Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

After the hotel doc stitches me up, I take Patty downstairs and we catch a cab just like regular schmucks. No limos today. I don’t want anyone at the hotel knowing where we’re going. All the cabbie will see is me taking my half-tanked squeeze to Universal to throw up on the big plastic shark.

The hotel is practically empty. Even in L.A., the Apocalypse is bad for business.

The freeway north is a joke. Angelinos and tourists are fleeing the city, locking traffic in a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic like a university experiment demonstrating just how impossible it is to flee L.A. And it’s not like the sky is any closer to normal up here. Clouds shoot overhead at double speed, like the whole sky is on fast-forward. The volcano and ash have disappeared as cleanly and thoroughly as Catalina but it seems to have made an impression on the unwashed. If that wasn’t enough, the cabbie’s radio explains how as part of its clever plan to panic even the nonpanicked population, the powers that be have shut down both LAX and the Burbank Airport.

I have the cabbie drop us off by the office buildings at the edge of Universal City. Instead of heading back in to town, the cab gets on the freeway north with the other abandon-the-ship types.

Patty leads us into the heart of Universal City, past huge glass buildings and to a squat four-floor building hidden behind a row of trees, just off the regular tourist route. There’s a guard station but it’s empty. I get the feeling the big office towers are deserted too.

Patty takes a pass card from her purse and lets us in. She seems perfectly sober now. The girl can hold her liquor. I’ve never seen anyone mix Hellion and civilian booze before. I hope she doesn’t explode and destroy the rest of the world.

The first floor of the dreamers’ building looks like any unfinished office space. A big open area with cable for DSL and phones. A couple of offices roughed in at the back. Walls a neutral shade of suicide beige. How could you work in one of these places and not seriously consider going apeshit postal at least once? An optional murder-suicide pact ought to be part of the hiring agreement right next to the 401(k) plan.

The stairway to the second floor is locked. Patty waves her card again and the door clicks open.

It’s dark inside and smells faintly of asphodel and belladonna. Forgetting and stimulation. Sounds like a party to me.

A cobweb brushes my face. I start to push it away but Patty says, “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of them.”

Through the dark I see more of the webs. They grow thicker the higher we climb. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see that they’re not webs. They’re long, almost invisible filaments, like fishing line. Only they seem to hum and whisper.

“It sounds like they’re talking to each other.”

Patty glances back over her shoulder.

“Good ears. They’re alive. When we’re asleep, our nervous systems merge with the Big Collective and these nerves broadcast our dreams.”

The second floor is a neural obstacle course. Most of the nerves are bundled along the walls like computer cords but the densest bunch run out from a twelve-sided wood-and-brass enclosure in the middle of the room.

A room off this one is a small but comfortable-looking rest area with a fridge, a massage table, and big overstuffed chairs.

The floor around the wooden enclosure is inlaid with the images of silver arches. The twelve vaults of Heaven. Patty touches each door as she walks around the big toy box. And stops by one. She pulls it open.

“Someone isn’t here today. Johnny Zed is supposed to be in here. I hope he’s all right.”

Inside the chamber is a fleshy pitcher-shaped pod of clear fluid. Nerve filaments drift inside like pale seaweed.

“This is it,” says Patty. “Dreamer central.”

“You get in there?”

“Strip down for a two-day skinny-dip. It’s not bad. It’s warm and you don’t feel a thing. You just float there. A womb with a view.”

“What do you dream about?”

“It’s hard to describe. It’s not things so much as the places between them. I wouldn’t dream of a table or you. I dream about big empty spaces. The hollow parts inside things. The atoms and molecules. I don’t dream about how fucked up things are out here but how perfect things are when you go deep down inside them.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Want to strip down and try it? You’re a little tightly wound, you know. It would probably do you some good.”

“What’s the dreamer safeword?”

She does a mock sigh.

“You’ve been to Hell but won’t even give Heaven a try. Silly boy.”

She closes the door and crosses her arms, looking serious for the first time since I got her away from the ghost.