The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim 8)

For this disguise, I choose a Hellion face. Some Hellions look pretty much human while others look like they just won an ugly-farm-animal contest. Some are more like human-size bugs—even other Hellions don’t like them. I go for middle ground and put on a bland, empty-eyed boar’s face, complete with cracked yellow tusks. It’s the little details that make the disguise. I don’t want to look like I got my mask from the bargain bin at Walmart.

It’s a shock being back Downtown. I haven’t been here in months and for the first few minutes the smell and sound of the place are hard to deal with. It’s all familiar, but drunk like I am, it’s hard to ease comfortably back into damnation.

When doomed souls walk through the front door into Hell, they’re funneled like cattle into veal pens, where they wait to be sorted. Who gets a holiday in lava? Who goes to the Butcher Valley or the Room of Knives. Me? I’m just another idiot Hellion out for a stroll, so I don’t expect any trouble getting past the guards. Turns out it’s no trouble at all.

And it’s not because I’m dressed like a local.

The new souls aren’t being led to the holding pens because they aren’t there anymore. Where there were cages is a collection of twisted metal bars and the crushed remains of cages in a shit-reeking mud swamp. I want to get a closer look, but I’m so light-headed I have a feeling that I’d end up flat on my face in the muck. Damned souls mill around the pens not sure what to do or where to go. There aren’t any Hellions left guarding them, much less telling them where to go. A few notice me and head in my direction, but I wave them off and head into the Hell’s capital, Pandemonium.

I don’t make it. I have to duck inside one of the abandoned guardhouses on the outskirts of the city, where I collapse on the floor. I’m drunk and the peepers are kicking in full force now. I can see everywhere, all of Hell at once, and it’s making me throw up in my skull.

You know how flies have those funny compound eyes that divide images into hundreds of little pieces? Now imagine one of those compound eyes where each of those hundreds of lenses sees something different. This is beyond information overload. It’s a flat-out Hellion acid trip.

I’m back at Lucifer’s palace in Downtown’s demonic Beverly Hills. I have a watery image of the palace lobby. The grounds outside. The kennels where the hellhounds are supposed to be. Even Lucifer’s endless library upstairs.

Ruins everywhere.

Everything trashed. The palace looks deserted. Out front, hundreds of Hellion legionnaires are camped in tents and in the backs of broken-down trucks. There are fires everywhere, fueled with Lucifer’s furniture and his books. Damned souls wander the streets—the ones that haven’t gone native and joined the roving legionnaire gangs raiding the last of the stores for food, Maledictions, ammo, and booze, that is. There are gang fights, executions, riots, and burning buildings all across the city. And I’m seeing this all at once, through one big sulfurous, spinning kaleidoscope.

I’m cold. I’m sweating. I can’t feel my legs. Then my legs come back and I can’t feel my arms. My heart bangs around my chest like my ribs are a mosh pit. I’m too dizzy to even get up and head back to the Tenebrae door. All I can do is lie here as drytts—Hellion sand fleas—trampoline over my face and hands.

I see south of the city, all the way to the golden walls around the fortress that opens into Heaven. Millions of Hellions and damned souls surround it. I expect rioting and fights here too, but it’s different. The crowd is barely moving at all. It’s just miles of hopeless, catatonic bodies, human and otherwise, in every direction. Months ago, God—Mr. Muninn—put out the word that Heaven was now open to everyone, human souls and fallen angels alike. Only the gates never opened. Over the walls of the fortress, I can see flashes of the angel war that’s raging to decide who gets into Heaven and who doesn’t.

It’s too much. I feel like someone parked an earthmover on my head. I can’t get enough stinking air breathing through my nose, but if I open my mouth, the sand fleas get inside. Even though I know I’m not bodily back in Hell, that I’m only here as a projection of my soul, everything hurts and everything is horrible and I roll over and throw up as the visions continue.

There are waves of Heavenly angels in the streets of Pandemonium. They’re carrying bottles in wooden crates like we use to haul wine bottles. The angels’ bottles are dark and whatever is in them swirls with a deeper darkness. I don’t need anyone to tell me that this is black milk because around the ones humping the bottles other angels are on guard, their Gladiuses out and ready to murder anything that gets in their way.

Somewhere in Downtown’s Hollywood, the leader of this angelic horde is talking to an old human soul, one I only met a couple of times, but one I’ll never forget. It’s Norris Quay. He’s laughing it up like him and the angel are all old Skull and Bones club buddies.

I don’t care about any of it anymore. I just want it to stop. For these bugs to get off me and the pounding in my head to stop.

But another vision comes swimming up through the rest. It’s Samael with some Hellion generals in the burning ruins of the old street market. They’re arguing. The generals close in on him. Fire up their Gladiuses. Samael doesn’t flinch. He fires up his twin swords and waits for them, a Zen warrior in a sea of monsters. I want to help him. I try to get up. Instead, I fall on my face back into the sensation of warm Jell-O that brought me here.

“FUCK!”

I open my eyes. I’m back in Max Overdrive, curled up in a fetal position on the kitchen floor. My arm is wet where I’ve drooled all over it. I wipe my mouth. Kasabian is on the couch with the dirty bucket by his foot and a beer on his knee.

He takes a sip of the beer.

“I take it it worked?” he says.

I roll onto my back.

“You could say that. It was all jumbled together, but I saw plenty. As much as I needed to.”

“So, you’re okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Kasabian says.

He walks over and dumps the bucket of water on my head.

I sit up sputtering and coughing.

“That’s for calling me Tin Man in front of Brigitte and Marilyne. Now give me my eye back.”

I pop it out and hand it to him. He pops it back into the socket, blinking to get it into place.