Read SS 04: Devil Said Bang: A Sandman Slim Novel for Free Online Page B

about
death
    What is good is easy to
get and
    What is terrible is easy
to endure
    He got it at least half right. That’s better than
most people.
    “Don’t fear God.” No problem. I met the guy. He had
a nervous breakdown and is broken into more pieces than me.
    “Don’t worry about death.” I died a couple of times
already. It was boring.
    “What is good is easy to get.” Here’s where
Epicurus’s head starts disappearing up his own ass. This seems to be a common
problem with philosophers.
    “What is terrible is easy to endure.” Try being
born half angel and half human, pal. A nephilim violates all the rules of the
universe. I was born an Abomination, the only thing alive hated by Heaven, Hell,
and Earth. Try that on for size and tell me how easy it is to endure, you
grape-leaf-eating son of a bitch.
    I drop the book on the floor. This is all Samael’s
fault. I should have guessed that part of my torture in Hell would be having to
read. L.A. was a lot more fun. Stealing cars, ripping out zombies’ spines, and
getting shot at. Good times.
    I get up and scrawl a note in big block letters and
leave it on the desk in case Kasabian can see it.
    CANDY. I MISS YOU.
STARK.
    Lucifer’s library has a pretty limited fiction
section. I push around the pile of books by the sofa until I find The Trial by Franz Kafka. It’s about a guy on trial
for something he doesn’t understand, accused by people he can’t find. It’s
fucking hilarious. It might not be my first choice for how to spend an evening,
but it’s better than going back to the Greeks. I don’t need another morality
lecture from a dead guy. I’ve been getting those half my life.
    M y
eyes snap open a few hours later. I sit up. I don’t even remember falling
asleep. I get up and check the peepers.
    After-hours flunkies sorting and filing endless
piles of palace paperwork. Soldiers patrolling the grounds. Cleaners trying to
get blood and gravel out of the lobby carpets. All expected. All boring.
Good.
    In L.A., I used to dream about Hell. In Hell, I
dream about L.A., but it doesn’t make me any less homesick. Home in my dreams
isn’t home. I see the city turning soft and sinking into the desert. Whole
neighborhoods are swallowed or just wink out of existence. The sky is black and
bruised like Hell’s, and then turns normal again. Sometimes instead of fighting
in the arena, my arena dreams turn into a floodlit Hollywood and Vine.
    This time I’m circling a Hellion roughly the size
and shape of a locomotive. I have to fight with a rusty junkyard na’at while
Casey Jones has a shield and a Vernalis, a kind of steel crab claw the size of
your average go-go dancer. A bunch of red leggers, freelance raiders and
looters, hoot and cheer for blood.
    We drive each other back and forth across the
killing floor. I slip one of his attacks and get in close. Just as I’m about to
open him up like a can of pork and beans, my na’at jams. It was rigged and the
Hellion knew it. The next thing I know, I’m on my knees screaming. There’s a wet
sound as the Vernalis slices through meat and crunches through bone. When I look
down, my left arm is lying in the intersection next to a three-month-old People magazine.
    And that’s not even the worst dream. The worst are
when I wake up sweating from nightmares about city-planning meetings. Swear to
God. I dream about signing papers. I dream about progress reports on freeway
repairs. About digging through mile-high piles of office supplies for Post-its
and paper clips. I’m a magician, an ex-gladiator, a killer, and now the Devil
himself and my greatest night terrors revolve around lost memos and trying to
remember the Hellion word for “incentivize.”
    Some nights I swear I’m tempted to sneak back to
the arena and step in for a couple of fights, like a junkie looking for one more
fix. It’s sick, I know. Yeah, it’s misery, but it’s a familiar kind and
sometimes that’s as close to happy as I’ll get down