Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“The only place we have a chance,” he said between breaths, now sparing with the oxygen himself. “Footbridge out to Shoreline Park.” He looked back. I didn’t, but whatever he saw there made him find a new gear he may not even have known he had. I did my best to stay right behind him.

But who was I behind, exactly? The Sam I’d thought I knew, my best friend, would never have kept anything really big from me-and this Habari stuff was bigger than big. Could I even trust him again? More important, could I stay ahead of that smoldering hell-thing long enough to find out?

We reached the footbridge, a narrow span with chest-high railings made for bicyclists and day-hikers that stretched over the marshlands like a yardstick balanced between the island and the shore. Our footsteps made it rumble and quiver. Then something howled in the distance behind us, loud enough to shake down the moon. I suspected my nemesis had just discovered that its quarry had skipped out again. The ghallu bayed once more, a sound that made the air pop in my ears, then I almost lost my footing as the sturdy little bridge began to groan and shake like seven on the Richter scale. The hot thing with horns was coming after us, thundering down the bouncing footbridge like a real freight train on a toy track. The only real question was how far across we’d get before it caught us.

Halfway across the bridge and I could already feel the heat of the thing against my back despite the chilly bay breeze. Sam was a couple of steps ahead of me but I’m sure he could feel it too. The ghallu was maybe forty or fifty feet back and closing fast, hindered only by the narrowness of the footbridge. It would catch us long before we got to the island side. Time for Plan B. Only problem was, I didn’t have one.

But the thing didn’t like water, right? And here we were running a few feet above San Francisco Bay. I seriously considered just diving over the railing into the shallow tidal inlet in the hope we could save ourselves that way, but I had no idea how deep the water was-perhaps only a few feet-and how much the creature actually disliked H 2O, and I wasn’t keen on finding out both things when it was too late to try anything else.

I put on a burst of speed and caught up with Sam. “I’m going to try something,” I said or tried to, through my gasps for breath. “Whatever you do, don’t stop running.”

To his credit (or as evidence of how fucked we were) Sam didn’t even argue but only lowered his head and tried to coax another few mph out of his legs. I snuck a glance back over my shoulder and saw that the monster was far enough behind us for me to turn and drop into a shooter’s crouch, which I did. The Five-Seven is a light gun, but I took a shooter’s stance and braced it with my other hand, because I was trembling so damn hard, then did my best to draw a bead on one of those two fiery red eyes coming toward me like the headlights of some hell-truck. Silver might not kill it, but I was wondering what it might think about getting a bullet-sized chunk of the stuff right in the eye-and maybe, if I was lucky, right through and into whatever served it as a brain.

But I wasn’t lucky. The thing didn’t slow down, and its footsteps made the slats of the old bridge jump and shake beneath me as I squeezed the trigger. The ghallu straightened up as I fired, my gun jounced low, and instead of giving it one in the eyeball I saw a fiery gout of something burst out near its knee.

The ghallu lurched and lost its rhythm for a second, throwing back its head as it staggered and letting loose a rumbling sound of fury (and pain, I devoutly hoped) as loud as an avalanche of scrap metal. I fired again and hit it in the chest, and it slapped at the molten wound, not mortally hurt but pained and distracted. Then it stumbled and crashed into the railing, shattering the redwood two-by-fours into splinters as it toppled flailing into the water. As it cannonballed into the bay a hissing cloud billowed up toward the moon and blotted my view.

I stood staring for a long second, wondering if I might actually have killed it, but then the great beast staggered upright, water bubbling violently off its skin and fizzing into steam. The brackish water barely reached the ghallu ’s knees, and it was already wading back toward the footbridge like a ground-hugging cloud. It roared again. This time it sounded like it was spitting out bay water, but that didn’t make the noise any prettier.

I was already sprinting after Sam as the horned cloud began to climb back onto the flimsy bridge where it had broken through. When I looked back, the broken boards were smoldering in its clawed hands, then a moment later a long section of the railing simply broke away and the creature slipped back into the shallow water. It hissed and slashed at the unresisting tide with its hands and horns, then waded sullenly forward, looking for a better place to climb out so it could catch us and shred us.

So much for killing it with the San Francisco Bay.

Still, the beast clearly didn’t like water, and enough of the stuff might at least take away much of its heat-any pain it caused the ghallu would be a bonus. Maybe it would even make the monster more vulnerable to silver.

Yeah, I thought, and maybe astronauts and cowboys will appear and save me.

I had two, maybe three of my expensive bullets left, so all I could do was try to think of some way to improve the odds a little and hope that Fate was done rubbing little Bobby Dollar’s face in his own stupidity.

A few moments later, with the steaming horror still dragging its bulk back onto the bridge, we were off the walkway and into the ruins of Shoreline Park. We dashed up the Little Promenade between the dilapidated shells of what had once been restaurants and shops meant to lure the park’s customers before they even reached the main events.

Some abandoned amusement parks have an eerie, haunted charm as nature in the form of trees and vines reclaims them, climbing over the skeletal rides, transforming them into a modern version of a Victorian folly, an artistic comment on the frailty of Man’s works. The commentary on Shoreline Park was a little less subtle. In the years since the park closed down for good it had become a wasteland in every sense of the word; a haven for seabirds, crackheads, and any homeless folk who could manage the hike from the mainland and didn’t mind living with broken glass and sharp rusted things underfoot. The walls that still stood were splashed with graffiti, both the formal tags of local gangs and others so crude and desperate that they looked more like the markings of animals, spray paint splattered mindlessly like blood and vomit-both of which were also splattered here, as my senses forcefully told me. A little patch of Hell on earth. Nice place to make a last stand.

Sam had slowed, and I joined him in a heavy, painful trot. Even our angelic bodies were pretty nearly tapped out. “Which way?” I gasped.

“I don’t know. I can’t take you where I was going to-that thing’s too close.” He looked blank and strange; I couldn’t even guess at what he was thinking. We had been like brothers, Sam and I, or at least I had thought so. Now I realized I scarcely knew him. How had we come to this?

Sam pointed off to the right. “The woods are over there,” he said, meaning the southern part of the island, the original turn-of-the-century park before the amusements were built, once a spot for picnics and family outings. “And the parking lot,” he said absently, as if trying to remember where we had left our car.

“Two good places to get slaughtered,” I said between ragged breaths. “But not what I was hoping for.” I wiped sweat out of my eyes and looked ahead to the amusement park section-“Merryland,” as it had been officially named, although no one had called it that for a long time before Shoreline Park actually closed. All I could see of it from here was the top of the Whirlaway and the wheel, but that was enough. The idea of trying to hide from a murderous Sumerian demon amidst that wreckage might have thrilled a movie’s art director, but it left me cold. Not to mention it would take us another five minutes or more to reach it-time I didn’t think we could afford. I pointed to our left beyond the row of ruined storefronts. “Are the baths still over there on the north side?” The howl of the demonic thing pursuing us rose into the darkness behind us once more. Even after all this time that sound grabbed me by my primordial shorthairs, and I could almost feel the last drops of my courage leaking out. “Sam?”