The Perdition Score (13 page)

The angel, the shooting at the food truck, and now this? That's too many coincidences too close together. Now I know that someone is fucking with me.

Candy comes over and puts an arm around me, but I barely notice. I don't hear much of the rest of the conversation either. When I come back to Earth, Candy and Alessa are chatting with Brigitte, and Kasabian is laying on the charm with Marilyne. I go over and tell Candy I'm leaving.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. I just need some air.”

I say good-bye to everyone, put the Mitchum face back on, and walk back to Max Overdrive. I'm too restless to sit around or watch a movie, so I haul the bike gear and a flashlight around the side of the shop and go to work modifying the Hellion hog. It's done by the time Candy and Kasabian come home and I've worked off enough nervous energy when they get there that I can act like a human again. But in the back of my mind I know that working for Abbot or not, I'm going to have to start killing people and it's probably going to be soon.

I
N THE MORNING,
I bring a cold twelve-pack of beer into Max Overdrive and set it on the counter. Not beer like last night's sewage. This is good stuff. Candy is already at work. It's just me and Kasabian.

“What's the occasion?” he says.

“No occasion. We haven't had a drink together in a while. I thought it was about time.”

“Okay,” he says, more than a little suspicion in his voice.

I open the pack and hand him a bottle.

He pops the top with his metal mitts, but he doesn't drink. He hands me the bottle.

“You first, chief.”

“Why do you immediately assume I'm trying to poison you?”

“Because you're you. Now drink.”

I hold it up and drain half the bottle. Put it back on the counter with a flourish.

Kasabian looks at me. Waves a hand in front of my eyes. I remain upright and extremely not poisoned.

Finally, he says, “Okay. But I'll pick my own bottle.”

“Don't strain yourself.”

He takes one from the corner and opens it slowly, like it might be full of snakes on springs. He sniffs and takes a small sip. When his tongue doesn't melt he takes a longer pull.

“Just because it's not poisoned doesn't mean I trust you.”

“I don't blame you.”

I pick up my bottle and finish it. I'm not really much of a beer fan, but I can handle it if it's the only thing around. Kasabian would get suspicious if I gave him beer and drank Aqua Regia. Kasabian, on the other hand, loves the stuff. He
has four bottles by the time I finish two. I'm barely sipping my third when he cracks open his fifth. I can smell traces of alcohol in his sweat and his eyes tremble microscopically, too little for regular people to see, but I can pick it out fine. Kasabian isn't smashed, but he's officially DUI. Now I just have to keep him calm and focused.

“Do you mind if we talk about Hell for a minute?”

He sets down his beer and makes a face.

“Oh man. And I was just starting to feel good.”

“I don't want a dissertation. Just a few questions.”

“I don't like seeing down there, man. I just don't.”

“Someone's got to keep tabs on it.”

He picks up his beer again. Sips.

“Great. You do it.”

“It doesn't work like that.”

“Why am I always the lucky one when you want a weather report Downtown?”

“Because you're the only one that has access to the
Codex
.”

“And you stuck that fucking peeper in my head. Don't forget that. I don't. The damn thing keeps me up at night.”

I sip my beer.

“Sorry.”

He drains his beer and opens another.

“First you leave me without a body, then you replace my eye with a Freddy Krueger marathon.”

“I'd trade you the eye anytime if I could use it.”

“Then do it.”

“I tried.”

“Try harder. You're good at making up spells and stuff.”

He's starting to slur his words. He's nice and toasted.

“Maybe I can give you a break for a while.”

“What does that mean?”

I set down my bottle. At this point, he won't notice if I stop drinking.

“Not a long break, you understand. Give me the eye back for a half hour. I want to try something where I might be able to see Downtown for a few minutes.”

“How?”

“I'm going to have to die a little.”

“Oh fuck,” he says. “You're going to do that blood ritual again, aren't you? Who's going to clean up the mess? Not me. And what if Candy comes home early and finds you passed out. She doesn't need to see you like that.”

