Dedication
For David Pomerico, who keeps the trains running on time
Epigraphs
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
I got a paper cut writing my suicide note. It’s a start.
Steven Wright
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
The Kill Society
Acknowledgments
The Devil in the Dollhouse
About the Author
Also by Richard Kadrey
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Kill Society
So far, being dead is about as much fun as a barbed-wire G-string.
Yes, there is such a thing. They invented it in Hell, which is where I am. I already said I was dead. Where else would I be? Try to keep up.
Where was I? I was talking about fun. First off, there’s the fact that I’m really, no shit, for sure, not coming back dead. I mean, I’ve been dead before, but now my body is stone-cold back in L.A., I’m in Hell, and I don’t see any angles to play. So, that’s a lot of laughs. As is the view. Up here on this spiky cliffside, Hell stretches out in all directions like the pockmarked belly of a gator with a bad case of just about everything. Acne. Psoriasis. Cancer. From the smell, gangrene and probably gingivitis, too.
Insult to injury: I’m stuck here with no weapons, no wheels, no fucking idea where exactly I am, and, oh yeah, there’s a dust storm the size of Texas headed straight for me. It rolls and thunders across the hardpack in the valley below. This leaves me with exactly two choices: I can sit up here on this nameless mountain and get ripped to shreds, a speck of chickenshit on the rocky tip of nowhere. Or I can go down into the valley and look this dust devil in the eye.
Not a lot to think about there.
I kick a rock down the slope and follow it as it tumbles ahead of me into the valley. As it goes, I spot something on the trail ahead. Bend down to pick it up. Okay, I might not know where I am, but I know I’m being fucked with. What I’m holding is a dusty pack of Maledictions. But no lighter. Someone somewhere is having a good laugh. With luck, they’ll choke on their good time while there’s still a little piece of me left to feel it.
The dust cloud reaches up into the bruised Hellion sky. It looks miles away, but sand and grit already sting my face. I walk straight at it for a while, then start to run. If Hell is going to shred me, let’s get it over with. I’m not even angry that Audsley Ishii murdered me right in front of Candy. Why would I be angry? I got to see Candy go Jade one last time as she ripped him to pieces. One last glimpse of her being exactly who she is. A gorgeous, perfect monster. My monster.
Good-bye, Candy. You made a stupid world hurt less and a place worth fighting for. And we broke a lot of furniture, the two of us. When this storm finishes me off and I fall into Tartarus—the only place lower than Hell—you’ll be what keeps me from going crazy in the dark.
All right, maybe I am a little mad about being taken away from her. But it’s too late now. The dust swallows me and Hell goes from a perpetual twilight to a rusty glow, the color of dried blood. My ghost nose closes with grit and my throat is rasped raw. I close my eyes and they instantly cement together. There’s nothing to look at anyway. I’ve seen my skin peeled off plenty of times in the arena. I know what my bones look like.
After a few minutes of running, I stop and listen. There’s a rumbling in the storm that’s more machine than wind. I swear, I can smell diesel fumes. And as much as the dust boils and tears at me, it isn’t nearly the storm I thought it was. It’s not a cocktail party, and I’ve been to some bad parties. The storm isn’t even what’s sending the dust into the sky. It’s something inside the storm.
I do a slow three-sixty. The rumble and smell of fumes get closer. When I’m facing it, I stop. Wipe as much grit from my eyes as I can. I can feel the sound in my chest, a deep shudder like someone running a drag strip through my ribs.
I’d do all kinds of depraved things right now for a smoke.
A second later, the rumbling stops. I don’t mean the noise dies down. I mean that whatever is causing it stops dead in its tracks, but it’s still growling and grinding as loud as ever. I stand where I am. Where am I going to go? Whatever it is, is a lot bigger than me, and if I’m about to get eaten, I’m going in facing the fucker. If I get lucky and it breathes fire, I might even get to smoke one last cigarette on the way down its gullet.
