Aimee couldn’t believe that the very continuance of her existence was in the hands of a goat and a semi-dwarf, both mindlessly gin-drunk. She tried a direct appeal. “Igor-”
Mr. Thomas shook his head warningly. “Don’t listen to her, Igor.”
Igor was now totally confused. “What should I do, Mr. Thomas?”
“I think you should order the guards to shoot them, Igor. Then, when the really mean and nasty nuns break in, we can claim that we’re on their side. Otherwise we’ll end up crucified right along with this lot.”
“I don’t want to be crucified, Mr. Thomas.”
“Of course you don’t, bach, so give the order to fire.”
But before Igor could give the order to fire, the third factor that saved Aimee came into play. A loud crash in another section of the environment was followed by a shock and a bang as though a grenade or a charge of explosive had gone off. The rubber guards were galvanized into slow-motion action by this new intrusion, which they saw as more pressingly dangerous than the intrusion of Aimee and her group.
“Emergency-emergency! Armed intruders in the Moorish colonnade! All-guards-respond! Armed intruders in the Moorish colonnade! All-guards-respond! All-guards-respond!”
This call to the guards appeared to countermand all previous programmed imperatives. Aimee and her people were forgotten as more formidable interlopers threatened. As the three rubber guards trundled from the Louis XVI Suite, Aimee smiled nastily. “So, goat, Igor left it too late, didn’t he? Now we sink or swim together.”
***
The pursuers emerged from the tunnel that Jim, Semple, and the Virgil had just left and immediately opened fire. As the first bullets ricocheted from the stone of the carved Dragon, all ducked for cover. The Virgil looked anxiously at Jim. “I can’t be expected to involve myself in this.”
Jim was busy ducking bullets; he was hardly able to pay attention to their guide and his troubles. “I don’t much want to be involved in it myself.”
“But this is your problem, not mine.”
A fragment of lead or stone all but parted Jim’s hair. “Can you get yourself out of here?”
“I’d be more than happy to.”
Jim quickly reached inside his coat and pulled out the bag of coins he had taken from Richard Nixon. He tossed it in the Virgil’s direction. The Virgil deftly caught the bag, hefted it to feel the weight, and treated Jim to a brief formal smile. “I thank you for your generosity, young sir. And now I must bid you farewell. I’m sorry I can’t stay to observe the outcome of this.”
The Virgil made a complex pass with his right hand and instantly vanished. Jim blinked and glanced at Doc. “How the fuck did he manage that?”
Doc was crouched behind the Dragon’s other extended foreleg. He shook his head. “Don’t ask me, boy. I guess the Virgils have their secrets.”
With the Gun That Belonged to Elvis in his hand, Doc was taking aim at the shadowy figures and muzzle flashes on the other side of the cavern. He fired three fast shots that exploded where they hit in highly destructive puffs of ghost plasma. A scream indicated that at least one of his projectiles had hit its mark, but Doc’s return fire also triggered another intense volley from the hidden pursuers. Jim ducked lower, seeking every inch of cover. “I wish we had that trick.”
Doc fired again. “Unfortunately, we don’t. Our only hope is to get ourselves into the Dragon’s mouth and away. Can you and Miss McPherson make it in there if I give you covering fire?”
“We don’t have any other choice, do we?”
“Not that I can see.”
“What about you? We only have the one weapon.”
Doc allowed himself a deadly grin. “Don’t worry about me, boy. If I can’t hold these clowns at bay, I don’t deserve to make it at all.”
“Surely they’ll just follow us inside.”
“I’m hoping, once we’re inside, we’ll be able to wind our way out almost immediately.”
“I sure as shit hope so, too.”
“Are you ready?”
Jim glanced at Semple to confirm she knew what the plan was. She nodded tensely and Jim looked back at Doc. “We’re ready.”
“Then go for it!”
As Doc laid down a positive fusillade of fire and the dim cavern was lit up by more flashes of plasma, Jim and Semple scrambled for the open archway formed by the mouth of the huge Dragon statue, bullets kicking up fragments of stone around their feet. The moment they were inside the dark sculpted maw, they turned to see if Doc was going to make it. With the same nonchalant lack of concern for his own safety that had made him a legend in the Old West, Doc rose to his feet. Two of the pursuers broke cover, a zoot-suited vato armed with a sacred Thompson gun and a thugee in dirty robes with a nineteenth century Martini carbine. Both ran toward Doc. Apparently they assumed that Doc was surrendering. They learned their mistake as Doc, still without hurrying himself, took aim and reduced them to dissipating plasma with just two shots. The disappearance of their two companions gave sufficient pause to the other pursuers that he was able to stroll calmly after Jim and Semple and into the mouth of the Dragon. As he approached them, he looked extremely pleased with himself. “Shall we get on with getting out of here?”
When the vato and the thugee came out into the open, it was the first time that Semple, Doc, or Jim had seen the people who had been following them. Until that moment Jim had been entertaining a paranoid flight of fantasy that the footsteps were nothing more than an audio illusion sent to drive the three of them crazy, and that maybe the Virgil was also in on the deal, leading them around and around in circles until they finally cracked. Real or not, the audible footfalls of the pursuers had dogged them, through tunnels and passageways, all the way into what had to be one of the most ancient sectors of Hell, an area that was dark, derelict, all but deserted, and largely forgotten by a population now occupied with well-lit tourist attractions. Unfortunately, the sector hadn’t been forgotten by the relentlessly following footsteps.
The Virgil had done his best to shake the unseen posse by making use of every twist, turn, and doubling-back corkscrew he could dredge up from his encyclopedic memory of Hell’s geographic backwaters. They had used tunnels so small that even Semple had to duck her head to pass through them. They had rounded hairpins, climbed and descended narrow spiral staircases, and crossed fragile bridges over abyssal chasms with red molten lava flowing in their depths. On several occasions the sound of the pursuit had faded to nothing, but no sooner had Doc, Jim, and Semple breathed a collective sigh of relief than the advancing echoes had started up again and they were forced to hurry on.
The long trek through Hell’s labyrinth ended in a high, roughhewn cavern where, in its ancient but unweathered glory, stood a massively heraldic, couchant Dragon, carved from living rock aeons earlier by some unknown demon sculptor. Beyond its gasping, stone-fanged mouth lay the mysterious power source that would, according to fable, transport them out of Hell and, within reason, take them anywhere they wanted to go. Unfortunately, when they had reached the cavern, their pursers had finally caught up with them and the firefight had ensued.
Even once they were inside the mouth of the dragon, the mystery of the Dragon Ride itself was far from revealed. They found themselves in the darkness of yet another tunnel. The only light came from a dull red glow deep in the interior. Nothing about this place encouraged either Jim or Semple to press on into the gloomy unknown, but they knew they had to. The crew sent after them by Lucifer and Kali was not going to call off the chase just because Doc had gunned down two of their number. If anything, it would probably make them even more vengeful. While Jim and Semple initially stood and stared, attempting to make sense of their new surroundings, Doc moved purposefully forward. “Come on, young lovers, we’re not out of the woods yet.”
“It’s seems like we’re going in deeper and deeper.” Semple fell into step beside him while Jim hurriedly brought up the rear. Doc glanced back, but there was no sign of the pursuers-not yet.