“Ah, yes,” he said. “Think you could? But I’d have it first, and then boom! The worse for you!” He chortled, his sagging face as empty as a jack-o-lantern. He was beginning to scare the crap out of me.
“Just let me out here,” I said. “This is where I wanted to go. Thanks for the ride.”
“Thanks?” Now he looked directly at me, and the wide-eyed expression on one half of his face looked even more severe next to the slack features on the other side. Saliva was dripping from the side of his mouth. “You have the audacity to give me thanks? When you want to murder me?” He slowed the vehicle, fumbling for his gun, which lucky for me was clumsily long for the crowded passenger cab. My pistols were still on the floor, and I knew I’d never reach them before he could shoot me, so I yanked open the door, kicked my guns into the road, then threw myself out after them.
A moment later there was an explosion like thunder. Hot gases leaped over my head as a chunk of the building ahead of me flew into powder and chips. As I went scrambling through the dark in search of my pistols, I heard Joseph get out of the car and cock his gun again. “Try to kill me, eh? Come back to try again, eh? Put another hole in Joseph, eh?” he shouted, but before he fired again the nighttime street was ripped by one of the most fearsome noises I’d ever heard: a howl that made my skin want to crawl right off my body and run away without me. The hellhounds. The hellhounds were inside the city. But I’d left them back in the hills, miles away. How had they caught up so fast?
Joseph may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid enough to mess with hellhounds. As I recovered my guns, I heard his door slam closed. Then he drove away.
As the noise of his engine dwindled, one of the beasts howled again, an echoing, whooping cry that could stop a healthy heart. Another answered, and it sounded even closer. They were spread out and hunting me, and I was at least half a mile away from the lifter tower in the center of the city. And now I was on foot.
There are times to fight, but this wasn’t one of them. This was a time to run.
thirty-nine:
isolation row
SELF-PRESERVATION IS the number one rule in Hell, as you’ve probably already figured out, so you can guess how many people leaped out to help as I sprinted through Blindworm’s business district.
Even as I ran, the bizarre sights of what crazy Joseph had called The City of the Selfish jumped out at me, streets and sidewalks as wide as in a fascist capital (so people could avoid each other more easily, I guessed), public spaces segregated by stalls and blinds so that they didn’t have to see each other and the clerks and shopkeepers never had to see more than one customer at the same time. Even the tracks of the central train station, which I followed toward the lifter column, had walls between them, presumably so the passengers in their individual compartments didn’t have to see riders in other trains. And of course, since it was a big city, even in the middle of the night people were out—cleaners, night-shift workers, coffee shop waitresses and their patrons arranged behind plate glass windows like museum exhibits. And none paid attention to anyone but themselves. Tunnels, walls, boxes, hatches, Blindworm had developed a world-class system of separation. I might as well have been in the middle of the Gobi desert, running across a sand dune, hoping for assistance from the lizards. Not that I was expecting help as I fled down Lonely Street (no shit, that really was the name). The only good thing was, if I didn’t get in their way, the citizens of Blindworm weren’t likely to get in mine, either. City of Sociopaths might be a better name, I thought.
The hellhounds’ bronze claws clattered loudly on the pavement, just half a block behind me now. Even the self-absorbed local citizens were beginning to pay attention, not to me but to the horrible rasp and clang of the pursuit: they disappeared from the street like startled mice as the howls echoed down the lonely corridors between buildings.
I looked back as I turned onto a wide thoroughfare called Isolation Row. The first hound was just turning the corner, mouth jutting from the retracting snout in a complicated snarl of teeth. The beast was almost as high at the shoulder as I was, but I could only run on two feet. It was like being chased by Eligor’s ghallu all over again—another ancient evil that had wanted to tear me to pieces, that had been bigger and faster than me, too—but this time I had no silver bullets, no Sam or Chico to help me, nothing. I cocked both my pistols, put my head down, and tried to find a little more speed in my exhausted muscles.
I could see the station beneath the massive lifter tunnel at the end of the wide street, and I dug toward it. Several hellhounds were only yards behind me, a rapid-fire clink of claws on asphalt, but I didn’t dare look back again.
The station doors were open. I leaped through, nearly knocking myself out on the first of a series of switchback barriers. Instead of a vast open space, like anyone would have expected in such a large public building, the whole thing had been turned into a rabbit run of mazy walls. I had no time to try to puzzle it out, but luckily the walls were only a little higher than I was tall, and I could still see the broad bottom of the lifter tunnel at the center of the concourse. Apparently, Blindworm had been built with a more conventional hellish population in mind and only modified later.
Just like The Infernal Fauna of the River Phlegethon, the sociological peculiarities of Blindworm could occupy a team of scholars for decades, but all I wanted to do was to survive the next minute or two. I sprinted through the maze, committing about thirteen or fourteen Blindworm Cardinal Sins by not only overtaking other citizens from behind but literally knocking them over so I could get past. The hounds were right behind me, and the Blindwormers who got in my way didn’t curse me long; I heard an entire train of shrieks and mayhem noises behind me as the locals found out what I was running from.
I burst out of the first set of walls into what had been the center of an old concourse, divided now into a beehive of isolation stalls where the passengers could wait. In a continuation of my run of shitty luck, none of the lifters was signaling, which meant that all the doors were still closed. There were no indicator lights to let me know which ones would be available next, either. For all I knew, the next five lifters to arrive might be on the opposite side of the huge central column.
A deep, reverberating snarl made me leap forward just in time to avoid the hellhound that came barreling out of the passage behind me, an unlucky commuter in his huge jaws. The beast shook the poor, screeching bastard like a terrier with a rat, then dropped the limp body when he spotted me.
I backed toward the lifter column, guns drawn, as the hound came toward me. I had tested Riprash’s pistols enough to know I couldn’t trust any shot much beyond ten paces, so I waited. But as I tried to keep my gun hand steady and the barrel pointed at its sloping forehead, two more hounds scrambled out behind, one of them chewing contemplatively at the tattered remains of a leg wrapped in a bloody dress.
I might have been able to take out one of the monsters with the bullets I had in the crude revolvers. I was a lot less sure about three. And even if I managed to shoot every hellhound dead without having to reload, I still had to deal with Niloch and his huntsmen who must be close behind. I could only see one chance open to me now, so I backed up a little farther, until I was standing beside a wall of partitioned stalls.
“Ah, yes my dear, there you are,” said a voice as rotten as week-old fish. Niloch made a whistling noise and the hounds backed off. The commissar shuffled forward out of the entrance maze, something like a long buggy-whip in one hand, a jagged knifelike blade in the other, his bone-frills fractured and charred. “You’ve led us quite a chase, Snakestaff, but now that silliness is over. I can get on with the important business of making you wish you’d never heard of my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw House.” He turned his bony head toward the soldiers following him out of the maze; they had to kick the torn corpses of several Blindworm citizens aside to force their way onto the open concourse. “Here he is,” Niloch told them. “You wouldn’t think to look at this puny creature that he could be dangerous, but he is, my sweetlings, oh, yes, he is. So look lively. If he does anything silly, cut him down immediately.”