Choking dust billows around me, but I continue to remain uneaten. If whatever is out there wants to play games, it better be ready for a round of “Stark runs away and hides under a rock until the bad thing goes away” because without weapons, I’m not about to play Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots with a Hellbeast.
It’s a good minute before the dust thins out and I can see well enough to look for a weapon. All I find nearby is a baseball-size rock. I pick it up and weigh it in my hand. Fuck. It’s pumice. Light as a feather. I might as well throw marshmallows at the thing. I toss the rock back where I found it. I’m not sold on the concept of death with dignity, but I’d rather not be a story monsters tell each other around the watercooler.
The dust finally settles down and I get a look at what’s coming.
Huh. I didn’t think of that.
Turns out it isn’t one giant thing. It’s really a lot of big things growling and shuddering at the fucking sky. More than fifty of them.
The simple way to describe it is that I’m face-to-face with a smoke-belching desert rat parking lot of semitrucks and pickups, passenger cars, construction equipment, and motorcycles. There’s even a few hellhounds with saddles and riders. Maybe I should have kept my rock. At least I wouldn’t look quite so much like a deer caught in the headlights.
No. I’d look like a deer with a rock. Forget it.
We stare at each other just long enough for me to, one, notice that no one is offering me a ride, and two, get bored. So, I head over in their direction. I’m maybe twenty yards away when a Hellion in a jeep up front holds his fists over his head. The sound of the engines dies away. He’s a big, spiky bastard, like a horned toad in a doorman’s uniform.
“Stop,” he says. “Where are you from and where’s the rest of your group?”
“At the day spa at the Bellagio. Come on over. We’ll have a shvitz and get to know each other.”
The Hellion talks to a short, baby-faced damned soul in the jeep with him. The soul shrugs and points at me. The Hellion frowns. It doesn’t improve his looks.
“What’s a shvitz?” he yells.
“Really? You’re driving up Hell’s asshole with these Grease rejects and that’s the first thing that falls out of your skull?”
The Hellion stands up a little straighter.
“What did you say?”
“I said, does Baby Face dress you? ’Cause from where I’m standing, I bet you don’t know how pants work.”
The Hellion gets out of the jeep. The damned soul starts to hand him a rifle, but Horned Toad shakes his head and starts in my direction.
Well, I got his attention. Everyone’s attention. Now for the second part of my well-thought-out plan to get a vehicle and get out of this dusty shithole. If I stand still, I’ll look scared, so I head straight for Horned Toad. Along the way, I look around for weapons, but all there is around me is dust and more of those light stones. Halfway there, I spot some animal bones sticking up out of the hard ground. Something the size of an elephant died out here and the wind scoured it clean. I need to think of something fast or my bones are going to be the next thing on display.
The real problem isn’t that I don’t have weapons, though; it?
??s that I don’t know anything about myself right now. Am I still strong? Am I fast? Can I still do hoodoo or manifest my Gladius and if I can, do I want a hundred or so Leatherface grease-monkey types knowing it?
I guess for now, part two of my plan is stay alive—so to speak—see what I can get away with, and go from there. Yeah. That should work. No problem.
Another question that just occurred to me: In my present condition, am I still hard to kill? Will I heal if I’m injured or will I bleed out like any other sucker down here and wind up in Tartarus? Whatever the answer is, I think I’m going to have it in a few seconds.
Horned Toad stops about ten feet from me. I spot a gun on his hip and he catches me looking at it.
“Scares you, does it?” he says. “Don’t worry. Got to conserve ammo these days, and anyway, I don’t think you deserve a bullet.”
“No. What I deserve is to be back in L.A. with my girlfriend, her girlfriend, and a bunch of other nice people who don’t look like they eat bugs in a West Texas gulch.”
Horned Toad pulls a knife the size of a labradoodle.
He says, “What I like to eat are eyes. I’m going to eat yours one at a time. Let you watch me swallow the first one before I cut out the other.”
