Hell on High

by Holly Lisle

  Rhea pulled up the workstation help menu and printed the first screen from the introduction. Jack grabbed the paper and held it up beside the other sheet.

  "It's perfect." He pointed to a spot on the page. "This line of text is exactly level with the blank spot on the diagram printout, and there are no dropouts in it at all."

  Rhea absently tapped her foot against the side of the desk. This was bizarre. "Let me try printing something else in graphics mode," she said finally. Jack nodded, and she brought up the CNN feed, freezing it on a frame of the president speaking to a group of senators.

  "He looks like he's in pain," Jack said.

  "Republicans give him gas," Rhea said, and hit print. Jack grabbed the printout. "It's back," he announced. Rhea looked. "Right through his nose," she agreed.

  "So it's not a print engine problem, or it would get the text too," Jack said. "It's got to be a firmware bug in the bitmap code. What are the odds here?" He waved the paper and the president flexed, still avoiding the issues. "Out of over three thousand rows of pixels, the one line that can screw us irretrievably is the one that goes out. What's next? Michael Bolton makes a good song? Maxwell's demons let ice boil?"

  Rhea stared at him. "You know... it just could be." She stilled herself inside, being careful not to think about what she intended to do. "Give me your coffee cup."

  The mug was clear, thick glass with a flattened world logo traced on it in white, and about half full of cold coffee. Jack handed it to her carefully; he obviously wanted to ask what she was doing, but she shook her head slowly, and he held his peace.

  Rhea turned to the printer and hit the cover release.

  The top popped open, and she darted a hand inside with inhuman speed. She closed her fingers over something that shouldn't have been there. Something that squirmed.

  "What the hell—" Jack said.

  Rhea popped her find into the coffee mug, keeping her palm over the top. "Precisely," she said. Inside the mug a small figure floated, treading coffee.

  It was humanoid, about two inches high, almost as clear as the crystal itself... and very unhappy. As they watched, it shimmered and changed to a bile green, then a brick red before going back to clear. During the whole sequence, it was beating its fists against the walls of the mug. Its imprecations and the small, glassy pings were almost as annoying as a Chihuahua in full yap mode. "Stop that!" Rhea said, and shook the cup. It lost its balance and floundered, kicking up an oily froth of brown bubbles as it sank beneath the surface.

  "What is it?" Jack asked finally.

  "Gremlin," Rhea said.

  Jack was silent for a moment. "That figures," he sighed. He tapped at the glass and the gremlin got its head above java level long enough to scream something obscene back at him. "Guess it doesn't like instant."

  "Or much of anything else at the moment."

  "So now what?"

  "Well, before it goes under for the third time, it's probably going to remember that it can port out of there if it feels like it, and then it's going to be history."

  As if taking a cue, the imp stopped struggling and raised an arm far enough above the surface to flip them the bird. It sank slowly and forlornly, and when the last extended finger disappeared into the murky brew, there was a muffled pop and the gremlin vanished in a coffee whirlpool.

  It reappeared, dripping, in the open top drawer of the file cabinet near the door. It tripped over Headsets and fell into Heatsinks. It clambered back out again and shook its fist. "Shitsmudge! Snotswallow! I tell! She gonna get," it shouted in a voice like a swarm of mosquitoes descending, and then it vanished again.

  "Shitsmudge? Snotswallow? Never heard those before."

  "That was probably its name." Rhea took her palm from the mug. The air pressure equalized with a gentle whoosh, and she put the cup down. "That was different."

  Jack leaned over her shoulder and pressed print again.

  This time the diagram came out perfectly. He rolled it into a tight cylinder and whacked it against his palm. "So I've been tearing my hair out and losing us money because a gremlin decided to live in my printer and kill one lousy row of pixels."

  "They're not very smart," Rhea said, taking the paper and unrolling it, "but they have an innate knack for knowing how to do the most damage. I doubt it will be back; once you get the gremlins out of a system, they move on to something else."

  "But what did it mean 'I tell'? And 'she gonna get'? I don't like the sound of that. And what's this she business, anyway? She who? It can't mean my gargoyle, can it? I mean, what are the odds of my having two Unchained on my case? Specifically."

