Devil in the Dollhouse: A Sandman Slim Story by Richard Kadrey Page B

talking or we’re going to see if you can dog-paddle through fire. I wonder if fried Hellion tastes like spicy or original recipe?”
    Geryon looks at me like I’m a moldy ham sandwich someone forgot in the back of the fridge at work.
    “What is it you want of me?”
    “The rest of the story. You were telling me about Henoch Breach.”
    Lucifer got me into this Hell mess and deserted me. Then Merihim and Ipos got me into this haunted house bullshit and they deserted me too. If you can’t trust a fallen angel, who can you trust? Geryon is supposed to have the lowdown on where we’re going but he hates me more than Aelita and Marshall Wells combined. Maybe Merihim and Ipos are smarter than I thought. Maybe they stuck me with Tiny Tears here to show me how much some of the townies despise me. Maybe I can even learn something from this guy if I don’t get bored and make his guts into a new fan belt for the truck.
    “Before the Breach there were the beasts. They were here when God threw us from Heaven’s walls. Few remember them and those who do think of them as nightmares. Nightmares from the terror of landing in this place. Some of us though, we still remember the truth. Great, fat obsidian snakes like blind worms and rats with fur like steel spikes.”
    I look out the front window. The air shimmers over the heat like waves on a lake. Molten rock flows in thick streams around burning boulders. Blackened bones of hellbeasts stick up from black patches of cooled lava like slaughterhouse stalagmites.
    “How in fuck’s sake are we supposed to get through that?”
    Geryon glances at the window and looks away. He’s scared but he doesn’t want to look bad in front of the mortal. Cry me a river.
    He says, “The rings are cruel. They are designed not to kill, but to break our spirits. We turn back now or we go through them, stopping for absolutely nothing. The choice is yours, thief.”
    The Unimog driver slows down and stops, waiting for me. He looks almost human, if the human summered in a trash compactor. His head is twice the size it should be and roughly the shape of a rotten pumpkin. His back is hunched and one of his arms looks like it was chiseled out of concrete. I nod to him.
    “Pour on the horses, Elephant Man, and don’t stop for anything.”
    The heat hits hard and fast, like one minute we’re fine and the next some bastard has dumped a ton of burning compost on our heads. Hellions might be fallen angels but they’re still angels, and seeing angels sweat like rotten meat is the kind of thing that can make a person tense.
    The ribbons of heat turn the air to Jell-O. It’s hard to breathe and I can barely see anything out the window. The driver inches us along the road at a crawl. The engine whines like it’s about ten seconds from melting down. I swear I can hear the tires sizzling underneath the truck. The troops in the back of the truck are getting restless, and by getting restless I mean pressing their ugly Hellion noses to the window, trying to see who’s going to panic first and do something incredibly stupid.
    Geryon sticks his head in the back and speaks to them.
    “We can make it. Others have and in lesser vehicles than this. We just have to be strong.”
    Geryon might be smart but he doesn’t have the best timing. Just as he finishes, both rear windows crack in the heat. One begins to fall apart but the other holds. Some of the troops grab their guns like they can shoot the heat away.
    The truck lists to the right and then lists more as we hit a patch of melting road. For a minute it feels like we’re going to roll over. Elephant Man shifts hard. Gears grind and scream like they’re about to pop out through the hood. Slowly the truck rights itself and just like that we’re clear of the flames. Like closing a window, we’re out of the smoker and onto a nice cool plate with cornbread and potato salad. The other two trucks are moving slow. I go to the back and look out the broken