”

“You made us, so what does that make you?”

He watches smoke rising from the nearby fire as it drifts up to meet the burning cloud of the sky.

“We were so sure we got you right the first time. Then there was the whole Eden debacle and it was all downhill from there. But don’t worry, the new ones are a lot better.”

“You’re done with us and on to Humanity 2.0?”

“Oh, we’re way beyond 2.0. The new ones are nearly perfect. Nearly angels. You’d hate them.”

“Fingers crossed I never have to meet one.”

He leans over to me and speaks in a fake conspiratorial whisper.

“You won’t. I put them far, far away from you people. Why do you think space is so big?”

He sits up and laughs, pleased with his vaudeville act. I always wondered if I’d run into him sometime. I’m not sure what I was expecting. A muscle-bound Old Testament Conan Yahweh. Maybe a pothead New Testament love guru. Something. But not Muninn. And especially not a bad Xerox asshole version of Muninn.

“Why did you leave me down here all those years?”

“You mean why do I allow human suffering?”

“No. What I mean is why did
you
leave
me
down
here
?”

“You don’t belong anywhere, so what difference does it make where you are?”

“You really hate me, don’t you? I’m every fucking mistake you ever made all rolled into one.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Aelita murdered Uriel, my father.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell her to?”

“Aelita and I aren’t really on what you’d call speaking terms these days.”

“Is my father stuck in Tartarus?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone.”

“Where?”

“He’s just gone.”

“The other dead nephilim, are they gone, too?”

He raises one hand and drops it back in his lap.

I ask, “What’s in Tartarus?”

He doesn’t say anything for a while.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d put that cigarette out. It bothers my allergies.”