Copyright, 2011

Satan  Loves You by Grady Hendrix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

All artwork by Eric Mueller of Element Group (www.element-group.net)

ISBN  978-0-9834487-0-9

To Amanda —

I owe you everything.

Including an apology.

But I still don’t think that life raft

Would have supported both of us.

Grady Hendrix’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod and is forthcoming in The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. His nonfiction has appeared in Variety, Slate, Playboy, Time Out New York, the New York Sun and the Village Voice. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2009, and you can follow every little move he makes at www.gradyhendrix.com.

SATAN  LOVES  YOU

Terminal C of the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport at 8AM on a Monday morning was no one’s idea of a good time. And right now, with the fruits of a freak snowstorm clumping on the skylights and whipping past the windows; right now, crammed with domestic passengers going nowhere and growing angrier by the minute; right now, with planes jamming up the gates and sliding gently off the runways and into sudden snowbanks, it was a little slice of hell on earth.

A long line snaked away from the Starbucks register where a frazzled US Airways Express passenger, who until then had worshipped exclusively at Dunkin Donuts, was trying to order.

“A large?” the register jockey said. “We don’t sell large.”

“I’m begging you,” the woman said. “what do you sell?”

“Short, Tall, Grande and Venti.”

“Which one’s the large?”

“There is no large. There’s Short, Tall, Grande and Venti.”

“Give me the biggest one.”

“The Venti?”

“Yes! The Venti!”

“You have to order it.”

“I’ll have a Venti coffee.”

“I’m sorry, we’re all out of Venti cups,” the register jockey said. He carefully kept his face blank and expressionless, but inside he was smirking.

Over at the Tie Hut, a wooden stand with decorative wagon wheels specializing in ties, scarves, cuff links and seated massage, an iPod was blaring out some of the worst country music ever written. This was, in turn, irritating five-month-old Ariella Kipling who was strapped down in her lightweight Gracco Travel System. At five months old, infants enjoy and respond to music and Ariella was responding to Lee Ann Womack’s “There is a God” by screaming her lungs out.

“It’s okay,” her mother cooed.“It’s okay, good girl. It’s okay. It’s only Lee Ann Womack.  She can’t hurt you.”

“Just pick her up,” Paul Kipling snapped.

“That’ll make it worse,” Nancy Kipling snapped back.

Paul rolled his eyes and tried to pick his daughter up but his wife was right. It was worse.

At the Carolina Sports Bar, Carl Willers couldn’t enjoy his Hearty Style Southern Breakfast because he couldn’t stop coughing. With every hack, his throat felt like it was being gouged from the inside by a giant ice pick.

“Jesus Christ,” he thought to himself, as he hacked up chunks of gray phlegm. “I’ve got some kind of infection. Holy God, this is painful. I need Cipro or some kind of antibiotic. Oh, Sweet Jesus...”

Seated nearby, a young man in a navy blue suit, with a non-descript haircut and a forgettable face, sat drawing on the cheap Carolina Sports Bar napkins. Every time Carl Willers coughed, the young man winced reflexively, but it was clear that his mind was a million miles away. Something was eating at him. Something was inside of him and he had to get it out onto these paper napkins. He scratched his pen against the crummy wood pulp paper.

Scratch, scratch scratch, scratch scratch scratch...

Trying to strike up some neighborly good cheer amongst the mob of seething, short-tempered, indefinitely stranded passengers, the New Light Fellowship Tour Group broke into a spontaneous line dance to Jake Owens’ “Eight Second Ride” now blaring from the Tie Hut.

“What was that other size you said?” the woman in the Starbucks line begged. “The one below Venti?”

Her hands were shaking. Every day for the past year she had started her mornings with an enormous Dunkaccino and it really took the edge off. She worked in the HR department of a company that sold a complicated financial product she didn’t quite understand, and her job mostly consisted of laying off people she had only recently hired. The Dunkaccino was the chocolate-infused, caffeine-saturated treat that got her out of bed in the morning, the wonder drug in a cup that soothed her seething brain, the liquid injection of love that settled her shaky synapses for the hateful day that lay ahead. And here she was, stuck in an airport far from home having to make do with Starbucks, trembling like a junkie trapped in the drunk tank over Fourth of July weekend, getting sicker by the minute and trying to treat her shakes with jailhouse hooch.

