Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

a dull counterpoint to the ragged chorus of screams and pleading that was as common to Hell ascrickets chirping in a damp earthly woods. Just what you'd expect in Hell, those cries, but therewere so many that they merged into a kind of grim chaotic composition, reminding Constantineof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.He set off, trotting between moraines of rubble.To one side was a brick building, and he made the mistake of glancing at it, his attentionsnagged by a twitchy movement between the bricks, a continuous shrugging of the bricksthemselves: Every one was held in place by a mortar of human souls, a red and bone-fleckedmortar of crushed bits of living bodies; the bricks grinding them, grinding the faces, the fingers,the gibbering begging bleeding souls, forever and ever, people compressed somehow alive intoinch-wide spaces, the bricks moving in place, grinding like ruminating teeth, the whole buildingshifting like the working of closed jaws-Constantine looked hastily away, making himself ignore the hoarse and hopeless pleading ofthose trapped in the jostling stones. He came to a low, eroded wall, vaulted it, slid down acharred embankment, and stopped again to get oriented on an elevated fragment of abandonedfreeway. An indeterminate stretch of the freeway was somewhat intact, like a giant shelf for thedisplay of hundreds and hundreds of fatal wrecks, perpetually just-happened, still smoking.He peered through the roiling ash at the decaying corpse of the cityscape. He did have aspecific destination in Hell Los Angeles. But would he recognize it anymore? There it was - thatbuilding, though shattered and shuddering, was just recognizable, and not so very far off:Ravenscar.He took a deep breath - and regretted it. So he balled his fists and set out, running now, alongthe freeway, between the hulks of cars, fast as he could go.Get there, get it done, get out. Hell's curiosity about why you're here may overcome itsrestraint.And there was another factor. He was not yet condemned - they had to kill his physical bodyto keep him here. But certain predators here were not bound by the rules that constrained thehigher demons.Even as the thought came, his peripheral vision - his psychic peripheral vision - warned himthat something insatiably voracious was tautly coiled inside a burnt-out Ford Explorer to his right;and it was bored with the sickly soul it was feeding on. Wanted something firmer. Oh, gloriousscent; oh, lip-smacking possibilities: Here was John Constantine himself... unique in Hell thisendless day.Constantine ran past the Explorer, going faster yet, even as the predator burst through awindshield, somewhere behind him, uncoiling through the toothy frame of broken glass toundulate across the crumpled hood, dropping moistly onto the oily concrete something centipedelikebut bigger than a python and with the head of a leering, giggling fat man, coming afterConstantine.But Constantine was focused on getting to Ravenscar. He reached the broken-off edge of thehighway, looked down through a sudden blizzard of ash at the streets below. There, soldierdemons, like the one who'd inhabited little Consuela, hunted the teeming damned, the crowds ofthe condemned - hunting and feeding, sometimes in murderous phalanxes and sometimes leapingrandomly into the wailing crowd, to rend, devour: an endless bitter harvest. And Constantineknew there was no surcease in being devoured: you were simply "digested" down into a worselevel of Hell....Some of the gangly demons turned their heads - heads that were mostly mouth-towardConstantine, up above them. Sensing him, they began loping his way. They knew instantly thathe was different, more succulent than these who'd been devoured many times before.... He wasfresh meat.Constantine saw a spiraling exit ramp off to the right that would get him to the street leadingto Hell's own Ravenscar. It was quite a ways off, but he ran toward it, thinking: