Aloha from Hell

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.”

Jack looks past me, shaking his head. He raises his hand and points.

“Look at the street,” he says.

I look over my shoulder, keeping the knife at his throat.

“I don’t see anything.”

“The sidewalks. The buildings. The windows. There are no proper joins. No right angles anywhere.”

“Why would there be? Downtown is getting shaken to death like Lassie with a rat.”

“It’s not the tremors, sir. Look across the street at where the pavement is falling away.”

ight="0" width="12" align="left">“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”

I look to where he’s pointing. The corner by the apartment building is shattered and sinking in the middle. The soil under the street is a mix of black mud and red muck.

“We’re standing on a suicide road,” he says. “The blood tide rises from beneath and eventually everything above drops down into it. This entire street could become a sinkhole at any moment.”

I try to read him to see if he’s bullshitting me. He looks as calm as can be expected with a knife at his throat.

“Then what are all these sleepyheads doing here?”

He looks at me like he’s trying to teach a few first words to a particularly dumb parrot.

“These are the only safe parts of the city. Thieves and raiders won’t come down here.”

“ ‘Safe’ is a pretty loose term around here.”

“Not for this sad lot. It’s hide here or end up skewered.”

“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m not anxious to go any farther.”

“No one asked you to come this far.”

“Have a wander on a suicide road and you could truly die down here.”

“Are you still here, Jack? I didn’t see you there.”

I put the knife away and head to the parking lot across the street. As soon as I step into the intersection, I see that Jack was telling the truth. The pavement crunches under my boots like an eggshell suspended over quicksand. An image of Alice dead down here and stuck in the Limbo between Heaven and Hell flashes in my head. I hear Medea Bava’s voice: Alice was ours.

No. She wasn’t, you old witch. I would have known.

Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?

I push it all into the dark. Let the angel explain it to her. He’s Mr. Sensitive. Medea will like him.

It’s one thing for me to know that Jack was telling the truth and another for Jack to know I know it. I keep going. If I step lightly, the worst that happens is I sink an inch or so into the road at the weak spots. I don’t look back or acknowledge Jack. The last thing I want is to owe him any more favors. No2" e favort that ignoring him means anything. Halfway across the street, I hear him behind me. It sounds like he’s trying to crush wine out of cornflakes.

“Stay the hell away from me, Jack. This road won’t hold if we bunch up.”

That was the wrong thing to say. He thinks I’m leaving him on the suicide road. I can hear him hurrying to catch up with me.

The road goes snap, crackle, pop and drops a few inches. Cracks shoot out from under us like black lightning. I run for the sidewalk. I sink lower into the road with each step. The lower I sink, the more the sewage muck tries to suck me backward and down into it. By the time I hit the sidewalk, it’s like I’m doing some kind of hick aerobics, stumbling like a pig farmer through shit while trying to get my knees up high for a real Jane Fonda workout. Feel the burn, Jethro.

The corner of the sidewalk crumbles as I jump from the muck, but a couple of steps in, it holds. I finally turn around and there’s Jack. Up to his knees in blood and mud. It’s where he belongs. Still dreaming of knives and all the women no one knows about because he dumped them like fish food into the drink. Fuck him. Let him go.

But I know the look on his face. It’s what I looked like when I fell from the sky into Pandemonium. It’s a feeling way beyond fear because your brain can’t get hold of it enough to be afraid. You want to be afraid. Afraid would be a hundred times better than this. This is total fucking incomprehension at what’s happening and it’s all happening to you. It’s being sane one second and stark raving spiders-tunneling-their-way-out-from-under-your-skin insane the next.

I kneel by the edge of the corner far enough back so I know the ground is solid and I hold out my hand. It’s the least I can do. Literally the least.

Jack scrambles for it in a panicked stumbling slog, sinking faster now that he sees a lifeline. He’s almost up to his waist by the time he reaches the corner.

“Help me!” he yells. I move my hand half an inch closer.