The Kill Society (Sandman Slim)(88)
She’s right. Vehuel is already starting to fade. But she’s strong. It’s a long time before she disappears completely. I help Alice up. Her eyes are red, but she doesn’t shed a tear. She’s a fighter and there are still things to do. There will be plenty of time to cry when she gets Upstairs. I won’t let her do it alone.
“I’m very sorry,” says Traven.
Alice just nods.
“What do we do now?” says Wanuri. “She was our ticket out of here.”
“No,” says Alice. “I can take you.”
I shift the bundle under my arm.
“Then let’s go. Henoch smells and I’m sick of the lies and a thousand other kinds of bullshit down here.”
She says, “Jim, you touch my shoulder. Father, you touch his. The rest of you, touch the person in front of you.”
For a second, I hope that she has to fly us there. I haven’t been on a roller coaster in years and wouldn’t mind a Disneyland moment on our way out of Hell. Instead, Alice looks at the clouds overhead and says a few angelic words. It’s not Space Mountain, but it’s still pretty good.
It’s like she punches a hole in the sky with fire. A blazing circle appears in a particularly dark cloud bank, and spreads wide, its edges burning bright with crimson flames. When she decides the hole is wide enough, and without any kind of fucking warning at all, she blows out her wings and leaps into the air, dragging me and everyone else with her. There’s a lot of wind and some turbulence on the way up, but it’s not exactly the roller coaster I was hoping for. It’s more like a freight elevator a million miles high.
As we climb through the clouds, lightning crackles around us. A storm blows up, smashing rain and hail down on us. A few remaining shards of the divine light glass tear at us. It’s like the clouds knew we were coming and Downtown saved one last fuck-you for us on the way out.
Okay—now we’re in the roller coaster. The crosswinds get worse. There’s glass in my face and hands. I squeeze the bundle with the Light Killer close against me. It would suck very hard to drop it now. Each flash of lightning illuminates things hiding in the clouds. Miles high, with claws like skyscrapers and wings wide enough to smother all of L.A. They are truly pissed about our little excursion Upstairs. They roar and howl, and their voices are the thunder and lightning that come close to knocking us off Alice’s back. But I tighten my grip on her armor and close my eyes against the glass. After all I’ve been through Downtown, I don’t want to end up in Heaven with just one eye.
Static electricity and volcanic heat burns us as lightning flashes in every direction, missing us by just a few inches. The roar of Hell’s guardians and hurricane winds hurt every bit as much as anything I fought in the arena. Just about the time I’m going to tell Alice that I changed my mind and that she should drop me off at the nearest Denny’s, it all stops. The noise. The wind. The rain and lightning. It’s gone. I look down and watch the burning hole above Hell fizzle out and the giant guardians pulling the clouds closed around them.
So long, you dinosaur-looking motherfuckers. You did your worst and we made it out on the wings of one lone, not-too-tall angel. Think about that for the next billion years, King Ghidorah.
As bad as the ride up from Downtown was, where we are now is flat-out unsettling. We’re nowhere. Empty space. Astronaut territory. Stars wink and pulse around us. Comets and the occasional meteor flash by, but none of them try to kill us. That’s a nice change. It takes me a few minutes, but I finally figure out where we are.
This is the fall. The limbo the first two Lucifers and their playmates fell through after Mr. Muninn kicked those kids off his lawn. It took them nine days to hit bottom. After our run through tornado asshole alley just now, I’m not sure any of us can hold on for that long. But it can’t be nine days for angels, right? I mean, they fly. Hellions just plummet like eggs dropped from a frat-house roof. The utter fucked-up emptiness of this place makes me feel kind of sorry for Samael and his bunch. I’ve never felt such a sense of being nowhere before. So far from everything—good and bad—and so empty inside. And Samael had to go through this for nine days. That would make anyone, even an angel with an ego the size of Texas, a little crazy.
Soon I see that I was right. A bright pinprick of light flares in the distance. It’s either Heaven or we’re about to get hit by the 3:10 to Yuma.
Lucky for us, there are no actual trains in limbo, just paranoids like me. It isn’t long before we see actual goddamn gates up ahead. They’re gold and even bigger than Hell’s flying guardians, which, if you ask me, is a bit much. I mean, angels are about as tall as regular-size people. Why do they need gates the size of Everest? It’s like Mr. Muninn was getting ready to sell the place and went a little crazy with the upgrades.
When we’re close enough to see details of the gates, they’re even worse than I thought. They look like solid gold—of course—shaped like fucking huge arches. There are towers and spires and rose windows set into the walls on either side of the gates. It’s all one big, epic Gothic orgasm. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the fancy-ass fence at a gated Ren Faire community. This is Brentwood with cherubs.
Worse, the bars on the gates are animated. They bend and twist around each other, forming shapes. There’s an explosion of light, then the birth of angels. Some angels start to hang stars in the sky while others build worlds. Fuck me. It’s the birth of the universe. Who is Mr. Muninn trying to impress? I think not going to Hell is pretty much what the souls who end up here care about. They don’t need a slide show while they’re getting their passports stamped.