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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 bagmen showed up even before the medics did. A sparkling line appeared in the air, just like when we open a Zipper to go Outside and meet the souls of the newly dead. Three guys stepped through. Three angels, I’m assuming, but I couldn’t swear to it because they were wearing something like hazmat suits, though not the kind you buy here on Earth. The faces behind those masks were blurs of shifting light. The bagmen didn’t say a thing, just looked to Leo. He pointed to Smyler where he lay. The little horror was still wheezing and giggling quietly, but you could tell he was bleeding out. One of the bagmen produced something from out of thin air, or at least that’s how it looked, a billowing thing like a parachute made from pulsing light, and then shook it out over the horrible thing on the ground. At first it just lay on him like a sheet, twitching as he moved beneath it, then it began to shrink until Smyler was nothing but a glowing mummy, too tightly wrapped even to struggle.

“Step back, please,” one of the bagmen said, then he and his companions produced the strangest guns I’d ever seen, about the size of Mac-11s but with a shiny bell like a trumpet’s instead of a barrel. When they pulled the triggers, fire vomited out of the ends of their weapons and engulfed Smyler, flame so white and hot it might have come from the inside of a star. We all moved back rapidly—way back—but I still got my eyebrows singed.

In the scant seconds before the bundle on the ground shriveled into smoking ash, I swear I could still hear that awful laugh. Then it was over. The ashes glowed, and a few dark wisps blew up into the air like spiderwebs. The wind carried them away.

The bagmen didn’t say anything else, just reopened their sparkling gash in the air and disappeared. Leo took the four-edged blade, maybe as an ugly souvenir, maybe for some other reason I didn’t and don’t understand. Then we went home.

“I don’t get it,” said Clarence. He looked like I felt—queasy and depressed. “What . . . did they do?”

“To Smyler? I’m not exactly sure. Leo didn’t like to talk about it. But as far as I can tell they bagged him in something that rank-and-file angels like you and me don’t know about, something that kept his soul from returning to Hell when he died. Then they burned him alive.”

“That’s horrible!”

“You wouldn’t think that if you saw him . . . saw it. Whatever he was. But the thing that’s bothering me is that I saw him again last night. It was Smyler who stabbed Walter Sanders. Even though I’m pretty sure it was me he wanted.”