Aldridge said there were around ninety -people inside the building, but there’s no way there are ninety bodies now. There aren’t enough parts left to make twenty. Saint Nick didn’t just play butcher boy here, he took some of his trophies home with him. Worse, from the look of the bodies’ decomposition, they weren’t all killed at the same time. It’s been maybe a day or a day and a half since the slaughter was really rolling along. Enough time for fresh bodies to enter and pass through rigor mortis and for the fresh meat to turn greenish--blue. Those are fresh kills. The patients and staff. But some of the bodies are swollen and the flesh raw and blistered. That takes around three days of decomp, which means Saint Nick didn’t just kill this bunch. He stockpiled bodies from another kill and brought them here. This is a busy, organized boy. I bet his record collection isn’t alphabetical. It’s a freaky, obsessive system by year and genre and probably color. Something only he understands. God help you if you put the Dead Kennedys near the Dictators. East Coast goes here. West Coast there.
But it’s not the corpses Saint Nick dragged here from his playpen that get to me. I keep wondering about the staff and patients. What would it be like to be the last person to go under the knife? To see almost ninety other -people killed, gutted, and sewn back together again. I saw a few things during my years in Hell, but nothing like that. Maybe they party like that in one of the really shitty regions where guys like Stalin end up. The House of Knives, maybe.
In a weird way, I guess I was kind of lucky when torture time rolled around. I was never the last to get beaten or cut or spun around a Catherine wheel. The Hellions wanted to make an example of me, so I always went first. I never thought about that before. I didn’t have to wait and piss myself watching everyone else get hammered. I guess if you can get lucky being tortured, I was lucky.
The Shonin and I walk around the room, checking out the piles, trying to make sense of things. Wells stands in the doorway, arms crossed. The poor sap can’t come in. He’s a God--fearing guy, and if there’s any place I’ve seen in this world that says God’s away on business, this is it. At least when Aelita went batshit, she was just one angel and he could imagine a Heaven full of other good and true halo polishers. But this is a bad, bad place. Wells got the Vigil back together, circling the wagons of true believers, and this is what he finds. The wagons are burning. Everyone is wounded and the cavalry isn’t coming. Maybe that’s why he put on the surgical mask. He didn’t want his -people to see him reciting Hail Marys.
I go over to the Shonin.
“Old dead mixed with new,” I say.
He nods his tea--colored skull.
“Yes.”
“What do think, could one man have done this over a long weekend?”
“Why do you say ‘man’? Everyone keeps saying man like it’s a fact.”
“You think Saint Nick is a woman?”
He shrugs.
“You think Saint Nick isn’t?”
We stop by a pile of naked torsos. Arms, legs, and heads cut off. Ribs spread where someone pulled out the organs. It’s like some kind of old Aztec sacrifice. I’m starting to wish I had a surgical mask, but I’m not about to ask Wells for one.
“What I’m saying is that moving this many bodies, and hauling more in from somewhere else fast enough to get all this done over a long weekend, is hard physical labor.”
“Not if she had help. Or if she used magic to move them and perform the surgery.”
“She would have to be a pretty powerful witch.”
“Yes.”
“So, you think Saint Nick is a woman.”
We walk back to the altar. The wet ceiling of the meat chapel extends from the back wall over to where we’re standing, turning the light pink.
“I doubt it,” he says. “I just object to assumptions.”
I look back to the door. Wells has taken a few tentative steps into the room.
The Shonin is probably right about one thing. If Saint Nick didn’t have help, he or she would be a world--class magician. I suppose an ordinary person could have gutted the bodies over a long weekend or could have made the meat church. But not both. That means using a crew or hoodoo. I hope to hell that Saint Nick had a crew. Worst--case scenario is someone with powerful hoodoo but with a crew too. That would put a Hulk Hogan–powerful magician right in the middle of an Angra sect. Why can’t nutcase killers get their orders from talking dogs anymore? Life was so much simpler when crazy meant crazy.
The Shonin says, “Why does Saint Nick cut up the bodies?”
“Because he’s an asshole with a Jack the Ripper complex.”
“Don’t talk like that. You know better.”
