The fireballs chew up his face, but he protects his one working eye and brings his shield down at me like a guillotine. I get the na’at into his gut a few inches, but not far enough to finish him. He swings the shield at my head, but I duck it. He raises it high and brings it straight down on the na’at, snapping it in half. That’s not supposed to happen. When a na’at is hit like that, it goes limp and bends in the middle like rubber. Mine shatters like glass. The break is clean and bright like someone’s taken a hacksaw to the thing and cut partway through it. I look at Crab Man. The na’at was rigged and he knew it. In the second it takes me to understand that, he gets my left arm in the Vernalis and closes the pincers. There’s a single white convulsion of pain as he crushes my arm and snaps it off a few inches below my shoulder. It’s a race between the arm and me to see who can hit the ground first. I win.

The crowd is going completely apeshit. For a second, the mad screaming and stomping sounds like I’m back in the real arena. I relax. I don’t want to croak in a backwater Hooverville soccer-mom park, but being back in the real arena, I can die happy.

Crab Man is bowing all the way around the stadium. Me, I just lie there and bleed. I’m done and he knows it. I want to go to sleep and stay that way. The angel in my head starts shouting. He reminds me that if I go out, I’ll die and so will Alice.

I let my mind float away and the pain takes me over completely. The agony of crushed muscles and bones revs my engines nicely. I bark a Hellion combat spell to slow the bleeding and another to suck the blood into the dirt so no one will notice it’s human.

Crab Man is soaking up the love. A few more bows and he’ll come back and finish me.

John Wayne wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, but that’s my favorite target.

I manifest the Gladius and drag myself up. I’m not what you’d call steady on my feet, but I’m close enough that I don’t have to be. I raise the Gladius as high as I can and slice off Crab Man’s Vernalis arm. The crowd goes silent. Crab Man stares at his stump. I take off one of his legs next. He falls on his face, balancing on one arm and one leg. He’s trying to move around to face me so he can attack. He swings his shield blindly, hoping I get too close and he can crush me. I let him close the distance before taking that arm, too. I keep waiting for the armed guards to open up with the shotguns, but they’re watching, as stunned as the drunks in the stands. I stagger around in front of Crab Man. I want him to see this.

He’s got one leg left and I slice that off at the knee. I want him to look in my eyes. I want the crowd to soak up every minute of this. I’m killing all of them. Every portion of pain I bring on Crab Man I’m bringing down on them. Genocide is evil and evil tastes good right now.

I slash Crab Man from right to left, through his chest. Before he comes apart, I swing the Gladius up and over, slicing him neatly from skull to ass. He falls apart in four big cauterized chunks of honey-baked ham.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call showmanship, with love from Sandman Slim.

The stadium is still quiet, like all the air has been sucked out of the place. But all it takes is for someone to drop a bottle and the sound sets everyone off at once. You didn’t see that coming, did you? Some ugly half-dead Hellion foot soldier that could pull out a Gladius. Sleep tight wondering what other secret things us infantry grunts can do.

My left arm has stopped bleeding, but it’s still a big open wound. I bark a pain spell, hold the Gladius to my arm, and burn the wound closed. Then I fall over and drift into a comforting blackness.

I feel a couple of guards drag me back to the holding pens. I don’t go back into the pen with the other prisoners. They toss me incoly toss to one of the blacked-out RVs alone. Even through the half-dead haze I can see they’re scared shitless. Maybe I’m a spy or an officer from Pandemonium come to check up on them and they just tossed me into a death pit with a roid-rage moron. The smell of my burned skin is making me nauseous. Damn I could go for a cigarette right now.

I feel around for the Maledictions. This really is Hell. One cigarette left and it was crushed beyond all recognition in the fight. I toss the pack into the dark. The angel is trying to remind me of something. I reach back into the pocket and find Muninn’s hoodoo healing egg. I bite into it and something soothing and sweet flows down my throat. In a few seconds my head is clear. I’m still weak, but the pain is gone and the world feels firm under my ass.

I let the angel loose. I need to think through this, because unless my new stump has a 007 plan to get us out of here, I’m going to have to call leaving my arm back in the arena a major setback.

I wonder if there’s a way to turn off the antihoodoo cloak around this place. I’m not too proud to crawl into a shadow and whimper in the Room for an eternity or two. Mason’s already putting up wanted posters. He knows I’m here. What do I care if one of his pet magicians detects me using the key? But I’m back in the holding area and the cloak is on, so I can’t throw any hoodoo. And there’s no way I’m fighting my way through all those guards with a wing clipped.

I need to stop for a minute and catch my breath. I don’t know how long Muninn’s egg is going to last. I need to keep moving while it does. I let the angel take over my senses. It can see right through the RV’s tin-can walls.

I expect to see Rommel and the Afrika Corps around the place, but there isn’t a Hellion within a hundred yards of me. I’m Chernobyl in a white-trash pied-à-terre. The angel does a three hundred-and-sixty-degree scan around the place. The few Hellions brave enough to be within eyesight are all on the arena side of the RV. Behind me is an empty field. But the RV is protected by the same Malebranche hex that zapped me good back in the flatbed. I cut a person-size hole in the wall and fall through. If I keep the RV between me and the posse, I just might be able to slink away into the dark with my tail tucked between my legs.

I guess this is Plan B.

JUST A FEW blocks away the streets are packed. I’m not sure where I am. I try to look nonchalant with my missing arm and the side of my coat soaked with dried blood and scorched by the Gladius. The crowd makes it easy to disappear. So does the fact that a lot of the losers lying in the street and begging around the food stalls don’t look much better than me.

I wonder if any of the big brains back at the stadium have figured out I’m not in the RV anymore. One of the brave ones is going to check out the arm I left behind, see that it’s human, and eventually figure out who it belongs to. My wanted posters are all over, so knowing the arm is mine doesn’t bother me, but I hate the idea that some Hellion cocksucker is going to stick it on his wall as a trophy.

This is the first crowded patch of land I’ve seen in Eleusis. Hard-core raider country. Instead of hitting the individual corner markets, the enterprising ones have cleared them out and set up their own stalls. It’s a county-fair midway, full of ugly Hellspawn and starving pagans desperate or brave or stupid enough to pick through the gutters and garbage for leftovers. Looking at what’s going on at the stadium and the ruthless bastards picking the city clean out here, I can’t see much difference between the raiders and the posse that followed Jack and me except who pays their salaries. It makes me wonder how many soldiers in Lucifer’s legions were true believers and how many were simple mercenaries. Another nice design job, God. You ate your roughage and shit out an angelic army that could be bought off with beer and Twinkies.

There are impressive cracks in the sides of some buildings. Like the houses, some are supported by power poles. Others by gas-station hydraulic lifts and broken-down backhoes. There are open cesspits on the side streets near piles of trash two stories high. That’s where most of the crazies and the pagans hang out, picking up and pocketing anything they can eat or trade. Cracks in the sidewalk ooze sewagey blood, but I don’t see any big sinkholes. That’s probably why everyone is bunched up in this part of town.