Kill City Blues: A Sandman Slim Novel (23 page)

“Not bad, old man,” I tell him.

“Thank you,” he says, pulling another potion from inside his coat. He downs it and tosses the bottle away. A few seconds later his breathing and heartbeat head back to normal.

“So, what did you take back there?” I ask. “Some kind of bat juice that let you float across?”

He shakes his head.

“No. One potion for balance. One for bravery. And a third to not give a damn about the other two.”

Hattie’s boys huddle at the edge of the chasm examining the wires. Diogo hawks up phlegm and spits it over the side. He and his brothers watch it drop like they’re watching the Super Bowl.

“I don’t suppose anyone following us will be able to come this way,” says Traven.

I take out the black blade and slice through the remaining cables so that the bridge collapses into the chasm. There’s silence and then a huge metallic rattle as it hits the far wall.

“Do you people intend to completely destroy my home?” says Hattie.

“You got paid,” I say.

“We’re really sorry,” says Candy.

“No one ever leaves Kill City, so whoever built the bridge is still around,” I say. “If it’s that important, they’ll come back and fix it.”

“And how long will that take?” says Hattie.

I say, “From the way you talked, it sounded like you didn’t come down here too often, so what do you care?”

“It’s the principle.”

“I doubt that. You’re not the chamber of commerce. You don’t give a damn about anybody else but your clan. If you did you would have said something when I stopped those guys from stomping the kid back there. I think you just want to shake us down for more gifts. We might have another bauble or two but not until we actually get somewhere. And if there are any swamps up ahead or giant spiders or fire-breathing fan dancers, you better say so before we get there. No more surprises.”

She laughs and claps her hands once together.

“No surprises? In Kill City? Boy, you couldn’t have chosen worse if you’re looking for a place with no more astonishments.”

Her sons laugh along with her. Hattie goes to the wall and takes an oil lamp down from a nail. Diogo gives her a match, which she strikes against the rough concrete. It sparks and she holds the flame to the lamp wick. It catches and yellow light fills the chamber. You can feel everyone’s mood lift in the warm glow of the lamp. Our LEDs and flashlights made Kill City look like a broken-down space station. Seeing the place lit by fire, I feel like we’re back on planet Earth.

Hattie opens another door and holds the lamp high.

“With all the noise you fools made, half of Kill City probably knows where we are. But I want to make sure those ahead see us coming. Don’t want to spook anyone.”

She leads us down another level, where the feel is different. Like we’ve moved into a ragged zone outsiders weren’t meant to see. Bare cinder-block walls. Exposed ductwork and steam pipes overhead. We slosh through a couple of inches of dirty water from leaking pipes. No one talks. Hattie is out front, leading us like Moses through the desert. Her boys are spread out around her, as nervous as she is fierce.

The passage narrows ahead. We’re getting into areas with heavier wreckage. Slabs of the upstairs floor lie on either side of us. Looking up through the hole, I can see the night sky. It’s a flat, gray-black slate, all the stars washed out by the lights of Santa Monica. In the dim pools of light from the lantern and our flashlights, the rusted rebar and rows of workers’ coat hooks along the walls look like props from a Roger Corman torture chamber.

Ahead is a narrow tunnel under the wreckage.

“It’s hands and knees here,” Hattie says.

She doesn’t miss a step. Gets right down on her belly, sets the lantern in front of her, and crawls, pushing the light ahead. Her sons follow.

I shine my light into the tunnel and lean my weight on the debris. Nothing moves. The pile is solid and the passage ahead looks clear. Still, I can’t see what’s at the far end.

“You want to take point on this one, Paul?” I say.

“Sure.”

“You’re not claustrophobic?”

“Not at all.”

“Great. Scream if you see dragons.”

“Very funny.”

Everyone takes off their bags and packs. All I have is a flashlight, so I go through next. I don’t want to stick around and watch Candy trying to maneuver her
Kekko Kamen
bag so it doesn’t get scratched up.

