The Dirty Streets of Heaven

twenty

Once again I was stuck in a dark room with guns booming all around me. At least this time I wasn’t the one being shot at.

Chico rested his front grip on the top of the bar and hosed down the hulking shadow that had come through the window, his gun on deafening full auto, strobing the darkness with muzzle flare. Beside me Sam fired the Mossberg slowly and methodically, trying to put as much of each load into the target as possible. I could hear Teddy Nebraska and Annie and Monica and Jimmy yelling, but the guns made too much noise for me to understand what they were saying. I’m guessing it was something on the order of “Oh, shit, what is that?”

The ghallu didn’t like Chico’s silver nitrate at all, which was probably all that was keeping us alive. Like rock salt from a farmer’s old bird gun it clearly stung more than it wounded, but from the howling and thrashing of the ghallu it stung a lot. How much it disliked the silver salt became clear a second later when it leaped right past me and bashed a smoking hole in the middle of The Compasses’ ancient mahogany bar in an attempt to get Chico. I didn’t see what happened to the bartender after he dove to the side but for at least the moment his weapon had been silenced.

“Annie, follow me!” Monica shouted as the ghallu dug through the wreckage of the bar like some monster badger trying to claw its prey out of the earth. I didn’t know what Monica was up to-running for her life, I hoped-but I needed to cover her, so I stepped forward with my revolver leveled, and as the thing turned its nasty, inhuman mask of a face toward the running women I started firing. The fetch swatted at the flashes and reared back from what I presume was the annoying pitter-patter of my little silver bullets on its skin. I hit an empty chamber and dove to one side to avoid being skewered by a spike of shattered bartop the size of a surfboard that the ghallu flung at me. I was seriously rethinking my little five-shot Smith amp; Wesson, which emptied in seconds. I hadn’t been forced into this kind of military rate of fire in a very long while, but right now I wished I had something with a more generous magazine. Like maybe a silver-throwing antiaircraft gun.

Sam had dug his way backward into the mound of chairs and desks we had stacked, which were now blocking our only exit, and from this improvised defensive position was laying down fire as fast as he could pump the Mossberg. I knew Chico had only tossed him a couple of boxes of shells, so he was going to run out soon. On the other side of the bar, and true to his name, Jimmy had turned over a table and he and Nebraska and Kool were barricaded behind it in one of the booths. I figured they were probably firing plain old lead, but even the ghallu still had to be made out of some kind of flesh and blood, since it was here on Earth vigorously breaking things: a shitload of regular bullets couldn’t hurt our cause any and might do some good as an annoyance. Young Elvis lay in a well-coiffed heap behind them, knocked silly by a piece of flying debris, but there was no sign of Monica and Annie in the main room, which made me feel a little better-maybe they would survive this unholy clusterfuck to tell everybody else what had happened. Then I could hope that somewhere up the line someone might pay Eligor back for letting his monstrous servant rip up The Compasses. I mean, the place was practically a sovereign embassy…!

The monster tore away chunks of the bar now, trying to get to Chico and his semi-automatic shotgun as the bartender fired the AA12 in ear-splitting drumrolls. Sam straightened up in his improvised blind and began peppering the creature’s back to distract it from killing Chico. He did his job well enough that the thing decided to do something about Sam instead.

The ghallu turned with a roar I felt as much as heard, a burst of pressure and heat that smelled like boiling sewage, then it flung a huge broken slab of the heavy mahogany bar at Sam. It hit like a missile and sent most of the tables flying as if they were bowling pins, silencing my buddy and his Mossberg. The impact knocked me down as well, and I knew I’d be limping later when the adrenaline faded. Before I could go help Sam the ghallu leaped toward the spot and began digging through the wreckage, roaring like a Harley that had lost its muffler. Even from a few feet away I could feel the heat radiating from it as if it were a dark sun. Worried that Sam might be unconscious and unable to defend himself, I stood up and gave the ugly bastard the rest of my silver rounds right in the side of its inhuman head. As my hammer fell on the last shell, and the flash of light caught that dreadful half-face turning toward me, twisted with near-mindless rage, I suddenly realized that we had this whole thing wrong: Sam and I had come here for the safety of the wards, but whatever Heaven had devised to protect The Compasses had come up short against this ancient hobgoblin. The bar was no longer a place of refuge, it was a trap with no way out but a fifty-foot drop or a deadly bottleneck in the stairway or the elevator.

