Aloha From Hell (50 page)

I wander back to a window and look out over my weird Convergence kingdom. It isn’t Hell and it isn’t L.A., but I’ve been to Fresno, so I’ve seen worse. I take the Singularity from my pocket and watch the black and white pinheads spin around each other.

I survived the arena and Mason down here, and I survived Wells, Aelita, and the Golden Vigil up there. I still have two legs, two eyes, an arm, and something pretty close to an arm. I’m back in Pandemonium, so I bet Kasabian can see me. Maybe I’ll learn semaphore Morse code so I can send messages to Candy. And I wouldn’t mind killing Aelita. She goes right at the top of my Infernal to-do list. Yeah. This might not be so bad.

You think I can’t cut it down here anymore? I grew up in L.A. and lived to tell the tale. Hell is just L.A. with lousy head shots. We’re balls-deep in the shit Downtown, but we know it and admit it. Someday I’ll get back home, and when I do I’m going to find an ahe to findngel with my face and kick his bony ass from Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles to the Pearly Gates and back. They might call me Lucifer these days, but I’m just a part-time devil, so don’t count me out. And don’t use up all the whiskey and cigarettes. I’ll be back.

Acknowledgments

M
ANY THANKS TO
Ginger Clark, Diana Gill, Holly Frederick, Sarah LaPolla, Nicola Ginzler, Suzanne Stefanac, Paul Goat Allen, Pat Murphy, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Jessie Edwards, Will Hinton, and Carol Schneck.

Thanks to the real Wild Bill and Vidocq for not smothering me in my sleep. Thanks to Bart Ehrman, Raymond Chandler, Lustmord, Jon Hassell, Sergio Leone, and Guillermo del Toro.

Thanks also to everyone who follows me on Twitter and isn’t a pornbot. Seriously bots, I have all the Russian mail order brides and barely legal Asian trannies I can handle.

About the Author

R
ICHARD
K
ADREY
has published six novels, including
Sandman Slim
,
Kill the Dead
,
Butcher Bird
, and
Metrophage
, and more than fifty stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, and his short story “Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye” was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award. A freelance writer and photographer, he lives in San Francisco. His dramatic, primarily fetishistic, photography can be found at kaosbeautyklinik.carbonmade.com.

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A
LSO BY
R
ICHARD
K
ADREY

Kill the Dead

Sandman Slim

Credits

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photograph © by Amanda Friedman/Getty Images

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint lyrics from “At the Devil’s Ball,” by Irving Berlin, 1913.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ALOHA FROM HELL. Copyright © 2011 by Richard Kadrey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-171432-0

EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062101181

11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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