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
I don’t know whether the beast didn’t have a brain in there or just didn’t use it much, but it clearly wasn’t going to die just because I drove a knife the size of a machete through its head. It did, however, seem to get grumpier, and began trying even harder to suck my face into its unpleasantly round, toothy mouth. I used the knife embedded in its jaw to keep it at bay, hanging onto the hilt for dear life as the hound kept forcing itself at my softer, more important bits.
I won’t spoil your day by describing what genuine hellhounds smell like up close, by the way. You can thank me later.
It was a stalemate, one that I knew I was going to lose pretty quickly. The thing weighed twice as much as I did, and if a knife in the brain wasn’t slowing it down, chances were I wasn’t going to outwrestle it either. So I grabbed my last chance: I pulled my feet up under me, put them against the thing’s bone-armored chest, and then shoved as hard as I could.
If I thought I’d get lucky twice, and it would fall away and slip off the bridge, I was disappointed. To be honest, I hadn’t thought things through that carefully—I just knew the beast was about to eat my head, and that my head was something I shouldn’t let it eat. The hound did fall back, and its back legs skidded out from under it, but that only meant it scrambled in place for a moment until it could find its balance and lunge toward me again.
But while that happened, I’d found my gun.
I lay on my back as the monster came toward me, with little chance to aim as carefully as I had at the first dog, so I emptied a couple of rounds into it as quickly as I could pull the trigger. I hit it in the chest, making a big, dripping red hole, and also blew off one of its ears along with a chunk of sloping skull, but although the thing whined and choked a little, it straightened its legs and took another few staggering steps toward me. Cursing like a man who’s just seen his hated brother-in-law win the lottery, I shot again. This time I put a round square in its chest and the dog took a strange, awkward sideways step, then another, as if the bridge beneath it had suddenly slanted to one side, then it walked right off the span.