The other blond removed one of his strong hands from Salvatore’s arm and pointed at the painting that had upset the old man. “You are the horse to the Loa, Mr. Cortina. After Kalfu it styles itself, but it was one of our kind once.”
Salvatore quit his struggling and stared up at the two men, frozen now with fear. “What– what are you?”
The men smiled. “Angels, Mr. Cortina. Angels.”
The blond on the right added, “In the flesh.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Salvatore lost himself in terror. He yelled out for help and struggled even harder than before, managing to dislodge himself from the angel’s grip. He threw himself to the floor next to the metal table. When he looked up and saw the child’s sewn-up face moving, twisting slowly in his direction, he scrambled to his face and darted across the penthouse suite.
“No!” he screamed as he ran. “No! I don’t believe any of this! Please, God, please help me!”
And then the migraine came on, and Salvatore fell to the floor, hands gripping his skull as he mewled pitifully for God’s forgiveness.
One of the angels walked near and squatted down next to the old man’s writhing form. “The thing inside you,” he said, quietly, “it will not stop. It will not rest, nor coddle, nor come to peace. Not until it has been redeemed. Not until the Garden is returned.”
“And that can only happen,” intoned the other angel as he joined his companion next to Salvatore, “once you have captured that child–”
“That girl.”
“She hides your Loa’s power.” The blond gestured toward the sewed-up child on the table. “You have gone to great lengths and incurred many debts to gain the thing that now rests inside this child. It will help you regain your power, and then your winter shall ruin this den of iniquity.”
“And in its place, the Garden will be reborn, meadows amidst the sand–”
“Heaven on Earth.”
“No,” pleaded Salvatore, his voice cracking and broken from the pain in his mind. “Please, Lord...”
“Let the creature Zamagiel come forth, old mortal. Let it ride you one last time.”
“Zamagiel can find the girl. Zamagiel can feel her, somewhere out there.” The angel pointed at one of the drape-ensconced floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Let Zamagiel finish this task.”
“Let it clean this stain.”
Salvatore screamed with pain, worse than any he had ever felt before, and the familiar sense of nothingness overtook him and his mouth filled with the taste of ash and blood.
Before he passed out completely, Salvatore heard the angel say, quietly, “Go, Zamagiel. Find your only daughter.”
14
WITHOUT A CAR, TRENT KNEW that they had no shot of getting safely out of Las Vegas. They could hit Interstate 15 going northeast and run out of gas before they had even crossed the city line. 515 southeast would take them into Henderson; they could maybe make it to the town’s southern border. No help there–the Henderson PD would be waiting as soon as they crossed the county line. And cutting all the way across the city to catch Highway 95 northwest would leave them out of gas somewhere around The Strip, Trent figured. He didn’t have a wallet with him, or any cash; both were in the van back at the Cagills’ house. There was no way they could buy gas, and a fuel-and-run would just give the cops a better lead on them. They had to stay in the city, at least until they found better transportation. And then Trent thought of Charlie V.
The motorcycle! His mind raced with the possibility. Charlie’s still got that thing. If there’s any time he’d give it to me– Trent looked around at the falling snow and the swaying street signs buffeted by icy winds that had begun to pick up in tempo. Even the sidewalks had begun to clear. If there’s a time for help, this is it.
The only question left was how to proceed on foot without being seen–or caught by the monstrosities still chasing them. That answer came quickly: the tunnels. Las Vegas had hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath it, built as storm drains to protect the desert city’s streets during the rare heavy thunderstorms. Most people did not know about the tunnels, but Trent did. He had once used the tunnels after narrowly escaping the ‘discussion room’ in the dingy basement of one of the off-Strip casinos. Through the parking garage and into a storm grate and he had practically been home free. Even the casino’s thugs had been wary of the tunnels, and had only followed Trent a short distance into the darkness before turning back.
He exited I-515, pulled a U-turn and got back on heading the other direction, north back into Las Vegas–into the fray.
