Devil Said Bang (15 page)

Something hits us again and this time the driver
can’t hold it. She curses in a grunting Low Hellion growl while jerking the
wheel one way as the wheels slide the other. We’re tossed around like socks in a
malfunctioning dryer. When we stop, the floor is the ceiling and the ceiling is
the floor. We’re upside down a few feet from a sheer drop off the road.

The engine sputters out and things go very quiet.
The driver has fallen over onto the passenger side but her legs are moving.
She’s alive but pretty out of it. Voices come through the wall. Four? No. Three.
A by-the-book Hellion hit team, just like back when Ukobach and his friends
pile-drived me.

Grizzly Lobster’s blood is everywhere. I slip on it
and fall back, banging my head hard on the wall. The outside voices stop. A shot
comes through the wall. More follow. I throw myself down on the ceiling, about
knocking my teeth out on a light fixture.

The rear doors creak open, metal grating against
metal. One falls onto the ground. Someone locks the other in place so it won’t
fall closed. All I can see are silhouettes framed in headlights. Two are way
back from the ambulance. Lookouts. One hovers by the entrance for a minute then
comes inside. He kicks Grizzly Lobster a couple of times, and when he’s
satisfied the big man is dead, he looks up front where the driver is starting to
thrash around. He yells back to the two covering him.

“One of you get up front and pull her out. Keep her
quiet. This is a private audience.”

He turns back to me. Makes a big show of pulling a
curved skinning knife from a sheath on his hip and waits for one of the grunts
to get to work.

There’s a lot of cursing and heavy breathing. The
sound of feet slipping and someone being pulled to her feet against her will.
The assassin in the ambulance pushes the driver to the assassin on top of the
ambulance, who hauls her out the window.

The one running the show hasn’t moved the whole
time. He’s the strong, silent type with his knife. I can see he’s wearing
standard-issue legion boots and pants. The pants are camo-colored, so he’s not a
red legger.

From outside someone yells, “All clear.”

He kicks Grizzly’s body out of the way and kneels
with the knife right over my face. Light coming through the door outlines one
side of his face.

“Do you know who I am? It’s important that you know
who I am. I know you’re hurt. I can wait a minute while you work it out. We’ve
got all night.”

I can almost place the face but it’s the voice that
gives him away.

“Vetis. Look at you all grown up and slick as pig
shit. You’re finally doing your own dirty work. Of course you waited until I was
in an ambulance. Am I supposed to be impressed?”

“Brave talk for a man covered in blood.”

“The blood belongs to the dead ambulance guy. You
can’t get anything right, can you? You blew it bad with bug boy. And that phone
call? What was that, you fuckwit Ghostface wannabe?”

He stares at me.

“So what’s this all about? You and your crew want a
raise? How about two weeks’ vacation while I pull out your intestines with an
oyster fork?”

He lowers the knife close to my eye and wiggles it
around. The shiny blade glints in the headlights. It looks brand-new. I’m
flattered.

“You mortals love to hear yourself talk, don’t
you?”

It’s hard to shrug gracefully flat on my back.

“In Hell, I’m usually the most interesting person
in the room, so it’s kind of inevitable.”

He glances away for a second like he’s thinking and
then jams the knife deep into my cheek, twisting the blade before pulling it
out.

“Was that interesting enough for you?”

“Would it help if I said yes?”

He takes a breath and his mood changes. Tense lines
of anger soften to something else. Not sadness. More like bone-deep
exhaustion.

He says, “Why did you come back?”

“I ask myself that every day.”

He pokes my cheek with the knife again.

“I came here to kill Mason Faim, you ungrateful
motherfucker. I saved your ass.”

He lets his head sag for a second. Uses his sleeve
to wipe my blood off the knife.

“That’s the problem,” he says. “If you’d just
stayed away, we’d be gone.”

I try to sit up. Vetis puts his forearm on my
scorched armor and pushes me down. He doesn’t have to push hard.

“Jesus fucking Christ. Are you stupid? Do you
really think the legions could have taken on Heaven’s armies and won?”

He looks out the back of the ambulance and then
back at me.

