He’s big, and with all that armor it feels like chorus line decided to do a show on my chest. It takes all of my strength to roll him off me. Once he starts moving, he goes easily. In fact he loses some weight in the process. His left urts. His arm falls off where I sliced through it in the fall.
I manifest my Gladius again and swipe it lightly across his face, giving him a scar like one of mine. He stays on his back, staring up at me. Angels don’t bleed, but something thick and clear is leaking out from where his arm used to be, closing the wound.
“You’re lucky. I want you to do my favor more than I want to kill you. This is your second chance to stay alive. No one gets a third.”
He closes his eyes for a second then turns his head to where his arm isn’t.
“I agree.”
“Swear, angel. Swear a holy oath you can’t break.”
He blinks twice. Stares into the sun. He’s thinking, Father why have you forsaken my ass? Because he can’t choose you over the other angels bootlicking hosannas. Or like the rest of us, you’re just another bug on his windshield.
“I swear and make a holy pledge as a servant of the Lord to abide by the bargain we make.”
I let the Gladius go out, grab his chest plate at the neck, and pull him up. Toss him back against Eden’s gates and get up close to his face so he won’t miss a word.
“Tell Lucifer I’m coming for him.”
Rizoel looks at me.
“Lucifer was his name in Perdition. In Heaven, he’s Samael.”
“Call him Travis Bickle for all I care, just tell him I’m coming. And I’m bringing all of Hell with me. Got it?”
“What kind of man are you that you’d wage war on Heaven?”
“It was this or stay home and watch The Wizard of Oz, and I hate musicals.”
I leave him where he is, flame on my Gladius, and slice through the chains on the gates. One kick and Eden is open for business.
Rizoel staggers back.
“I’m going to get written up for this, you know. It’ll go on my permanent record.”
“Shouldn’t you be on your way somewhere?”
Rizoel is horrified at seeing an Abomination in the garden. One step. Two steps. He doesn’t move. I think he was expecting me to turn into a pillar of salt. I turn, and when he doesn’t move, I drag my Gladius through the rosebushes. They burst into flame.
He takes a couple of steps back, shaking his head. “You are such an asshole.”
“Don’t forget our deal. By the way, how do I get to Hell in here?”
The look of disgust fades as his lips draw up into a big Cheshire-cat smile.
“It’s easy. Exactly the way the human part of you did it the first time.”
Before I get a word out, Rizoel spreads his wings and throws himself into the ridiculously bright blue sky.
I take a look around the garden. It’s just a fucking garden. Rizoel was too gleeful to just be mocking me. He was giving me a clue. Hell is in here somewhere.
I stroll around the garden like a tourist in the kind of flower prison that florists dream about. After a while all the plants look the same to me. Leaves. Got it. Stems and flowers. Got it. Bark and fruit. Got it. I’m Steve McQueen and the Blob is after me, only it’s made of dandelions and begonias.
Where is Hell in here? I stomp through the rosebushes and under pine trees. Climb up snaky vines and dig up screaming mandrakes. That was a bad idea. I thought they might be carrots. I’m getting hungry.
There’s nothing here. No doors. No rabbit holes. No hoodoo portals or sci-fi transporters. I’m stuck in a feed-store calendar and I’m getting just a little pissed off.
Fuck you, angel, and everyone who’s been spewing cryptic crap at me. The way you did the first time. “Be a rock.” “Click your heels three times and think of flying monkeys.” The next thing that quotes me a fortune cookie gets turned into a novelty paperweight.
Time is passing. Tick tock. Tick tock.
There’s nothing left to do. Hey, Heaven. I let your angel live, but you don’t understand the concept of cutting someone slack, huh? Fine by me. When this is over, just remember that you set the rules. Not me.
There’s only one thing to do with a garden if it won’t give you what you want. Get rid of it.
I drag the flaming Gladius along the ground as I stroll through the winding path that curves from the entrance through the orchards, the redwoods, the pines, the thorny jungle foliage, and the crayon-colored flower beds, cutting a flaming red scar behind me. God must have yanked all the animals out of here when he gave Adam and Eve the boot. Good. The life of one flea-bitten squirrel means more than one inch of this pussy-willow paradise.