“We’re going back,” he said, mostly for his own benefit.
Celia did not respond. She had her head down, quiet tears dribbling onto the floorboard.
Trent grimaced and tried not to think of his own loss. Part of him found it easy. He simply could not believe what had happened. It just had not registered yet. Susan wasn’t–
He shook his head to clear away the train of thought. No need to go there. Not now. He focused on the road, and his current task, and the sad little girl beside him that he needed to keep safe.
By the time they had reached Tropicana heading west, the sedan had begun to sputter. The ‘refuel’ light blinked on and then off and then on again, and stayed. They were coasting on fumes. Trent floored the gas to try to get up some extra speed, weaving in and out of the traffic on the avenue as he passed UNLV on the right and then McCarran Airport on the left. A plane soared over them, its engine noise rattling the ground and the car. Judging by the weather, Trent thought. That’ll be the last flight in tonight.
To keep his mind away from thoughts of Susan, Trent focused on his fragmented memories from the crash. He remembered the lobby at McCarran. He remembered buying trinkets for Susan from the old Asian guy that ran a kiosk in the airport. He blinked back tears, wishing he could see her smile again as he opened his eyes in the hospital bed, her hand in his. He frowned and pulled the cowboy hat down tighter on his head, afraid that someone might see him crying. He cursed himself and then Las Vegas. Everything bad that had ever happened to him had started here, and now it looked like it would end here too.
The sedan’s engine let out a final loud clunk and then the car began to slow. Trent pumped the gas pedal a few more times, hoping to squeeze whatever was left out of the gas tank, but to no avail. The car sputtered to a stop and he rolled it off onto the shoulder. They were between the MGM Grand and the Tropicana, only a few hundred feet from the intersection of Tropicana and The Strip. To his right, the palm trees swayed rigidly in the blustery winds, their green now covered with silvery ice. In the distance, he could see the roller coaster at the New York New York, stopped on its track, abandoned; no more fun today.
Trent looked at the ditch off to the side of he road. He knew the tunnel entrance was nearby. It would have to do.
“Come on,” he said and tapped Celia on the shoulder. “We’ve gotta walk.”
She looked up at him, eyes bloodshot and tired. “Walk?”
“Outta gas. I told you way back–” He saw the deadened expression on her face and knew that it didn’t much matter what he said to her now. The teenager’s world had turned upside-down, much like his, and at the moment, that was all they shared: a deep, gut-wrenching sense of loss and a depression that refused to cease its hammering away at their faith in the world.
He simply gestured with his head, opened his own door, and got out of the sedan. After a moment, Celia did too, and Trent’s depression deepened. It had somehow escaped his notice until now that she still wore the hospital gown from the Children’s Center. She began to shiver almost immediately as she looked around at the palm trees and the buildings and the few improperly-dressed tourists moving stiffly along the sidewalk in front of the Grand.
Trent wished he had brought a jacket to give her. He heard the familiar chirp of police sirens nearby; they were only a few blocks over. No time to waste, he thought. We’ll just have to risk the cold.
&nb
sp; “Come on,” he pleaded, holding out his hand. “I have a friend, a little ways north of here. We just have to make it there.”
Celia looked at him, a mask of betrayal on her face. She moved around the front of the car and took his outstretched hand.
A few cars zoomed by on the avenue, heading for the Interstate past The Strip. When the coast was clear, Trent guided the teenager across the street. They ran past the oncoming traffic, hopped over the divider, and took off west, the chilling winds whipping the power lines overhead and fluttering Celia’s turquoise gown. Trent had to keep one hand on the top of his head to hold the hat down.
An opening to the tunnels wasn’t far, just inside the parking garage at the nearby Excalibur. As they passed under the concrete structure, Trent noted that the puddles of water from last night’s rain had now all turned to ice. In some places, tiny nubs of icicles had begun to form as water dripped down the outside of the slightly warmer garage. They made their way to the back of the garage and approached the tunnel opening.
