Ferox sees me squirming.
“There you are, sleepyhead. I was getting worried that I’d hit you too hard. But you’re with us now, yes? Say something to let us know you understand what’s happening.”
“Is this the right bus? I need to get off at La Cienega.”
Ferox nods, still arranging his toys.
“There we are,” he says. “Wit so hot it almost burns. So good to have you back among the living.”
“Speak for yourself. I was happy asleep.”
“You wouldn’t want to miss your coming-out party, would you, Sandman Slim?” He looks over at me. “Yes, even down here we’ve heard of the infamous Sandman Slim. You and I have a lot in common, you know.”
“You love Night Ranger, too? Unchain me and I’ll buy us a cold six.”
He smiles, showing his sharp, ragged teeth.
“I meant that we’re both nephilim. Though we Shoggots are a slightly more exotic variety.”
“That means what? You’re a mix of angel and pig fucker?”
“While you’re a mix of ordinary angel and a mortal woman, we come from fallen angels.”
I shake my head.
“I’ve been to Hell, Simple Simon. The only Hellion that can come to earth is Lucifer. The others are all stuck Downtown, going severely batshit. And even Lucifer can’t make a nephilim. No fallen angel can.”
“But we’re living proof that it is possible. And when Father Lucifer leads his army to take the earth for Hell, we’ll be there by his side and sit at his right hand in Hell for all eternity.”
I can’t help but laugh a little. It makes my head hurt.
“Damn, did you back the wrong pony. Lucifer isn’t coming back to skull-fuck the earth. The Angra Om Ya are. And they’re not going to be impressed by your story any more than I am.”
Ferox furrows his brow.
“I was hoping that being brothers of a sort, we could be civilized with each other.”
“Is that why I’m chained to a wall?”
“No. That’s so you won’t hurt yourself moving around too much once we start the experiments.”
“What experiments?”
“So, you don’t believe we are who we know we are?”
“I know exactly what you are.”
“Please enlighten me,” Ferox says. He turns to the other Shoggots. “Everybody listen. We’re about to get a lesson in metaphysics from Sandman Slim himself.”
I know I should keep my mouth shut, but now it’s too late to back down. All I can do is press harder.
“I don’t know your family’s history, but I know this from looking at you. You’re not nephilim. You’re losers and fuckups. You especially, Ferox. You drove your family from up there in the city into this sewer, and looking for a way not to have to blow your brains out, you came up with a sad fucking fairy tale about what special little snowflakes you are and how you wanted to be down here all along waiting for Ragnarok. But the Devil isn’t coming for you. God isn’t coming for you. You’ve heard of Sandman Slim? You’re one up on me because I’ve never heard of you assholes and I bet no one I know has either. You can scare these Kill City clans, but out of here you’re just another sideshow act. All you need is a two-headed calf and a pickled punk.”
Ferox comes over and looks at me hard.
“How many scars do you think you have?”
“No idea.”
“Let’s start a new count. One.”
He takes out the Liston knife and draws it across my chest, making a deep, hard cut. I grit my teeth to keep from making a sound. Just because I’m hard to kill doesn’t mean that bullets and knives hurt me any less than anyone else.
He turns to the other Shoggots.
“Who here has a watch? I’d like to know how long it takes for that cut to heal. Time it, please.”
He goes back to his instruments, wiping my blood off the Liston. I wonder if he did all the body mods to the other Shoggots himself or did he encourage them to do it to themselves?
He says, “Before you got here, we were planning on catching the old Roman ourselves. You see, we know about the angel and that the old ghost knows her secret. After we made him tell us what it is, we were going to sell him. But I think we’ll ease him onto the back burner because now we have you. And I think Sandman Slim will fetch a better price. After I’ve finished my research, of course.”
“I’ve got some research for you. Why don’t you cut me loose and I’ll take you to meet Lucifer and he can tell you to your face what morons you are and maybe you can haul your asses out of Kill City and do something for your family.”
Ferox comes over with a magnifying glass. He sticks his fat thumb into the cut on my chest. I try not to, but I flinch a little. He studies the blood on his fingertips, and when he’s done he wipes it on my torn shirt. He rips it open the rest of the way and starts examining my scars.
“Look, if this is your way of getting to know me, why don’t you just friend me on Facebook?”
He lowers the magnifying glass and goes to a brazier in the corner of the room. Comes back with a small branding iron and holds it to my chest until the skin sizzles. When I’m good and cooked he tosses the iron back into the brazier and goes back to looking over my scars.
“Would someone please time how long the burn takes to set? Thank you.”
He looks up at me.
“What I want to do is take you apart. Down to the smallest sliver of your being. I want to see you laid out on a table like a flesh puzzle and put you back together again in my own image. I’ve never had the heart to test the limits of nephilim body on my own family, and even though you and I are different sorts of nephilim, I suspect that the results will be applicable. Don’t you? For instance, I wonder how many organs you can lose before you die.”
He goes back to the table and brings back a scalpel. I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve been tortured like this, but it isn’t. The Hellions cut me up pretty nicely when I first got to Hell. They’d never seen a live human before. But for them, it was mostly just having a good time, kicking around the weak new kid. Ferox, on the other hand, seems like the real thing. A science groupie with a grudge against God, who rejected his family, and the Devil, who hasn’t rescued them. And right now my sorry carcass is the complaint department.
Ferox says, “Don’t worry. I have no interest in killing you. I’m going to take you to the brink, and then let you rest and heal. When you have, we’ll move on to other tests. All right? Good. Now hold still. This might sting a little.”
He drives the whole head of the scalpel into my gut a few inches below the navel and starts dragging the blade north. My body shakes. I can’t help it. It’s rejecting the blade, this situation, the whole world, trying to shake it off like a dog with mange. I breathe deep. In through my nose and out through my mouth. I won’t give this fucker the satisfaction of screaming. But I might faint and that would be embarrassing too. He cuts up three, four, five inches and stops. My legs and boots are warm with blood. My head spins. I hold my head up, not wanting to black out.
“It’s been bothering me,” says Ferox. “Why are you only wearing one glove? Did you lose the other?”
He pulls my glove off, and dazed as I am, I can still see his eyes go wide when he sees my Kissi hand. He pushes up my sleeve. Seeing that the prosthetic goes up farther, he slices my sleeve all the way to my shoulder, where the Kissi arm and I are attached.
“Glorious. Glorious. That’s not a gift from God. Who have you been spending time with, you naughty boy?”
Ferox taps the scalpel on the arm, listening to it like it’s a tuning fork. He probes it with the tip and tries to slice it. When it doesn’t work he presses harder until the scalpel’s head snaps off. He drops it and goes back to the brazier. It gives me a moment to breathe. I’m lucky that the feeling in the Kissi arm is a little dull. But even though he can’t hurt the arm, I can feel everything he’s doing. I’m getting paranoid about the cut in my belly. Like if I squirm around too much, my intestines or my liver might fall out.