“Of course not. They would have slaughtered us. And
all of this”—he stretches out his arms to take in all of Hell—“would be
over.”

I’m so dumb sometimes I’m surprised I’ve never used
dynamite for a toothbrush.

Now I know how Mason got so much of Hell and got so
many generals and their troops working with him so fast. The war with Heaven
wasn’t a war. It was a suicide pact. Death by cop. Provoke the guy with the gun
so he’ll shoot. Storm the gates of Heaven until the golden army burns you in a
rain of holy fire. Bye bye Hell. And they wouldn’t have to worry about being
sent to Tartarus because I destroyed that. A perfect setup for the biggest
suicide cult of all time.

Semyazah was the only holdout. One of the few
Hellions left that still believed in Lucifer’s argument with Heaven. Semyazah
isn’t stupid. Of course he doesn’t want to be Lucifer. How do you lead an entire
civilization of wrist cutters?

No wonder Deumos and her shiny happy church popped
up. She’s the only one offering an alternative to dog-paddling around God’s
toilet forever. Even if it’s New Age bullshit wrapped up in a Hellion wet
dream.

Is this why God broke into a million little pieces?
Before Aelita murdered him, Neshamah said Hell was never supposed to be like
this. I thought he meant the fires and sinkholes and earthquakes. Now I know
what he meant. He put the rebel angels in an eternal time-out and never came
back. The Lord’s just and wise punishment inspired millions of his children to
mass suicide. No wonder the old man had a nervous breakdown.

“What happens now? You going to slit my throat?
With no Lucifer, this place is going to get real interesting real fast. Maybe
the whole thing will collapse into one big sinkhole. Won’t that be fun, wading
knee-deep in blood and shit for a trillion years, waiting for the universe to
end?”

He taps the knife against my Kissi arm like he’s
trying to tell if a melon is ripe. He moves the blade to the gauze on my chest,
trying to work the tip of the blade underneath so he can lift it and take a
look.

“Don’t worry about us. You need to be worried about
yourself right now.”

“Why? You’re going to kill me and I’m too hurt to
fight back. I’d only worry if I thought there was something I could do and maybe
I’d fuck it up.”

“See? Talk. Talk. Talk. That’s all you humans
do.”

“At least I don’t get other people to do my killing
for me. If I wanted to die, I’d do it myself and not trick Heaven into doing it
for me.”

He sighs.

“We must be such a disappointment to you,
Lucifer.”

He lays heavy sarcastic emphasis on “Lucifer.”

“This whole dump is one big disappointment. Maybe
that’s why God forgot about you. You’re so fucking boring.”

Vetis presses the knife into the burn on my neck. I
try not to wince.

He says, “Let me put you out of your misery.”

“Give me the knife and I’ll put you out of
yours.”

Outside someone yells, “Hey!” Someone else curses.
There’s the sound of running feet. A lot of them. More shouts. Guns go off and
something hits the ambulance hard.

Vetis looks up as a dozen hands drag him out of the
ambulance. One of them twists Vetis’s wrist until it pops and he drops the
knife. They drag him around the side of the ambulance and I lose sight of him. A
moment later, a woman steps inside and looks around for somewhere to sit that
isn’t covered in blood. She finds a foam pillow pinned to the wall by the gurney
and sets it on one of the cabinets.

“That worked out nicely, if I do say so myself,”
says Deumos.

“It would have worked out even better if you’d
gotten up here five minutes ago.”

She holds up her hands in a what-can-you-do
gesture.

“Getting through the canyons without being seen
took more time than we thought.”

I sit up and lean back against the wall. Grizzly’s
blood soaks through my pants. I don’t care.

“I wasn’t sure you’d show at all.”

“But here we are, keeping our part of the
bargain.”

“And I’ll keep mine. Just one thing. Did you bring
a doctor or nurse?”

“We have a doctor and a nurse. Why?”

“The EMT they pulled out of here is probably pretty
out of it. Someone should have a look at her. Also, can someone come in here to
dig around for painkillers? I want to lie in a kiddie pool full of
OxyContin.”

