The Getaway God

“And how pray tell does the ritual work?”

“First I have to die a little.”

Wells puts up his hands and claps once.

“Well, isn’t that peachy? Another death today? And a suicide? Right here in Vigil headquarters? I can’t see Washington minding that at all. Please go ahead.”

“It isn’t technically suicide because I’m only partway dead and only for a little while.”

“Good, because suicide is a sin, this is consecrated ground, and I’ve already broken enough commandments just letting you in here.”

I hand Candy the cooler and go up to Wells.

“You came to me for help, remember? You know what I do and how I work. Anytime you don’t want me around I’m gone. But when I leave, the Magic 8 Ball comes with me.”

“So you can lose the weapon again? How about you clean up this mess before you go causing another?”

“Fine. Get me a room where I can do the ritual. Preferably somewhere quiet and private. There’s going to be some blood.”

“More good news,” he says. “Come with me. I wanted you to see this anyway. It’s one of the old club offices. We’ve turned it into a kind of lab so you pixies can do magic or whatever without contaminating or scaring the bejesus out of the newer agents.”

“They sound a little too sensitive to be cops.”

“Don’t bad-mouth my people. None of them’s ever come back with a head in a box.”

“Maybe you didn’t ask nice enough.”

Wells leads us through the place. The building is swarming with agents. Some in dark suits like Wells’s. Some in lab coats.

The building doesn’t resemble much of a country club anymore. They’ve knocked down walls and torn out floors and ceilings to bring in their special tech. I never had much use for the stuff, but I guess it suits whatever most of them do. The tech is a mix of hush-hush black budget science-fiction toys crossed with angelic hoodoo they used to get from Aelita. I don’t know what they’re doing for it now. Maybe they have another angel on the payroll. They sure can’t ask me for help. I’m a nephilim. Half human, half angel. And I worked hard to get the angel part of me under control. The little prick is a boy scout and a bore. I’m not bringing him out again just to sup up some laptops and ray guns.

Wells leads us into what used to be one of the business offices. Now the windows have been blacked out and it’s been turned into an occult space. A place where disreputable pixies like me can perform forbidden rites and magical high jinks.

Candy sets the cooler down on a worktable piled high with old books and manuscripts.

“What do you think? Looks like you finally got your hoodoo man-cave.”

“I’ve seen the Vigil do worse. At least they’re admitting that they need something more than angelic halo polishers on their side.”

Candy flips through the old books, looking for wood prints of medieval monsters, one of her favorite things. I look around.

There are lab coats, aprons, gloves, and eye protection by the door. Dry-erase boards mounted along one wall covered in English and angelic script. A few Angra runes too. There’s what looks like an alchemy setup in the corner, with test tubes, burners, alembics, and enough herbs, elixirs, and powders to build a hedge maze. Some clever boots has installed a silver magic circle in the floor. A massive crucifix is bolted to the back of the door. A rube’s talisman designed to keep our unholy magic from contaminating the rest of the Vigil’s headquarters. Same as always. They need us hoodoo types, but they never let us forget that we belong in the back of the bus.

“What’s that?” says Candy.

Back by the plants and lab gear is a broken-down Japanese shrine, just big enough to hold a wizened old body. The coffin-size shrine and mummy look hundreds of years old. The body sits cross-legged in a meditation pose. It’s dressed in gold ceremonial robes and a conical monk’s hat, so someone is looking after it. Paper-thin flesh stretches over delicate bones. It almost looks polished. Like the body isn’t a mummy at all, but a statue carved from lacquered wood. There are offerings of mochi, an orange, and incense at the foot of the shrine.

I go over and touch the dried, worm-eaten word on the top of the shrine.

“Don’t know. It looks like Norman Bates’s prom date.”

Wells comes in and sees me.

“Don’t touch that,” he barks.

“What’s the deal with Skeletor here?”

With a creak, the mummy turns its head.

“Me? What’s the deal with you, fatty?”

Slowly, the mummy monk unfolds its arms and legs. It’s so slow and delicate, it looks like a giant stick insect waking up.

I take a few steps back. Candy comes around the table and stands beside me, holding on to my arm. Not out of fright but in a “Holy shit can you believe this shit?” way.

Finally, the mummy is standing. The golden robes hang off him like a layer of extra flesh. He stands up straight, puts out his arms, and stretches.