The Metatron Cube ritual is one where I draw a mystical sigil on the floor, get down in it, and slice my wrists. It lets me talk to the recent dead, especially if they're close by. This time, though, I want to try something else.

“The Cube is strictly a backup. I think I have a work-around.”

“What kind? If it hurts, I'm not doing it.”

“Relax. It's just a potion called Dream Tea. I used it once when I worked with Ishiro Shonin last Christmas.”

“That four-hundred-year-old, walking, talking bag of bones you worked with at the Golden Vigil?”

Kasabian looks suspicious again.

“Wait—how is it you ended up with a Vigil potion?”

“What do you think? I stole it.”

“Oh good. You're such a little Mary Sue these days I thought you might have paid for it. So, how does it work?”

“That's the great part. You just drink it and meditate.”

“You can't meditate.”

“Yeah, but I can have some Aqua Regia and relax into it. It worked last time.”

“And there's no blood?”

“Not a drop. There's only one weird part.”

He rolls his eyes.

“Here it comes.”

“The only time I used it was when I was following a dead man into the Tenebrae. This time I'll be on my own.”

Kasabian finishes his beer and opens another.

“And you might not be able to make it back this time—I get it. You're doing this upstairs. If something goes wrong, I don't want your bony ass cluttering up my sales floor.”

“That's fair.”

So I head upstairs and he follows me, a little wobbly on his feet. He bangs off the walls a couple of times, but makes it into the apartment without too much damage. He drops down onto the couch.

“So what do we do?”

I pour some water into a mug.

“Like I said, I haven't done it this way before. But think of it like pizza delivery. I guarantee to have the peeper out and back in your head in thirty minutes or less.”

He shakes his head.

“I don't want to have to pry my eye out of your dead body.”

“You won't.”

He thinks creaky booze thoughts for a minute.

“I'm getting a bucket of water. If I think you've been gone too long, I'm dumping it on you.”

“That's not a bad idea.”

“Wait here,” he says, and staggers downstairs. While he bangs around down there I get the Dream Tea out of an old suitcase full of other stolen goodies that I keep under the bed.

Kasabian comes in with the filthy bucket we use to clean up downstairs. He fills it at the kitchen sink and carries it back to the sofa.

I put the mug of water in the microwave for a minute. When it's finished, I dump in some of the tea and let it brew or steep or whatever it is tea is supposed to do. When it looks done, I swallow the whole cup. It tastes like Swamp Thing's bathwater.

“If you die, try not to piss yourself,” Kasabian says. “The smell is hard to get out.”

“Love you too,” I tell him, carrying a glass of clean water over to the sofa. “Now give me your eye.”

“I hate this part,” he says.

“You'll get a lollipop if you're a big boy.”

First, I whisper a little hoodoo, pluck out one of my eyes, and drop it in the glass. It floats there like a deflated egg. Carefully, I pop out Kasabian's peeper and put it in my socket. Kas flinches a little when it comes out, but doesn't whine, and I'm grateful for that at least.

With the eye in, I get up and walk around, trying to get it to settle into place. It doesn't take long. As my vision grows clearer, I feel the familiar drunk sensation I had when I first used the tea. I stumble in the direction of the sofa, but don't make it and have to sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the counter. Closing my eyes, I feel like I'm sinking into a bath of warm Jell-O.

When I open my eyes I'm on a wide plain of dry packed
earth. I know that if I walk in one direction I'll get to Tenebrae Station and the ruins of a kind of ghost L.A. where restless souls too afraid to even haunt the crumbling streets hang out. In the other direction is a range of low mountains. I stumble in their direction, and before I'm halfway there, a door opens in the rock face. This is the door to Hell. Souls get a choice at this point. They can go inside, to a freak show designed to torture and torment them for eternity, or they can stay out here in the Tenebrae, with nothing but their shell-shocked brains and other hungry ghosts for company. In their shoes, I'd go inside. I'd rather be someplace than nowhere at all. But that's me.

