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Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

I grabbed the stinger around my neck with my hand. It was like holding a white hot wire, but as I said, by this point I could do pain. I yanked at it hard, then braced myself and kept pulling, even though it felt like I was cutting my own head off with a power saw, until the tendril finally snapped. Vera let out a screech of rage, but she sure didn’t sound injured. Those translucent folds snapped over her eyes as she hissed in fury and heaved her filaments at me again. I ducked, then smashed the closest jar with the iron poker, then smashed another. As she pulled back her tendrils I struck out around me as widely as I could, knocking one jar into another, sweeping the unbroken ones as well as the shards off the shelves. Glass was everywhere, and the stinking clouds of the preserving liquid all but blinded me.

But there were body parts all over too, and like a school of slow, slow fish they were making their way through the glass and spilled liquids toward Vera.

Now I pushed over whole rows of jars, trying to fill the floor with broken glass and free as many of Vera’s immortals as possible. As they piled around her, different parts from dozens of different bodies built bridges with each other, clinging, climbing. Hands worked together to lift a head up to other hands. Many-headed, many limbed piles of dripping meat built themselves up from the sloshing floor like volcanoes being born. The composite creatures quickly surrounded Vera, and despite the love she had lavished on them and the kindnesses she had shown them, none of her immortals seemed willing to miss out on this reunion.

She had forgotten about me and was trying to fight her way free, but the coral reef of fingers and feet and kidneys and faces had already risen to her waist. Hands climbed her body like crabs—many already clung to her dark, loosened hair. She shrieked and tried to knock them away, but more flung themselves onto her and then made chains so that other hands could cross, until Vera swayed at the center of a crowd of these teetering, squirming piles, white-faced and astounded, still screaming but almost without sound now because she had shrieked herself hoarse. Hands scuttled closer and pulled themselves to her so that the heads could kiss her. As the body-meat piles grew higher, the heads ran their tongues over her, tongues that sometimes came loose and dropped to the floor like overfilled leeches.