“Nice nap,” he says, then looks back at me. “You’re the one I’ve heard so much about. You been running around shooting more people, fatso?”

Dead man or not, Candy steps up.

“Don’t call him names, you bony bastard. He’s skinny as a rail.”

The mummy waves a dismissive hand at her.

“You need glasses.”

“That’s a holy man, young lady,” says Wells. “You do not speak to him like that.”

“Then he shouldn’t call people names,” she says.

“Stark, let me introduce you to Ishiro Shonin.”

Before Candy can start arguing with Wells, I go over to the mummy, hoping this is all some kind of hazing ritual.

“What’s your story, dead man? I hear you speaking English, but your mouth is doing something else.”

He shuffles to the table with the herbs and lab equipment. Drinks something green from an Erlenmeyer flask.

“Ah,” he says when he’s done. “You have good eyes for a fool. I speak how I like and you hear how you like. Same thing for me. I hear you, so you make sense. Not that someone like you makes much sense.”

“I bet you wow them on talent night at the morgue. Do you do balloon animals too?”

“Fat, and ugly too. Not much for someone like you out in the world, is there? You have to hide and consort with the dead like me.”

“Speaking of the dead, why don’t you get more shut-eye? I need to talk to a dead man before he’s gone completely. You have any crow feathers around here?”

Ishiro Shonin glances over at the ice chest. I don’t have to tell him what’s in there.

“How are you going to talk to him?”

“A messy ritual. But effective. It’s the Metatron’s Cube Communion.”

The Shonin nods.

“That’s why you want crow feathers. You lie down with the dead man and slash your wrists. Lots of blood and all that? Of course you’d choose that one.”

“I’ve used it before. It’s goddamn effective.”

“Watch the blasphemy,” says Wells.

“You like the Cube Communion because you’re in love with death,” says the Shonin. “You die a little and come back. Cheat death over and over like a bad boyfriend kissing another girl.” He looks at Candy. “Is he a bad boyfriend?”

“No. He’s great.”

“Then you shouldn’t let him be so stupid.”

I say, “So what do you suggest?”

The Shonin pokes around the table of herbs with the black bony fingers. Picks up a furry twig dotted with small yellow blossoms.

“Dream tea. I learned it from a moon spirit. You probably don’t believe that kind of thing, but it’s true.”

“Me? I believe in everything. How does it work?”

“You make a tea. You meditate. You enter the spirit realm and find your man before he drifts away. That okay with you, fatty?”

“Great. Brew some up. I’ll try it.”

“You know how to meditate?”

“Everyone in L.A. knows how to meditate.”

The Shonin looks as doubtful as a skeleton can. He puts water on a small flame to boil. Drops the twig into the pot.

“I should do it. I have more experience,” says the Shonin.

“And I have trust issues. I’ll do it.”

“If you get lost and can’t come back, don’t blame me.”

“If I get stuck because of your hoodoo juice, my ghost is going to come back and shit in your skull.”

The Shonin shakes his head. It sounds like twigs cracking.

“No reasoning with some people.”

“Amen to that,” says Wells.

Candy says, “You’re really going to drink that stuff?”

I take off my wet coat and throw it over the back of a chair.

“If I don’t have to slice and dice myself, I’m willing to try it. Wells won’t let him kill me, will you, Wells? I’m the only one with experience handling the 8 Ball.”

“So far,” says Wells. “But there’s always tomorrow.”

“Maybe not too many,” says Candy. “You might want to remember that.”

The Shonin takes the tea off the burner and pours a brown mess into a small ceramic cup.

“The girl …”

“Candy,” she says.

The Shonin looks at her.

“Your name is food? How about I call you Banana Split or Hot Dog?”

Candy turns Jade for a second. Her eyes go black, with pinpoints of red at the center. Her teeth are as sharp as a shark with a switchblade.

“Why don’t you just do that?”

The Shonin looks at Wells.

“What the hell kind of a place do you run here? You bring me a fatty and a demon to work with? I didn’t meditate in a hole in the ground for four hundred years for this crap.”

Candy goes back to her human face and I touch her shoulder on the way to the cooler. She doesn’t take shit from anyone. It’s one of the reasons we get along.