The hotel had put an iron grate across the opening, not so much to keep people from going in, but to keep the tunnel-dwelling vagrants from coming out, and into the Excalibur garage. But the lock had long ago been broken open, and no one ever bothered to replace it.
Trent pulled on the gate, his tired arms straining to make a space large enough for the two of them to squeeze through.
Before they slipped into the dark, Trent surveyed the garage and the road beyond. He saw the lights of a police car as it turned into the far end of the garage, moving slowly. He grabbed Celia’s arm and slipped inside the tunnel and pulled the iron gate shut behind them.
The storm drain tunnels were not a sewer, though the heavy rains from the night before had filled them partially with ankle-deep, waste-topped water, now freezing cold. Some of it still ran freely, while in other places it had frozen into puddles of partially solidified slush. The thin, wet coating on the tunnel walls had already frozen hard, and Trent found quickly that touching the ice-cold walls caused considerable pain. He noted with alarm that the same could not be said of Celia.
As she walked, bare feet sloshing through the freezing water, she seemed almost unaware of the cold now, and her fingers traced along the ice on the walls as if she were analyzing it by touch.
“Celia?” he said. “You okay?”
“Of course,” she replied, her voice quiet and low, almost sounding as though she were hypnotized. “I like the cold.”
“But the water–”
“I’m fine,” she said.
And that’s all they said to one another for nearly an hour’s walk. Trent slogged through the filth and the muck behind her, trying desperately to keep his feet moving, trying hard to see in the scant light. He could barely feel his feet after the first twenty minutes. His vision started swimming after forty. And still the diminutive teenager marched on ahead of him, apparently oblivious now to the dangerous weather.
Trent tried to hold his grip on reality by analyzing his surroundings. The tunnels were mostly pitch-black, even during the day, but every so often they would pass beneath an inlet or sewer grate that would afford them a lit view of their surroundings. Those lit places with access to the surface were filled with cigarette butts, broken syringes and bent spoons, interstitial zones of rest and refuel for the unseen masses that lurked in the depths of the City of Sin, forgotten by those above. Other lit areas had been filled with graffiti, some racist propaganda, some beautiful and haunting. At the juncture of two tunnels, a warning had been crudely spray-painted on the pillar between:
IN CASE OF FLOOD SWIM FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE.
The tunnel they were in headed north, almost directly beneath The Strip. In places, waste pipes jutted from the cement walls, pouring steaming fluid into the muck at their feet, effluent from the casinos above; and though the stuff reeked, Trent found himself longing for those spots where the slush thawed and the water turned warm, if only for a few steps.
As they walked, he began to have serious doubts about this plan. His legs had begun to falter, and his breathing had grown shallow. Though Celia seemed unaffected, he knew that he could not go much further. The temperature seemed to drop with every passing minute. Parts of the tunnel floor had turned from icy water with some slush to pure, freezing slime, and the curved ceiling threatened them with icicles like crystalline stalactites; more than once, Trent snapped an icicle off with his hat.
“Celia,” he said, gasping for air as they passed beneath a dim beam of light from a vent above.
She turned to look at him, her face impassive, eyebrow raised. She said nothing.
“Celia,” he said again, “I don’t think– I can’t–”
“There’s warmth up ahead,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.” With that, she turned away and continued down the tunnel, one hand sliding lazily along the ice-encrusted cement wall.
Sure enough, around the next bend, Trent watched with relief as orange firelight broke the pitch-black. He hobbled after Celia.
The fire burned away inside an old metal barrel that someone had managed to drag down into the tunnels and left here, in a relatively dry, raised portion of the tunnel floor. Trent knew that a community of several hundred people was rumored to live down here. As he squinted at the suddenly bright fire, he noticed one of them lying next to the barrel.
The man was old, sickly thin and pale, and his scraggly white hair hung down to his shoulders. He had a full beard and moustache, also white, and his eyes remained shut as they approached. As soon as they were closer, Trent saw why. In the old man’s limp hand was a syringe and next to him sat a crushed aluminum can, the top scorched and brown with heroin residue.
