The Dirty Streets of Heaven

But this was no octopus, or anything else I’d ever seen. It was vaguely man-shaped but huge, almost eight feet tall, and so dark that even by the parking lot lights I could barely make it out except for spreading horns on its head and a sloping, complicated muzzle that made it look a bit like some abstract sculpture of a minotaur. Even from a few feet away the heat it threw off was painfully intense.

There was no question of trying to stand up to something like this. I turned and sprinted across the motel parking lot. I could hear it galloping right behind me, shedding bits of splintered door as it came, so I dove under somebody’s sport wagon and desperately tried to claw my gun out of my waistband holster, which is no easy trick while you’re lying on your belly crammed under a greasy SUV. The thing still wasn’t making a noise except for its deep grunting breaths-That’s good, I thought, if it’s breathing maybe it can be hurt-but it knew exactly where I was, and it was very interested. It circled the wagon, then a big, hot hand suddenly swept underneath and missed my head by only by a few inches, and I swear I felt my eyebrows crisping as if someone had tried to close a waffle iron on my face.

An instant later the thing simply bent down and heaved the whole car up in the air, lifting it so that only two wheels still touched the ground. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if it dropped it again with me underneath, so I rolled to one side and finally was able to pull my revolver. I emptied it into the middle of the thing, all five slugs. I can’t believe I missed from that close but as far as I could tell, it did nothing but stagger the creature a bit and startle it into dropping the wagon, which bounced on its big tires as I took the opportunity to scramble farther away. We were making a lot of noise: as the echoes of my shots died, lights were coming on all over the building. I had no idea what was after me, but I didn’t want any ordinary people getting mixed up in this. From what I had seen, my assailant would go through them like they were made of butter.

My decision was hastened by the huge horned shadow scrambling over the wagon toward me. Later on, the police who investigated the scene would decide that the car had been vandalized with a blowtorch and a pick-ax, but I was there-those marks were made by fingers and toes, or hooves, or whatever it ran around on. The screech of punctured metal was enough to tell me what would happen if it ever grabbed me, so I jumped up and sprinted across the parking lot and out into the lights of the busy Camino Real, fumbling for my speed loader as I dodged startled, honking motorists.

This is why I hate carrying a gun, by the way. As soon as I’ve got it, I suddenly keep needing it.

Most witness reports afterward described something like a gigantic black bear in a Halloween wig chasing a man through traffic and at one point leaping over an entire cab, which had fishtailed to a stop behind a clutch of startled drivers. A lone dissenter insisted that not only had the man also jumped over the cab, he was being chased not by a bear but “a giant gorilla in some kind of Viking hat.” Other than that guy nobody but me seemed to have noticed the impressive sweep of horns.

I reached the other side of the Camino Real about a second and a half in front of the burning black shape. I was almost weeping with anger at my own stupidity in having stayed in the same place two nights in a row, and I was gasping for air as well, but I didn’t dare stop. I was pretty certain my aim hadn’t been the problem with my shoot-the-fucking-thing idea, and I didn’t have a new idea yet, so I kept running until I reached the used car lot across the street. Instead of diving under another vehicle (I didn’t trust the clearance on any of the economy models sitting there) I ran right toward the showroom window, feeling the thing closing on me from behind as if it were a rolling ball of lightning. A set of talons as wide across as a garden rake whooshed over my head. As I felt my hair sizzle I reflected that at least I had a pretty good idea now what had marked my door. At the last moment I juked sideways and by some miracle kept my feet, but the monstrous whatever-it-was had too much mass to turn that quickly and crashed full on into the ten-by-thirty plate glass window with a noise like a bomb going off in Chartres Cathedral.

By the time the thing dug its way out of the wreckage I was crouching on the bumper of the N 35 bus on the other side of the Camino Real, heading south. I could dimly see the shadow snorting and sniffing in the ruins of the showroom, but apparently it didn’t see me clinging to the bus’s rear quarter panel, struggling for breath while I bled gently down the CalTrans logo and onto the asphalt that was sliding away beneath me.

It doesn’t really count as riding because I didn’t buy a ticket.

ten

that frightened

I jumped off the bus in the Miramonte district at the southern end of the city. After a long conversation with the nervous desk clerk of a chain motel (and a bribe with one of the emergency twenties out of my money belt) I finally had a place to stay-“hide out” might be a better term, but I had no idea whether hiding from the thing that had just attacked me was even possible. Still, angels, demons, and even powerful malign spirits can’t flaunt the rules of cosmic order-it’s just that some of the rules are different for us folks than they are for you folks. If the monstrosity had a physical body, and it most definitely had (very hot, very strong, very mean-remember?) then it was operating on the physical plane. It might be able to track me by scent or something else, but in a city of a million plus it would have to get reasonably close to me first. The thing had almost certainly been pointed in my direction by some guiding intelligence, but that probably just meant it would be haunting my familiar spots. As long as I kept moving I should be all right, at least for a while. All the same (and not that it would slow something like that down for more than a couple of seconds) I put the chain on the motel room door and jammed a chair under the knob.

I had stopped at a nearby pharmacy for first-aid stuff, so after I took care of my wounds, which were fairly minor under the circumstances, I could finally leave my bandaged, Bactine-smeared body asleep on the motel bed to answer the summons from my superiors.

I wasn’t really looking forward to whatever was going to happen to me upstairs and wanted to put it off as long as possible, so I took the long way in to the Celestial City. I could do this without getting in trouble because there’s really no time in Heaven: when you’re there is when you’re there. It’s all Now. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to explain unless you’ve done it.

Anyway, since it wasn’t going to make a difference to anyone but me, I took the long, slow way through the Fields, breathing the sweet airs and letting the sight of the contented faithful dancing and singing on those infinite meadows comfort me. There’s a reason we angels do what we do, I sometimes tell myself (especially when the doing part has been particularly unpleasant, frightening, or painful) and in my case it’s to bring deserving souls to this happy rest. Every success means another person gets to leave all misery, sickness, and old age behind and come to live here, forever young in the gardens of the Lord.

Thinking that way helped-it always does-but it didn’t make all my problems go away. Didn’t make the whole mess easier to understand, either.

What was this horned abomination that seemed so interested in ripping my head off? It had the stink of the deeper pits of Hell all over it, but it’s very hard to manifest something like that in the real world-that’s one of the reasons angels and demons look pretty much like regular folk when they reside on earth: it’s just a lot easier to maintain something ordinary. So someone had been exerting a hideous amount of power to make that monstrous thing appear in the first place and keep it hunting me, which it had obviously been doing for at least a few days. Who wanted to hurt me that bad?

I wondered if finding out what exactly that monstrosity had been would give me a clue about who sent it. It was big and nasty, that was all I knew for sure, and it sure felt like a demon, but there was something unusual about it that kept me from being certain. It seemed old, somehow-primitive. Even the Opposition’s meanest, most monstrous fetches can usually communicate, or give you the impression they could if they wanted to. The horned thing had seemed empty of any thought but violence, more like an idea brought to life than a thinking being. I’d never seen or heard of anything quite like it, but it was definitely out there and definitely interested in killing the crap out of me.

By the way, you may be wondering why I fought so hard not to get murdered when death isn’t permanent for my kind. You’re probably thinking, Big deal, angel-guy, so something ugly chews up your body-you can always get another body, right? But what you’re missing is a few key facts. First of all-and this is