More importantly, though, the monster was after me, not Sam or any of the others, so if they couldn’t help me kill it-and if Chico’s awesome silver-salt machine gun wasn’t going to do it, nothing else would-then I needed to get out. Otherwise my friends would die too, and what would be the point of that?

Of course, this was all completely academic because the ghallu had just refocused itself on me, a soft squishy thing with an empty revolver, standing only a couple of yards away. It dropped the shattered table it had just lifted, then sprang toward me like a cat on a lame mouse.

A stream of water smashed into the ghallu and knocked the thing stumbling to one side. It soaked me too but I hardly noticed that. The creature bellowed in anger and-hallelujah! — serious pain, enveloped in clouds of hissing, billowing steam. Police spotlights were now shining through the broken window from the street below, but even by their glare all I could see of our attacker was a writhing, black shape, a shadow within a shadow.

Monica and Annie Pilgrim stood in the doorway of the hall leading to the restroom, struggling to aim a giant fire hose as if they were wrestling a live anaconda, hammering away at the demon with something like a hundred pounds of water per square inch. The steam clouds were getting thicker and thicker but the creature hadn’t lost its footing and, in fact, appeared to be wading against the thunderous flow of the hose toward the source.

It had been a wonderful idea but it wasn’t enough water to completely cool the creature, or even enough force to slow it down very much. It was enough, however, to give me a single desperate idea and the chance to operate on it. As the room slowly turned into a boiling hot sauna, and the monster bellowed and gurgled and fought back against the hose, I leaped over the bar and dug through the wreckage until I found the bar hoses for soda water and tonic. I ripped off the nearest one, faucet and all, then crawled through the wreckage to the wall, feeling with my hands until I found a heavy extension cord, which I pulled loose from the socket. I could hear Chico groaning somewhere in the rubble.

“Chico?” I called. “You okay, man?”

“Some broken ribs, I think. I need to reload but I can’t find the rest of the fucking shells!”

“I’m getting out of here-I think it’ll follow me if I do.” I jammed the siphon hose into my belt, grabbed the extension cord, then straightened up and sloshed as quickly as I could past the splashing, thrashing giant and toward the shattered window. I was almost blinded by the thick clouds of steam, but fortunately so was the ghallu, and I managed to slither past just beyond its reach. The water around my ankles was already getting uncomfortably warm from the demon’s heat as I reached the jukebox and looped the extension cord around it, keeping an end in each hand like a logger climbing a big tree. It was almost certainly too far down to the street to jump without breaking an ankle-our angel bodies are tough but not magically invulnerable-but I was hoping to lessen the distance with this little trick. I climbed onto the window sill, kicking long slivers of glass out of the frame, then when the creature’s angry bellowing quieted for a moment I shouted, “Monica-take the hose off it!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Trust me!”

The stream of water shifted to the side and the ghallu straightened. For an instant I could see something of what it looked like undistorted by heat, its skin dark, knotted and shiny, like something out of one of Billy Blake’s most apocalyptic etchings. The pressure suddenly gone, the ghallu actually stumbled; before it could regain its balance and go after the two female angels who had made it so angry, I bellowed as loud as I could, “Hey, you! Yeah, you-big, hot and stupid!”

As the steaming thing turned toward me, I leaped off the window backward, one end of the heavy-duty extension cord in each hand like a giant jump rope. I had a moment of freefall, then a painful jounce that almost yanked my arms out of their sockets. I didn’t have long to suffer, though: my weight on the loop of electrical cord tipped the juke box over, a result I hadn’t expected, so instead of having a moment to ready myself for the rest of the drop I simply bounced once in midair and then kept falling.