“It’s good to pace yourself. You don’t want to fill up before dessert.”
“I know about your type. Talkers,” he says. “Talkers are all cowards.”
I check my sides, and while the ground is flat and even, there’s nowhere to run to except the mountains. Besides, I’ll never outpace all these trucks and bikes.
I point at Horned Toad.
“You look like an apple-pie guy. Me too. Except when they put cheese on it. Do you like that? Can toads even eat dairy? Is that why you eat eyes? Have you tried Lactaid?”
“Kill him,” yells the baby-face guy from Horned Toad’s jeep. Other voices join him, chanting for Horned Toad to gut me.
He lunges at me with the giant knife. I dance back and he misses me by a mile. He lunges again and I jump to the side this time. Okay. I can still move. That’s the first piece of good news since I woke up here. I wonder what else I can do?
He lunges at me again, but it’s a fake-out. Instead of going for my gut, he does a second lunge down low. I move out of the way, but he still gets a piece of my left leg. It burns like hell and the sight of my blood gets the peanut gallery going with whoops and catcalls.
When Horned Toad comes for me again, instead of moving back, I dive under his arm and drive a knee up into his lower ribs. I hear him suck in air when the pain hits, but the fucker swings his blade down and slashes me across the back.
“Watch the coat, asshole!” I yell at him. “They don’t make these down here anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll leave your eyes and eat your arms and legs first. Would you like to watch me gnaw your bones?”
“I’d rather watch you do the backstroke in lava.”
He smiles and I smile right back at him. I’m the one bleeding, but he’s the one who just gave me an idea.
We go on like that for a couple more minutes. He lunges and I dodge the blade or the lucky prick gets a piece of me. I knock him back with some decent kicks and a few elbows to the head. The important thing is that I don’t stand still and I keep him moving in the direction of the animal bones nearby.
By the time we make it there, Horned Toad is leaning a little to his left from all the shots I’ve given him to the ribs. On the other hand, every time I move, my blood does a Jackson Pollock mural on the sand, so maybe we’re even at this point.
We trade blows a little more until I’m near enough to the bones that I can make my move. I let him get close and swing at my head. When he does, I give him one more quick kick in the ribs that knocks him back and leaves him open. As he rocks back, I grab one of the half-buried ribs to smash him with.
And nothing happens. The rib is solid in the ground. It isn’t going anywhere. Not with me yanking on it like a mouse trying to uproot a redwood.
I’d like to say that the laughs that go up as I pull on the rib don’t hurt, but they do. Though not as much as all my knife wounds and the feeling that I’m running out of options.
Horned Toad is really feeling good now and runs at me like a lizard-skin freight train. On the ground next to the rib I can’t budge is a big canine tooth from whatever died here. Just as he reaches me, I fall to my knees, grab it, and throw all of my weight behind a lunge at his legs. I drive the tooth deep into his thigh and twist it on the way out. Black Hellion blood splatters on my hands and coat. I roll away as Horned Toad drops to his knees. While he’s down, I jump at him, swinging the tooth down at his neck.
I guess fucking up Horned Toad’s leg in front of his friends really pissed him off because he does what every Hellion does when he’s losing: he cheats. To be fair, I’ve cheated in plenty of fights, too, but he grabs his pistol when I thought this was a knife fight, and, well, it’s a very upsetting moment.
I kick sand in his face, jump, and roll off to his right side. Horned Toad fires blind and ends up popping off a couple of shots at his own people. They scramble out of the way like dusty roaches. I want to scramble, too, but I know that with a crowd like this watching, it’s more important to stand my ground and risk being shot than to back down. With luck, I’ll still heal fast. With all the slices Horned Toad has taken out of me, I’ll know soon.
His Hellion Glock has an extended clip, and with the way he’s shooting, he’s bound to get lucky and hit me. It’s time to take action. It’s time to get strategic.
It’s time to do something really stupid.
