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The shaking turns into a steady vibration. Two heavy bodies scraping against each other. The bottles beneath us clatter together. Softly and then like a truckload of xylophones being pushed down a long flight of stairs. It’s hard to hold on to the shelves as the tremors deepen. Parts of the ceiling fall down on us. There’s a sick liquid moment when the whole intersection shifts. Up ahead, the rear wall cracks and the rest of the ceiling starts coming down. The whole liquor store is sliding forward.
“Move your ass, Jack.”
I scramble past the shelves and kick off the top one, grabbing onto the door frame at the top. I climb to the back of the storeroom and pull on the door. The twisting building has jammed it shut. I grab the doorknob and shove the black blade into the metal lock. It pops out and clatters against the wall like a bell. The door swings open and I pull myself up onto the rear step.
Jack is stumbling over office furniture. Cracks open at my feet. The store is breaking away from this last anchor of ground.
The building growls and creaks like an iron elephant with the bends. It lurches. Slides left and down. Jack is pulling himself up on the door. I grab his wrist as a subterranean shriek of snapping concrete and sheering metal launches the liquor store down the way we came. It crashes into the garage and both structures shatter like hundred-ton dollhouses before disappearing into the sinkhole below. The slab sways like it’s bobbing in a bathtub and begins to fall. I grab Jack and jump to the roof of a dry cleaner’s beyond the edge of the slab.
I tuck and roll as we hit. Jack flops like a sockful of oatmeal thrown from a speeding car. When the section ofo te secti road hits, one of the cleaner’s walls collapses and we slide down the roof like worn-out kids at the worst amusement park in the world.
Jack and I lie on the broken pavement until the dust settles. We only slid a floor, so our asses are spanked and bruised but we’re pretty much intact.
Jack was right. Eleusis is right where he said it would be. There’s a twenty-foot stone wall topped with broken glass across the street. It’s exactly how I pictured it. It wouldn’t be Eleusis without the wall, Heaven’s vision of paradise in the abyss. Hell’s only gated community.
JACK IS STILL on his back when I get up and head for the wall. A couple of minutes later I hear him behind me.
“Thank you for saving me back there.”
“Don’t mention it. Really. Don’t.”
“I still think we were brought together to accomplish something bigger.”
“If everything works out, maybe I’ll get a chance to stop a war. That’s pretty big, don’t you think?”
Jack grunts.
“Anyway it’s all, as the big brains say, academic, Jack. I saved you from Mammon and you got me to Eleusis. We’re even-steven.”
Up ahead, a gutted city bus has jumped the curb and plowed into the stone wall. The damage is mostly blocked by the bus’s body, but through the windshield I can see where part of the wall has collapsed. I glance back at Jack. He looks nervous and a little confused. Is that a good look or a bad look for a serial killer? Whichever, I want to cut this freak show loose. I climb into the driver’s-side window and call back to Jack.
“Take it easy, man, and thanks for the memories.”
He yells something after me, but I don’t stop. I kick open the front door and head into the city.
Finally Eleusis.
Fuck me.
I wonder if Kasabian is watching me through the Codex? Is he eating pizza with Candy and giving her a blow-by-blow? He must be laughing his ass off by now.
Eleusis, God’s city in the Inferno, halfway across Hell from Pandemonium, is part of goddamn North Hollywood. Light Bringer, Lucifer’s biopic, was supposed to be shot in a Burbank soundstage just a couple of miles up the freeway. I’m still in L.A. This whole fucking world is L.A.
I’m almost there, Alice. I think. I hope. Who fucking knows anymore? I could walk a block and e2" block nd up back in Venice or the cemetery. We seem to have come in a big circle from Hollywood back to Hollywood. But it’s not the same Hollywood. And where I am can’t be entirely random. Mammon was taking me somewhere and Jack has been taking me somewhere and I don’t believe Mammon but I do believe Jack. He didn’t have any reason to lie. He thought we were partners, Hope and Crosby on The Road to Zanzibar.
This is what I get for putting my life in the hands of a crazy road spirit. Mustang Sally would love wandering around like I have. More streets, more roads, more crazy-ass tracks in the dirt for her to claim. You’re going to get a lot more salty peanuts than candy the next time we meet, Sally. No more sugar rushes for you.
I hear stones crunch and fall behind me. I’m not scared. I recognize Jack’s footsteps. Don’t get too close, Loony Tune. I really want to punch something right now.
On the other side of the rubble is a big intersection. Malls and parking on one side. A forties-style apartment house on another. The Scientology Celebrity Center nearby. There are bodies curled up under the dead trees and bushes where they’ve turned the celebrity center into a pagan flophouse. Most are dressed in hospital greens and bathrobes. A few are in straitjackets that look like they’ve been gnawed apart. There are even a few demented hellions with them. Refugees from the asylum. Finally something like good news. I’m getting closer.
There’s faint noise in the distance. Yelling. Gunshots. Maybe even engines revving. Someone is having fun somewhere in Eleusis.
I should probably wait and get the lay of the land but one of these Sleeping Beauties knows where to find the asylum. I step down from the rubble and head across the street to the parking lot.
I don’t get ten steps when Jack grabs me. I spin and come up with the knife under his chin.
“Do not even begin to try your Ripper act on me. I’m not one of your scared Whitechapel girlfriends. I’ll teach you what every slash and cut you gave them feels like. I felt them in the arena and they don’t feel good.”