“I don’t know. He’s making offerings maybe. Killing -people isn’t enough, so he cuts them up and puts pieces together ’cause the Angra prefer turducken to steak.”
The Shonin walks back to Wells, who’s come into the room. He’s walking from pile to gory pile, as stunned as Aldridge was.
“All you all right?” says the Shonin.
“Are you?” Wells says.
“This is a bad place. There’s an aura of malevolence. You and your -people shouldn’t remain here long.”
Wells nods.
“I’ll pull them out after they sweep the building.”
The Shonin looks at me.
“These aren’t sacrifices,” he says. He points at the naves with the thirteen inverted bodies. “Those are sacrifices. The rest of these bodies, they are machines. Parts of machines. Do you see?”
“Not even a little.”
“Saint Nick is creating empty vessels. Inhabiting an intact human body would be difficult for a God. But by using specific parts of different bodies, someone could make something more suitable.”
“He’s making meat vacation homes for the Angra to move into?”
“The other Saint Nick murders and corpse defilements could have been experiments. Beta tests. Saint Nick was honing his talents.”
Wells says, “He’s never killed on this scale before. Why does he need so many bodies now?”
“Remember that the Angra aren’t just thirteen primary Gods. There are smaller pieces of the old ones on Earth.”
I look at Wells and back to the Shonin.
“You mean demons? Qliphoth?”
The Shonin wipes a spot of blood from his robe.
“The Angra will want an army. One that can move and interact with the human world. Bodies built specifically to hold Gods or Qliphoth would make good vehicles for that.”
“But we talked about this once. About Lamia,” I say. “She had a body and lost it. But she could still kill as a ghost.”
“Yes. But when she lost her body she was just a fragment of a fragment of a God. Like a demon. If Lamia had access to one of the empty vessels when she was alive, humanity might be gone by now.”
“If Saint Nick is making an army, where is it?” says Wells.
The Shonin leads us out of the chapel and back into the hall. He closes the door behind us.
“That’s a very good question. And having succeeded in a mass killing like this, will he try more?”
I say, “Could Saint Nick’s chop--shop -people do what he did and make more vessels?”
The Shonin leans on one of the broken church pews in the hall.
“I doubt it. This is very powerful magic. Qliphoth wouldn’t have the skill or knowledge for it.”
“What about another Lamia? A smarter piece of the Gods?”
“We would have heard about something like that by now,” says Wells. “The Vigil is always on the alert for reports of possible Angra infiltration.”
The Shonin puts his hand on my arm, steadying himself on the pew. If a dead man can look unwell, that’s how he looks.
“You got all this from that book you’re drinking?”
“Most of it. Why?”
“Think there might be another copy lying around somewhere?”
“It’s doubtful, but anything is possible. Do you know someone who might have one?”
There’s blood on the bottom of my boots. I scrape the soles on the side of a pew.
“I don’t know. You’re the expert. I’m just trying to keep up.”
Wells says, “If you know something, Stark, speak up.”
“It’s not anyone here. Some Hellions I know are awfully anxious for the Angra to come home. I was wondering if you could do something like what we saw in there to fallen angels.”
Wells shakes his head and checks his own shoes for blood. He doesn’t care about Hell’s problems. I can’t say I blame him.
“It’s an interesting question,” says the Shonin. “If you find the answer let me know.”
“What about Der Zorn G?tter?” says Wells. “Your dead friend Hobaica said they were involved with the scene in the meat locker. This could be their work too.”
Julie Sola comes around a corner holding a computer tablet. She stops for a second and without thinking puts her hand to her face. Even though she’s wearing a respirator, this close to the chapel the smell is getting through.
“Yes? You have something?” says Wells.
She hands him the tablet. Then reluctantly slides off her respirator.
“We’ve found footprints and dirt throughout the facility. We need to get in there,” she says, nodding at the chapel, “but it’s pervasive. My guess is that we’ll find the same results.”
Wells touches the screen and the tablet lights up.
“What am I looking at here?”
“A chemical analysis of the soil samples. Indications of methane and hydrogen sulfide gases. Sand. Clay. Igneous rock and traces of crude oil.”
“And what does that tell us?”
“It’s the basic soil structure of Los Angeles. Not at street level. Underground.”