This is what I get for putting my life in the hands of a crazy road spirit. Mustang Sally would love wandering around like I have. More streets, more roads, more crazy-ass tracks in the dirt for her to claim. You’re going to get a lot more salty peanuts than candy the next time we meet, Sally. No more sugar rushes for you.
I hear stones crunch and fall behind me. I’m not scared. I recognize Jack’s footsteps. Don’t get too close, Loony Tune. I really want to punch something right now.
On the other side of the rubble is a big intersection. Malls and parking on one side. A forties-style apartment house on another. The Scientology Celebrity Center nearby. There are bodies curled up under the dead trees and bushes where they’ve turned the celebrity center into a pagan flophouse. Most are dressed in hospital greens and bathrobes. A few are in straitjackets that look like they’ve been gnawed apart. There are even a few demented hellions with them. Refugees from the asylum. Finally something like good news. I’m getting closer.
There’s faint noise in the distance. Yelling. Gunshots. Maybe even engines revving. Someone is having fun somewhere in Eleusis.
I should probably wait and get the lay of the land but one of these Sleeping Beauties knows where to find the asylum. I step down from the rubble and head across the street to the parking lot.
I don’t get ten steps when Jack grabs me. I spin and come up with the knife under his chin.
“Do not even begin to try your Ripper act on me. I’m not one of your scared Whitechapel girlfriends. I’ll teach you what every slash and cut you gave them feels like. I felt them in the arena and they don’t feel good.”
Jack looks past me, shaking his head. He raises his hand and points.
“Look at the street,” he says.
I look over my shoulder, keeping the knife at his throat.
“I don’t see anything.”
“The sidewalks. The buildings. The windows. There are no proper joins. No right angles anywhere.”
“Why would there be? Downtown is getting shaken to death like Lassie with a rat.”
“It’s not the tremors, sir. Look across the street at where the pavement is falling away.”
ight="0" width="12" align="left">“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”
I look to where he’s pointing. The corner by the apartment building is shattered and sinking in the middle. The soil under the street is a mix of black mud and red muck.
“We’re standing on a suicide road,” he says. “The blood tide rises from beneath and eventually everything above drops down into it. This entire street could become a sinkhole at any moment.”
I try to read him to see if he’s bullshitting me. He looks as calm as can be expected with a knife at his throat.
“Then what are all these sleepyheads doing here?”
He looks at me like he’s trying to teach a few first words to a particularly dumb parrot.
“These are the only safe parts of the city. Thieves and raiders won’t come down here.”
“ ‘Safe’ is a pretty loose term around here.”
“Not for this sad lot. It’s hide here or end up skewered.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m not anxious to go any farther.”
“No one asked you to come this far.”
“Have a wander on a suicide road and you could truly die down here.”
“Are you still here, Jack? I didn’t see you there.”
I put the knife away and head to the parking lot across the street. As soon as I step into the intersection, I see that Jack was telling the truth. The pavement crunches under my boots like an eggshell suspended over quicksand. An image of Alice dead down here and stuck in the Limbo between Heaven and Hell flashes in my head. I hear Medea Bava’s voice: Alice was ours.
No. She wasn’t, you old witch. I would have known.
Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?
I push it all into the dark. Let the angel explain it to her. He’s Mr. Sensitive. Medea will like him.
It’s one thing for me to know that Jack was telling the truth and another for Jack to know I know it. I keep going. If I step lightly, the worst that happens is I sink an inch or so into the road at the weak spots. I don’t look back or acknowledge Jack. The last thing I want is to owe him any more favors. No2" e favort that ignoring him means anything. Halfway across the street, I hear him behind me. It sounds like he’s trying to crush wine out of cornflakes.
“Stay the hell away from me, Jack. This road won’t hold if we bunch up.”
That was the wrong thing to say. He thinks I’m leaving him on the suicide road. I can hear him hurrying to catch up with me.
The road goes snap, crackle, pop and drops a few inches. Cracks shoot out from under us like black lightning. I run for the sidewalk. I sink lower into the road with each step. The lower I sink, the more the sewage muck tries to suck me backward and down into it. By the time I hit the sidewalk, it’s like I’m doing some kind of hick aerobics, stumbling like a pig farmer through shit while trying to get my knees up high for a real Jane Fonda workout. Feel the burn, Jethro.
The corner of the sidewalk crumbles as I jump from the muck, but a couple of steps in, it holds. I finally turn around and there’s Jack. Up to his knees in blood and mud. It’s where he belongs. Still dreaming of knives and all the women no one knows about because he dumped them like fish food into the drink. Fuck him. Let him go.
But I know the look on his face. It’s what I looked like when I fell from the sky into Pandemonium. It’s a feeling way beyond fear because your brain can’t get hold of it enough to be afraid. You want to be afraid. Afraid would be a hundred times better than this. This is total fucking incomprehension at what’s happening and it’s all happening to you. It’s being sane one second and stark raving spiders-tunneling-their-way-out-from-under-your-skin insane the next.
I kneel by the edge of the corner far enough back so I know the ground is solid and I hold out my hand. It’s the least I can do. Literally the least.
Jack scrambles for it in a panicked stumbling slog, sinking faster now that he sees a lifeline. He’s almost up to his waist by the time he reaches the corner.
“Help me!” he yells. I move my hand half an inch closer.
He’s practically swimming when he reaches the corner. Goddammit. He gets close enough to grab a couple of my fingers. I close my hand around his and pull. It’s the very least I can do. I’m amazed and a little pissed off when he swings a leg onto the sidewalk. I let go and let him get out the rest of the way on his own. I look over at the celebrity-center bushes where the asylum refugees have been passed out. They took off. They’re crazy. Not stupid. The street was sinking. I lean back against the low wall around the mall and look up at the black boiling sky. Are you explaining to Candy for the five-hundredth time what an asshole I am, Kasabian? Is she pissed at me for saving this walking, talking piece of shit? Candy wouldn’t have done it. She’d have put her boot on Jack’s head and helped him down under the muck. And I would have loved her for it.
Panting and stinking like sewage and rotten fish, Jack pulls himself onto the sidewalk and collapses. I light a Maledic thht a Mation.
“Stay over there, Jack. You smell like what comes out of Moby-Dick after a truck-stop burrito.”
He just lies there gasping and trembling like a trout tossed on land by a passing boat.
I smoke for a couple of minutes, until Jack stops shaking.
“You scared off all my crazies, you know. I was going to get them to take me to the asylum. Now they’re gone. Do you know where it is? Be very careful how you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it and I’m going to feed you back into the muck face-first.”
He points to a dome on top of a hill that’s mostly mud and dead grass. Huts and lean-tos made of scrap lumber, flattened aluminum cans, and drywall from the asylum flow from the top of the hill and down the sides like junkyard lava. Looks like a lot of the crazies had it together enough to escape, but not enough to cut the apron strings and leave home.