In this city, the people are all dead.
* * *
What is this place? Cinny wondered. She lay in a stinking alley, flat on her back as if dropped there. Cut-off jeans and a holey t-shirt that read MOTORHEAD. A tiny tattoo on her ankle affirmed NOWHERE LEFT TO GO BUT DOWN.
What am I doing here? she thought, but the thought speared her mind like an ice-pick. She tried to think back, couldn't remember. All she knew was this:
I'm in a city ...
It was too big for St. Pete, she knew. She turned tricks there all the time, when Harley Mack was either in jail or too strung out to deal ice. Cinny would do anything for Harley Mack-and she had, literally, anything-because she knew the only thing keeping them together was their mutual addiction to crystal methamphetamine. Her eyes opened wider, and then she shrieked when something chittered alongside. A rat-a big one. She saw its shadow slip away into a pile of garbage. The animal looked the size of a puppy.
Cinny tried to get up but couldn't yet. Her heart was beating funny-it did that a lot lately, when she smoked too much crystal at once-and her mind continued to reel, not just from the toll the drug was taking on her but from her confusion. Some john must've knocked her out; it happened all the time, a hazard of her profession and one she'd long since learned to live with. They were too cheap to fork over the twenty-five bucks, so they'd just hit her in the head with a blackjack or something, then dump her somewhere later. That must've been what happened. Some trick jacked me out and dumped me here.
But-
Where, exactly, was here?
She peered harder out the mouth of the alley, leaning up now on her hands. No, she wasn't in St. Petersburg and she knew as well that this couldn't be downtown Clearwater. This city was too big for either of those. Tampa, she realized. Right now Cinny was looking at some big buildings, and there were plenty of those in Tampa. It just seemed a whole lot of trouble, though. Why would a psycho john drive her all the way from St. Pete to Tampa just to hurt her?
She thought back harder, her heart still beating funny, beating slow. Then some memories began to emerge, recollections that dashed her previous suspicions: Wait a minute ... I wasn't turning tricks tonight. I was with Harley Mack. We were breaking into that place it was a pharmacy or clinic or something ... The memories continued to jell. Harley Mack had gotten wind of a local medical clinic that had a lot of Dilaudid and other synthetic smack stored in its pharmacy vault. That kind of stuff went for big money on the street these days, so he and Cinny had broken into the place ...
But that's all she could remember.
Gotta get up, gotta get out of here, she told herself. She'd remember the rest in time; the actual events that had led to her being in this stinky, rat-infested alley weren't important right now. She had to find Harley Mack. She had to get up and get going, and hitch a ride back home.
Get up, get up, get up! she was yelling at herself now, but she was still so dizzy and racked out, any movement sent her senses reeling. She sighed and lay back down against the slimy pavement, tried to settle down and catch her breath.
Then she heard the sound.
What's ...
A vigorous, wet smacking.
The sound emanated from her left side; she quickly turned her head.
"Who are you!" she shrieked when she saw the man sitting there.
He sat against the alley's wall, dressed in rags that reeked. A homeless bum. He was loudly eating food and looking right at her at the same time. Eventually he said, "My name is Edward Teller." His yellowed eyes went briefly wide in some secret enthusiasm. "Have you heard of me?"
Cinny squinted. God, he stinks! "No," she replied.
"You're not very well educated, are you?"
Cinny chose not to answer the ridiculous question. So what if she actually had dropped out of school in the seventh grade? Who was he to insult her? At least I'm not a stinky bum!
"I built the Fat Man with Oppenheimer," he said.
"Huh?" Cinny said.
"Then I invented the hydrogen bomb."
You're crazy, Cinny thought. She saw street people like this all the time; they were all nuts, they were schizos.
Then he said, "Excuse me, my foot itches," and he pulled off a corroded tennis shoe. The stench that wafted up was the worst odor Cinny had ever encountered in her life. Her sinuses seemed to swell shut. Clumps of something fell to the pavement when he peeled off a sock; it took Cinny a moment to realize what the chunks were: pieces of dead flesh, white as paraffin. In fact most of the flesh on the bottom of his foot had peeled off with the sock. Toenails yellow as a YIELD sign stuck out inches long, out from under which grew parasitic green mold.
