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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

The good part was that I was only one level below Abaddon now. The bad part: I was only one level below Abaddon, and that’s where the commissar, his hounds, and his troops would be looking for me, and if they were thorough, they might come looking for me here as well. Then I’d be in Niloch’s nasty, rattling hands.

No, I realized, if I was captured, Eligor’s crab-grenade was going to go off in the middle of my thinkers, and then my next conscious thought would be, Oh, shit, I’m in the Infernal Transfer Lounge for Souls and everyone’s staring at me. After that, the real pain would begin. Eligor had held back from my utter destruction because he wanted something from me, but the big bosses of Hell wouldn’t be so kind. The whole operation here was expressly set up for just the kind of things they’d be doing to me, and they’d do them forever.

So I did the only thing I could do at that point. I pulled up my big boy pants and headed out into the Forest of Suicides.

It would have been an awful, awful place even if it had been right beside some lovely college town, five minutes from great nearby schools and nifty places to walk your dog, but as it was, a real estate agent would have had trouble finding anything cheerful to say. The Grey Woods were halfway to being a swamp, the ground treacherous and squelchy, and the constant mist made it difficult to get any idea of where you were or even where you’d already been. But I knew the way up to the next level would be somewhere on the outskirts, and that fact alone was what gave me any kind of chance of finding my way.

In theory, all I had to do was keep the lifter station behind me, and I’d be heading straight out across the level on a radial track. Problem with that was that once I was a hundred steps from the station, I could no longer look back and see the huge lifter tower through the murk. I’m not joking. The tower was the size of the Empire State Building, a giant cuboid reaching all the way to the roof of this level, and it was already hidden by the dense mist. All I could do was try to maintain my direction by picking an object that I could see, then heading toward it, then picking another target by my best guess at the same direction. Efficient and fun, especially in a drizzling gray nothingness of skeletal trees and deadly quicksand bogs. And it got worse when I began to encounter the suicides.