The Kill Society (Sandman Slim)(102)

I didn’t notice Geryon coming up beside me.

“You had no reason to save me. I’d told you the story. You didn’t need me anymore but you saved me all the same.”

“Don’t worry. It wasn’t anything personal. I just don’t believe in leaving my crew behind.”

“All the same, I owe you my life.”

Elephant Man comes over with a bottle of Aqua Regia. He hands it to me and I take a pull. Pass it to Geryon.

“So tell me the rest. What does the city of traitors have to do with all this?”

Elephant Man goes back to the other troops while Geryon and I settle on a log passing the bottle back and forth. The booze helps me forget that we both still smell faintly of Hellion shit.

“It doesn’t even have a name,” he says. “Lucifer didn’t want to give them any cause for pride, so he gave them a place but no identity other than as a land for the shame of the lowest among us.”

“I thought that used to be me. Nice to know there was someone even more fucked up. So what does being a traitor mean down here? I mean, you’re fallen angels. Doesn’t that make all of you a bunch of traitors?”

Geryon half turns his head toward me then away again. I guess it’s not worth the argument.

“The early days after the fall were hard. Some didn’t survive the fall itself. Others went mad. There were murders and suicides. Lord Lucifer, Samael, gathered the fallen and just as in Heaven, he became our leader. He urged us to build and create our own civilization. One to rival even Heaven. He saved us. Still, with all that, there were some who refused to follow.”

“Because he fucked things up so badly during the war?”

I pass Geryon the bottle and he shrugs.

“I’m sure they told themselves they had reasons, but it was really simple greed. Some had escaped Heaven with weapons and riches. Enough, they thought, to mount a new war. Lucifer knew this would destroy us, so he attacked them first. The ones who survived he exiled here.”

I can’t help but hum a couple of lines from “Town Called Malice.”

“What did they do all the way out here?”

“Through the tunnels they lived in they mined the mountains. They grew spices and created rare potions from local plants. In short, even in exile, our Lord made them earn their keep.”

“Is the town still there?”

By the trucks the soldiers have broken up into small groups. Good. We did the same thing after a bad day in the arena. It’s not something you think about, it just happens. You fall into the orbit of friends and familiar faces. You don’t even have to like each other. You just have to be there to remind each other that you survived and that this is real. I’m sure there’s a scientific name for it. The old fighters just called it Tea Time.

Geryon says, “No one knows if the town exists anymore. Hell has fallen apart so badly since Samael left and with the beasts on the road, we’re the first visitors out this far in years.”

I take another hit off the Aqua Regia and recork the bottle. This isn’t the time to drink as much as I want to.

“I guess one way or the other we’ll know tomorrow.”

“I hope they’re all gone,” says Geryon. There’s an edge to his voice I haven’t heard before. “One set of monsters is enough.”

“Amen to that.”



Night and day are kind of abstract concepts out here in the hinterlands. Hell exists in a kind of perpetual bruised twilight, but in Pandemonium and other towns there’s an agreed-upon cycle for morning, noon, and night. Out this far the only difference between 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. is a slight color change in the sky. Still, after eating everyone sacks out. A lot of the troops fall asleep. There are guards posted but this far out all they’ll probably see are desert rats and sand fleas.

Around what I think might be midnight, the trees start to move. It begins with a rustling. It sounds like wind but I don’t feel anything on my skin.

The camp comes awake around me. The troops heard the sound, too. Hellions look around for the noise, the breeze, or whatever, as puzzled as I am.

The first scream comes from deep inside the dead grove, followed by another on the edge. One of the guards, a big bastard with a revolver grenade launcher slung over his shoulder, disappears into the trees. Whatever is happening, he doesn’t die all at once. There’s a dull thump and a grenade explodes in the middle of camp, scattering soldiers and weapons high into the air. A second later another grenade goes off right above the treetops, lighting up the grove. That’s when we see the trees moving.

They come apart like ripping cloth and fall to the ground in a tangle of branches and blasted trunks. They writhe and then crawl. A second later they’re on their feet running at us.

Guess what? They aren’t branches and they weren’t trees, thank you very fucking much. They’re bodies, as dry and rotten as week-old roadkill. They were wrapped around each other in a frozen graveyard embrace and we woke them up. There’s hundreds of them closing on us, and more in the distance.

The firing starts before any of them make it into camp. The sound of piss-scared soldiers blowing clip after clip on full auto fractures the air and numbs my ears, but it doesn’t do much else. It sure as hell doesn’t slow the roadkill. They charge into camp like a bone-and-gristle Mack truck, mowing down rows of heavily armed and severely motivated soldiers.