I hit the ground with a painful jolt to both legs, but did my best to parachute-roll and disperse the force. As I lay panting on the ground feeling for anything interesting like compound fractures, I saw the ghallu staring down from the shattered window above me, haloed in the water from the hose that Annie and Monica had trained on it once more. The thing stood almost motionless despite all that pressure, looking for me…or sniffing for me. Police officers and firefighters were all over the sidewalk and street around me, clearly called in on what they thought was some kind of armed robbery of the Alhambra Building gone very wrong-another reason I had to get the monster away quickly, before it massacred them all. I rolled over, scrambled to my feet, and ran limping away from the flashing lights into Beeger Square with people yelling after me and a few policemen even trying to catch me.

That wasn’t going to happen.

As I reached the middle of the square I heard the first startled screams from the late-night crowds, and I knew the ghallu was after me again. That was one less thing to feel bad about-at least I was taking it away from my friends-but if the next part of my hasty plan didn’t work, I definitely wasn’t going to make it to Ash Wednesday this year.

A couple of teenagers riding double on a motorcycle almost knocked me over in their hurry to escape the square, self-selecting themselves as key ingredients in Part Two of my plan: I knew that if I didn’t get back into some kind of vehicle I wasn’t even going to make it to the far side of the plaza before the demon pulled all my bits off. I ran after the motorcycle kids and caught them in a few strides. I yanked the one in the back off his seat, then jumped up behind the driver and, before he realized quite what was going on, lifted him up and tossed him over too. I leaned down over the handlebars and fumbled the bike into second gear-it was a newish Yamaha, and I hadn’t ridden one in a while-then yelled back at its driver where he lay on the ground, “Tell me you got insurance. You do, right?”

He said something I couldn’t quite make out-I told myself it was, “Yes, plenty!” Then I gave it all the throttle I could, and it leaped ahead. The engine was surprisingly strong; the front wheel came up off the ground for a moment, but I leaned way forward and brought it down, then blasted across the square as fast as I could, weaving in and out of startled revelers who were beginning to panic and run in different directions-perhaps because of me, perhaps because of the giant, steaming, horned terror that was chasing me.

I almost dumped the bike getting out between a couple of official vehicles on the far side of Beeger Square but regained my balance and accelerated again along Main Street as I left the crowds behind. I was aiming for the open-air Riverside Shopping Center since it would be closed for the night, and I couldn’t really afford to dodge pedestrians much longer. The ghallu was just behind me, something I could hear even though I didn’t dare risk a look back at the speeds I was traveling. Up and down curbs and through pedestrian alleys not meant to be traversed at sixty miles an hour-I was coming damn close to killing myself and sparing the ancient demon-thing all the trouble. But somehow I bounced up an inactive escalator without popping a tire and made it to the upper esplanade of the Riverside Center. Now I risked a look back and saw the black shape coming up the escalator behind me. It had dried and was already ablaze again, flames licking its silhouette, gleaming red eyes fixed remorselessly on me.

The upper level of the Riverside Center has shops all along one side, but the other side is open to the manicured bank of the Redwood River below. I needed to get to the far end of the shopping center where the water widened and deepened, but the roof was full of cement planters and benches and little kiosks that sold waffle cones and candy and other useful things, padlocked now, so I had to ease up on the throttle enough to slalom through them all. I could actually hear the slap of the ghallu’s feet on the esplanade behind me, still in close pursuit. The monster was all but tireless, but I definitely was not.

There was no way to jump the iron fence at the end of the esplanade, so I did the only thing I could: at the last second, with the fence ten yards away, then five, four, three yards, I clambered up and stood on the seat, spreading my arms, then jumped as high as I could.

The Yamaha smashed into the fence at something over forty miles an hour with an explosive, grinding clang. Carried forward by momentum, I flew through a shower of sparks as a whole length of iron pickets tore free with the motorcycle still tangled in them like a dophin in a net. The broken fence tumbled awkwardly down the embankment, carrying the bike with it. I watched it in almost slow-motion clarity, because I was plunging through the air toward the green water far below.

