If anything, it was hotter inside the station.
The sergeant was waiting for them. “If you’ll all just follow us we’ll get this business cleared up straight away.” He turned and led them up a corridor, chatting with his taller, younger subordinate.
Frank went straight to his daughter. She wasn’t crying, but there was panic in her eyes and she was trembling visibly. He opened his arms and she sagged gratefully against him, her hair disheveled, her blouse torn from one shoulder.
The slimy-looking officer behind the front desk was staring at them and grinning. His teeth were filed to fine points. His desk, like the floor and walls, was fashioned of cut stone. There wasn’t a sliver of wood to be seen in the building.
Trembling a little himself, Frank started to step around his daughter. Her arms tightened against his.
“No! No. It’s okay, Dad. I’m all right.” She glanced back over her shoulder to where the two officers had stopped to wait on them. “He didn’t do anything much. Just got me scared, that’s all.”
“You sure?” He searched his daughter’s eyes, was immensely relieved not to find what he’d feared there.
She nodded. “Daddy, where are we?”
He remembered the sign, didn’t have the heart to quote it. “A bad place. Very bad. But we’ll be out of here soon, you’ll see. As long as we keep our cool and stick together we’ll get out all right. We have to keep our composure, though. Understand?” He gripped her shoulders hard.
“I understand.”
“Okay. Now wipe your face. We don’t want to let these things think they’re getting to us, right?”
She nodded again, managed a feeble smile.
They followed the two officers up the corridor.
It might have been any office building in Los Angeles except for the intense heat and the fact that everything was made of stone or metal. No air-conditioning in Hell, he thought. Only heat and hotter. Officers and nonuniformed help passed them in the halls. Doors opened onto busy rooms full of clerks and technicians. Many of them were far less human than the two patrolmen who’d picked up Wendy. Steven stayed between Alicia and Mouse while Wendy hung close to her father. The station’s personnel ran the gamut from near-human to semihuman to utterly alien grotesqueries equipped with multiple tails and horns. Some had more than the usual complement of eyes and arms. Others sported fangs borrowed from saber-toothed cats. There were computer operators with forked tongues and filing clerks with long, narrow skulls that showed more bone than flesh.
They stopped outside a door while the sergeant vanished into the office beyond. The younger officer picked his teeth while something seven feet tall slumped down the hallway, long arms dragging the floor, knuckles turned inward. It did not turn to inspect them, for which Frank was grateful. He had no desire to encounter those vast yellow eyes with their tiny black pupils nor to see what might live inside that cavernous, bulging mouth. It held a sheet of plastic in one immense paw. Two red chevrons gleamed on the six-foot-long sleeve of its tunic.
Two more-modest monsters flanked a water cooler in the room opposite. The cooler jug contained an amber-colored liquid. Gasoline? he wondered. Or something equally volatile?
The sergeant emerged from the office he’d entered, took the younger patrol creature aside and whispered to it. Frank wanted to smash in both smug faces. He might’ve tried it in Los Angeles, but not here. Not in this place. A stupid, probably futile gesture that would do neither him nor his family any good. He wasn’t afraid of the younger officer who’d tormented his daughter, but he was damned afraid of the other things that lurked throughout the building. Besides which it wasn’t a smart idea to take a poke at a cop inside a police station, no matter what kind of things populated the place.
The sergeant turned back to them. “We’ve done some checking. The lieutenant wants to see you.” He turned and they followed him inside. Frank kept a protective arm around his daughter. The younger officer kept staring at her and grinning. She avoided his gaze.
In the outer office they passed something like a shell-less tortoise. It had a uniform and a face like a demented wild boar. The sergeant spoke to it and it grunted a reply before waddling past.
They halted outside a door of frosted glass, except the design in the glass wasn’t frost but rather flames. It was very artistically done, even to the details of the human hearts that floated in the midst of the flames.
The lieutenant was waiting for them. He was four feet across at the shoulders and weighed in the neighborhood of a quarter ton. His oversized desk barely accommodated his enormous frame. It was dominated by piles of plastic sheets, which he was perusing as they entered.
Frank’s gaze rose to the pictures that filled the wall behind him. There were several framed certificates, including a crimson diploma. A miniature gold pitchfork was mounted on an engraved brass plate. Obviously symbolic rather than practical, it looked like the sort of thing you’d give a retiring judge, only he’d get a gavel.
He preferred not to study the actual photographs, would have given a lot to keep Steven and Wendy and Alicia from having to look at them at all. He could only hope that they were too stunned by what they’d encountered already to pay much attention to them. They’d ignore the long string of preserved human organs that hung above one filing cabinet, twisting slowly in the hot air of the office, only because their attention was drawn to the mounted, stuffed, perfectly preserved figure of a four-year-old boy that sat regarding them blankly out of glass eyes from its marble base atop another cabinet.
The lieutenant’s saucer-sized eyes were pink with red pupils, framed by towering bushy eyebrows that resembled dancing flames. His orange hair had recently undergone a severe crew cut. The uniform he wore could serve as a tent for any three normal men. Whether it was his natural body odor or some grisly cologne, Frank had no way of knowing, but the great body stank like the backside of a slaughterhouse.
The uniformed monster put aside his plastic sheets and regarded the arrivals with interest. His was not a pleasant stare and Frank would have given a lot to be out from under it.
