Part 8 (2/2)
”Now, now, it's not that bad. We also have sticks,” Hod chided, shaking his staff at her.
And then the front wall caved in, and an enormous beast stood among the wreckage and billowing dust. Emaciated, with cobweb-gray fur stretched over ribs as thick as bamboo poles, the hound vibrated with anger. When it stalked forward, its blade-sharp shoulders six feet off the ground, Lilly could see the movement of every muscle and tendon. She tried to draw her eyes away from its scab-red eyes and yellow, blood-smeared teeth, but she couldn't look away. The dog's low growl seemed to come from all directions.
”I have a plan,” Hod said in a conversational tone. ”I'll need your help. Throw a stone at the dog to make him bark. That will help me locate him. Then, when I attack, you run.”
The hound's ears snapped flat against its skull.
”That's suicide,” Lilly whispered. ”For both of us.”
Hod's brow drew down over his abysmal eyes. ”Stop thinking like a living person and throw a d.a.m.ned rock, will you?”
She lifted a card-deck-size stone from the counter and, with a grunt, chucked it at the hound's head.
The dog let out a shrieking, stomach-gouging bark and sprang forward. Hod leaped high in the air to meet it. Swinging his staff overhead in a circle, he brought it down with a snap across the hound's muzzle. The ground shook as both G.o.d and monster returned to earth. Hod's stick wheeled as he backpedaled, striking the hound with each end of it. Another bark collapsed into a choked screech as Hod thrust his staff into the hound's throat. Again and again, with snapping jaws, b.l.o.o.d.y foam spraying from its mouth, the hound tried to get around the blurring motion of Hod's stick, but again and again Hod drove it back with quick strikes.
Lilly hurled rocks at the dog, but even when one connected with the hound's eye, there was no discernible effect. That was not the case with Hod's blows, which drove the hound back and had it yelping with pain. Lilly watched the Aesir fight, fascinated. So this was what it meant to be a G.o.d.
The hound ceased its attack and backed against the rubble of the fallen wall. b.l.o.o.d.y stripes from Hod's blows marked its fur. The violent canine madness had left its eyes. Now it lowered itself to the ground and merely looked sad.
Hod was still unbloodied, but he looked worse off than the dog. His breath came in ragged sobs, his alabaster flesh looking like wax. ”I thought I told you to run,” he said between gulps of air.
”That's chickens.h.i.+t,” Lilly said, not willing to admit to him that it had been fear and awe that had held her in place.
”Then I just spent myself for nothing. I suppose that's fitting, this being Hel's realm, but mortals should follow the counsel of G.o.ds.”
”I don't think the dead should be counted as mortal. But, anyway, what do we do now? Fido looks like he's catching his breath.”
”Indeed, I believe he is. And when he does, I shall again go on the attack, and this time you will flee like a startled rabbit. Garm will catch you soon enough, but if delaying the inevitable is good enough for Odin, it's good enough for you.”
As if on cue, the hound rose from its haunches, towering atop its polelike legs. It pulled its lips back and showed its teeth. Ropes of blood and saliva stretched to the ground.
Terror s.h.i.+vered down Lilly's thighs, but she would not run, would not abandon Hod to this. She'd faced death before, she reminded herself. She'd even died. Why should she fear anything now?
A sound drew her attention down toward her feet. A flat stone the size of a pizza box slid aside and revealed a man's face looking up at her from a dark hole. ”I'd drop down here, if I was you,” the man said, before vanis.h.i.+ng back down the hole.
Lilly wasted no time. ”Back over the counter,” she shouted to Hod, rus.h.i.+ng to yank him by the arms. Still clutching him, she stepped into the void. Together, they fell.
It turned out not to be very far to fall. Following the weak greenish halo of the man's torch, Lilly and Hod trailed him down a narrow rock pa.s.sage-the ceiling so low they all had to crouch to avoid sc.r.a.ping their heads. After what seemed like several minutes of turning sideways to squeeze through the corridor, rock walls abrading their skin, they followed the path sharply downward. The sounds of Garm's anger faded only a little.
Finally, the man came to a stop and turned to face Lilly and Hod. In bib overalls and a plaid s.h.i.+rt, he was as stocky as a bale of hay. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, the entire left side of which was the autumnal rust of old blood.