I hit the water in the clumsiest, most painful cannonball dive imaginable-really, I’ve seen people land burning aircraft more gracefully. But the important thing was what happened next: I splashed down into the river at a place where it was deep enough to absorb the energy of my fall. I also somehow managed to stay conscious. When I stopped moving and began to float to the surface again I pulled the bar’s siphon hose from my belt and ripped off the little faucet, then put the end of the hose in my mouth. I held my breath as long as I could as I drifted up, then poked the other end of the hose above the surface. When I reached a place where I could put my feet on the bottom and still get the tip of the hose out of the water, I stopped moving and tried just to stay still.

I was well out into the middle of the river, and I didn’t think that anything that had howled so much at being hosed down would wade out into so much water if it couldn’t even see me. I was hoping being underwater would hide my smell, too.

It had been a desperate plan, and one of the things I hadn’t had a chance to consider was what it would feel like to be submerged in fifty-degree water, breathing through a plastic tube. It wasn’t so bad for the first couple of minutes, but even with my stronger-than-human constitution I was shivering so badly by the ten-minute point that I began debating whether it was really worse to be captured or killed by that creature than to die of exposure in a river full of cold water.

I gave it one more minute, then crept slowly into the shallows and staggered ashore on the cement bank at a spot hidden under a pedestrian bridge, soaked and shivering. No sign of the ghallu, but I didn’t move any further until I saw that the police and other emergency workers were gathering along the esplanade where the bike had gone through the wrought iron fence, pointing to the spot where everything had hit the water. Some of the twisted wreckage protruded above the surface. I figured they’d be sending in divers to look for my body soon, so I clambered out on the far side of the bridge and did my best to squeeze most of the water from my clothes, hoping that when I was done I’d just look like a bum who’d had a hard, hard night. Cold and miserable? Don’t ask.

I called Sam but nobody picked up, so I left a terse message to let him know I was alive. I hoped he was the same, but the creature had hit him very, very hard, and I was worried. I tried Monica, too, but also without luck. I was seriously worried that my incompetence might have gotten all my closest friends and colleagues killed, but I couldn’t worry long because I knew for a fact that the ghallu was still out there somewhere, that I had no car and no silver bullets, and that by now Eligor must have spies all over town.

As I huddled there shivering I couldn’t even raise Clarence the trainee, which made me wonder if everyone was just avoiding me out of self-preservation. I didn’t want to try to walk dripping down brightly lit Veterans in search of a motel, and I didn’t know of even a homeless shelter I could get into at this time of night. Which left me but one option.

I called the number I never really thought I’d use. Nobody answered that one either, but I left a message.

Fifteen minutes later the big black car pulled to the side of Veterans near the place where, still drizzling river water, I was crouching out of sight of the road. I scrambled up the embankment and, keeping my head low, opened the passenger side door. As I pulled myself in, something hard and extremely gunlike pushed against my forehead.

“You realize this taxi ride isn’t free, don’t you, Dollar?” The Countess of Cold Hands had a very steady grip on the pistol, no tremor. “Either you’re going to tell me everything you know and everything you think you know, or they’re going to find a floater that looks like you in the Redwood River tomorrow morning.”

It’s hard to argue with the barrel of an automatic pressing against your glabella. “You have my angelic word on it.”

“Lovely,” she said with perhaps just a hint of sarcasm. “Buckle up.” She removed the barrel from my forehead but kept it pointing toward me. It was a big Czech 9mm with what looked like silver plating, I was guessing platinum or chrome. Very flashy, though.

She stared her disapproval as I arranged myself wetly on the leather upholstery, then she swung the big car out onto Veterans. “You smell like pond scum and duck shit, Dollar. I’m guessing you might have found yourself in over your head.”

“Ha ha.” The unamused way I said it was slightly undercut by my violent shivering. “Could you turn up the heat?”

“I’m not sure you can take it any hotter,” she said, but dialed it up a couple of notches anyway as she nosed through traffic, the gleaming automatic now tucked between her thighs. “And after you tell me what I want to know, where will I be taking you?”

“Right now Hell itself would make a nice change.”

She frowned. “You have no idea how unfunny that is.”