I take the dead man’s head from the cooler and sit facing it in the silver circle on the floor. I take the Colt from my waistband and hand it to Candy. She snatches the tea out of the Shonin’s hand and brings it to me.

“Thanks.”

“Now I have both of our guns. If anything weird happens here, I’m shooting these two first.”

“Please do.”

I look at the Shonin.

“I’d still like that crow feather.”

He goes to the herb table and pulls a feather from a bundle wrapped in twine. Candy takes it from him and brings it to me. This isn’t like the old days. I’m still getting used to having someone watch my back. It’s an okay feeling.

“Thanks, baby.”

I throw back the cup of tea. It tastes like hot swamp water filtered through a baboon’s ass.

“Okay,” the Shonin says. “Now you meditate. You need a zafu to sit on? What kind of meditation do you do?”

I pull a flask from my back pocket.

“The liquid kind,” I say, unscrewing the top and downing a long drink of Aqua Regia, the number one booze in Hell. It goes down like gasoline and hot pepper and washes the taste of baboon out of my mouth.

The Shonin says, “Drink all you want, dummy. You won’t find God in a bottle.”

“I already found God,” I say. “That’s why I drink.”

I hand Candy the flask and she takes a quick gulp before putting it in her pocket. I’m used to Aqua Regia’s kick, but down enough at once and it’s going to turn anyone’s cerebral cortex into chocolate pudding. I let it and the tea do their work. They fight it out in my stomach. The Hellion hoodoo wrestling whatever kind of magic Mr. Bones uses. My stomach cramps and for a few seconds I want to throw up. But I hold on and the feeling passes. The room gets thin, like it’s made of black gauze. I put the crow feather between my teeth just as I fall out of myself.

I’m standing on an alkali plain stretching out flat and cracked in all directions. In the far distance is a shaft of light, but it never moves. The sky is dim, like just before sunrise or after sunset. Flip a coin to decide. The air is thick and hard to breathe. I wouldn’t want to have to run a marathon here.

The dead man wanders around shivering. Probably from being on ice for so long. I’m glad it worked and I didn’t have to come halfway to Hell for nothing.

The dead man stumbles back a couple of steps when he sees me. A second later he recognizes me and starts over, a little cautious.

I say, “Joseph Hobaica.”

He stops.

“How do you know my name?”

“We’re standing in fuckall limbo and that’s your first question? It’s just a little trick I can do.”

He looks around, hands across his chest, holding on to his shoulders, shaking.

“Where are we?”

“I just told you. Limbo. Halfway between Hell and Heaven. You’re dead. Remember?”

His face changes. Things start coming back to him. Death can be a real kick in the ass, especially a death like Hobaica’s. Sometimes it takes awhile for spirits to come back to themselves.

“This isn’t right,” he says. “This isn’t where I should be. Where’s the Flayed Heart?”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

“I know that name. It’s a nickname for one of the Angra Om Ya. A big goddamn carnivorous flower. Her real name is Zhuyigdanatha, right?”

He drops his hands to his sides. Narrows his eyes at me.

“You know nothing about the Flayed Heart.”

“I know it’s easier to say than Zhuyig-fucking-danatha.”

“Don’t blaspheme her name.”

“You can knock that off right now. I’ve already got one schoolmarm worrying about my language. I don’t need two.”

Hobaica turns in a dazed circle.

“I don’t understand. Where’s the fire? Why is my body still intact?”

“Maybe you blew your ritual. Remember that? It’s where we met.”

“You were the witness to our sacrifice. An ordinary, mortal man shattered by such a holy rite was our way to paradise.”

“And yet here you are. Downtown Nowheresville. Like the view?”

Hobaica comes at me.

“You did this.”

He tries to grab me. I sidestep, give him a little shove to throw him off balance, and stomp on the back of his knee. He goes down on his face, hurt but in one piece.

“You got that out of your system and now you’re going to be smart, right? Good. First off, who told you I was following you?”

Hobaica nurses his hurt knee, but manages a smile.

“A little birdie. Der Zorn Götter has friends in many places.”

I’ve heard of them. An upper-crust Angra sect. They have connections in money and politics all over the Sub Rosa and civilian world. Could they have connections to the Vigil?

“You made a mistake asking me to be your witness, genius. First, I’m not exactly mortal, and second, I spent eleven years in Hell. You think a bunch of nitwits sawing their own heads off is going to shatter me? In Hell we called that ‘Wednesday.’”