Fuck this place and fuck your games. This is where you first failed us. You gave us minds and told us not to think. You gave us curiosity and put a booby-trapped tree right in front of us. You gave us sex and told us not to do it. You played three-c">
Whatever your reasons, you won’t have Paisley Park much longer. All you gave us here was daisies and fairy tales and you acted like that was enough. How were we supposed to resist evil when you didn’t even tell us about it? You wanted us innocent. But when Lucifer found a way around your rules and we weren’t innocent anymore, you blamed us and tossed us out into the wasteland like garbage.
You lounge upstairs on your golden throne like you’re the greatest thing since “Johnny Be Good,” but to me you’re just another deadbeat dad.
I hope you can smell Eden burning. I hope you choke on it.
Alice wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t part of the big lie. She was real and she was mine.
Eden is an inferno. Some of it went up so fast the foliage is already gone. I kick through the cinders, looking for a way Downtown, but I don’t find anything. Stay calm. This is important. It’s worth waiting for.
I follow the course of the fire as it eats up the plants. I kick through the dirt behind every burned hedge and blackened bush. I don’t find anything. There’s nothing here.
I go to the big tree at the center of the garden. The one that started all the trouble. It’s the only thing that hasn’t burned. I’ve been saving it for last. I reach up to the lowest branch and snap off an apple. Shine it against my coat and bite into it.
It’s good. It’s sweet and juicy, but it’s not worth losing paradise over. For that, you’d think the man upstairs would make the fruit taste like the greatest thing ever. Your tongue should have an orgasm and drunk-dial old girlfriends to tell them about it. Still, the juice is refreshing. It clears the smoke and sand from my throat. I toss the core into the fire and reach for another apple but can’t reach one. They’re all on the higher branches. I swing up the Gladius and slice off a limb. The wood collapses when I pull off the apple. I push at the cracked bark with the toe of my boot. The branch is hollow. I cut another branch. It’s hollow, too. I hack off more. They’re all the same. The branches are like props in a high school play. The tree is a fake.
I concentrate and it calms the angel in my head. He’s been quiet since we entered Eden, and now that he’s seen what I’ve seen, for once he’s on my side.
I swing up the Gladius, concentrating. It burns bigger and hotter than it’s ever burned. The tree trunk is big. I have to start the cut way back, like I’m batting in the World Series. I swing the blade and it goes through the tree like a bullet through a chocolate sundae. The tree creaks, cracks, and falls over.
I was right. Just like the branches, the tree is hollow. Inside, the two halves of the tree are different. Inside the top d side thehalf is a winding silver staircase that winds up to Heaven. In the stump is what looks like a grimy diamond-plate-metal staircase going into an industrial subbasement.
The angel told the truth. I get to Hell the way we did the first time. At the tree. You could have just said that, Tweety Bird. Then I wouldn’t have had to burn Dad’s prize marigolds. But I probably would have anyway.
I climb into the stump and walk down the rusty stairs.
IT ISN’T A long walk to Hell. Shorter than the walk to Eden. No surprise there.
The stairs lead to a long passage that looks like an abandoned maintenance tunnel. Someone needs to sweep up down here. Here and there whole sections of the ceiling have crashed onto the cement floor. I have to half walk, half hopscotch around it to keep from tripping. In the flickering fluorescent light, I swear some of the rusted rebar looks like bones.
After an hour of wandering I come to another set of metal stairs. It’s not the best feeling being this close to Hell again. But it’s what I signed up for. If Mason has a Hellion bike gang with chains and knuckle-dusters stationed at the top of these stairs, I’m going to be pissed. I could have stayed home and let Medea Bava kill me while eating hundred-dollar chicken and waffles with Candy.
There are double doors at the top of the stairs, the kind you see in front of old buildings for deliveries. I push with my arms, but can’t budge them. I go up a few more steps, brace my back against the doors, and push.
The doors feel hot against my back. I can’t tell if it’s the metal or if I still hurt from where Rizoel tagged me. I ignore the pain and keep pushing. Nothing seems to be happening, but then light shines down through a space between the doors. I bend my knees and spring straight up, knocking both doors open.
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.
EVERYTHING 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.
THERE’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.