Highways to Hell Read online

  Her smile broadened, became truly radiant. “Hello, John. I knew you were coming. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”

  Beyond any shadow of a doubt, it was her.

  Angela Willis.

  A memory came to him. Angela’s mother on the news, crying for the cameras, begging the police to do anything to catch the monster who had taken her baby.

  John turned and ran.

  He shoved his way through the crowd on the sidewalk with heedless abandon, knocking a fat man into a demon’s back in the process. The demon turned, snarling as its black wings unfurled. Its mouth widened, the flesh displaying a shocking level of elasticity as the black maw grew to a size large enough to swallow the fat man’s head, which it promptly did. John kept moving, turning his back on the demon as its flashing, razor-sharp teeth clamped together.

  He glanced back twice to see if Angela was pursuing him, but he seemed to have lost her in the foot traffic. He slowed his pace and eventually came to a panting stop outside the open door of a rock club. Live music blared through the open door, filling this section of the street with its concussive beat. It was yet another AC/DC song. “Night Prowler.” John frowned. It was obvious he was hearing live music and not a recording. But that voice...

  Nah, couldn’t be...

  Curiosity and the need to find a place to hide and collect his wits drew him into the club. The place wasn’t very big, a dark and grimy dive. There was a bar and a stage. Between them was a scattering of tables. The people sitting at the tables were drinking and watching the band, who were not AC/DC. The singer, though, was Bon Scott. No mistaking that guy for anyone else, and no mistaking that whiskey-drenched Scottish yowl. Some of the musicians in his backing band looked kind of familiar, too. A younger John Marlowe would likely have recognized them all on the spot.

  “Night Prowler” ended and Scott interacted with the crowd, cracking jokes and engaging in witty and ribald banter with a large-breasted female in a miniskirt. The female was humanoid, but not human, with red eyes and tusks protruding from the corners of her mouth. Two small black wings, unnoticeable at first, were folded tight against the broad expanse of her back. John cringed at an impossible-sounding proposition made by the she-thing, then wandered over to the bar, slid onto a stool, and ordered a beer.

  The bald and burly bartender crossed his massive tattooed forearms and sneered. “Ain’t got no Guinness.”

  “Newcastle?”

  “Nope.”

  “Spaten?”

  “You ain’t in Germany, dickhole.”

  “Harpoon IPA?”

  “You really aren’t getting the picture, are you?”

  John rattled off a long list of other favorite brews, none of which were stocked at the Dirty Halo, which was the name of the place. “Look, can I just get a menu?”

  The bartender picked up a glass and placed it under a tap. “Shut up, asshole.” He flipped the taphead down and filled the glass with a rich, dark brew. He set the glass in front of John. “Drink that. You’ll like it.”

  John picked up the glass, sniffed at it, and took a tentative sip. The sensation of the liquid on his tongue was exquisite. He showed the bartender an astonished expression. “Dear God, that is the best fucking beer I have ever fucking had.”

  The bartender smirked. “That’s Gein’s Mean Imperial Stout. Most popular beer in the Bathory district.” The big man’s brow creased. “You’re new to the Mephistopolis, aren’t you?”

  John sampled some more beer and shivered at the heady taste. “Yeah. How did you know?”

  The man laughed. “The freshly Damned are always fuckin’ clueless, man.”

  John wasn’t offended by the remark. “Makes sense. Listen, I just got here. Any idea where I should go from here? I mean...” He waved a hand at the club’s open entrance, a vague gesture meant to encompass the whole of Hell itself. “...this is all sort of overwhelming. Hell is just this giant fucking city. There’s all kinds of insane shit out there, but people have jobs. They go to clubs to see bands. So how do I fit in? Where will I live? Do I go to some kind of infernal temp agency?”

  “This has all been arranged for you, John.”

  John jumped at the sound of her voice. The pint glass popped out of his grip and tumbled over, spilling stout all over the bar.