  "I'd guess low. Exceedingly low. And I can't imagine what the little monster meant." Rhea knew a bit more about the subject than she cared to say. She'd put together plaguing teams in her time—it would take at least a demon to ride herd over a team comprised of a gargoyle and a gremlin. And in any case, for Jack to have three Hellraised working on him, he would have to have a special significance to Hell over and above his value as fodder. She knew what Hell looked for in recruitment cases, and she just didn't see it.

  "Anyway, you're missing the moment, Jack." She waved the diagram. "We've got what we needed. The money. The fix for the MULE drive. We're in business."

  Then she smiled. "Well," she qualified, "maybe."

  Chapter 27

  Jack watched as Rhea took one of his pencils from his desk and started tracing on the printout. "It'll cross here, here and there," she muttered, but he wasn't really paying attention. He felt like a light had been turned on in his own personal root cellar... like he'd been awakened from a dream in which he'd done something so unspeakably gauche that he could never face polite society again.

  He savored the feeling of relief and freedom for a minute, and watched the woman who had shaken him awake. Rhea's face was intent, and she absently brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes. Her lips were pursed in thought, but Jack found the effect quite aesthetic. He moved to stand by her and look over her shoulder, but her closeness made it even harder to focus on the diagram.

  Could Jan be right? He wanted to think so. If she were interested in him, and he didn't say something now, he'd be the worst kind of fool. He could feel the heat of Rhea's presence, and hear her breathing over the gentle skritch of the pencil. And if Jan were wrong?

  Well... then he'd be the second worst kind of fool—and everyone should have a goal in life. He cleared his throat.

  Rhea looked up and flashed him a high bandwidth smile, freezing him in place. "Look," she said, "this is going to take a while. Why don't we tackle it tomorrow, fresh. There's at least twenty hours of cutting traces and patching in surface wires—"

  Jack finally looked—really looked—at the annotations Rhea had been making. "I think I can do it in sixteen hours," he said, his thoughts of the moment before forgotten.

  "Whatever. The point is we've got our money, we think we've got our drive problem. It's time to celebrate!" She stood up from his chair and looked into his eyes. "Why don't we go to my place... no... better make that your place. We can call out for some Szechuan and talk." The word seemed laden with more meaning than a single syllable could bear, and her smile was back, amused and alluring at the same time.

  Sometimes the world says put up or shut up, and Jack didn't think he was completely deaf. "I, well, yes. I mean my place looks like hell, but—"

  "I doubt that," Rhea told him. She walked to the door and turned off the light. "Besides, I'm having critter problems."

  Jack followed, not running—quite. "Mice?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Cockroaches?"

  "Angels," she said.

  "Oh." Jack was nonplused. "Well, I've got gargoyles, or gargoyle, anyway."

  "But a gargoyle," Rhea said, "isn't a problem when you want to be bad."

  Chapter 28

  His lead hadn't panned out, but it would be a shame to waste the trip. "Here, doggy, doggy. Here, doggy, doggy," Glibspet called, and clapped his hands.
He was stopped at the curb, with the door of the Lincoln open. He was in a residential neighborhood—fairly nice, and far enough away from the Triangle's hotspots to lack most urban paranoia. Too bad for them. He smiled.

  The dog was a plump poodle, and it seemed nervous about leaving its front yard. Glibspet was taking great pains to smell like a freshly cut steak. The dog danced forward, then backwards, as though it could only hold a single imperative at a time in its one-ounce brain and kept swapping gluttony for fear. Finally, it got close enough, and Glibspet grabbed it. It let out an anguished yip, shrill enough to shatter glass; then Glibspet stuffed it in his sack and slammed the car door.

  "Hey!" There was a yell from the house as Glibspet gunned the Lincoln. A fat woman stood on the porch, shrieking after him. He turned the corner and she disappeared from his rearview mirror. The heavy sack on the passenger's seat gave a whine of terror, and Glibspet grinned. Life was good on Earth.