I work my way around behind Horned Toad, with just a few feet between him and the skeleton. From what I figure, I was able to get away from most of his attacks, so I have a little speed left. And I was able to hurt the fucker, so I’m still strong. I hope that’s not all that’s left of the old me. But I’ve got to be careful and not give too much away until I figure out all I can do and who this Wild Bunch really is.
While he’s firing in the opposite direction, I run for the skeleton and grab one of the ribs. Like the first one, it doesn’t budge. This time, though, I use the noise of the gunfire to cover me as I whisper some Hellion hoodoo.
For a second, nothing happens and I’m sure that I’ve reached a new level of fucked. Then the hardpack around the rib shatters and I haul it out of the ground like a deranged Fred Flintstone.
Horned Toad stops firing.
“Where are you, mortal? Come and fight me like a man.”
From behind him, I say, “No.”
And swing the rib over my head, crushing Horned Toad’s skull like an anvil landing on a soft-boiled egg. It’s messy, and bloody, and I get toad juice all over my boots, but he’s sure as shit not firing his gun at me anymore. I grab it and his knife as his body blips out of existence and starts the long, nasty fall into Tartarus.
I stand there, breathing hard, but with a dumb smile on my bloody face. I can still throw some hoodoo. That’s the best news since I arrived here. Now I just have to keep all these creeps from finding out until I know how much I can do.
My little ego fest is cut short by bullets tearing up the ground around my feet.
Horned Toad’s pal, the baby face in the jeep, is running at me, firing the rifle. I guess he’s upset because he hasn’t grasped the fact that it’s really hard to hit anything when you’re running and your gun is bouncing around like a rubber duck in a typhoon.
This time, I don’t stand my ground. I run toward the fucker. The way he’s shooting, he couldn’t hit the sky from a weather balloon. When I’m close enough to see his pearly whites, I throw Horned Toad’s knife, and nail Dobie Gillis right through the throat. He falls on his face, gurgling into the sand. It’s an unpleasant sound, so I steal his rifle and drop to one knee.
More than Dobie, what I’ve had my eye on is another Hellion, this one a bit more human looking, in the flatbed of a small pickup truck, swinging a sixty-caliber machine gun in my directio
n. He has a good position and stable footing and I have a bad feeling that he knows what he’s doing. I can’t take a chance on missing him when I shoot. So I don’t shoot him.
I shoot a jerrican of fuel strapped to the side of the truck.
It explodes with an extremely satisfying whoomp. Satisfying to me, at least. It would be nice to think that the screams from the burning Hellion are him cheering me on for making such a great shot, but that’s probably too much to hope for.
I get a bead on the human torch while a group of Hellions and souls rushes to him with blankets and water to put out the flames. They’re not going to make it in time. I squeeze the trigger.
“Excuse me,” says a very human voice nearby. “Before you shoot.”
I glance over and there’s a small man in a white duster standing on the roof of what looks like an armored ’69 Charger with tank treads instead of wheels. He’s out in front of the pack, like maybe he’s the one leading them through the desert.
“Excuse me,” he says again through a megaphone.
I keep the rifle trained on Johnny Storm and yell, “What?”
“We would all appreciate it if you didn’t kill Megs.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m not aiming a gun at you. And I’m asking you politely.”
I take quick stock of my situation. There are maybe a hundred idiots out there in those vehicles. My guess is that every one of them is heavily armed and eager to kill. There are more high-caliber guns mounted on other vehicles and other Hellion weapons that I don’t recognize. If everybody opens up on me at once, hoodoo or not, I’m going to look like a flank steak shooting out of a wood chipper. Plus, I don’t know where I am. I still don’t know if I’m going to stop bleeding. I’m not sure that I can do hoodoo more complicated than yanking dead things out of dirt. I’ve swallowed enough sand that I’m going to shit cinder blocks. And I stubbed my toe on Horned Toad. It really hurts.
I lower the rifle and let the burning fucker’s friends put him out.