  The bartender didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked furious. But then his face turned pale. He unclenched his fists and bowed his head, mumbling words of terrified contrition, alternately referring to Angela as “My Lady” and “Your Highness.”

  John puzzled over the bartender’s obsequious reaction, then looked at Angela. “I’m just not going to get away from you, am I?”

  She sat on the stool next to him and placed a hand in his lap. “No, you won’t.” She laughed, and the sound was as he remembered it from that long ago night in the park before he revealed his true intentions. Soft and musical, like a feather tickling the pleasure centers of his brain. She massaged his crotch, stirring him to full arousal with an ease that belied the circumstances. “And believe me, John, you won’t want to. I’m the personal concubine of a Grand Duke. I have an exalted position in this part of the Mephistopolis, with privileges that aren’t available to most humans. I always get what I want, John. And what I want now is you.”

  He frowned. “I chopped your head off and had sex with your dead body. If what you say is true, you’re probably taking me back to your unholy castle or whatever to torture me for the rest of eternity. Right?”

  She smiled as she tugged at his zipper tab. “Has it not occurred to you to wonder why I’m in Hell, John? After all, I was just an innocent victim of a horrible crime, right?”

  John’s frown deepened. “Huh. Well, now that you mention it...”

  “My name joined the endless list of the Eternally Damned the day I smothered my sick and elderly grandmother with a pillow. I was eight, John.” Her hand was inside his pants now. He gasped at the feel of her fingers curling around his stiff member. “The ‘accidental drowning’ of my little brother on our beach vacation a few years later was just icing on the Damnation cake. And for weeks I’d been imagining how I might get away with killing a pregnant co-worker when you came along and did what you did.” There was a strangely wistful note in her tone now. “Which was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  John gasped and gripped the edge of the bar as she continued to stroke him.

  He looked at her and managed to speak between gasps. “Are you...fucking...kidding...me?

  Another of those incredible laughs. “Oh, darling, I would never kid you. Life on the other side bored me so. All those repressed notions of right and wrong. It was stultifying. When you sent me here, you set me free.”

  John whimpered. “I sent you to...Hell.”

  She smiled and licked her lips. “Yes, and here I’ve flourished. Suddenly I found myself in a place where I was free to indulge all my darkest passions. Absolutely free to commit acts of atrocity I would never have dared imagining before. And I reveled in it, darling. I crushed the skulls of little children with bricks. Broiled a baby in an oven and fed it to its mother. Sawed off a man’s penis, cooked it, and fed it to him.”

  John gasped again and slapped the top of the bar. “Holy shit, you are one sick bitch.”

  She giggled, the little girlish quality of which was quite disturbing juxtaposed against the recitation of purest evil spilling from her lovely mouth. “Yes, I am. I quickly became a rather notorious character, John, and soon caught the attention of District Commissioner of Torture Kennedy. From there I slept and murdered my way up the power hierarchy, eventually arriving at my current position as personal concubine to Grand Duke Dracul. I have riches beyond imagining at my disposal. I have a lover willing and able to give me everything I could ever want. Including you, John.”

  A corner of John’s mouth quirked. “Me?”

  She stopped stroking him and wrapped her fingers tighter around his cock, making him whimper again and slide tow
ard the edge of the stool. “Yes. The Grand Duke’s sources were able to pinpoint the precise moment and location of your arrival in Hell, and as a gift to me a document was filed with Luciferic bureaucracy allowing me to claim you as my own personal property.”

  She squeezed him harder and John’s fingernails dug into the bar. “You mean...like...your slave?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  John thought of his last week of mortal life and marriage with Linda.

  So this was going to be his existence in Hell—an eternity of the same torment.

  Well, he couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it, at least.

  She giggled again. “Oh, relax. You’re going to love it, seeing as I’ll be fucking you half-blind a lot of the time. Do you know, John, that when you held me down in that park and showed me the meat cleaver, I knew I’d at last found a kindred soul? Oh, I was scared half to fucking death, but in that moment I knew you were like me inside. I wanted to tell you, but...” She shrugged, and there was something almost sad in her smile now. “Anyway, I don’t think you would have listened. You were too focused on your work.”

