“You mean the Winter Garden?” says Vidocq. “You want to put someone to sleep?”
“She’s already kind of asleep.”
“What does that mean?” says Allegra.
I get the chop--shop woman from the hall and bring her inside.
Allegra raises a hand to her mouth when she gets a look at her.
“What happened to her?”
“Yeah, she isn’t pretty, is she?”
She puts her hand on the body’s forehead.
“James, she’s already dead.”
I set the body down on a chair.
“I don’t think so. I think she’s just empty. The body is fine, but there’s no one inside.”
Vidocq and Allegra look at each other for a moment.
Allegra opens the chop shop’s eyes and peers at them. They’re still clear.
“It’s not like I have anything else to do right now. I still think she’s dead, but I can keep her from getting any deader.”
“Thanks. When you’re done, just stick her in a corner somewhere. She won’t be here long. I have to go.”
“Do you need any help?” says Vidocq.
“Lots. But I have a plan. I think. Maybe. I hope. If not, maybe we’ll all get lucky and Hell will survive and I’ll see you there.”
“Why do you think we’re going to Hell?” says Allegra.
“Because you’re my friends.”
It’s 9:50. I head out through a shadow for the Nickel—-Fifth Street and Pershing Square.
THE SQUARE IS above street level, so it’s fairly clear of the flooding. There are trees and benches and not much else around us for a giant to crush me with. The monsoons have backed off a little and the rain has gone from pounding to merely drenching.
After everything that’s happened and everything the Shonin told me, I still don’t feel like the thing that came along to destroy the universe. Not that I’d know what that felt like. But I have to believe it would feel like something. Not evil or anger or anything like that. Maybe hunger. A deep--down gnawing hunger that won’t be filled until it swallows all of creation. What do you chase the universe with? Beer or a cold Coke?
I wonder what oblivion will be like? Let’s face it. The chances of everything working out the way I want, the chances of anything I plan working out, are dim at best. Still. What else is there to do? I have a lot to make up for, I guess, even if I never intended to murder everything. Yeah. I thought about it, but I never did it and now I find out I was doing it all along. Funny, the things you find out about yourself. Maybe I should get my aura read or try going macrobiotic. That should take the edge off being a universe killer, right?
I don’t know what to think anymore. If I can’t trust my own past, what can I trust? And don’t say the future because one, there might not be one, and two, how do I know I’m not something else nefarious? A jaywalker or a sleepwalking flimflam man?
I guess I’m supposed to be okay with everything dying. Marcus Aurelius, a guy I read when I was stuck in Hell and finished all the coloring books said, “Death, like birth, is a secret of nature.” Only with birth you get a blanket and a bottle. You get a blanket with death too, but they call it a shroud and everyone else gets the bottle. How am I supposed to be okay with that?
The future is a mess, the past is a wreck, and I’m center stage at the shit storm of the century. I guess I can take comfort in knowing that if it all goes balls up tonight, I’ll be among the first to die and won’t have to see everything gobbled down like an all--you--can--eat buffet.
It’s 9:55.
I take the 8 Ball out of my pocket, toss it up into the air, and catch it a -couple of times in my Kissi hand. As it falls, it changes shape too quickly for me to see. I want to look anyway because it’s the last time I’ll see it. I keep tossing it and waiting.
The light in the square goes up a -couple of notches. The trees blur and the air turns red. A vault slowly emerges in the air above the treetops. It’s red and wet. Not with rain, but blood. The flesh cathedral encloses half the park, like a Grand Guignol band shell. I don’t know how many bodies hang inside it. The naves stretch back as far as I can see. It’s all of Saint Nick’s victims, plus the Angra worshipers who offed themselves.
Weaving through the suspended bodies are two chop shops. The guy is Shaky. I don’t recognize the scarred woman.
She says, “I told you you should have joined us. All this pain. All this fighting and here we are, just where I told you we’d be.”
I know the voice from our phone chats.
“Deumos? Is that you? Your look finally matches your personality.”
She shakes her head. Her face is split nearly down the middle. Her eyes and lips don’t quite line up right. Her face is a mass of wrong angles.
“I won’t engage with you, Stark. You’re just stalling and you know it’s futile. Just give us the Qomrama.”
Shaky looks a little bruised after his fight with Ruach.
“Don’t waste any more of my time or I’ll kill all of your loved ones and make you watch,” he says.
I toss the 8 Ball one more time.
“You know, I think I can pull Deumos out with this thing. I wonder if I can do any other tricks?”
I touch it to Deumos’s body. The ball glows for a second and stops.
“You see?” she says. “Nothing.”
“I’m not so sure. I think you’re stuck in that body now.”
“What difference does that make?”
“You won’t die like an angel. You’ll die like meat. Like a mortal.”
I check my phone. It’s ten o’clock.
Shaky puts out his hand.
“Now, Abomination. Give it to me or see the young Jade die.”
“Okay.”
I toss it to him. The 8 Ball bounces off his chest and he catches it. Stares at it for a second like he doesn’t quite believe it’s real. Then he smiles, a wild, ecstatic thing. A smile that’s been coming for a billion years.
