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.
WHEN 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.”