”You'll have to tell me who you are if you want me to take you another inch,” he said, furrowing his push-broom eyebrows.
”Hod, son of Odin,” said Hod wearily. ”And Lilly Castillo, late of Midgard.”
”Venice, California,” Lilly supplied. ”Get us away from here and we'll owe you.”
”Owe me? That sorta implies you have something to pay me with.”
More grating sounds. Garm was digging through the rock.
”Didn't you hear my friend?” Lilly said, grasping at straws. ”He's a son of Odin. Wouldn't you like to curry the favor of G.o.ds?”
The man laughed and spat at the same time. ”Aw, h.e.l.l, we know all about Hod in these parts. Skewered his own brother, fouled things up for all of us. I'd say he already owes us more than three times my last mortgage.”
Hod smiled bitterly and offered a shallow bow.
”We're going to follow you wherever you're headed, no matter what,” Lilly said. ”So you can either proceed or wait here for Garm to mine through the rock and tear us to shreds.”
”Garm? Oh, no, that ain't Garm. That's just one of Garm's pups.” The man shook his head, incredulous. ”Haven't you ever seen Garm?”
”I don't see much,” Hod answered.
The low ceiling seemed to s.h.i.+ver as the noise of the hound's labors grew louder.
”Well, I suppose you did answer my question. Follow me.” He turned on his worn boot heels and led the way with his light.
The route became more complex and disorienting. After a time, the dog's digging was no longer audible, and the pa.s.sage opened onto a chamber the size of a three-car garage. It was lit by about forty men and women carrying sticks smeared in some sort of bioluminescent slime. They seemed more costumed than clothed, the men wearing jeans and s.h.i.+rts of cuts and fabrics that Lilly a.s.sociated with the Dust Bowl and Woody Guthrie. Most of the women wore ap.r.o.ns. Their faces, whether lean or fleshy, carried the weight of hard times. And, like the other dead, they wore their old wounds-lacerations and bent limbs and caved-in heads. Lilly noticed that many of them had made repairs to their clothing, the rips patched up and st.i.tched tight. Lilly fingered the hole in her own s.h.i.+rt, near her ribs.
”Who are you people?” she asked.
The man who'd rescued Hod and Lilly turned to the others. ”The blind fella's a G.o.d,” he said, ignoring her question. ”The gal says she's from California.”
”California, huh?” said a handsome woman with gray streaks in her black hair and a small cleft at the tip of her long nose. Little blue flowers decorated her ap.r.o.n. ”My brother went to California. Men with shotguns turned him away at the Kern County border. They fired shots over his truck even while he was driving away, didn't care that his kids were in back with everything they owned.”
Another woman stepped forward, squinting at Lilly. ”Are you a Mexican?”
”I was born in Los Angeles,” Lilly said carefully. ”My family's from Mexico.”
The woman turned to face the group. ”Mexicans in California ain't got it no better than folks like us,” she said. ”But I don't know about the blind one. Maybe we should have a vote.”
”He handled Garm's pup pretty well,” said their rescuer.
A bark echoed down the length of the chamber.
”You sure that's just one of the pups, Henry?” asked the woman with the cleft nose. ”That sounded awful big.”
Henry's bushy eyebrows went up and down in a little shrug. ”I dunno, Alice. Sometimes monsters get bigger.”
Alice accepted this fact unhappily. Returning to the business at hand, she said, ”I'm not sure about the girl, but we've learned everything we need to know about G.o.ds. The b.i.t.c.h-queen Hel's a G.o.d, ain't she? Everything that's ever gone wrong since we died is because of a G.o.d. Jesus excepted, of course.” She crossed herself, as did several of the others. ”And this blind one, we've all heard stories about him, how he killed his own brother out of jealousy and brought on blizzards and dust storms and twisters. He might be the very one who killed us all.”
Lilly looked at Hod, waiting for him to speak up in his own defense. But he just stood there with a small, patient smile on his face, a silent observer to his own character a.s.sa.s.sination.
Lilly had no reputation with these people, so there was no way she'd be able to talk them into accepting Hod out of a sense of pathos. She'd have to opt for practical arguments.
”Hod's been in Helheim longer than any of us,” she said. ”He knows things about this place that could be crucial. And he's a fighter. Whatever dangers you people are facing out here, he can be useful.”
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