The Dirty Streets of Heaven

The monster had begun stamping and huffing its way all along the base and sides of the gate as if trying to find a weak spot in whatever charms or holy names held it at bay. Tired as I was, I still had no urge to stand in the cold lights of the garage waiting for the elevator while that unholy thing stared red murder at us, so I led Sam toward the stairs. After a few carefully selected words of disagreement, he followed.

We staggered out onto the fourth floor and down the hallway to The Compasses. A slightly faded sign next to the front door proclaimed, “Tonight-One Night Only! Gabriel and His Hot Trumpet at the Living End!” Chico’s put that sign out every day for years-somebody’s joke from way back when, now a tradition. It’s also a tradition that the front door is always open during business hours.

I ended that one.

“Hey, Dollar, what are you doing?” Chico shouted from behind the bar as I slammed the thing and threw the bolt. “We got fire regulations! The Opposition call in complaints all the time just to get us hassled-!”

“No time. Bad shit outside.” I looked around. There were only a few other people in the place: Young Elvis and Jimmy the Table camped at the bar along with Kool Filter and an angel friend of his named Teddy Nebraska who I didn’t know very well. It wasn’t quite the doomsday survival crew I would have chosen; Jimmy the Table is built along the lines of George from the Seinfeld show, and Kool looks like he’s just stepped off the Duff Breweries tour. Nebraska at least looked like he had some smarts-he was strapped and was already reaching for his piece at my announcement. I allowed myself to wonder for an idle second what he did before he became an advocate.

“What’s going on?” Chico was no slouch either; he was already digging under the bar. “What is it?”

“Demon called a ghallu. Big, hot as hell, and old,” I said. “Holy water won’t work. Silver-a little, maybe. That’s what I’m using, anyway. Beyond that I’m out of ideas.”

“Okay,” Chico said, straightening up. “Sam, you pushing silver or lead?”

“All I got’s Brand X.”

“Then catch.” Chico straightened up and lobbed Sam a pump-action Mossberg and a couple of boxes of shells. Sam caught them and started loading the magazine. Chico bent again and stood up with the ugliest-looking weapon I’ve seen in a while-a massive black shotgun with a round drum like an old-fashioned tommy gun.

“AA12,” Chico said. I think he must have been in the vengeance business too, once upon a time, but he never talks about it. Still, I hadn’t seen him this happy since the Davis verdict riots. “Automatic shottie. This will fuck some supernatural shit up.”

“Oh my God. What are you firing?”

“Silver nitrate-that’s silver salt for you lay brothers,” Chico told me with a very disturbing smile on his usually stoic Aztec face. “Gonna spread some pain.”

His own gun now loaded, Sam had started tipping over freestanding tables and shoving them against The Compasses’ front door. I ran to help him. At just that moment Monica came out of the ladies’ room with Annie Pilgrim, another co-worker I hadn’t seen much of late. For just the barest microsecond I wondered whether they been double-dating with Kool and Nebraska. And then I thought, Who the hell cares?

Monica’s eyes went very wide as they turned from Chico and his monstrous gun to me. “Bobby, what are…?”

“That ghallu thing that was after me? It’s outside trying to sniff its way through the wards. Any idea how strong they are?” Monica was our unofficial historian and knew a lot more about the Alhambra Building than I did.

“Strong.” She thought about it for a moment. “Does it fly?”

“The ghallu? Not as far as I’ve ever seen, but it sure can run-why?”

“Because the wards are strongest around the base of the building, of course, on the doors and windows on the ground floor.” She frowned, thinking. “And I’m pretty sure the roof is warded as well. But I’m not so certain about everything else.”

“What does that mean?” Suddenly I had a cold, cold feeling around my heart. “Monica, that thing can jump like a flea-a giant, two-thousand-degrees-hot, man-eating flea.”

“Push!” Sam shouted at me. We had almost completely buried the front door behind a pile of tables eight-feet high. It might not keep the ghallu out for long but it would keep it exposed as it smashed its way through-enough time for Chico and Sam and me to put a bunch of silver in it, anyway.

“It’s just that I’m not so certain about the upstairs windows…” was all Monica had time to say before the lights suddenly went out, and something huge came through the big glass rectangle behind us like a runaway jet plane, spraying glass and bricks everywhere, its blackness big enough to obliterate the very stars of the sky.

twenty

wards and wheels

Once again I was stuck in a dark room with guns booming all around me. At least this time I wasn’t the one being shot at.

Chico rested his front grip on the top of the bar and hosed down the hulking shadow that had come through the window, his gun on deafening full auto, strobing the darkness with muzzle flare. Beside me Sam fired the Mossberg slowly and methodically, trying to put as much of each load into the target as possible. I could hear Teddy Nebraska and Annie and Monica and Jimmy yelling, but the guns made too much noise for me to understand what they were saying. I’m guessing it was something on the order of “Oh, shit, what is that?”

The ghallu didn’t like Chico’s silver nitrate at all, which was probably all that was keeping us alive. Like rock salt from a farmer’s old bird gun it clearly stung more than it wounded, but from the howling and thrashing of the ghallu it stung a lot. How much it disliked the silver salt became clear a second later when it leaped right past me and bashed a smoking hole in the middle of The Compasses’ ancient mahogany bar in an attempt to get Chico. I didn’t see what happened to the bartender after he dove to the side but for at least the moment his weapon had been silenced.

“Annie, follow me!” Monica shouted as the ghallu dug through the wreckage of the bar like some monster badger trying to claw its prey out of the earth. I didn’t know what Monica was up to-running for her life, I hoped-but I needed to cover her, so I stepped forward with my revolver leveled, and as the thing turned its nasty, inhuman mask of a face toward the running women I started firing. The fetch swatted at the flashes and reared back from what I presume was the annoying pitter-patter of my little silver bullets on its skin. I hit an empty chamber and dove to one side to avoid being skewered by a spike of shattered bartop the size of a surfboard that the ghallu flung at me. I was seriously rethinking my little five-shot Smith amp; Wesson, which emptied in seconds. I hadn’t been forced into this kind of military rate of fire in a very long while, but right now I wished I had something with a more generous magazine. Like maybe a silver-throwing antiaircraft gun.

Sam had dug his way backward into the mound of chairs and desks we had stacked, which were now blocking our only exit, and from this improvised defensive position was laying down fire as fast as he could pump the Mossberg. I knew Chico had only tossed him a couple of boxes of shells, so he was going to run out soon. On the other side of the bar, and true to his name, Jimmy had turned over a table and he and Nebraska and Kool were barricaded behind it in one of the booths. I figured they were probably firing plain old lead, but even the ghallu still had to be made out of some kind of flesh and blood, since it was here on Earth vigorously breaking things: a shitload of regular bullets couldn’t hurt our cause any and might do some good as an annoyance. Young Elvis lay in a well-coiffed heap behind them, knocked silly by a piece of flying debris, but there was no sign of Monica and Annie in the main room, which made me feel a little better-maybe they would survive this unholy clusterfuck to tell everybody else what had happened. Then I could hope that somewhere up the line someone might pay Eligor back for letting his monstrous servant rip up The Compasses. I mean, the place was practically a sovereign embassy…!

The monster tore away chunks of the bar now, trying to get to Chico and his semi-automatic shotgun as the bartender fired the AA12 in ear-splitting drumrolls. Sam straightened up in his improvised blind and began peppering