The tunnel is maybe twenty tight feet from end to end. Crawling on my elbows takes a minute or so to come out the other side. We’re a long way from the world now. Dug down into the earth like bugs. Even if the bridge was still intact, there’s no going back. The team following us could be around the first corner. Until I know who they are, I don’t want to take a chance on running into them. That means we have no choice but to follow wherever Hattie wants to take us, and she knows it. On our hands and knees it feels like we’ve crossed a new barrier. We’re moving forward but I don’t like it.

Candy comes through the tunnel next, followed by Vidocq, Brigitte, and Traven.

The new room looks a lot like the last one, probably just an extension of it. The same rough walls and unfinished feel.

“Where to next?” I say.

“We’re about there,” says Hattie.

There’s a grunt and a whirring sound from the other end of the room, then the growl of a generator coming to life. Bright halogen work lights come on all around us. I go blind for a few seconds.

When I can see again, there they are. I have to give it to the Shoggots. They know how to make an entrance.

The passage opens onto a wide concrete room with a metal catwalk overhead. At least twenty members of the Shoggot tribe are lined around the walls and on the walk. And they are dead-dog ugly.

Hattie and the boys pull up short. We stop behind them.

All of the Shoggots, the men and the women, are in looted designer suits. High-end stuff. But the silks and expensive wools are covered in grime and dried blood. Probably the Shoggots’ own. They’re definitely human, but they’ve been holed up down here working on their bodies for so long that at first glance they look like some peculiar flavor of Lurker. Their teeth have been filed to points. Some have split their nostrils. Others have cut off their noses or lips. Their cheeks are adorned with ritual scars and metal. Most have similar body mods on their throats, arms, or chests and many of the cuts are held open with metal hooks embedded in their skin. Some of the cuts look fresh. Others are old and infected. I see maggots in more than a few of the deeper cuts. I wish I’d quizzed Hattie on how crazy these crazies were before we came down here.

A tall Shoggot in the middle of the catwalk rests his hands on the top of the rail.

“Hattie. Lovely to see you. And you’ve brought friends.”

“Hello, Ferox. These aren’t friends. They’re travelers looking for the old Roman.”

“And what good is that old madman to anyone?”

Delon pushes his way up beside Hattie.

“If it’s a matter of payment, I have things to trade for information.”

Ferox stands up straight, scowling.

“Who was talking to you, traveler? What you want couldn’t matter less to us.”

Delon reaches into his pack and pulls out a long, thin knife.

“This is a Liston knife, once used by Robert Liston himself. Before the days of anesthetic, he was one of the most famous and fastest amputation surgeons in Europe.”

Ferox takes a step forward to get a better look at the blade. He gestures to a couple of Shoggots on the floor nearby.

“Bring it to me,” he says.

While they’re carrying it up to Ferox I get next to Delon.

“Are you stupid? Giving these psychos a knife?”

“I’m trying to make us a deal.”

Ferox takes his time looking over the Liston, holding it from different angles to see how straight it is. Moving it through the light to test its sheen. He makes a shallow cut inside one of his wrists, testing the amount of pressure needed to break the skin. He smiles and looks down at us.

“Hello, Officer,” he says. “Would you come up here, please?”

It takes a minute before anyone figures out who he’s talking to. Then Diogo takes a tentative step forward in his mall-cop shirt.

“Yes. You. That’s right. Please come up and join me.”

Diogo takes a couple of more steps and stops.

“Don’t do it, kid,” I say.

He looks at me.

“Diogo,” says Hattie.

He’s frozen in the middle of the room. His dim brain is overloading.

Ferox looks annoyed.

“Bring the pig up here,” he says.

Shoggots grab Diogo and drag him, kicking and screaming, up the catwalk.

Hattie and the boys don’t do anything. They’re paralyzed. I reach for the Colt but decide to wait it out. Even with hoodoo, I don’t know if I can take on this many crazies at once.

A couple of Shoggots hold Diogo as Ferox raises the kid’s right arm.

