An endless sea of fire and bones, and floating there, as big as the sky, is a lotus made of rotting human teeth. Bodies pour into the flower’s fanged maw and are ripped apart. Zhuyigdanatha swallows some of the bodies, but there’s so much falling into its stinking gob that limbs, heads, torsos, and feet cascade down the side. They crawl together in the fire, forming new, weird creatures. A -couple of arms merge at the shoulder with an eye attached under each armpit. Torsos with six, eight, ten legs bob along on the flames, swimming in one direction and then another as the legs compete with each other. A few piles of limbs have pulled together enough pieces to form a complete body. These climb up the sides of the tooth lotus, pushing back bodies that miss the Flayed Heart’s mouth and try to get away. Others swim through the fire into caverns at the base of the lotus.
Since he’s dead, I can’t gauge Hobaica’s mood by the smell of his sweat or the sound of his heartbeat, but being in his head, I can feel his excitement. This is what Hobaica hoped for when he cut his head off. To be one of those bodies falling into Zhuyigdanatha’s mouth, feeding his master.
The old Angra moves as it chews its lunch, twisting this way and that to catch the choicest bodies. If you see it from different angles, Zhuyigdanatha changes. It becomes a slimy lizard, snaring falling bodies with a prehensile tongue a thousand miles long. A baobab tree, with razor foliage and a trunk made of rheumy eyes. A crawling fungal mass plucking bloating corpses from a sea of sewage. At least I know this really is an Angra I’m seeing. Zhuyigdanatha isn’t really changing. It’s a transdimensional being. We ordinary slobs can only see one dimensional aspect of the God at once, so it seems to change as it moves and dreams.
From inside Hobaica’s head, I can feel the man wilt as it finally comes to him that he’ll never be saved by his God. His sacrifice was a joke. The Angras are in another dimension. The other God, the God of this dimension, isn’t wild about -people deity shopping. It starts to dawn on Hobaica that he’s not only lost his personal Jesus, but killing himself as a sacrifice to the Flayed Heart means he’s pissed off the other God. With his frequent asshole miles he’s earned himself a window seat on the big coal cart to Hell. He’s not even scared. He’s beyond fear or even despair. He knows he’s lost. That he lost the first day he drew his or anyone else’s blood for Zhuyigdanatha.
There’s a mountain range off to the side of where we lie. I climb off Hobaica and he struggles to his feet.
“Where did those mountains come from? I swear they weren’t here before.”
An opening appears in the side of one mountain. Pale light shines out onto the dim plain.
“That’s for me, isn’t it? I’m going to Hell.”
“Don’t feel so bad. It beats Fresno.”
Hobaica drags his arm over his forehead, wiping away the blood.
“I’m a fool.”
“You bet on the wrong horse, yeah. But you’re not the first one, so don’t beat yourself up.”
I sort of feel bad for the sucker. I mean, his life has been a joke from day one. But Hobaica’s current attitude isn’t a bad way to enter Hell. There’s not much the Hellions can do to him that he isn’t already doing.
He says, “What do I do now?”
“You can stay where you are for the rest of eternity, which, the way things are going, might not be that long. Or you can go inside.”
“To Hell.”
“Yes.”
“So, I can be somewhere awful or nowhere at all.”
“It’s a lousy choice, I know.”
He looks at me. His clothes are speckled with his blood. He looks a little like what he looked like back in the meat locker. It’s pathetic.
“Which would you choose?” he says.
“I didn’t get to make a choice when I went. But if I were you, I’d choose to be someplace. All they can do in Hell is hurt you. Out here with nothing but yourself to talk to, you’re going to destroy your mind. Being alone is worse than being somewhere bad.”
He nods. Even manages the faintest smile in human history.
“Thank you,” he says, and starts for the mountains.
“Vaya con Dios.”
He stops.
“Is that a joke?”
“Yeah. Not one of my best.”
“A bad joke isn’t much of a send--off before an eternity in Hell.”
“I could tell you the one about the one--eyed priest and the bowlegged nun.”
“I’ll be going now.”
He walks to the mountain and goes into the tunnel without looking back. It closes behind him. Alone on the alkali plain, I sit down with my legs crossed. I wipe the blood off my face with my hand and the alkali burns the cut in my forehead. The drunken feeling comes over me again. My shoulders sag. My head falls forward and my mouth opens. Something light drifts out and settles on my leg.
I wake up in the circle across from the severed head. There’s a puddle underneath it where it’s starting to defrost. Candy takes my arm and helps me up. I run my fingers over my forehead. No blood. Score one for the bag of bones. I didn’t have to bleed in real life after all.
I put Hobaica’s head back in the cooler and hand it to Wells.
“I’m done with this. It’s your problem now.”
He sets it on the floor. Goes to a sink and washes his hands.
“Did it work? Did you see anything?”
“Some bad dental work. And fire. And bodies being ripped apart. The meat locker where I found ice--chest man was feng--shuied with body parts.”
“You think the man cut up the bodies?” says the Shonin.
“Him and his friends, yeah. My guess is those meat pi?atas were volunteers. More Angra zealots.”
“They wanted to be cut up like meat?” says Candy.
I nod.
“Yeah, but they didn’t see it that way. The feeling I got from Hobaica—-that’s your dead man—-is that he and his pals wanted to be hacked up like those bodies. They thought if they sacrificed themselves right they’d be reborn as bouncing baby Angras.”
The Shonin laughs at that.
“They’re even dumber than you.”
“Did he actually tell you he cut up those bodies?” says Wells.
“I wasn’t taking a deposition. These are all just impressions I got from a shell--shocked dead man on his way to Hell.”
“Is that all?”
“Some of the body parts clumped together and made new bodies. There were caves they might have drifted into. Everything was on fire.”
“It sounds like the realm of the Flayed Heart,” says Shonin.
“It was.”
“Zhuyigdanatha likes underground places,” says Shonin to Wells. “If there’s a larger Angra group, you might find them there.”
Wells shifts his weight from one foot to the other.