Richard Kadrey - Aloha from Hell

“Remember what I said, Carolyn. Go see a doctor about your blood pressure. You’re about to lose your supplier, so your job is going to evaporate. The good news is that Cale won’t be asking for any of that money you have in the wall. Take it and use it to clean yourself up. Dying isn’t the worst thing in the world, but dying because you’re stupid is.”

I head out the front door. I’m halfway across the doomed lawn when I hear Carolyn yell something. I go back to the house. Behind the bright mesh of the screen door Carolyn looks like a ghost child.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She leans forward so that her face is almost touching the screen and whispers, “Tell Hunter I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … you know.”

I nod.

“Sure. I’ll tell him.”

WHEN I GET back to the hotel, I find Candy in the room and Kasabian holding forth on Terrence Malick’s Badlands .

“See, what Malick did wasn’t tell us the story of a couple of kids on a cross-country murder spree, but to tell us a dream about it. Like the whole thing is a shared fantasy in the kids’ heads and ours, which, from what I’ve heard, is pretty close to what it was like for Charlie Starkweather to kill all those people.”

She smiles up at me from the foot of the bed as I come in.

“Hey there. I’m getting Film 101 from your boss.”

“My boss?”

“That’s what he said.”

I look at Kasabian.

He says, “What do you know about accounting, insurance, inventory control, and, you know, running a video store besides watching movies all day?”

“Not much.”

“Then I’m the boss.”

I sit down next to Candy.

“You can’t argue with that logic,” she says.

“I could, but it would end in tears and divorce lawyers, and I can’t stand paperwork.”

Candy leans gently into me so our shoulders are touching.

I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to her.

“Why don’t you get us another room where we can talk? If the night manager gets weird, use my name and give him too much money. He’ll set you up.”

She bounces off the bed onto her feet and goes to the door. On her way out she blows Kasabian a kiss.

“I’ll be back for your master class on Monte Hellman.”

He beams at her as she leaves.

“Now that’s the kind of girl you shoplift beer for.”

He whizzes around on his skateboard to face me.

“Good thing you got here when you did. I was going to rock her world with some surfboard moves. She would have been mine.”

“You’re the boss and I don’t surf. You could probably have her in Mexico by now with a preacher and a cut-up fishnet stocking for a wedding veil and a donkey for the witness.”

“ Badlands was probably too cerebral for a first date. I should have gone with something sexy and scary like Suspiria . Next time.”

“Sure. Next time.”

I start to say something about delusions of grandeur, but keep my mouth shut. I haven’t seen Kasabian this happy in probably ever.

I’m out of cigarettes. I reach into the nightstand and get a fresh pack of Maledictions. There aren’t too many packs left. Kasabian’s happy. He doesn’t need to know that. I light two and stick one between Kasabian’s lips.

“I need you to look up something for me in the Codex .”

“That sounds like work. Didn’t you see the sign? I’m closed for the evening.”

“You may be the boss, but I pay the beer bills and rent, so pull a little overtime for me.”

Kasabian puffs on his cigarette and frowns. His little legs take the Malediction out of his mouth and tap ashes onto the floor.

“What do you want to know?”

“I need to know about a … Qlifart? Qlifuck? Screw it. Demon. This one is different. It’s confident. Maybe even smart. It does possessions, but it doesn’t automatically attack unless it feels threatened. I thought for a while it might be a Kissi, but I know them, and this doesn’t feel like their work.”

He shakes his head.

“That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a demon, it’s dumb. All demons are dumb. Which means they have an inferiority complex that makes them trigger-happy.”

“If it made sense, I wouldn’t ask you to look in the Codex .”

“Why are you dragging me into this thing? I don’t like demons. Just because you’re feeling magnanimous doesn’t mean I am.”

I sit on the end of the bed and smoke. I flick the ashes onto the carpet, too. Got to give the maid something to do when she comes in so she won’t notice the dead man on the skateboard.

“Yes, you are. Candy’s working with me on this. Do it for her. Dazzle her with your kung fu.”

“Nice try. I was kidding before.”

“She’s a Jade. You never know what kind of fetishes they have.”

Faint traces of cigarette smoke drift from the bottom of Kasabian’s neck and hang around his face like mountain mist.

“I was going to watch Blue Velvet and order chicken wings. What more could a guy want?”

“How about a body?”

His eyes narrow.

“Is this case of yours going to get me one?”

“I doubt it. But fucking off in here isn’t either. The more hoodoo work we do, the more likely one of us will stumble on a fix-it spell for your situation.”

“My situation,” he mumbles. “You put me in this situation.”

“After you shot me.”

He smacks the keyboard and the computer wakes up.

“Asshole. Here I was, talking to a pretty girl, content as Jayne Mansfield’s pasties, and you come in and want me to flip burgers on the night shift.”

“You’ll check the Codex ?”

“I’ll check.”

“Cool.”

I get up to go out. He yells something at me.

“I need highly concentrated carbs to do this brain work. Get me something cold and I’ll make you Employee of the Month.”

I go to the kitchen and get a six-pack from the fridge.

I set it on his table and say, “You want a soufflé or something, too? I’ll need to warm up the oven.”

“This will do. Don’t forget to punch out when you leave.”

“I’m about to punch something.”

I ASK THE night manager what room Candy is in and head upstairs to the last one at the back. It has a nice view of a used-car lot.

I stop for a second before going in, feeling a little strange. Candy and I have been dancing around each other for months, but we’ve hardly ever been alone together. Maybe the one and only time was when she stabbed me in the heart to give me the zombie serum. Does that count as a first date? And if so, on what planet? I’m thirteen again, trying to figure out how to talk to a girl. This is ridiculous. We’ve killed and fought side by side and kept the gates of Hell from opening. I should be able to string enough words together not to drool on myself.

I open the door and Candy is waiting for me, standing naked in the middle of the bed. I barely get the door closed when she jumps all the way across the room and lands on my chest, pinning me against the wall. A pure predator ambush.

Candy’s skin is as corpse cold as I remember from the first time she pecked me on the cheek outside Doc Kinski’s clinic. But she warms up when we fall onto the bed and I’m on top of her and we’re kissing like it’s the cure for cancer.

She shreds my shirt with her nails and I barely get my pants off before she destroys those, too.

Candy wraps her legs around me. I slip inside her and the world goes black and hot. Her teeth wolf into my shoulder. I pull her hair as her nails dig into my back. I pull harder and bend her head back so I can see her face. I catch a glimpse of the Jade lurking just under the skin. Her nails extend into claws and our grinding bodies torpedo us from this soft and stupid human world to someplace where monsters can tear and bite. No one’s afraid of it and all the groans and pain and craziness are beautiful.