Shaky holds up the 8 Ball and it sort of unfolds, becomes a hundred different shapes at once. Some alive and some inert. It writhes, spins, flaps, swims, burns, melts. Grows wings, eyes, spines like icebergs, and limbs like dead trees. It does all this at once. I can’t look. It hurts my eyes. It hurts my head, trying to take it all in. But I can see the sky. Lightning flashes and the rift opens again. The rip blacks out stars. Something comes through, and this time it’s not just smoke and bones. It’s fully formed things that are as wild, unidentifiable, and painful to look at as the thrashing 8 Ball. It hurts, but I keep looking.
Shaky takes off like a rocket to meet his asshole buddies. Something huge and yellow streaks after him. It’s Ruach, blown up as big as Shaky was when he was a building. But it doesn’t do him any good. By the time Ruach catches up, Shaky’s friends are close enough to grab him. The twelve of them go wild with their first taste of God--flesh gumbo. They take their time ripping him apart. The Angra’s squeals of delight and Ruach’s screams of pain are like overlapping claps of thunder.
Nearby, Muninn appears, flanked by Samael and Chaya. I go over to them, wishing Ruach hadn’t pulled his little stunt. It’s not going to make this any easier.
I open the one remaining door to the Room.
We don’t say anything to each other. Just watch.
Deumos loves it. I bet she was a big fan of the arena in Hell, even if she hid it well. I take out the Colt and shoot her in both legs. I don’t want her dead just yet. While she’s still stunned in her new body, I carry her to the door and toss her in.
“Ladies first,” I say.
She just lies there looking around the Room, amazed at how much having a body can hurt. I go back to the carnage in the sky.
By the time I get back, the Angra have finished with Ruach. L.A. becomes Hell for a minute as Ruach’s holy blood mixes with the rain, staining the streets red. Where drops touch the flesh cathedral, it and the hanging bodies shrivel up and disappear.
Watching his brother being killed, Muninn walks forward so the Angra can see him. He’s a brave son of a bitch. Samael keeps a hand on Muninn’s shoulder and Muninn doesn’t seem to mind. Chaya looks like he’d like a one--way ticket to Zanzibar or wherever the farthest place from Pershing Square is.
The Angra spread out across the sky.
Shaky looks down at us, his lunatic smile smeared with God blood. It’s easy to tell when he spots Muninn because he lets out a shriek that deafens every bird and sets off every car alarm from L.A. to downtown Tokyo.
All thirteen of the Angra Om Ya, pissed, crazy, sporting vengeance hard--ons the size of Mount Rushmore, dive for Pershing Square.
Muninn moves closer to the door. He can’t let them get him. He has to draw them inside for this to work.
It’s hard to figure out the exact timing on everything. Staring up through the rain at flying elder Gods, it’s not easy to get a sense of scale and distance. We’re going to have to do this free jazz. Try to find a melody and a beat in the cacophony, and improvise our way to the end.
Samael walks Muninn closer to the door.
I go to Chaya.
“Aren’t you going to say good--bye to your brother, you chickenshit?”
He looks like he wants to strangle me again, but he’s too freaked out to do it. I shove him and he lets me. But he looks at me hard.
“Tread lightly, monster. I’ll be the God of this universe soon.”
I look over at Muninn, then up at the sky. The Angra are almost down on us.
Samael puts his arms around his father.
The Angra can’t be more than a hundred feet above us.
I gut--punch Chaya. He doubles up, then chokes when I take something from my pocket and shove it down his throat.
Samael lifts Muninn into the air as I shove Chaya as hard as I can into the Room.
Samael throws Muninn on the ground and I hit the deck as the Angra fly overhead, chasing the only God brother they can see into their precious Room. Then I close the door.
And wait for the universe to explode.
But it doesn’t.
There’s just a soft thud and a mild earthquake, like a nuke going off a hundred miles underground. Then all I can hear or feel is the rain. And the pain in my chest because throwing your dumb ass on the ground with bullets in your chest is a poor escape plan. By the time I push myself back up to my feet, Muninn is heading my way. If he was another kind of God, he’d be spitting fire and locusts at me.
“Was it your plan all along to sacrifice Chaya?” he shouts. “You made a promise to me and you didn’t keep it.”
I hold up my hands in case he thought of the locusts on the way over.
“The universe needs you more than it does your idiot brother.”
He turns on Samael.
“And you,” says Muninn. “You were in on this together.”
“No,” says Samael. “But to be fair, Father, if Stark hadn’t done it, I would have.”
Muninn sits on a bench, his hands balled into fists.
“You’ve given them the Room. You’ve unleashed the Angra on all of creation.”
I pull the Mithras out of my pocket and show it to him.
“Relax. Chaya bravely volunteered to swallow the Singularity. With all the doors locked, the Angra either died in the Big Bang when it went off or they have a whole new universe to play with. Whichever it was, they’re stuck in the Room and they’re not coming back.”