Richard Kadrey - Sandman Slim

"No wonder I couldn't get a date for the prom."

"There's something else you need to know." He looks at his watch. "I should call Candy soon. See how she's doing. I have her on double doses of the blood substitute."

"Is she going to be all right?"

"Hard to say. It's hard to fight your own nature. I couldn't do it. Angels are creatures made to love and protect humanity, only we weren't supposed to fall in love. But I did. Candy's a predator. A killer through and through. She's trying to change that and I'm trying to help her. Maybe that's a mistake."

"I thought it was you who was making her give up the kill."

"No. She came to me."

"I wouldn't have guessed that."

"Like I said, I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing by helping her. There's something else you ought to know about the nephilim. Not all of them were killed off by God's hit squads. Your kind is mostly gone because you tend to kill yourselves. You're not the most stable being, but I guess you knew that."

"Is that how you got that wound on your arm? Those guys who tried to shove you into a car. Those were angels trying to kill you?"

Kinski laughs.

"No, boy. Heaven doesn't worry about me anymore. Those were Kissi. They were shopping for one last angel for their New Year's party."

I look at him hard, trying to read him. Wanting a final, for-real take on him. But he's a blank wall.

He smiles at me.

"I know what you're doing. You can't read angels like regular people. Even angels can't always read other angels. Otherwise we would have never had that little dustup with Lucifer in Heaven."

"Can you read me?"

"Of course."

"What am I thinking?"

"You're afraid I'm crazy because that's one more person you can't count on. And you're afraid I'm telling the truth 'cause that means you were screwed before you ever drew your first breath."

That's exactly what I'm thinking.

"Will I be like you? Will I be able to read you someday?"

He shrugs.

"It's hard to say. With nephilim, it's always different. Some are more human and some are almost angels and can do almost anything angels do. You'll know what you can do when you can do it. That's all I can tell you."

"Let's say I believe this story. Could you fix me up with a cocktail like Candy's? Make me like a regular person?"

"I wouldn't even try."

"Why not?"

"You always had magic, but you came into your real power in Hell. You were running wild, not holding yourself back like the nephilim that grew up around humans. You found yourself and accepted what you could do without all the angst and bullshit that they went through."

"And what is it I can do?"

"Warrior is the nice word, the traditional word, but that's just a polite way of saying that you're a natural-born killer. You're Sandman Slim, the monster who kills monsters. I'm not going to drug you up to change that."

"Even if I wanted to change it?"

"Especially then. How many angels showed up to save the world the other night? Did Aelita and her little quilting bee conquer the evil at Avila's heart? No. It took a monster to walk between all the forces massed there and to beat them all. No one else could have done that."

"There were two monsters there," I remind him.

He nods.

"Right. Two monsters."

The pizza delivery boy brings out a second pile of pizza boxes, loads them in the van, backs up, and heads into the afternoon traffic. He gives us the finger on the way out of the parking lot.

"I can feel a lot of stuff pinballing around in your head. You want to tell me what you think about all this?"

"If your story is true, then one of my parents fucked an angel. Which one?"

"Why does that matter?"

"It doesn't, but I want to know."

"Your mother."

"I thought so. My father was gone a lot on sales calls. Mom was lonely and pretty. I guess that explains some things about my father."

"If you say so."

"He knew I wasn't his."

"But he still raised you. Give him credit for that."

"He wanted me dead."

"Hell, boy. At some point, all fathers want to kill their sons. Just like all sons think about killing their old man. They're too much alike or the're not enough alike. It doesn't matter. What's beautiful is that they don't do it."

"Are there other nephilim around?"

"It's not like there's a newsletter or anything, but as far as I know, you're the only one."

"I used to worry all the time about being boring. Suddenly boring looks pretty good."

"Try not to sing too many sad songs for yourself. The universe already hates you. Self-pity isn't going to help."

Whenever the hammer has come down in my life, I've always wondered what my father would do. Then I usually do the opposite, but I still always think of him first. But now I'm seeing my mother's face instead of my father's. And I'm thinking about Alice. And Candy. And Allegra breathing fire into Parker's eyes. And Vidocq, who isn't a father, but who makes being a man easier than any of the men in my family.

I flick my cigarette butt at a rat that's stalking a couple of pigeons in the parking lot.

"You know what I'm thinking right now?"

Kinski is silent for a minute.

"That you really want a drink."

"Yeah, but that's too easy. I always want a drink. Guess again."

"You're back wondering if I'm crazy or not and leaning toward crazy."

I nod and take few steps in the direction of the Mercedes.

"Actually, I'm not. I'm leaning toward I don't give a goddam. I'm sick of Heaven and Hell and angels and nephilim and all the rest of it. I knew what I was doing there. And no one told me that I'm not who I am. Be a fallen archangel if you want, but leave me out of it. I don't want to be part of your soap opera. I don't want to be mythological."

I start back for the Mercedes, but it looks ridiculous to me now. A brain dead cross between a giant grasshopper and a Cubist Corvette. I walk past the car and into the shadow of a lampost at the corner of the lot. Kinski watches me go. As I slip into the Room of Thirteen Doors, for just a second, some annoying part of my brain whispers, "You know that thing that you're doing right now, going from a parking lot to the center of the universe and out again? That's pretty seriously mythological."

THERE'S ONLY ONE problem with L.A.

It exists.

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will.

New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is crisscrossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber.

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

I NEED FOOD. I need booze. I need to smoke a cigarette outside a bar where you can hear people dry humping in the alley behind the Dumpster.

I walk from Max Overdrive to the Bamboo House of Dolls, sucking down stage-six smog-alert air and lingering over a sunset as bloody as the fall of the Roman Empire.

People stare and point at me as I go inside. For a second I have that anxiety-dream paranoia that I'm not wearing any pants. But no one's laughing and I've got a pocket full of money and a knife tucked in the back of my jeans, so I think I'm covered on the pants thing.