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There are about twenty Hellions on tricked-out ATVs and Unimogs. They have hot-rod flames on the sides and animal skulls mounted on the roofs and hoods. Their spotlights are LAPD issue. When they hit you with one from a helicopter, it’s instant daylight and you better stop and look happy about it. Jack and I duck behind the door as the light moves over the front of the building.
A ticking, whirring sound follows the posse. I don’t need Jack to tell me what that is. A pack of hellhounds. There wasn’t much in Hell that gave me the creeps as much as the metal hounds. Maybe my subconscious really is shaping the place. The hounds are the only things I’ve seen that look just as hard and awful as they do in regular Hell.
The hounds move in packs. They’re clockwork war dogs bigger than a dire wolf and are run by a brain suspended in a glass globe where their heads should be. A hellhound is smart and dangerous on its own. In packs, they’re like a herd of velociraptors driving tanks. The best way to fight them is to run away and hope they die of old age.
The mechanical hounds lope behind the noisy trucks, their gears ticking quietly in the dark.
“Goddammit, Jack, how much longer before we get there?”
“If we cross over to the street behind this one, with luck we can beat them all to Eleusis. I know of a wall with just a little bit of a hole in it.”
“Let’s get moving.”
“On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea to let the raiders or the men following them get there first.”
“Why?”
“You know of the asylum, but do you know that as Pandemonium has fallen apart, so has the asylum. Most of the inmates have escaped and wander the streets. The old pagans to whom the place was a paradise have all been killed or driven into the wilderness. All you’re going to find in Eleusis are madmen, raiders, and thieves hiding from the war.”
I go to the door to look out again, and something crunches under my boot. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a little wooden umbrella.
Something has been bugging me ever since we came into this place. I look at the dusty hula girls against the wall and tiki lamps and it finally sinks in that this half-collapsed shit shack is the Bamboo House of Dolls. The roof is down over the bar, but the jukebox is where it belongs. The glass dome in front is broken. Dust lies around the interior in small dunes. The player is cued up to Martin Denny’s cover of “Miserlou.”
“A friend of mine is still in the asylum. Do you think there’s a chance if she’s still in there that she’s alive?”
“I couldn’t say, but it’s my understanding that whatever inmates remain in the asylum are of a more benign nature. The ones with strength and will escaped long ago.”
Something tickles my hands and legs. Drytts. Hell’s sand flies. They’re not dangerous, just disgusting. If they find you and you stay still too long, others will come and you’ll end up buried in them.
“We can’t stay here. You have one hour to get us to Eleusis.”
“One hour or what?”
He sounds defiant, like I hurt his feelings.
“Or I’m going to think you’ve been fucking me around this whole time. Don’t forget. I’m the one with the knife. Let’s start there and let our imaginations go.”
He nods at the back door.
“The quickest way is that rise a hundred yards off. It’s also the steepest and most dangerous.”
“Lead the way.”
“Is that an order?”
“A polite suggestion.”
THE RISE JACK was talking about is a whole intersection that’s been punched up out of the street at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. A couple of restaurants, a small shopping center, and a gas station hang in the air over our heads. The sinkhole below is so full of wrecked cars and motorcycles that it’s nearly level with the street. The junk stews in the same bloody sewage that was in the sinkhole outside Hollywood Forever.
I start climbing, hanging on to gas pumps at the bottom and moving up to the empty garage. When I make it around there, I pull myself up on metal parking-lot crash posts. I turn around to check, and see Jack slowly following me up. I don’t think he’s happy to be around me anymore. His whole theory about fate having a reason for tossing us into the same salad has evaporated. He looks like 1C; looks all he wants is to get through this without ending up in Tartarus with Mammon.
As Jack climbs, cracks form under his handholds. He’s followed me through the garage and is pulling himself up the crash posts. As he puts his weight on each post, the cracks under it widen. The last two posts wiggle like rotten teeth. My arm is wrapped around the solid base of the shopping-center sign. I move up to a newspaper vending machine that’s anchored in the sidewalk. Jack grabs onto the solid foundation of the shopping-center sign before the posts give way.
When he’s secure I crawl into the entrance of a liquor store. If you cut through the place, the back door will take us to the top of the rise.
The liquor store stinks inside. A thousand broken bottles of wine, vodka, beer, scotch, and soda have soaked through a mountain of junk food and the whole mess is piled against the front counter and front wall. The floor is sticky with dried booze and sugar, which is disgusting but helps me keep traction as I climb to the storeroom in back. Jack is right behind, baby-crawling past the empty shelves.
I’m at the back door when the shaking starts again. It’s so subtle that it’s almost not there. It feels like the muscle memory of a nasty dream. I thought it was an earthquake, but I think our climbing has upset the delicate balance that’s kept this slab of L.A. junk wilderness upright.
