Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey Page A

shrink-wrapped shroud, leaking Hellion
juice and exposing a black, bloated hand. It gets worse when I uncover the body.
It’s the kind of stink that would turn a buzzard vegan.
    It’s a woman. She’s in a legion uniform but I can’t
read her name or tell what regiment she’s from. The top of her skull is missing.
It looks like someone was dissecting her brain. Clamps and sutures still cling
to the rotten meat.
    This is new. I never heard of Hellions vivisecting
their own. They do it to some of the more heinous dead souls in the House of
Knives, but not to each other.
    Whatever this is, it doesn’t look like torture.
This was an experiment and this soldier was the lab rat. I bet if I checked the
body bags I’d find more head-bone excavations. What kind of Dr. Moreau shit was
going on in here? And who was doing it? Only one name comes to mind.
    Mason.
    What the fuck was he looking for?
    You’d think with all the Hellions I’ve hacked up
over the years, manhandling a dead one wouldn’t be so disgusting. But I just
killed them. I didn’t stick around to watch them rot. Mason must have encased
this room in heavy magic armor. Before I destroyed Tartarus, dead Hellions
blipped out of existence like soap bubbles and ended up in the Hell below Hell.
But Mason managed to keep these corpses intact even after they were dead. You
have to admire the pure psycho will it took to pull off something like that.
Admire it and then kill it. That last is the important part.
    So what was he looking for?
    I loosen the corpse’s straps and let it fall
forward onto its knees. The corpse leaves scraps of hair, rotten uniform, and
skin on the back of the chair.
    There’s a long shallow divot cut into the wood
where the soldier’s head was held back. Whatever was in the shallow hole is gone
now.
    I undo the straps holding her arms. They’re kind of
glued to the chair with bodily fluids. I have to yank off each one, making sure
to keep them wrapped in plastic so I don’t have to touch them.
    There are divots on each of the armrests where the
dead woman’s bare hands would rest on them. I pull her bare feet off the
footrests. Divots there too.
    I’ve wandered deep into the realm of What the
Fuck.
    Turn and scan the room for clues. Body bags.
Rolling metal tables with drills, saws, and surgical instruments. A blackboard
covered with what looks like machine schematics. A pile of empty bags. Rows of
potions. Bet most are dope so the guinea pigs wouldn’t squirm while Mason worked
on them with a chisel. I keep scanning the room but stop when I see myself
pinned to the wall.
    The last twelve years of my life are spread across
fake wood paneling.
    Photos of the dozens of Hellions I murdered. There
are notes about how and when they died. There are shots of dead people on Earth
too. I didn’t kill all of them. Everyone in the Magic Circle. Parker dead in a
motel room with half his face missing. Doc Kinski. A shot of Josef the Kissi
wearing his human übermensch face. A young vampire named Eleanor, her bitch of a
mother, and her suicide father. Cabal Ash and his sister. Simon Ritchie, the
movie producer. Snapshots of anonymous, well-groomed blue bloods, rich assholes
that died during the New Year’s Eve raid on Avila. Mug shots of bald young
teenyboppers and worn-out middle-aged White Power morons who probably died when
I torched a skinhead clubhouse a few months back. Like the Hellions, they have
date and death notes.
    There’s a photo of Alice, the girl I left behind
when I was dragged Downtown eleven years ago, off to the side by itself. I take
it down and put it in my pocket. I’m not leaving her here in this madhouse.
    There’s a shot of another young girl. I’m ashamed
that it takes me a minute to recognize her. Green hair and pretty eyes. She
isn’t wearing her uniform or ridiculous wire antennae in the shot. I like to
think that’s why I missed her, but the fucked-up thing is that she’d slipped my
mind. She was a counter girl at