Something tickles my hands and legs. Drytts. Hell’s sand flies. They’re not dangerous, just disgusting. If they find you and you stay still too long, others will come and you’ll end up buried in them.
“We can’t stay here. You have one hour to get us to Eleusis.”
“One hour or what?”
He sounds defiant, like I hurt his feelings.
“Or I’m going to think you’ve been fucking me around this whole time. Don’t forget. I’m the one with the knife. Let’s start there and let our imaginations go.”
He nods at the back door.
“The quickest way is that rise a hundred yards off. It’s also the steepest and most dangerous.”
“Lead the way.”
“Is that an order?”
“A polite suggestion.”
THE RISE JACK was talking about is a whole intersection that’s been punched up out of the street at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. A couple of restaurants, a small shopping center, and a gas station hang in the air over our heads. The sinkhole below is so full of wrecked cars and motorcycles that it’s nearly level with the street. The junk stews in the same bloody sewage that was in the sinkhole outside Hollywood Forever.
I start climbing, hanging on to gas pumps at the bottom and moving up to the empty garage. When I make it around there, I pull myself up on metal parking-lot crash posts. I turn around to check, and see Jack slowly following me up. I don’t think he’s happy to be around me anymore. His whole theory about fate having a reason for tossing us into the same salad has evaporated. He looks like 1C; looks all he wants is to get through this without ending up in Tartarus with Mammon.
As Jack climbs, cracks form under his handholds. He’s followed me through the garage and is pulling himself up the crash posts. As he puts his weight on each post, the cracks under it widen. The last two posts wiggle like rotten teeth. My arm is wrapped around the solid base of the shopping-center sign. I move up to a newspaper vending machine that’s anchored in the sidewalk. Jack grabs onto the solid foundation of the shopping-center sign before the posts give way.
When he’s secure I crawl into the entrance of a liquor store. If you cut through the place, the back door will take us to the top of the rise.
The liquor store stinks inside. A thousand broken bottles of wine, vodka, beer, scotch, and soda have soaked through a mountain of junk food and the whole mess is piled against the front counter and front wall. The floor is sticky with dried booze and sugar, which is disgusting but helps me keep traction as I climb to the storeroom in back. Jack is right behind, baby-crawling past the empty shelves.
I’m at the back door when the shaking starts again. It’s so subtle that it’s almost not there. It feels like the muscle memory of a nasty dream. I thought it was an earthquake, but I think our climbing has upset the delicate balance that’s kept this slab of L.A. junk wilderness upright.
The shaking turns into a steady vibration. Two heavy bodies scraping against each other. The bottles beneath us clatter together. Softly and then like a truckload of xylophones being pushed down a long flight of stairs. It’s hard to hold on to the shelves as the tremors deepen. Parts of the ceiling fall down on us. There’s a sick liquid moment when the whole intersection shifts. Up ahead, the rear wall cracks and the rest of the ceiling starts coming down. The whole liquor store is sliding forward.
“Move your ass, Jack.”
I scramble past the shelves and kick off the top one, grabbing onto the door frame at the top. I climb to the back of the storeroom and pull on the door. The twisting building has jammed it shut. I grab the doorknob and shove the black blade into the metal lock. It pops out and clatters against the wall like a bell. The door swings open and I pull myself up onto the rear step.
Jack is stumbling over office furniture. Cracks open at my feet. The store is breaking away from this last anchor of ground.
The building growls and creaks like an iron elephant with the bends. It lurches. Slides left and down. Jack is pulling himself up on the door. I grab his wrist as a subterranean shriek of snapping concrete and sheering metal launches the liquor store down the way we came. It crashes into the garage and both structures shatter like hundred-ton dollhouses before disappearing into the sinkhole below. The slab sways like it’s bobbing in a bathtub and begins to fall. I grab Jack and jump to the roof of a dry cleaner’s beyond the edge of the slab.
I tuck and roll as we hit. Jack flops like a sockful of oatmeal thrown from a speeding car. When the section ofo te secti road hits, one of the cleaner’s walls collapses and we slide down the roof like worn-out kids at the worst amusement park in the world.
Jack and I lie on the broken pavement until the dust settles. We only slid a floor, so our asses are spanked and bruised but we’re pretty much intact.
Jack was right. Eleusis is right where he said it would be. There’s a twenty-foot stone wall topped with broken glass across the street. It’s exactly how I pictured it. It wouldn’t be Eleusis without the wall, Heaven’s vision of paradise in the abyss. Hell’s only gated community.
JACK IS STILL on his back when I get up and head for the wall. A couple of minutes later I hear him behind me.
“Thank you for saving me back there.”
“Don’t mention it. Really. Don’t.”
“I still think we were brought together to accomplish something bigger.”
“If everything works out, maybe I’ll get a chance to stop a war. That’s pretty big, don’t you think?”
Jack grunts.