“Well,” a voice rumbled, as if from somewhere deep beneath the ground, “it’s clear you shouldn’t be here.”
Frank hadn’t made it close to the top of the business world by being meek and deferential. This wouldn’t be the proper place to show weakness, he decided quickly.
“Of course we shouldn’t be here! We were just cruising along, observing all the local laws, minding our own business, not in the flow of traffic at all, when these two pulled us over and insisted we follow them.” He indicated the sergeant and younger officer, who stood off to one side. “And that one,” he added for good measure, “tried to take advantage of my daughter.”
“Good,” the lieutenant growled. “Glad to know my people are doing their job. As for pulling you over, what else would you expect them to do? I’ve read the transcript of their report and you’re right about not being in the regular traffic pattern. Around here that’s more than unusual: it’s exceptional. There is only the prescribed traffic. Casual travelers just don’t end up on that piece of highway. It’s reserved for the departed who’ve been assigned this as their final destination.”
“We did our own determining,” Frank insisted. “We must’ve taken a wrong exit somewhere. We were on our way to Vegas and—”
The lieutenant interrupted him, nodding to himself. “That could explain it. Las Vegas is as close to Hell as humans can get in the real world. I can see how there could’ve been a mix-up. An interchange under repair, some fool places a detour sign improperly—not impossible. You’re certain you were going to Vegas, not coming from there?”
“That’s right.”
Great craggy eyebrows bunched together. “Damn peculiar. I knew when Joe described you to me we had a real problem here.”
While he pondered the fate of those before him, the young officer had worked his way next to Wendy. He grinned down at her while she tried to move away from him. Frank wanted to shout in his inhumanly beautiful young face, to order him to stay away from his daughter, but he held on to his temper. The slightest wrong move might upset the lieutenant’s fragile objectivity. So far he’d been courteous, even polite. But not apologetic. Frank could not risk getting on his bad side, assuming he wasn’t all bad side already.
He kept his mouth shut until he heard Wendy whimper.
“Look, if this situation’s beyond your authority I’ll be glad to speak to your superior officer.”
The demon’s face twisted into an unexpected, horrid smile. He leaned way back in his couch-sized chair and filled the room with his laughter. His elephantine bellowing bounced off the rock and shook the pictures and plaques on the walls. Steven clung to Mouse’s waist while Alicia turned away and tried to shield Wendy.
By the time he regained control of himself, the lieutenant had tears rolling down his cheeks. They didn’t roll very far, evaporating with tiny sizzling noises before they fell as far as his mouth.
“The Chief? You want to see the Chief? Now that’s really funny! Anybody would know you people don’t belong here or you’d never say anything like that.” Abruptly he leaned forward across his desk. He seemed to take up the whole room that way, shoulders and chest and face of planetary dimensions, glowing pink eyes continents adrift in a sea of unwholesome flesh. His tone lowered and it sent shivers through Frank’s entire being.
“You don’t really want to talk to my boss, do you?” he growled softly.
“Not if we can solve this business without bothering him, I guess,” Frank said bravely.
“I thought you might reconsider.” The demon sat back in his chair, which creaked beneath his enormous weight. “I don’t like to have to deal with the Chief under any circumstances. The more you can avoid him, the more pleasant your sojourn in Eternity will be. I guarantee you wouldn’t enjoy the meeting.”
Out of the corner of an eye Frank could see the tall young officer’s hands roaming over his daughter’s body. She stood motionless save for her trembling because she didn’t know what else to do. Frank didn’t know what to do, either.
Steven had left Mouse’s side and retreated to the far end of the room, as far from the two patrol-things as possible. Instantly three squat creatures popped into existence, surrounding him. They were smaller than adults but bigger than Steven. Each wore sneakers, jeans, dirty shirts. One had on a leather jacket. They began poking and kicking, trying to trip him. All had mean, narrow little faces, believably human save for the brightly glowing eyes. Three schoolyard bullies, a precocious, overweight youngster’s worst nightmare come to life.
So far Alicia had been ignored, and Mouse might be immune, but it was becoming clear that the longer they lingered in this place, the less reluctance the inhabitants felt about abusing them. Demonic inhibitions were breaking down while he and this officer argued. If they didn’t do something to get away soon, their presence here might become a fait accompli instead of a matter for debate.
“We don’t belong here because we haven’t died yet,” he argued desperately. “It’s not our time, or whatever it is they call it. This is a big mistake.”
“I tend to agree with you,” the lieutenant rumbled. At that declaration the schoolyard trio paused in their bullying. The young patrol-thing stepped away from Wendy. “Yet it remains that however you got here, you are here, and must be dealt with. I don’t know what kind of leeway I have in a situation like this. I’m going to have the records checked for precedents. If there is one, it will guide me in the disposition of your case.
“Meanwhile”—he turned to the sergeant, who stiffened beneath that relentless glare—“put these people somewhere comfortable so I can find them when I want them.”
“First Level?” The sergeant’s voice was eager.
“No,” replied the lieutenant with obvious reluctance. “Can’t do that until it’s official. Someplace neutral but secure. Your enthusiasm for your work is commendable, Sergeant, but we have to follow correct procedure. Don’t worry. If this works out the way we all hope it does, I’ll see to it that you and your partner receive proper credit.”
