Aloha from Hell

I get up and grab hold of a section of the fence. And promptly land on my back, feeling like someone just handed me a glass of whiskey with a thousand-volt chaser.

Berith laughs.

“Neat trick, eh? One of the Malebranche’s hexes. You can touch the walls of your cell all you want, but the moment you come at it with attitude, well, you see what happens.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“We’re all going to be dead soon. We need to have a few laughs along the way.”

I put my hand on the fence. Nothing happens. Holding on to it, I pull myself to my feet. We’re past all the houses and apartments and into a wider main street. Somewhere around Western maybe. Lots of burned-out buildings, but with a little something extra. My face.

Wanted posters offering a hefty reward cover every building, signpost, and bus kiosk still standing.

I guess someone figured out that Mammon and his staff are missing. Mason will know who did it, but that’s still goddamn fast to get posters plastered all over the place. Even with all the map games this place has been playing on me, the angel, who’s better at these things than I am, is sure we haven’t been here more than a day. And how does Mason even know I’m heading for Eleusis and not wandering the streets of Pandemonium like the Flying Dutchman? Jack couldn’t have made it back yet and ratted me out. With my face in a bag he can claim he killed me and get the reward. The bastard will be drinking mai tais and eating prime rib before I get near the asylum.

I hear cheering voices. There must be a lot of them if they’re loud enough to hear over the Unimog’s rumble and grinding gears. A couple of more blocks down, there’s a stadium. It’s not as big as the L.A. Coliseum. It’s more like the place well-off parents pay for so their sprogs can play soccer on a regulation field that’s not full of beer cans and gopher holes. Frposer holeom the tone of the crowd, they’re not playing in there.

We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane driveway behind the stadium and roll alongside what looks like a holding area for the posse’s prisoners. Big wire-mesh pens and RVs with blacked-out windows hold dozens of dirty, frightened Hellions. The fact that they’re being held in a stadium tells me that the posse isn’t above having a little fun with their prisoners before they’re shipped back to Pandemonium.

The truck stops. Six Hellions in SWAT body armor, carrying shotguns and homemade morning stars, hustle us off the flatbed and into the pens, where we have a clear view of the playing field.

Some people have dreams where they show up for final exams in their underwear or for a course they didn’t know they were taking. Other people wake up in the middle of the ocean. There’s land in the distance, but no matter how hard they swim, they never get any closer. Me, I dream about the arena. Shrinks call these “anxiety dreams.” I call them road maps. They show you where you’ve been and where you’re headed. A dream about being lost at sea doesn’t mean you’re going to end up as an extra on Gilligan’s Island, but it probably means you’ve gone off track somewhere. For me it’s even simpler. I don’t dream in metaphors. When I dream about the arena, I’m really dreaming a dream about the arena.

In my heart of hearts I’ve always known I wasn’t finished with the place. It’s like a drunk who goes on the wagon but decides to pitch his tent in the Jack Daniel’s parking lot. Yeah, he cleaned up, but he didn’t run very far from what made him a lush in the first place.

Once I’d killed the other members of my old magic Circle and sent Mason Downtown, I should have walked away from the whole hoodoo world and become just another brain-dead civilian. Take a mail-order course in taxidermy or sell maps of the stars’ homes to tourists. Instead I hung around with Lurkers, renegade angels, and Jades. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to get back here. If the Bamboo House of Dolls didn’t have such a high-quality jukebox and Carlos didn’t make such good tamales, I would have been back here months ago and this would all be over with.

All those dreams about tests and being lost and being back in the blood and the dust are just lines on a map. The elevation marks reveal that no matter how low you get, there’s always somewhere lower to fall.

Some of the Hellions from the flatbed go right up to the fence to get a good look at the current fight, trying to convince themselves they’re not seeing what they’re seeing. Others, the ones with a firmer grip on reality, are at the far end of the pen puking and shitting themselves. They’re not in denial about what’s coming.