I want to run for the door, get Downtown as soon as possible, and spend as much time as I can there, but my legs won't cooperate. I feel like I'm drunk, and that didn't happen last time. It might be the effect of coming through here with no one waiting on the other side. Whatever it is, I'm not feeling springtime fresh by the time I step through the door. I throw on another glamour as soon as I get inside. The last thing I want is for anyone to recognize Sandman Slim when he can barely stand and definitely can't defend himself.

For this disguise, I choose a Hellion face. Some Hellions look pretty much human while others look like they just won an ugly-farm-animal contest. Some are more like human-size bugs—even other Hellions don't like them. I go for middle ground and put on a bland, empty-eyed boar's face, complete with cracked yellow tusks. It's the little details that make the disguise. I don't want to look like I got my mask from the bargain bin at Walmart.

It's a shock being back Downtown. I haven't been here in
months and for the first few minutes the smell and sound of the place are hard to deal with. It's all familiar, but drunk like I am, it's hard to ease comfortably back into damnation.

When doomed souls walk through the front door into Hell, they're funneled like cattle into veal pens, where they wait to be sorted. Who gets a holiday in lava? Who goes to the Butcher Valley or the Room of Knives. Me? I'm just another idiot Hellion out for a stroll, so I don't expect any trouble getting past the guards. Turns out it's no trouble at all.

And it's not because I'm dressed like a local.

The new souls aren't being led to the holding pens because they aren't there anymore. Where there were cages is a collection of twisted metal bars and the crushed remains of cages in a shit-reeking mud swamp. I want to get a closer look, but I'm so light-headed I have a feeling that I'd end up flat on my face in the muck. Damned souls mill around the pens not sure what to do or where to go. There aren't any Hellions left guarding them, much less telling them where to go. A few notice me and head in my direction, but I wave them off and head into the Hell's capital, Pandemonium.

I don't make it. I have to duck inside one of the abandoned guardhouses on the outskirts of the city, where I collapse on the floor. I'm drunk and the peepers are kicking in full force now. I can see everywhere, all of Hell at once, and it's making me throw up in my skull.

You know how flies have those funny compound eyes that divide images into hundreds of little pieces? Now imagine one of those compound eyes where each of those hundreds of lenses sees something different. This is beyond information overload. It's a flat-out Hellion acid trip.

I'm back at Lucifer's palace in Downtown's demonic Beverly Hills. I have a watery image of the palace lobby. The grounds outside. The kennels where the hellhounds are supposed to be. Even Lucifer's endless library upstairs.

Ruins everywhere.

Everything trashed. The palace looks deserted. Out front, hundreds of Hellion legionnaires are camped in tents and in the backs of broken-down trucks. There are fires everywhere, fueled with Lucifer's furniture and his books. Damned souls wander the streets—the ones that haven't gone native and joined the roving legionnaire gangs raiding the last of the stores for food, Maledictions, ammo, and booze, that is. There are gang fights, executions, riots, and burning buildings all across the city. And I'm seeing this all at once, through one big sulfurous, spinning kaleidoscope.

I'm cold. I'm sweating. I can't feel my legs. Then my legs come back and I can't feel my arms. My heart bangs around my chest like my ribs are a mosh pit. I'm too dizzy to even get up and head back to the Tenebrae door. All I can do is lie here as drytts—Hellion sand fleas—trampoline over my face and hands.

I see south of the city, all the way to the golden walls around the fortress that opens into Heaven. Millions of Hellions and damned souls surround it. I expect rioting and fights here too, but it's different. The crowd is barely moving at all. It's just miles of hopeless, catatonic bodies, human and otherwise, in every direction. Months ago, God—Mr. Muninn—put out the word that Heaven was now open to everyone, human souls and fallen angels alike. Only the gates
never opened. Over the walls of the fortress, I can see flashes of the angel war that's raging to decide who gets into Heaven and who doesn't.

It's too much. I feel like someone parked an earthmover on my head. I can't get enough stinking air breathing through my nose, but if I open my mouth, the sand fleas get inside. Even though I know I'm not bodily back in Hell, that I'm only here as a projection of my soul, everything hurts and everything is horrible and I roll over and throw up as the visions continue.