“If I remember correctly from my reading, the technique was like this. A single deep curved slice, severing the skin and connective tissue in one cut. Let’s see if I’m right.”

He draws the blade across Diogo’s biceps, digging deeper into the skin until the Liston disappears inside. He draws it all the way around so that both ends of the cut meet. Diogo screams and thrashes in the Shoggots’ arms. When Ferox is finished they let him go. He falls onto his face and vomits over the side of the catwalk.

Hattie holds on to Doolittle’s arm, whispering over and over, “My boy. My boy.”

“Not bad for a first time, don’t you agree?” The other Shoggots nod and grin. The ones with lips, at least. “We neglected to bring a saw, so we’ll have to go through the bone later. Tie off his arm so he doesn’t bleed to death. Leave the travelers for now. Bring me the other boys.”

“No!” Hattie shouts.

Ferox points at her with the Liston knife.

“I told you not to come back here, Hattie.”

I pull the Colt and take two quick shots at Ferox. The first just misses and he hits the deck before the second can get him. Two Shoggots on my level rush me and I put a bullet through their foreheads. Out of the corner of my eye I see vials fly by as Vidocq throws his potions. Candy blasts away with her folding pistol while Brigitte takes careful single shots. Delon has disappeared into the back with Father Traven. It looks like his gun is jammed.

Ferox whispers an incantation and deflects Candy and Brigitte’s shots into the ceiling. So the Shoggots are Sub Rosa. I was afraid of that. Ferox tosses a ball of white-hot plasma at Doolittle, burning him from the inside like he’d swallowed a pound of phosphorus. A group of Shoggots knocks Hattie down and drags away the rest of the boys as they scream, “Mama!”

I bark some Hellion and send a stream of fat, needle-sharp projectiles at Ferox. He sees them coming and suddenly his arm looks like a skinny porcupine when he raises it to block the needles.

This time he throws a plasma ball at me. I deflect it with some defensive hoodoo and knock it into a big Shoggot rushing at me with Diogo’s ax.

Before I can go after Ferox again, a couple of nearby Shoggots throw their own flashy hoodoo my way. Muscles split open beneath the open cuts in their arms and shoot out at me like quivering pink tentacles. I blast one of the tentacle throwers with the same needles I used on Ferox, catching him in the face. Another tentacle latches on to my Kissi arm and pulls hard enough to knock me off balance. I grab the black blade from under my coat and slice through the muscle in one blow. The Shoggot screams and is joined by two more.

All three hammer me with hexes. I can barely throw up enough of my own defensive hoodoo to keep them off me. I can’t see Candy or any of the others anymore. I think they’ve been pushed back behind me to the door.

I pocket the knife and grab the na’at. Swinging it out like a sawtooth bullwhip, I take out two of my attackers. But three more join the fight. Even in the arena I never went up against this many armed fighters at once.

On the catwalk I catch a glimpse of Ferox hexing rubble, tossing it at me like hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs. I bob and weave, trying to keep off the nearby assholes, when a piece of brick slams into my ribs. I slip and go down on one knee as more debris hurricanes around me. Another brick slams into the back of my head. The nearby Shoggots keep up a stream of blasts. I can’t catch my breath, trying to keep up with them. Blood runs down the side of my head and into my eye. It burns and blinds me on one side. I turn just in time to see a pipe flying at me. And the world goes dark.

I
’M LOST.
I
’M
not sure if I’m in Hell, L.A., or Kill City. It feels like I’m in the arena. I’m hunting something and I’m being hunted. I’ve seen the water and the smokes they left behind. But this doesn’t look like the arena. Concrete corridors alternate between long straight lines and sharp turns left and right that double back on themselves. Shit. I’m in a maze. I was just in one of these, wasn’t I? Something like it. I was definitely lost, with something on my tail and closing fast.