Trent stumbled over next to the old man and sat down, his feet outstretched toward the barrel. He could barely feel the heat coming in through his cowboy boots and worried that he had already suffered frostbite. He looked over to see how Celia was faring.
She had already taken a seat nearby and sat cross-legged on the tunnel floor, amidst the cigarette butts and drug debris. Her face remained impassive. The crying had stopped long ago. Trent wasn’t sure if she had gone into some sort of shock or denial, or if she had snapped under the pressure. He worried about her more with every passing minute.
“Celia?” he said, but got no response. He tried again, louder this time, “Celia!”
“Belongs to me,” interrupted a booming voice from the darkness further down the tunnel.
Trent stood quickly.
After a moment, the form of Salvatore revealed itself like a dream, wavering in the dim light from the fire barrel. It grew more solid as the old man approached. He had a smile on his face, even as his long black coat swished through the water on the tunnel floor.
“Leave us alone,” Trent growled. “You’ve killed enough people today.”
Salvatore’s wicked grin shifted suddenly to a look of contrition that surprised Trent. “I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded genuine. “I did not want to hurt them, but I had to. I had to end all of this.”
“What?”
Trent watched as the old man’s face struggled with itself. Alternating expressions of anger, sadness, malice, and fear wrestled for dominance. Finally, his head cocked to one side and a smile took the place of tears and grief. He spoke.
“This is my destiny, gibborim. This is my chosen path. I must undo what has been done. The child must be found, must be drained of her unnatural gift. It upsets the Lord. His will must be done.”
Behind him, Trent could hear Celia moaning softly with confusion and terror.
A look of fury crossed Salvatore’s face for the briefest of moments, before making way for a wry smile. “But I don’t suppose you believe in God, do you? None of your kind really does anymore.” He sighed. “I don’t blame you. He’s not talked to any of us in quite some time.”
“Not my problem,” replied Trent.
“So with no God
to protect you, the police on your trail, what do you have left, then? What is there that is so important to you that you must continue to get in my way? Give me back my child and this will all be over.”
“You’re insane.”
Salvatore raised an eyebrow. “Both godless and foolish? A terrible combination, gibborim.”
But his words had raised doubt in Trent’s mind. He was risking his life, risking the lives of the police and the hospital workers, all for this little girl he barely even knew. He had even lost Susan, all to arrive here, half-frozen in the dank tunnels beneath Las Vegas. And for what?
Salvatore chuckled.
“You’re cracking, mortal. I can see it on your face. You want so badly to be the hero. But this is not about heroics. You are just a lucky child playing with fire, and soon you will be burned.” A sudden look of anguish drifted across his face. “I should know.” The sad look disappeared as fast as it had come and Salvatore began moving toward Trent and Celia, his steps splashing in the icy muck.
Trent raised a hand and pointed. “Stay back,” he said. “Just stop right there.”
“Or what?” Salvatore raised an eyebrow. “This is over, child. Your little game is done. The girl belongs to me, now. I will take her back with me, relieve her of the power she has accidentally inherited, and then leave her for the police to find. You can turn around now and walk away, turn yourself in if you wish. You will be exonerated as soon as my task is done and the child is found.”
“He’s lying,” Celia hissed. “He’s going to cover the city in snow.”
Salvatore whirled on her, his lips twisted into an angry sneer. “How do you know that?”
“I know what you want,” Celia shot back. “I can feel it. You killed my parents and now you’re going to kill me and the blizzard will come and kill everyone.”
Salvatore’s sneer became a grin. “Come with me, or I will end him.” He pointed at Trent.
“No,” Celia replied without hesitation.
The old man’s expression shifted again, a drastic change. Sadness once more filled his eyes. “Please,” he said, “don’t despise me. This is for the best. For the greater good. For the glory of God. Please, daughter...” He held out a hand.
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