Several of the soldiers had guns, long and impressively trimmed rifles currently pointed at my favorite person in Helclass="underline" me. Others had swords and axes. Either way, getting “cut down” was going to be painful.
“And what if I just shoot you before anyone can stop me?” I asked, turning my revolver from the nearest hellhound and pointing it at Niloch himself, aiming right between those shiny little red eyes. “I could live with that result.”
The commissar laughed, a fluting noise like a breathy, delicate sneeze. “Oh, perhaps you could—”
I didn’t bother to let him finish, because I hadn’t meant to start a conversation, just make him think that’s what I wanted. Like most of these lordlings of Hell, Niloch loved the sound of his own voice. I shot him in the face.
It didn’t kill him, of course, or even slow him down much, but I hadn’t thought it would. You don’t get rid of a major demon that way, even on Earth where the physics are against them. I was more interested in distractions: one of the lifters had chimed its arrival, and I knew it was now or never. As Niloch fell back toward his soldiers, his skeletal head temporarily a blossom of shattered bone, I threw myself at the row of lifter stalls as hard as I could.
I wasn’t particularly strong by Hell’s rigorous standards—I doubt I could have stood toe-to-toe with Niloch—but I was just strong enough to rock the flimsy, partitioned wall and start it collapsing. Again, I was lucky that Blindworm had been adapted for isolation rather than constructed that way from the beginning. The stalls were little more than the infernal equivalent of plywood. Even as the first soldiers got clear of flailing Niloch and began to fire their guns in my direction, the stall structure wavered and then collapsed sideways like a row of dominos. I took cover behind the wreckage and began firing back at Niloch’s troops.
As shocked as the waiting passengers were to have the structure fall on them and then find themselves in the middle of a gunfight, they were even more shocked to find themselves face to face with, or even literally tangled up with, their fellow citizens, the very thing they feared and avoided every waking minute. Needless to say, they shrieked and fought like only the terrified insane can fight, and within a few seconds the fracas was spreading through the terminal as customers were confronted by the twin horrors of hellhounds and their neighbors.
I scrambled along the floor toward the lifter column and then stood up and shoved my way through the panicked crowd until I found the open door. There was only one passenger, a tall, scrawny demon with a face like a depressed mortician, frantically palming the wall to get the door to close. I grabbed him and shoved him out to absorb any random bullets flying around, then called out the name of a lifter stop on a level above Blindworm. I needed to go down many levels to get out of Hell, but I didn’t want my pursuers to know that. In fact, since I had no idea if they could trace or even override one of the lifters and imprison me between levels, I didn’t even want them to know which one I was riding.
The door began sliding shut, but then clanged to a grinding halt around the broad neck of a nightmare head—one of the hellhounds. The sheath of its face pulled back as the wet pink snout came out. It didn’t have regular jaws in that awful jack-in-the-box muzzle, just a round, toothy mouth like a lamprey’s. It damn near reached me as I emptied the last of my bullets into it. Foul blood and bits of tissue sprayed back at me, then I put my foot on the beast’s chest, doing my best to avoid the ragged, wounded snout, and shoved so hard that I fell back on my ass. That would have been it for me, but the hellhound stumbled back just far enough for the doors to close, and a moment later I felt the lifter car coughing and vibrating into movement as I headed back up toward Pandaemonium.
Panting, forearm bleeding from a bullet wound that I hadn’t even noticed, I slapped the wall and called out the name of a nearer stop, then quickly reloaded my gun out of the oilskin bag as the car slowed. When the door opened, I stepped out in as relaxed a manner as I could manage, and several other passengers stepped in, clearly oblivious to what had happened just a couple of levels down. A few of them noticed the bloodstains on the floor and the pair of hellhound teeth in the corner, both as big as my thumb, but this being you-know-where, they didn’t seem too upset.
I didn’t even look around the new station, but simply got onto the next open lifter, which was also going up, then got out and went down a couple of times, then up again, making sure that I wasn’t leaving Niloch and his hunters an easy trail to follow. When I thought I’d mixed it up enough, I jumped into an open, empty lifter in Ragged Armpit station and told it to take me to the Abaddon level, far below.
I was exhausted, of course, and skin-crawlingly nervous every time the lifter stopped and new passengers entered, but after I had traveled downward for a good while unhindered, I began to think I really was going to make it.
Then, at the seventh stop, two of Niloch’s soldiers got on.
forty:
grey woods
LUCKILY, THE lifter was crowded and the two soldiers were talking to each other. Also luckily, they were just Murderers Sect and not the tougher, smarter Purified, the Mastema police. I sank back against the wall near the door, as much behind them as I could manage, and tried to look like just another infernal commuter on his way home, splattered in the blood and dog-brains of an average working day. Because of all my up-and-down trips to confuse the trail, I’d let Niloch’s hunters get past me, which meant I might run into them anywhere from here on down.
“His lordship is steaming,” said one of the soldiers, a bear-headed fellow with a neck big as my waist and shoulders you could build a house on.
“And he doesn’t look too good, neither,” said his companion with a guttural laugh. He was as big and ugly as his friend, although a little shorter. Both looked as though they could separate my head from my body with just a thumb and forefinger. “Did you see the commissar’s yap? Splinters on top of splinters!”
“If the spy hadn’t ruined my day with all this running about,” said Ugly Number One. “I’d shake his hand. ’Course I’d still rip it off him after that.”
“From the description, sounds like someone else already did,” said Number Two. His laugh was starting to annoy me already, but he was looking around the car now so I slouched back even farther and dropped my eyes. If he saw me, he wasn’t really looking at me, because he then said, “Why are we going down to Beggar’s End?”
“You dumb shit-hole,” said Number One. “Why do you think? The commissar’s putting us and a lot more on every level between Tophet and Lower Lethe. This escaped spy can’t go below the top Punishment Levels, see? He tried it once, and it made him sick. I heard some Mastema muckamuck was in a lifter with him when it happened, that’s how they know. So we start down in the Lethe levels and then we work our way back up, some on the lifters, some on the roads. Commissar’s got boats out on the rivers, too, ’case he tries that way again.”
It was all I could do not to groan. How was I going to get to the Neronian Bridge if Niloch and his thugs were going to be looking for me all over? For that matter, how was I going to get off this rotten damn elevator?