Whoever is behind me doesn’t feel human. Even if it was a Lurker, I’d pick up breathing or a heartbeat. Maybe it’s an angel. Maybe Aelita? Maybe Medea Bava has learned some hoodoo to hide her breath and heart so I can’t see her coming.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. I can’t detect what’s behind me because what’s behind me isn’t alive. What is it, then? Vampires? Is Tykho here to take the 8 Ball from me? I doubt it. She’s subtler than that. Maybe it’s Paul. Paul and Trevor and all their mechanical brothers.

Imagine all of L.A. filled with windup men wandering empty-headed and waiting for orders and directions and purpose. That’s L.A. in a nutshell. A city of driven creatures, but no one is a hundred percent sure what they’re driven toward. Wealth. Fame. Power. Love. Revenge. These are all the obvious end points for the citizens of a spectral city, but none of them quite encompass a final goal. That’s more fragile. Something that slips away like smoke the moment it’s in your hands. It’s a moonshine cocktail of desperation and desire, the certainty that you can find perfection through sheer willpower and the cold terror that if you do reach the goal it will have twisted into something new. A new fevered need born of the search for this one. Searching for the next goal will breed another. And on and on. L.A. and Kill City full of Pinocchios with whirring gears for brains, all wanting to be real boys but sunk in the certainty that they’ll never become anything because they’re nothing. They came from nothing and are headed for a further and harder nothing. Condemned by their own stupidity to end up buried deep underground with the losers, the dead, and other people’s trash.

W
HEN
I
COME
to, the first thing I see is my coat wadded up on the floor across the room, which is weird because I was just wearing it and don’t remember taking it off.

Gradually, the rest of the room comes into focus. More important is that when I try to move I can’t. I’m chained to a wall.

I’m in a high-ceilinged room with Ferox and a handful of other Shoggots. Some have rags pressed against fresh wounds. A few have to be held up by their shithead Shoggot pals. Ferox is arranging tools and delicate surgical instruments on a table. He has the Liston knife in a belt around his waist. I pull on the chains to see if I can break them or work them out of the wall. Nothing. Just my luck. These fuckers are probably dining on rats down here, but when they left the city for this shithole, they brought their hoodoo restraints with them.

Ferox sees me squirming.

“There you are, sleepyhead. I was getting worried that I’d hit you too hard. But you’re with us now, yes? Say something to let us know you understand what’s happening.”

“Is this the right bus? I need to get off at La Cienega.”

Ferox nods, still arranging his toys.

“There we are,” he says. “Wit so hot it almost burns. So good to have you back among the living.”

“Speak for yourself. I was happy asleep.”

“You wouldn’t want to miss your coming-out party, would you, Sandman Slim?” He looks over at me. “Yes, even down here we’ve heard of the infamous Sandman Slim. You and I have a lot in common, you know.”

“You love Night Ranger, too? Unchain me and I’ll buy us a cold six.”

He smiles, showing his sharp, ragged teeth.

“I meant that we’re both nephilim. Though we Shoggots are a slightly more exotic variety.”

“That means what? You’re a mix of angel and pig fucker?”

“While you’re a mix of ordinary angel and a mortal woman, we come from fallen angels.”

I shake my head.

“I’ve been to Hell, Simple Simon. The only Hellion that can come to earth is Lucifer. The others are all stuck Downtown, going severely batshit. And even Lucifer can’t make a nephilim. No fallen angel can.”

“But we’re living proof that it is possible. And when Father Lucifer leads his army to take the earth for Hell, we’ll be there by his side and sit at his right hand in Hell for all eternity.”

I can’t help but laugh a little. It makes my head hurt.

“Damn, did you back the wrong pony. Lucifer isn’t coming back to skull-fuck the earth. The Angra Om Ya are. And they’re not going to be impressed by your story any more than I am.”

Ferox furrows his brow.

“I was hoping that being brothers of a sort, we could be civilized with each other.”

“Is that why I’m chained to a wall?”

“No. That’s so you won’t hurt yourself moving around too much once we start the experiments.”

“What experiments?”

“So, you don’t believe we are who we know we are?”

“I know exactly what you are.”