I go over and pull Hobaica to his feet.

“This is a trick,” he says.

“Show me what’s in your head. I want to see what you expected when you died. Show me the Flayed Heart.”

“Never.”

“Listen, man. I know you don’t mind a little pain, but you’re dead now. You don’t need to have to do that anymore. Show me what I want or it’s going to hurt.”

He stands up straight. A moron with scruples.

“I won’t tell you a thing.”

I nod.

“No matter what the old mummy said, I knew I wasn’t getting through this without losing some blood.”

“What?”

“Hold still,” I say, and pull my knife.

Hobaica tries to run, but his gimpy leg collapses and he goes down on his face. I kneel on his chest, pinning his arms to the ground.

“I should probably feel worse about this, but you hack up people to decorate your playpen, so I don’t.”

I grab his chin with my free hand and cut a sigil into his forehead. The mark of Nybbas, the Seer. He stops thrashing for a second when the blood flows into the eyes. I take that moment to run the knife over my own forehead, making a deep gash. Grabbing Hobaica’s face, I push my forehead to his until our wounds touch. As our blood flows together, I get a dirty, low-res image of his mind.

This is what Hobaica expected. What he wanted.

An endless sea of fire and bones, and floating there, as big as the sky, is a lotus made of rotting human teeth. Bodies pour into the flower’s fanged maw and are ripped apart. Zhuyigdanatha swallows some of the bodies, but there’s so much falling into its stinking gob that limbs, heads, torsos, and feet cascade down the side. They crawl together in the fire, forming new, weird creatures. A couple of arms merge at the shoulder with an eye attached under each armpit. Torsos with six, eight, ten legs bob along on the flames, swimming in one direction and then another as the legs compete with each other. A few piles of limbs have pulled together enough pieces to form a complete body. These climb up the sides of the tooth lotus, pushing back bodies that miss the Flayed Heart’s mouth and try to get away. Others swim through the fire into caverns at the base of the lotus.

Since he’s dead, I can’t gauge Hobaica’s mood by the smell of his sweat or the sound of his heartbeat, but being in his head, I can feel his excitement. This is what Hobaica hoped for when he cut his head off. To be one of those bodies falling into Zhuyigdanatha’s mouth, feeding his master.

The old Angra moves as it chews its lunch, twisting this way and that to catch the choicest bodies. If you see it from different angles, Zhuyigdanatha changes. It becomes a slimy lizard, snaring falling bodies with a prehensile tongue a thousand miles long. A baobab tree, with razor foliage and a trunk made of rheumy eyes. A crawling fungal mass plucking bloating corpses from a sea of sewage. At least I know this really is an Angra I’m seeing. Zhuyigdanatha isn’t really changing. It’s a transdimensional being. We ordinary slobs can only see one dimensional aspect of the God at once, so it seems to change as it moves and dreams.

From inside Hobaica’s head, I can feel the man wilt as it finally comes to him that he’ll never be saved by his God. His sacrifice was a joke. The Angras are in another dimension. The other God, the God of this dimension, isn’t wild about people deity shopping. It starts to dawn on Hobaica that he’s not only lost his personal Jesus, but killing himself as a sacrifice to the Flayed Heart means he’s pissed off the other God. With his frequent asshole miles he’s earned himself a window seat on the big coal cart to Hell. He’s not even scared. He’s beyond fear or even despair. He knows he’s lost. That he lost the first day he drew his or anyone else’s blood for Zhuyigdanatha.

There’s a mountain range off to the side of where we lie. I climb off Hobaica and he struggles to his feet.

“Where did those mountains come from? I swear they weren’t here before.”

An opening appears in the side of one mountain. Pale light shines out onto the dim plain.

“That’s for me, isn’t it? I’m going to Hell.”

“Don’t feel so bad. It beats Fresno.”

Hobaica drags his arm over his forehead, wiping away the blood.

“I’m a fool.”

“You bet on the wrong horse, yeah. But you’re not the first one, so don’t beat yourself up.”

I sort of feel bad for the sucker. I mean, his life has been a joke from day one. But Hobaica’s current attitude isn’t a bad way to enter Hell. There’s not much the Hellions can do to him that he isn’t already doing.

He says, “What do I do now?”

