Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
“You’ll never make it,” Riprash said. “There are necks and black sinkers and a shit-swarm of big fang jellies in this part of the river. Any one of ’em will swallow you like a pickled eyeball.”
I didn’t even want to be swallowed like a regular eyeball. “Can you get me closer to the shore?”
“Not here. Can’t lose the current or they’ll be on us. But in a little while we’ll be past Bashskull Point where the Styx meets up with the Phlegethon at the edge of the Bay of Tophet. Water’s shallower, won’t be any fang jellies. Might be some hogsquid, but they’re not as bad. You know about them, right?”
To be honest, I didn’t really want to know about hogsquid or fang jellies or any of them. Everything already sucked so completely that some new bad information would have just pushed my situation past its current state of Zen-like perfect fuckery into something messy and overdone.
The Headless Widow was gaining on us, and when they fired their guns the white waterspouts of falling shells were now only a few hundred yards behind us. I stopped on the way back to Riprash’s cabin and picked up a cannonball of my own to carry off, adding the gunnery sergeant to the list of Hell-denizens who thought I was crazy.
I thumped the heavy iron ball down in a corner of the cabin and did my best to make it secure against the pitch of the ship; it was big enough to break bones if it started rolling. Then I went back to directing old Ballcramp. “Leave a hole here, at the corner,” I told the spindly creature.
He shook his shriveled head at this senseless order, but the undead flying fish were cracking against the outside of the cabin, and it was a lot nicer inside, so he said nothing.
“You’re both safer with Riprash,” I told Walter and little Gob as I strapped myself into the crude oilskin vest I’d had Ballcramp make. Puffed up with the air I’d just blown into it, it made me look a bit like the Michelin Man, but less svelte. A fair wind, one of the few bits of luck I’d had in this whole cursed trip, had kept us ahead of Niloch long enough to reach Bashskull Point, and I was determined to get off the Bitch before the commissar destroyed it.
“But they know this ship,” Walter said. “They know Gagsnatch’s stall, everything. We’ll never be able to go back to Cocytus Landing now!”
“Don’t matter,” said Riprash as he lifted me into the dinghy. “We’re not going back.”