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“It’s called a Gladius. It’s just something I found I can do.” There’s no goddamn way I’m explaining to her how only angels have them.
“You killed those guys and didn’t even flinch,” she says.
“First off, they weren’t guys, and second, I’ve killed a hell of a lot more than them. How do you think I got here? Do you think I got these scars on the debate team? Killing is what I do down here. And it’s what I still do.”
“But only bad things, right?”
“We’re in Hell. I don’t think Mother Teresa or Johnny Cash are in much danger.”
She has to think about it for a minute. It’ll take her a lot longer than that to make sense of the last few minutes and we don’t have time.
“We need to keep moving.”
“Okay.”
As we go, she tries to take my hand.01Cake my It goes right through me.>I go down the side hall, stepping over pieces of the guards, until I come to the door in the back. It’s locked and the sliding viewing panel is welded shut. I can’t be a hundred percent sure what’s on the other side. I slash open the iron padlock with the blade. Before the lock hits the floor, I kick the door open as hard as I can. It swings back and one of the hinges pops as the door swings open and hits the wall.
As I step inside I hear a stifled scream from the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. It sounds awfully human.
“Alice?”
Nothing.
“Alice?”
And a second later there she is. Eleven years I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve lost track of how many beings I’ve killed, and destroyed everything in my way. I’ve been beaten, stabbed, burned, and maimed across two planes of existence to get to this moment. And here I am and here she is and we’re together in the same room maybe a few hours before the end of everything. I want to grab her and kiss her, but I don’t think the feeling is mutual.
She has her back to the far wall and her teeth are bared. She’s holding a wooden stake. It looks like she broke the leg off a chair and sharpened it on the floor. That’s my girl.
“Alice . . .”
“Keep away from me!” she screams, and kicks a metal dish covered with foul-smelling slop at me. Have these pinheads been trying to feed her Hellion food? Even I wouldn’t eat most of that stuff and I didn’t come here on a direct flight from Heaven.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s me. I’ve come to take you out of here.”
She holds the stake higher.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, asshole! Leave me alone!”
There’s only one small oil lamp in the cell. All she can see is my shadowed profile from the light in the hall. I get closer so I’m not a ghost anymore.
“Alice. I’ve come to save you.”
She lunges and jams the stake deep in my chest. I fall back against the wall. A couple of months ago Candy gave me the zombie-bite antidote on the point of a knife and now this. Why do all the women I like end up stabbing me?
In this case the answer is obvious. I got so excited at the idea of finally seeing her that I forgot I’m sporting a robo-bug arm and a Hellion’s face.
I pull the wood out of my chest and toss it into the hall. Even unarmed, Alice looks like she’s ready to go Frazier and Ali with me. She’s always been like that. She was never big on backing down from anything.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
Shut up, Medea. We’re having a moment. And I know you were lying now, so can it.
Getting staked isn’t going to kill me, but it hurts like a rhino giving you a flu shot with its horn. I sit down on a wooden chair Alice didn’t break and push the hoodie back from my head with my new bug arm. My boots are slick with the dead guards’ innards. My coat is covered in blood and smells like the sewer. And then there’s my face. For those few seconds when I first saw her, it felt like I wasn’t Sandman Slim anymore. I was plain old boring James Stark. With the pain the truth comes back. I’m in a Hellion asylum, rank, mangled, and horrible. I’m finally the monster I always said I was.
I have to laugh. There isn’t much else left to do. Go down into the deepest darkest parts of Hell, and you’ll see what I mean. They laugh all the time down there.
I reach into my coat pocket and feel around. For a second I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for. I pull out what Mustang Sally told me to bring through the Black Dahlia. My hands are bloody from my chest wound and I’ve left sticky red fingerprints all over the small plastic rabbit. I wipe it on my coat, but that just smears the blood. Fuck it.
