Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

I charge at what I hope is a door and not a crossbeam. It’s harder to menace people when you’re gimping around with a broken nose.

I pass through the wall like it’s air. And hit something hard. It cracks open. Wood splinters. Something heavy falls behind me. I think I found the door.

I’m in the middle of a dark, cluttered room. Behind me is the hoodoo wall, rippling like water on this side. The door is on the floor, in pieces. Someone isn’t getting their deposit back.

Wherever the hell I am, it’s dark. All I can see in the feeble pool of light through the wall is something that looks like a cluttered garage. Somewhere Dad keeps his tools for the weekend projects that help get him out of having to talk to the family.

Crates are piled all over the place. Scraps of cut and hammered metal on the floor. Tables with vises and C-clamps. Someone forgot their lunch. It stinks in here.

I feel along the wall. Find a light switch and flick it on.

Turns out it wasn’t lunch after all.

Five body bags are stacked in the corner. A sixth body wrapped in plastic is strapped to what looks like an old wooden electric chair. There’s a tear in the side of the shrink-wrapped shroud, leaking Hellion juice and exposing a black, bloated hand. It gets worse when I uncover the body. It’s the kind of stink that would turn a buzzard vegan.

It’s a woman. She’s in a legion uniform but I can’t read her name or tell what regiment she’s from. The top of her skull is missing. It looks like someone was dissecting her brain. Clamps and sutures still cling to the rotten meat.

This is new. I never heard of Hellions vivisecting their own. They do it to some of the more heinous dead souls in the House of Knives, but not to each other.

Whatever this is, it doesn’t look like torture. This was an experiment and this soldier was the lab rat. I bet if I checked the body bags I’d find more head-bone excavations. What kind of Dr. Moreau shit was going on in here? And who was doing it? Only one name comes to mind.

Mason.

What the fuck was he looking for?

You’d think with all the Hellions I’ve hacked up over the years, manhandling a dead one wouldn’t be so disgusting. But I just killed them. I didn’t stick around to watch them rot. Mason must have encased this room in heavy magic armor. Before I destroyed Tartarus, dead Hellions blipped out of existence like soap bubbles and ended up in the Hell below Hell. But Mason managed to keep these corpses intact even after they were dead. You have to admire the pure psycho will it took to pull off something like that. Admire it and then kill it. That last is the important part.

So what was he looking for?

I loosen the corpse’s straps and let it fall forward onto its knees. The corpse leaves scraps of hair, rotten uniform, and skin on the back of the chair.

There’s a long shallow divot cut into the wood where the soldier’s head was held back. Whatever was in the shallow hole is gone now.

I undo the straps holding her arms. They’re kind of glued to the chair with bodily fluids. I have to yank off each one, making sure to keep them wrapped in plastic so I don’t have to touch them.

There are divots on each of the armrests where the dead woman’s bare hands would rest on them. I pull her bare feet off the footrests. Divots there too.

I’ve wandered deep into the realm of What the Fuck.

Turn and scan the room for clues. Body bags. Rolling metal tables with drills, saws, and surgical instruments. A blackboard covered with what looks like machine schematics. A pile of empty bags. Rows of potions. Bet most are dope so the guinea pigs wouldn’t squirm while Mason worked on them with a chisel. I keep scanning the room but stop when I see myself pinned to the wall.

The last twelve years of my life are spread across fake wood paneling.

Photos of the dozens of Hellions I murdered. There are notes about how and when they died. There are shots of dead people on Earth too. I didn’t kill all of them. Everyone in the Magic Circle. Parker dead in a motel room with half his face missing. Doc Kinski. A shot of Josef the Kissi wearing his human übermensch face. A young vampire named Eleanor, her bitch of a mother, and her suicide father. Cabal Ash and his sister. Simon Ritchie, the movie producer. Snapshots of anonymous, well-groomed blue bloods, rich assholes that died during the New Year’s Eve raid on Avila. Mug shots of bald young teenyboppers and worn-out middle-aged White Power morons who probably died when I torched a skinhead clubhouse a few months back. Like the Hellions, they have date and death notes.

There’s a photo of Alice, the girl I left behind when I was dragged Downtown eleven years ago, off to the side by itself. I take it down and put it in my pocket. I’m not leaving her here in this madhouse.>Fun as it was busting up the meeting, something real kicked in for me. Something I sort of already knew but couldn’t put into words.

They’ve gone insane down here.  Every fucking Hellion has gone mad.

They can’t lay a finger on Heaven and they can’t leave. They’ve been stuck in this hole for what? Thousands of years? A million? Time doesn’t move for angels like it moves for us. They’ve turned inward and created a rat-maze culture. All bureaucracy, schizo rituals, and murderous deadfalls.

Do you think God had a business plan when He created the universe? Did He worry about the invention of light or gravity running over budget?

Meetings and infighting. Made-up ceremonies and new religions and Noble Virtues. This is how you fill up eternity when all you have to look forward to is the clock running down and the universe collapsing in on itself and starting over.

There’s something up ahead. I can’t see it but I can feel it. There’s a set of double doors leading to a meeting room. The opposite wall is blank but there’s something funny about it. It isn’t solid. To these Lucifer eyes, the plaster and paint are cheap sideshow effects. Change the light and you can see right through them. At least the wily bastard left me something useful.

Sooner or later even the nonstop rituals aren’t going to hold and these assholes are going to turn on each other. The biggest baddest civil war ever, until none of them are left. What would Heaven think of that? Probably get a real chuckle out of it. A Hell without Hellions. A real-estate developer’s wet dream. They can sell time-shares, “This two-and-a-half-bath beauty is close to schools, shopping, and on a clear day you can see the dismembered devil corpses floating in the lake of shit.”