AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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.>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.”