“Please enlighten me,” Ferox says. He turns to the other Shoggots. “Everybody listen. We’re about to get a lesson in metaphysics from Sandman Slim himself.”

I know I should keep my mouth shut, but now it’s too late to back down. All I can do is press harder.

“I don’t know your family’s history, but I know this from looking at you. You’re not nephilim. You’re losers and fuckups. You especially, Ferox. You drove your family from up there in the city into this sewer, and looking for a way not to have to blow your brains out, you came up with a sad fucking fairy tale about what special little snowflakes you are and how you wanted to be down here all along waiting for Ragnarok. But the Devil isn’t coming for you. God isn’t coming for you. You’ve heard of Sandman Slim? You’re one up on me because I’ve never heard of you assholes and I bet no one I know has either. You can scare these Kill City clans, but out of here you’re just another sideshow act. All you need is a two-headed calf and a pickled punk.”

Ferox comes over and looks at me hard.

“How many scars do you think you have?”

“No idea.”

“Let’s start a new count. One.”

He takes out the Liston knife and draws it across my chest, making a deep, hard cut. I grit my teeth to keep from making a sound. Just because I’m hard to kill doesn’t mean that bullets and knives hurt me any less than anyone else.

He turns to the other Shoggots.

“Who here has a watch? I’d like to know how long it takes for that cut to heal. Time it, please.”

He goes back to his instruments, wiping my blood off the Liston. I wonder if he did all the body mods to the other Shoggots himself or did he encourage them to do it to themselves?

He says, “Before you got here, we were planning on catching the old Roman ourselves. You see, we know about the angel and that the old ghost knows her secret. After we made him tell us what it is, we were going to sell him. But I think we’ll ease him onto the back burner because now we have you. And I think Sandman Slim will fetch a better price. After I’ve finished my research, of course.”

“I’ve got some research for you. Why don’t you cut me loose and I’ll take you to meet Lucifer and he can tell you to your face what morons you are and maybe you can haul your asses out of Kill City and do something for your family.”

Ferox comes over with a magnifying glass. He sticks his fat thumb into the cut on my chest. I try not to, but I flinch a little. He studies the blood on his fingertips, and when he’s done he wipes it on my torn shirt. He rips it open the rest of the way and starts examining my scars.

“Look, if this is your way of getting to know me, why don’t you just friend me on Facebook?”

He lowers the magnifying glass and goes to a brazier in the corner of the room. Comes back with a small branding iron and holds it to my chest until the skin sizzles. When I’m good and cooked he tosses the iron back into the brazier and goes back to looking over my scars.

“Would someone please time how long the burn takes to set? Thank you.”

He looks up at me.

“What I want to do is take you apart. Down to the smallest sliver of your being. I want to see you laid out on a table like a flesh puzzle and put you back together again in my own image. I’ve never had the heart to test the limits of nephilim body on my own family, and even though you and I are different sorts of nephilim, I suspect that the results will be applicable. Don’t you? For instance, I wonder how many organs you can lose before you die.”

He goes back to the table and brings back a scalpel. I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve been tortured like this, but it isn’t. The Hellions cut me up pretty nicely when I first got to Hell. They’d never seen a live human before. But for them, it was mostly just having a good time, kicking around the weak new kid. Ferox, on the other hand, seems like the real thing. A science groupie with a grudge against God, who rejected his family, and the Devil, who hasn’t rescued them. And right now my sorry carcass is the complaint department.

Ferox says, “Don’t worry. I have no interest in killing you. I’m going to take you to the brink, and then let you rest and heal. When you have, we’ll move on to other tests. All right? Good. Now hold still. This might sting a little.”

He drives the whole head of the scalpel into my gut a few inches below the navel and starts dragging the blade north. My body shakes. I can’t help it. It’s rejecting the blade, this situation, the whole world, trying to shake it off like a dog with mange. I breathe deep. In through my nose and out through my mouth. I won’t give this fucker the satisfaction of screaming. But I might faint and that would be embarrassing too. He cuts up three, four, five inches and stops. My legs and boots are warm with blood. My head spins. I hold my head up, not wanting to black out.