  Chapter 29

  Denny's Denies Discrimination

  Dillon, SC—Reuters

  In an impromptu press conference Wednesday, Janice Richardson, manager of Denny's in Robeson County, North Carolina, hotly denied claims that her restaurant discriminated against the Unchained.

  A group of devils aired the charges Tuesday, claiming that they were denied service at the restaurant during an outing Sunday evening. "We sat there for two hours without seeing our waitress," claimed the group's spokesman, who identified himself as Slimespudge. Richardson did not dispute the group's claim, but denied that any discrimination was involved. She argued that the design and staffing of the restaurant made such occurrences inevitable. Under insistent questioning from the press, she became more and more agitated, finally saying, "Look—everybody gets lousy service at Denny's. It's a fact. The pictures on the menu look a lot better than the real food too." She quickly retracted the statement, but continued to deny any discrimination.

  The chain's district management would say only that, "Discrimination is completely against Denny's corporate policy, and we will be reviewing Ms. Richardson's franchise very carefully."

  The area in which the incident allegedly took place lies at the southernmost stretch of Interstate 95 in North Carolina. It is a popular destination for sightseeing Unchained who stand at the state line and look across into the sprawling South of the Border roadside complex in Dillon, SC. "It's like the promised land," one demon said in a recent interview.

  Rhea pulled the Triumph into the driveway behind Jack's Camry and got out. She looked around appreciatively. It was dark, but that didn't bother her much, and the yard was a riot of flowers. She breathed deeply and caught the fragrance of spring. She walked over to Jack. "Nice place," she said.

  "Thanks," he said. "I can't take much credit for it, though. The people who lived here before planted all the flowers. All I do is try to keep the yard up. Better than the house, anyway." Jack didn't take praise well, she thought. She would have to do something about that.

  He took the white paper buckets from the back seat, and the fragrance wafting from them was even better than the flowers. Jack's stomach growled and Rhea stifled a laugh. He definitely hadn't had supper, and may not have had breakfast or lunch. She'd had an excellent supper, but her metabolism was malleable within certain limits, and the Szechuan smelled awfully good to her, too. "Shall we go in?"

  Jack closed the car door and straightened up. "Okay," he said, "but remember, I warned you about the mess."

  Rhea headed for the front door, but Jack grabbed her arm as she started up the steps. "NO! Not that way!"

  "Who that?" A shrill sleepy voice came down from the roof.

  "It's just me," Jack called back.

  Rhea watched, fascinated, as the gargoyle stuck her head out over the gutter and looked down at them. She was a good specimen, Rhea thought, though a little thin. Suddenly she noticed Rhea.

  "Not just you," the gargoyle said. "You got girl! No like. I girl, you no need she."

  "Just great," Jack mumbled. "I didn't figure Hell would have any problem with polygamy."

  Rhea smiled at him. "Getting a bit ahead of yourself, aren't you?" She could feel the heat of his blush.

  Jack looked up at the gargoyle. "She's a friend from work," he told her.

  "No like!" the gargoyle repeated.

  Jack shrugged. "Well, it's not my job to keep her happy, anyway," he said. "This way," he told Rhea, and they started for the carport. The gargoyle moved with them.

  "I don't think she wants me in there," Rhea said.

  "We'll just have to use our superior brain power, then." Jack glanced over at her. "Um... I left mine at the office. How about you?"

  "Me too." Rhea looked up again. The gargoyle glared down. "But how about if we offered her something to eat. She looks pretty hungry." She knew she could master the gargoyle easily enough, but even so small an expenditure of Hellawatts might get her noticed. Maybe the expenditure of some of their Szechuan would suffice.

  "Okay." Jack looked over the bag full of boxes. "It's not like we don't have enough." He handed Rhea the bulk of their meal, keeping one bucket. "Hold these and I'll see what I can do."

  Rhea stepped back.

  "Hey," he said, holding up the bucket. "You hungry?"

  The gargoyle's eyes tracked the bucket intently.

  "Hungry, yes," she agreed. "Bad hungry."

  "Well, then," Jack hefted the bucket. "Tell you what. I'm going to throw this bucket up on the roof down there at the end. You go down there and eat it, and you can have the whole thing. If you don't, I'll pull it down and hide it and you won't get anything. Okay?" He walked back to his car and got some string from the trunk, tying a long piece to the bucket handle. "Okay?" he repeated.

