Kill City Blues (Sandman Slim 5)

The building rumbles from below. It builds until it feels and sounds like a freight train under our feet. The whole mall slides sickly to the left. The Christmas tree sways. The trunk cracks. I pull Brigitte from Traven’s body and everyone runs to the wall as the tree crashes to the floor. For a minute we’re blind from the dust and fungus spores. I can hear sections of the ceiling coming down around us. The floor stops shaking, but the rumble remains, a steady background hum.

The rumbling rises and Kill City starts shimmying again. The glass around the elevator shafts shatters to the ground. I see faint light across the lobby.

“Follow me. Keep your heads down.”

I grab Candy’s hand and feel the weight of her grabbing someone else’s. Crouching, running, feeling stitches popping in my belly wound, I head us down the stairs we just came up. Then down the dead escalator.

The windows over the Roman baths have collapsed into the main pool, flooding the whole floor in pale dawn light. I look around for a hole in the wall.

“This way. Through the chapel.”

The building shifts in one direction and then the other. It’s worse now. Before it felt like a solid movement from side to side. Now the motion feels soft and liquid, like we’re off the foundation and floating free.

Inside, there isn’t much left. A chasm has opened in the floor in front of the altar, swallowing the pews and part of the wall, destroying the regular chapel and revealing the secret Angra altar. Those fuckers are everywhere. Whatever the plan is to bring them back, it was set in motion a long time ago.

Something is crawling out of the wall. Not a crack in the wall. The wall itself, like the plaster and stone is trying to pull itself free. Its long beaklike mouth comes through first. That’s all I need to see. Concentric circles of cutting fangs and grinding molars. It’s a demon. An eater. We can’t make it to the hole that leads to the ocean before it gets loose in the room. I shout at Candy.

“Give me your knife.”

She tosses me her black blade and I rush the thing. Get a foot on some rubble and launch myself over the demon so I land right on its snout. It roars when it feels my weight and forces itself out of the wall faster. Its five spiderlike eyes emerge next and then the rest of its head. I bring the blade down as hard as I can at the base of its skull, where it meets the body, slicing through nerves connecting it to the head. The eater screams and bucks like a bronco, finally throwing me off. Halfway out of the wall, its buzz-saw mouth whirs and grinds at me, but its body won’t move. It’s stuck where it is. I toss Candy her knife and we head for the wall.

Vidocq and Candy jump into the water first. Brigitte comes to me slowly, looking back over her shoulder every few steps.

“What about Liam’s body?”

Before I can say anything, the building drops like it’s heading for the center of the earth. Back in the chapel something pushes the eater out of the wall and starts climbing out. What looks like a human hand clad in gold emerges. I grab Brigitte, toss her through the hole, and jump through after her.

The Pacific water is icy. The salt burns my gut and the burn Ferox left on my chest. The rumble grows. Around us, whole sections of the beach slip into the ocean, leaving a deep chasm below, like all of Santa Monica might be pulled down on top of us.

I don’t know how deep we are underwater. I kick toward the surface, trying to keep an eye on Brigitte. As Kill City sinks the suction pulls us down with it, like the damned place is magnetic. I look back and something swims up from the churning murk below. A woman, completely covered in gold. Patterns on her skin like snake scales and circuit boards. She wears an elaborate golden headdress with swept-back wings. Half of her face is missing. An empty eye socket above a nonexistent cheek and a raw, ragged jaw are all that’s left on her right side. She reaches for me. I kick harder but it doesn’t feel like I’m putting any distance between us. She gets hold of one of my boots, but seems to lose strength. Her body drifts down a few feet. She comes to for a minute, but it’s too late. The suction is too strong that far down and she’s sucked into the swirling wreckage below.

When Brigitte and I hit the surface, we swim away from shore, out into the deeper ocean, as Kill City comes around behind us. I don’t know how long we swim. Maybe minutes. Maybe just one. When the noise and rumbling stop, I grab Brigitte’s arm and turn her around. She looks at me wild-eyed. She doesn’t want to go back. She isn’t swimming away from the wreck but from Traven’s body. I point her back toward shore and give her a shove. Soon she starts swimming.

We walk out of the water and collapse, exhausted and hurting. Brigitte is crying. Then it hits me.

“The 8 Ball. Where’s the 8 Ball?”

“I dropped it during the quake,” says Candy.

She goes to Brigitte and puts her arms around her.

Vidocq, drenched and looking every one of his hundred and fifty years, comes down to the water’s edge and pulls me onto dry sand.

“All that for nothing.”

“Not quite,” he says. And pulls the wooden vessel Traven made for the 8 Ball from his coat pocket.

“I’m a thief, remember? Once a thing is stolen, it doesn’t get away from me unless I want it to.”

I’m so relieved I laugh. Then I hear Brigitte crying. A crowd of early-morning swimmers and surfers gathers behind us. The remains of Kill City slip into Santa Monica Bay, pulling a million tons of prime beachfront real estate with it. Sections of it continue to settle and collapse. Hattie’s rooftop kingdom comes crashing down. Walls crush inward, revealing the food court and the dead interior amusement park. I look for bodies to bob up in the waves. Where are the rest of the Shoggots and the other tribes we saw inside? Where are the Grays? They’re fighters. They’ll survive. Crawl out of the water and crouch among the pier pilings until the crowds go home. Then move into Santa Monica and find another abandoned space to take over and call their own.

People pull out phones and cameras and snap photos. That’s my cue to move. I look around and find a beautiful shadow by one of the broken boardwalk supports. I get everyone on their feet. While the crowd is busy watching Kill City breathe its last, I pull us through the Room and into the Chateau. I want to say it’s a relief being home, but it’s not.

Kasabian looks up from his work. I don’t know what we look like, but even he doesn’t have anything smart to say. I curl up on the floor, waiting for the salt ache to ease up on my wounds. The others fall onto couches and chairs. No one talks. Candy brings Brigitte some whiskey. Brigitte cries like she might never stop.

I FIND A bottle of Aqua Regia and drink enough that I’m more wasted than I’ve been in a long time. Maybe since Alice died. Drunk enough that for a while I blot out Traven, the Qomrama, the end of the world, and every other ugly thing boring into my brain.

Things swim in and out of my consciousness. Candy. Vidocq. Kasabian tries to talk to me and I push him away. It seems like maybe Allegra is there at some point, working on me. It doesn’t matter. This stupid dream is a joke. God is a joke. We’re a joke. Bugs on God’s windshield. If the Angra want to bite down on this shit sandwich, I say let them. What’s left to lose but a world that never made any sense in a universe that’s so out of control it takes a bastard like me to roust a little bit of God from his beach home and get him back in the game? Or at least to Hell, which is probably where he belonged in the first place.