“It’s been bothering me,” says Ferox. “Why are you only wearing one glove? Did you lose the other?”

He pulls my glove off, and dazed as I am, I can still see his eyes go wide when he sees my Kissi hand. He pushes up my sleeve. Seeing that the prosthetic goes up farther, he slices my sleeve all the way to my shoulder, where the Kissi arm and I are attached.

“Glorious. Glorious. That’s not a gift from God. Who have you been spending time with, you naughty boy?”

Ferox taps the scalpel on the arm, listening to it like it’s a tuning fork. He probes it with the tip and tries to slice it. When it doesn’t work he presses harder until the scalpel’s head snaps off. He drops it and goes back to the brazier. It gives me a moment to breathe. I’m lucky that the feeling in the Kissi arm is a little dull. But even though he can’t hurt the arm, I can feel everything he’s doing. I’m getting paranoid about the cut in my belly. Like if I squirm around too much, my intestines or my liver might fall out.

Ferox comes back with the piece of flaming wood and holds it under the arm. This time I can’t hold back. I don’t scream but he knows why I’m groaning. His cut-up face splits into a wide smile.

“You can feel it, can’t you? Not only does this lovely thing move, but it feels too. It’s miraculous.”

He turns to the other Shoggots.

“Who here thinks I deserve an arm like this?”

My head is spinning like a carnival teacup ride. The crowd, on the other hand, is as excited as if he was busting out with an encore of “Free Bird.”

“Get me the saw,” he says.

I’m losing too much blood. I can’t stay awake to fight him. Who am I trying to fool? I’m way beyond fighting anyone. I can barely stay awake. Any second now, my insides are going to slide onto the floor.

I feel pressure on my arm as Ferox tests the best angles to start sawing, but where my head is taking me everything is fine and nothing hurts.

S
CREAMS WAKE ME
up. How shocked am I as it slowly comes to me that the screaming isn’t coming from my mouth but from across the room? I can’t exactly see what’s happening. It looks like a fight. I think.

The brazier is on the floor and the wall is crawling with weird shadows. I can see the Shoggots all right. Then something else. Gray streaks. Flashes of knives and swords. One of the streaks stops for a second. It’s a man in a gray suit that covers his whole body except for his eyes. There’s something else. He’s short. About four feet tall and slashing away with a blade almost as long as he is tall. He and the other blurs move like psycho-fuck pint-size ninjas.

Then there are hands on me. Someone undoes the chains and I slip to the floor. The world is a series of blurry snapshots. I think I hear a different kind of shouting. Maybe see Candy’s face. Or maybe my insides really are gone and this is a new way to feel death. That’s okay. It seems like I’m lying down, even if I’m not. I’d rather die comfortably than die chained to the wall in some asshole’s man cave.

And that’s pretty much all there is before I stop caring and pass out.

I
WAKE UP
on a blanket. Candy is next to me, cross-legged, holding my human hand. We’re back in the big room where the fight with the Shoggots first started. Everyone else— Brigitte, Vidocq, Traven, and Delon—is there too, talking, eating, and drinking with the gray mini-ninjas. The fuckers might be small but they’re covered in an impressive amount of Shoggot blood.

“How long was I out?”

“A couple of hours. Think you can move?”

I try to sit up and make it up onto my elbows. Candy has to pull me up the rest of the way. I put my hand on my stomach. Someone has stitched me up and wrapped me in a bandage. Some kind of healing ointment seeps through the material.

“Vidocq did it,” says Candy. “I think he’s been getting lessons from Allegra.”

Delon comes over and kneels next to us.

“How are you feeling?”

“How far are we from the baths?”

“I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure where we are anymore.”

“Figure it out. I’d like to be home when the world ends.”

Delon nods.

“If I can find some landmarks, I’m sure I can get us there.”

“That’s fucking reassuring.”