  The gargoyle stared from him to the bucket in his hand, then to Rhea, then back to the bucket. "Okay," she said after a long pause. "I eat."

  Jack took the bucket, walked to the end of the house and threw it up on the roof. He took care not to stand directly beneath the eaves, and he held onto the string.

  The gargoyle sidled across the roof towards the food, moving very quickly at the end. She grabbed the bucket. "Deal?" Jack asked, still holding the string.

  "Deal," the gargoyle replied.

  Jack let go of the string and walked back to join Rhea. "After you, miss," he said, ushering her onto the carport. "There's no way you could have pulled that bucket back after she grabbed it," Rhea said.

  "No," Jack agreed, looking for his keys, "but maybe she didn't know that. Or maybe she's not such a bad gargoyle underneath it all." He found the key he was looking for, and inserted it in the lock, turning it slightly. Rhea heard a faint click. Then he replaced the first key with another, and turned again. There was a louder click, and Jack turned the knob, lifting slightly. The back door came open.

  "What was all that?" Rhea asked. "Security lock?"

  "No," Jack admitted, "my keys just don't work very well. I've been meaning to get that fixed. The door's a little warped too."

  Rhea followed Jack into the kitchen. It was a cozy room with pine cabinets and red-checkered curtains. "Nice place," she commented.

  Jack set the food down on the round table off to the outside edge of the room. "Thanks," he said. "I keep it clean, if not neat, but that's about it. And it has its quirks." He opened a drawer by the sink and started fishing for silverware.

  Rhea looked at the printout unrolled from the edge of the kitchen, through the dining room and all the way down the hall. "What's this?" she asked.

  "Umm, carpet protector," Jack answered after a short pause.

  Rhea looked closer at the code on the printout. It seemed to be from a minor project they had abandoned last year. "Well," she said, "you might want to think about that. It's got to be a fire hazard."

  "I will," Jack said. He laid out the silverware, and unwound some paper towels for place mats and napkins. "Would you like some coffee or tea? I might have some Coke in the fridge. Coke doesn't spoil, does it?"

  Rhea sat dow
n at the table and slipped off her shoes.

  She moved the silverware to put the two place settings adjacent to each other. "I'll have hot tea," she said. "Green if you have it."

  "Just Lipton."

  "Okay."

  Jack filled a glass kettle with fresh water from the sink. He took it over to the stove, put it on a back burner, and lit the oven. Then he lit the burner diagonally across from the kettle's. Finally he lit the burner under the kettle and turned off the oven and the other burner.

  Rhea had been watching the display in fascination. "What was all that about?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure," Jack admitted, "but I know if I don't do it that way, I'll have a flame-out every time. I've been meaning to look at that." He set a plate down in front of her. "Here you go."

  Rhea spooned rice and vegetables onto her plate. They were still warm. Good. She could use the chopsticks, but she wasn't going to if Jack wasn't. Jack sat down beside her and started heaping his plate.

  "So, Jack," Rhea said, "tell me a little about yourself. The things that aren't on your résumé." She saw his fork freeze in midair and rushed to reassure him. "Hey, this isn't a test. I just want to know you better." She put her hand on his knee. It wasn't subtle, but it seemed effective.

  "Well," Jack said, "not much to tell. I was born in Myrtle Beach, great parents, two sisters and a brother. I had a happy childhood, no hidden traumas. I went to MB High, worked summers at Painters Ice Cream, graduated, went to Clemson and got my double-E Masters. Worked for a few loser companies, then found Celestial."

  "That certainly is a thumbnail sketch, I know there's more than that," Rhea said.

  "Maybe," Jack said, "but it's not any more interesting in detail. It's like Columbia: It's a great place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there." They ate for a few minutes in silence. Rhea didn't move her hand, and Jack didn't ask her to.

  The teapot began to whistle, and Jack got up. "How do you like it?" he asked.

  Rhea batted her eyelashes at him theatrically. "Strong and hot," she said. Jack nearly spilled the water.