She pats me lightly on the shoulder.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

T
here’s no Oxy or Hellion Vicodin around, but Deumos comes back with
someone’s flask full of Aqua Regia. It’ll do. We sit on the shoulder of the road
looking back toward Pandemonium. Even falling apart, the place looks enough like
L.A. to make me feel homesick.

The side of the hill where we sit crunches under
our feet where the vegetation burned. But the place isn’t entirely dead. Scrubs
of ghost thistle and even a few asphodel flowers have made it up through the
layer of ash.

“You don’t look well,” says Deumos.

“With a month’s vacation, a face-lift, and a crate
of Ecstasy, I might work my way up to feeling like shit.”

“General Semyazah isn’t going to be happy about any
of this. Running around the hinterlands with weapons. Attacking his troops. And
especially you conspiring with me.”

“He’ll be fine. I’ll send him a fruit basket.”

We sit for a minute, neither of us saying anything.
There’s the kind of warm breeze that if you didn’t know you were in Heaven’s
sewer you might find almost pleasant.

“So tell me, how does someone invent a new church
in Hell? You run out of Sudoku?”

“I had a vision.”

“Of course you did. All you prophets do is have
visions. And burn heretics. That’s like catnip to you people. Why don’t you take
a pottery class or learn Japanese?

She frowns.

“You don’t believe in oaths or revelations. What
do
you believe in, Lord Lucifer?”

“I believe we’re going to be dead a lot longer than
we’re alive, so anything you like you should do to excess. I believe America
lost its soul when they took the big-block V-8 out of Mustangs. I believe
Hollywood should stop remaking
A Star Is Born.
”

She looks at me and slowly shakes her head.

“I have to apologize for burning you in effigy. I
thought you were our enemy. Now I see that your greatest enemy is yourself.”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Mary Magdalen.
Aside from a couple of paper cuts I’m doing fine.”

“Of course.”

She pulls a folded piece of paper and a pen from
inside her robes and hands them to me.

“Before we left, I took the liberty of drawing up
an agreement. There’s nothing in here we didn’t discuss earlier. My church gets
its own Tabernacle and funding not less than but not exceeding that of the old
church.”

I sign the papers and hand them back to her.

“You’re not going to read them first?”

“You saved my ass. I’m fine with whatever’s in
there.”

She puts her hands on my shoulders and turns me
toward her. Looks at my scorched armor and the wound on my neck.

“You did that to yourself? You’re mad.”

I shrug.

“I had to be out of it enough that the killers
would make their move. It was either the Gladius or a bullet, and I’ve been shot
enough for one lifetime, thanks.” I say, “Tell me about your vision.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t believe in anything. To tell it
to you would be to cheapen it.”

“I just gave you a church.”

“I just saved your life. And we both did what we
did for the same reason. We wanted something from each other.”

“You know I’ve only been Lucifer for like three
months, right? I’m not the one that made you ride in the back of the bus all
these years.”

She waves to one of her men. He comes over and she
hands him the agreement. He goes back to wait with the others. Smart woman. She
wants the paper away from me in case I change my mind.

She says, “It suits you, you know. Armor for the
man who is always armored.”

“Visions and fashion tips? You do it all,
sister.”

She leans back like she’s sizing up her kid for his
first big-boy pants.

“I mean it. You look better in it than the other
Lucifer. Look at the damage God’s final thunderbolt did to the metal.”

She touches the battered part of the armor.

“Even with the Lord’s mark on him, Samael was so
anxious to play the tragic warrior king that he added the thunderbolt
crest.”

She pats a blank spot in the center of the
breastplate.

“I’m happy to see you removed it.”

I touch the armor where she had her hand. There’s a
tiny divot where a bolt might have been removed. Suddenly I want to get back to
the palace.

“I think I’m going to head out before someone
realizes I’m gone. You can handle Grand Funk Railroad back there?”

“You’ll release the rest of my people?”

“I’ll make the call as soon as I get back.”

“We’ll drop off the prisoners when they’re
returned.”

One of her crew, a tall silent woman with spiders
branded into her arms and cheeks, drives me to the bike in the jeep Vetis took
up here. She barely slows long enough for me to jump out before she’s tearing
back up the road. So much for Hail Satan.