“You can stay where you are for the rest of eternity, which, the way things are going, might not be that long. Or you can go inside.”

“To Hell.”

“Yes.”

“So, I can be somewhere awful or nowhere at all.”

“It’s a lousy choice, I know.”

He looks at me. His clothes are speckled with his blood. He looks a little like what he looked like back in the meat locker. It’s pathetic.

“Which would you choose?” he says.

“I didn’t get to make a choice when I went. But if I were you, I’d choose to be someplace. All they can do in Hell is hurt you. Out here with nothing but yourself to talk to, you’re going to destroy your mind. Being alone is worse than being somewhere bad.”

He nods. Even manages the faintest smile in human history.

“Thank you,” he says, and starts for the mountains.

“Vaya con Dios.”

He stops.

“Is that a joke?”

“Yeah. Not one of my best.”

“A bad joke isn’t much of a send-off before an eternity in Hell.”

“I could tell you the one about the one-eyed priest and the bowlegged nun.”

“I’ll be going now.”

He walks to the mountain and goes into the tunnel without looking back. It closes behind him. Alone on the alkali plain, I sit down with my legs crossed. I wipe the blood off my face with my hand and the alkali burns the cut in my forehead. The drunken feeling comes over me again. My shoulders sag. My head falls forward and my mouth opens. Something light drifts out and settles on my leg.

I wake up in the circle across from the severed head. There’s a puddle underneath it where it’s starting to defrost. Candy takes my arm and helps me up. I run my fingers over my forehead. No blood. Score one for the bag of bones. I didn’t have to bleed in real life after all.

I put Hobaica’s head back in the cooler and hand it to Wells.

“I’m done with this. It’s your problem now.”

He sets it on the floor. Goes to a sink and washes his hands.

“Did it work? Did you see anything?”

“Some bad dental work. And fire. And bodies being ripped apart. The meat locker where I found ice-chest man was feng-shuied with body parts.”

“You think the man cut up the bodies?” says the Shonin.

“Him and his friends, yeah. My guess is those meat piñatas were volunteers. More Angra zealots.”

“They wanted to be cut up like meat?” says Candy.

I nod.

“Yeah, but they didn’t see it that way. The feeling I got from Hobaica—that’s your dead man—is that he and his pals wanted to be hacked up like those bodies. They thought if they sacrificed themselves right they’d be reborn as bouncing baby Angras.”

The Shonin laughs at that.

“They’re even dumber than you.”

“Did he actually tell you he cut up those bodies?” says Wells.

“I wasn’t taking a deposition. These are all just impressions I got from a shell-shocked dead man on his way to Hell.”

“Is that all?”

“Some of the body parts clumped together and made new bodies. There were caves they might have drifted into. Everything was on fire.”

“It sounds like the realm of the Flayed Heart,” says Shonin.

“It was.”

“Zhuyigdanatha likes underground places,” says Shonin to Wells. “If there’s a larger Angra group, you might find them there.”

Wells shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

“What caves are we talking about? Carlsbad Caverns? A salt mine in Louisiana? Lascaux?”

The Shonin pours out the muck he gave me. Puts water and green tea into the pot and places it back on the burner.

“These were California boys, so it will be a California cave that connects, at least on a spirit level, with the Flayed Heart’s dwelling place.”

I start to say something, but don’t. I know some caves nearby, but if the Vigil doesn’t know about them I’m not going to tell them yet. I need to check with someone first.

Candy is slumped on a metal stool on the other of the room, away from everyone. She’s pale and fidgety. I go over to her.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “Just let me sit here.”

“I can take you home if you want.”

“I’m fine. Okay?”

I nod.

“Okay.”

“Stark,” says Wells. “You know lowlifes. Any of your pixie friends like to spend their time underground?”

“What makes you think the Sub Rosa or Lurkers have anything to do with this? Angra worshipers are mostly lily-white civilians.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I look at the Shonin.

“You want to know about underground dwellers? Why don’t you ask the jabber over there?”

Jabbers are ghosts so scared of the afterlife that they won’t even leave their dead bodies. They claw their way through the soil under the city, dried-out bones living in dirt.

“Don’t you dare talk about Ishiro Shonin that way. This is a holy man. Jabbers are cowards. What this man did took years of dedicated training and preparation. Successful self-mummification is incredibly rare.”