Cinny was reeling at the stench. "Put your shoe back on!"
"Oh, of course. You're new here. You're not acclimated to such things yet."
What did that mean? The smell was so awful it made her teary eyed, like tear gas. "What city is this?" she tried to get through to him. "Is this Tampa? I don't know where I am."
"It's not Tampa. It's the Mephistopolis."
Cinny peered at him again. "It's ... what?"
The bum shrugged. "You're dead. You died and went to hell."
Jeeze! she thought now. This guy really was crazy. But even beyond the impossible abstraction, Cinny knew she wasn't a bad person. She'd done things in her life that were bad but they weren't her fault. The meth made her do those things.
Her mind trailed back. Sure, she'd helped Harley Mack set up her first husband, Barny, but Barny had beaten her, he'd nearly killed her a few times, so Cinny had slipped Harley Mack the key to the trailer one night and he'd killed Barny with a hub-cap mallet and made it look like a burglary. He'd also killed the dog and Barny's mother, who'd happened to be visiting; then there was the neighbor who'd seen him go into the trailer-old Mrs. Hollis, who was, like, ninety or something. Harley Mack had had to beat her head in too because she was a potential witness.
But Cinny hadn't done those things, Harley Mack had, so why would Cinny go to hell for his crimes? Turning thousands of tricks wouldn't condemn her to hell, would it? There were prostitutes in the Bible, at least that's what she'd heard. And then there were her two babies. She'd sold them both for meth money to an "adoption broker." He'd promised her that the babies would go to good, wealthy parents who'd give them a better life than Cinny could. It wasn't Cinny's fault that the broker was lying and that he'd actually sold them to some underground research lab where they did experiments with infant brain tissue. The broker would go to hell, not me! she thought.
It didn't matter anyway. She wasn't in hell, she was in Tampa, and she had to find someplace to hitch a ride back home. She could care less what this nutty old bum was saying.
This time Cinny made a concerted effort to get up. She tried to put her feet down against the pavement-
But couldn't.
Then she started screaming. By now her eyes had acclimated to the alley's darkness and she could see why she couldn't stand up.
Both of her legs were gone from the knees down.
"Sorry," the bum said. "I couldn't help it."
He continued to eat, lips smacking. He was gnawing ravenously on her left calf, like a big turkey leg. Her right calf and most of the foot connected to it had been consumed to the bone. It lay glistening beside the bum.
Cinny screamed so hard she saw stars, but in between the stars two figures approached. They seemed hulking but quick, as if homing in on her horror. Were their eyes alight through lids like chisel-slits? She could make out no details, only the most vague fragments of features. Heads like silhouettes of anvils, with protrusions, like horns. Hooks for hands. Grins akin to black holes full of nails. That was all she could see, and all she needed to.
But it must be a nightmare: there were no people like this, not really. It was all those years of meth that made her see these things. They weren't monsters, they were just men, and her mind was making her see the rest.
HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP! POLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE! WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE CALL THE POLICE!"
The chuckling rose. The bum remained where he sat, having just finished the last morsels of his meal, and he calmly informed her: "I hate to tell you this, but those two men are the police ..."
* * *
Hell is a city.
It stretches, literally, without end-a labyrinth of smoke and waking nightmare. Just as endlessly, sewer grates belch flame from the sulphur fires that have raged beneath the streets for millennia. Clock towers spire in every district, by public law, but their faces have no hands; time is not measured here in seconds or hours but in atrocity and despair. In the center of this morass of stone and smoke and butchery and horror stands the 666-floor Mephisto Building, where Gargoyles prowl the wind-blown ledges and from whose highest garrets the innocent are hung from gibbets and left to rot for eons. The lone occupant of the very top floor looks down upon his dominion and smiles a smile that is brighter than a thousand suns. Here, yes, everyone is dead yet everyone lives forever.
Welcome to the Mephistopolis.
Welcome to the city of Hell.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Infernal Angel by Edward Lee Copyright © 2004 by Edward Lee. Excerpted by permission.
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