Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

--Sweat-soaked paramedics, breathing hard as they labored over the teenaged John Constantineon a gurney in the back of an ambulance. There was an IV set up, shaking with the vehicle'smotion. They gave young Constantine a shot. He was unconscious, dying, but he was prescientenough to be aware of everything going on in the ambulance. The young Dr. Archer was there -before finishing med school, she was a paramedic.The EMTs watched him, waiting. But Constantine didn't respond to the shot.Archer had the defibrillator paddles poised over Constantine to try to jolt his heart.Maybe too late: Constantine felt himself tugged from his body....And he flew up through the ambulance roof, his soul soaring out of his body - for a long, longmoment feeling triumph, exulting in his release. He was going to be free of his earthly sufferingat last! Perhaps he would meet God and God would at last explain...Soaring on wings of hope - sure, because the Devil likes it that way. He likes them to thinkthey're about to escape, going to go up that smooth tunnel into that loving, welcoming light....Let them kid themselves about that. So it can be ripped away from them ... hope ripped awaylike a child struck by a car while rushing to her mother's arms.And Constantine, spiraling up over Los Angeles, gazing in awe over the city, its millions ofmortal lives... suddenly realized that Satan's little joke was reaching its punch line.One moment he was gazing at the familiar city of palm trees and pale buildings and broadboulevards and thriving freeways; the next, L.A. was transfigured, or perhaps revealed: as HellLos Angeles.As suddenly, ushered in by a demonic laughter that rang from horizon to horizon, vastcurtains of amber flame licked up over the complacent city; the pillars of smoke rose, the blizzardof ash fell, the buildings collapsed with rumbles of despair. And the demons boiled up out ofnowhere, seething rapaciously in the city's new wounds like maggots in gangrene.You died in New York, you went to Hell New York.You died in Bangkok, you went to Hell Bangkok.But this - Los Angeles captured forever in the yellow of a jackal's eye; a Los Angeles where itforever rained ash, and only the demons thrived; where humanity was always dying, everyoneperpetually dying: in crushed cars, in rubbled malls amid melting plastic, in the very mortar ofbrick buildings ... or tom to pieces as part of a show that never ended in the Hollywood Bowl.Constantine's soul arced over Hell L.A. - and he told himself he was escaping from it, he wasflying upward, not downward. But the laughter was for his benefit. A kind of astral gravitationtook hold of him. He stopped ascending. Stared with horror into Hell....And plunged down into it. The soldier demons were waiting for him with open arms, gapingjaws.Can a soul feel pain? Oh, yes; and with exquisite nuance. It suddenly seemed as if there'dnever been anything but pain. Ever."Time's relative?" Constantine laughed to himself. "Angela - Einstein didn't have a clue.... "The young Constantine's soul was one moment in Hell... then suddenly he was back in theambulance again, jerking convulsively to sit up in the gurney screaming - as the defibrillatorsthat had brought him back from the dead were pulled away from his chest, smoking faintly."Easy, kid," the young Archer said. "You were dead - don't push it! Lay back and rest...."--Constantine was poised on the brink of that smoking pit of memory. He recoiled from it -carrying with him a terrible knowledge.Muttering to Angela, "Take it from me, two minutes in Hell is a lifetime...."He sat up straighter as he realized people were staring at him. He'd been bent over almostfetally on his stool.