  She relinquished her grip on his cock and John came explosively all over the front of the bar. He collapsed against the top of the bar and lay there in a shuddering, whimpering heap for several moments while Angela stroked his hair. The band launched into another song while she leaned close and cooed reassurances in his ear. When it was over, Angela took John by the hand and pulled him off the bar stool.

  He still felt woozy and staggered along beside her as they left the Dirty Halo. “Where are we going?”

  She smiled again as they came to a stop out on the sidewalk. “Home, John. I’m taking you to your new home. And there’ll be a special surprise for you once we get there.”

  Surprise?

  She saw his concerned expression and gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “You will love it. I promise.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  He looked up and saw huge winged creatures moving across the scarlet sky. His took another good look around. He saw thick clusters of black and impossibly tall skyscrapers in the distance. They dominated the skyline. He also saw the thick smokestacks of factories belching great billowing clouds of black, diseased smoke at the sky. The stench of decay permeated everything.

  John looked at Angela. “What does ‘City Mutilation Zone’ mean?”

  She laughed. “An institutionalized method of random slaughter. Nothing for you to worry about.” She winked. “When you’re with me, that is.”

  “I offed myself with a .44 caliber bullet. Probably took off the top of my head. So where’s the giant fucking hole in my skull?”

  “That was your mortal flesh, John. You have a new body now. Your spirit body.”

  John nodded. “Uh huh. Or...and let me just throw this out there...alternate theory kind of thing...maybe this is all a hallucination. I’m in a coma, being kept alive by machines, dreaming of a new and strange life in an impossible place because I’m too far gone to ever come back all the way. The Brits had a show like that, long after you died. Was pretty good.”

  “Do you really believe that, John?”

  John’s gaze was drawn upward again, where he saw two more winged things flapping across the roiling red sky, each of them grinning and clutching the leg of a screaming nude woman. The woman dangled upside down, her giant white breasts jiggling as her face twisted in an expression of endless horror.

  He looked at Angela again. “No. I don’t believe it.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched, trembling on the edge of amusement. “And why is that?”

  “Because in a lot of truly fucked up ways, this place feels far more real than the place I left behind.”

  Her smile broadened. “Like a place where society’s polite veneer has been stripped away, exposing and reveling in the grandly terrible truth behind the lie?”

  “Um. Sure, something like that.”

  A big black boat of a car rolled up to the curb and stopped. A rotting severed head was impaled on a large spike on the hood. He wondered if rotting head hood ornaments came standard with limos in hell. A door opened and a man in chauffeur’s livery popped out. The chauffeur called out a greeting to Angela and came quickly around to their side, where he opened one of the rear doors and stood aside for his passengers to enter. Angela touched the man lightly on the arm as she entered the car and said, “Thank you, David.”

  John looked at the man again, a thunderstruck expression on his face.

  Holy shit.

  It was him all right.

  He followed Angela into the car, a question freezing on the tip of his tongue as he slid onto the slick leather seat. The streetwalker who’d accosted him upon his arrival in Hell lay hog-tied across the seat opposite them. She turned her head toward them at their arrival, her eyes wet and imploring as she recognized him. The hooker gurgled at him, spittle flying from the corners of her crimson-stained slit-mouth.

  John squinted at her as the chauffeur threw the door shut. “What?”

  She gurgled at him again.

  It was then that he noticed the pink flap of bloody flesh impaled on one of her stiletto heels.

  Her fucking tongue.

  John grimaced. “Whoa.”

  Angela giggled. “You like? She did threaten you, after all.”

  John looked at her. “Yeah. She did.” He frowned. “Is this the surprise you were talking about?”

  “No, John. She’s merely an appetizer. And I’ll not spoil the surprise. You’ll just have to wait until we’ve arrived at your new home.”

  “Which is where again?”

  She beamed at him. “With me, John! In the court of Grand Duke Dracul. You’ll be my manservant and trusted aide.” Yet another of those girlish giggles that made her sound like a demented teenybopper. “As well as my indefatigable fuck toy.”

  John gritted his teeth. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a life in shackles. It’d been a long, long time since he’d been subservient to anyone, with the glaring exception of the miserable week as Linda’s whipped puppy. But he clearly wasn’t in a position to argue or rebel. Besides, the life she described sounded as if it would be a dream come true for most residents of the Mephistopolis. He supposed many here would resent his easy ascension to so coveted a position. Which posed another matter of some personal significance. Though he had worked hard to redeem himself through the bulk of his adult life, there was no doubt the likes of John Marlowe deserved to spend eternity in Hell. But he would apparently spend that eternity living in luxury and circulating amongst Hell’s power elite. He was no expert on matters spiritual, but he was pretty sure this was not the sort of fate envisioned by the fire and brimstone preachers back on earth for especially egregious sinners. Surely one so vile as The Little Rock Madman should boil forever in a lake of fire.

  Angela slid open a cabinet to reveal a fully stocked bar. “Drink, John?”

  “If you’ve got something like bourbon in there, I’ll have a double.” He eyed the gleaming bottles and reconsidered. “No, make that a triple. And while you’re at it, could you please tell me how in the name of blue fucking hell David Hasselhoff could be your chauffeur. The man’s not dead yet.”

  Angela filled two glasses with amber liquid from a smoky black bottle and passed one to John. “Cheers.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “Cheers.”

  John shivered. The booze had a bite, but was also smooth going down, like liquid nirvana.

  Angela closed the bar and settled back into the seat. “Oh, David’s been dead since the 80’s, John. Before me, even. That thing on earth is a magickal construct, a thing fashioned by skilled Bio-Wizards in Lucifer’s most secret laboratories. It bides its time. A moment will come. All the world will be watching. And then...”

  John let the implied question hang. Whatever diabolical design Hell had in mind for the Hoff’s ringer on earth was something he could live without knowing. Things were weird enough already. S
omething else had occurred to him while watching Angela shift around in the seat and noted the exquisitely supple way the fabric of the dress adhered to her flesh. Ripples and eddies of white radiance swirled across the dress whenever light hit it in just the right way.

  “Your dress. It looks...”

  She sipped more of the smoky booze and scooted closer to him, placed a hand on his knee. “You like? It’s a one of a kind design. Skin, of course. Human skin. Specially treated and enchanted. An anniversary gift from the Grand Duke.”

  “Okay.”

  They finished their drinks and had one more. By then the limo had reached its destination. The door to John’s right opened. He stepped past the Hoff and gaped at the huge mansion. It stood like a hulking black beast against the scarlet sky, and it looked like the kind of place Donald Trump would want to call home after his own inevitable arrival in Hell.

  John looked at Angela. “Is this...” He gulped. “It couldn’t be...”

  She took him by the arm again. “It’s your new home, darling.”

  John tried to say something else, but only a wheeze emerged.

  Angela laughed. “Come. I’ll give you the tour.”

  The tour was a blur of endless hallways and rooms. Dracul’s mansion consisted of seemingly a thousand different wings. The place was awash in decadence. He saw things having frenzied sex with other things. Some of it may even have been consensual. They passed through a kitchen, where a bloated human body was roasting slowly over an open pit. At one point he peered through the open doorway of a bedroom and saw a bound man having his nuts chewed off by a woman in a Nun’s habit. After a time that felt like two, maybe three years, they arrived at a spacious set of living quarters, impeccably appointed adjoining rooms. One of the rooms was technically John’s, but Angela insisted this was a formality. He would spend nearly all his time with her. When she wasn’t attending to the Grand Duke’s needs and passions, anyway.

  John sat on the edge of a plush bed the size of a houseboat and watched the Hoff dump the still-bound hooker on the floor. Angela dismissed the dead B-lister and the man quietly departed, closing the door behind him.