“The sizes are on the wall, ma’am,” the register demon said.

“Hey, could you step on it?” the man behind her said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have my glasses with me,” the woman said.

“A Grande,” the man behind her said. “You want a fucking Grande.”

The woman recoiled. Without her protective coating of caffeine his profanity chafed her brain like sandpaper.

“There’s no need to be rude,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me try that again: please, bitch, order a fucking Grande. Is that better?”

The woman’s last frayed nerve snapped, and she turned around and slapped the man in the face.

Everyone heard it.

Everyone except the people sitting within a ten yard radius of five-month-old Ariella Kipling whose screams had managed to climb to a higher pitch than scientists had previously assumed possible. Her bickering parents were, however, unable to appreciate this miracle of physics taking place in their midst.

“You don’t know anything about children,” Paul Kipling said. “You’re so out of touch with your own body that you’re already giving our daughter an eating disorder.”

“She’s still breast feeding,” Nancy Kipling snarled. “I am her primary food source. She can’t have an eating disorder! She eats me!”

“Your negative body image is contaminating your breast milk like a carcinogen,” Paul snapped back. “That’s why she’s unhappy. She’d rather starve than keep drinking your hate milk!”

The toxic emotional spill gushing from the Kipling marriage was oozing over the passengers around them, whose defenses were already down thanks to Ariella’s aural attack. Their fight was a noxious cloud contaminating all of the relationships and marriages within earshot, causing conversations to curdle into arguments, tender gazes to harden into icy stares and cuddling to morph into stiff-armed rejection.

Over at the Carolina Sports Bar, customers felt their gorges rise as Carl Willers was seized anew by a series of wet, gloopy hacks so powerful that he rocked helplessly back and forth in his chair. Some of them stared at him murderously, while others pointedly picked up their trays of eggs and grits and moved to the counter.

The nondescript man sitting near Carl kept scratching away on his paper napkins, only dimly aware of Carl’s coughing. And far up in the pipes and girders, a heavy glass High Bay light fixture suddenly began to show alarming signs of metal fatigue in the clamps and screws that secured it.

The New Light Fellowship reached the end of “Eight Second Ride,” struck a pose and a few confused travelers gave them a spattering of desultory applause. But one middle-aged passenger, grossly overweight and deeply unhappy, threw a half-empty cup of Mountain Dew in their general direction and yelled, “Country music is for queers!” The New Light Fellowship believed in turning the other cheek, but everyone has a limit and insulting country music was theirs. They surrounded the heckler and began shoving him back and forth. They pinched his fat arms. They kicked his sagging butt. One of them spat in his face.

Over at Starbucks, the slapped man stood there for a moment, surprised that this frumpy spinster would dare lay hands on him, and then he shoved her hard, sending her backwards into a wicker basket packed with Ethos Water. She sprawled on the floor in an avalanche of plastic bottles and instantly she sprang back up and came at him, swinging her purse like a battleaxe.

At the Carolina Sports Bar, Carl Willers started up a new round of hacking, coughing so hard he thought he was going to throw up. Nearby, Ariella Kipling was screaming so loudly that several passengers began to weigh the pros and cons of actually killing her.

“When we get home I’m going to throw the TV right in the garbage and if you want to watch Real Housewives then you can go find some manorexic to move in with!” a red-faced Paul Kipling yelled at his wife.

“Are you calling me fat?” his wife screamed back.

And then, without a sound, the support screws holding the light fixture twenty-five feet above Ariella Kipling quietly snapped. The fixture weighed eighteen pounds, and it fell straight down at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. It fell so fast and true that it looked like a missile fired right into Ariella’s Gracco Travel System and when it landed it made an enormous “Splortch!”

There was sudden, blessed silence. Paul and Nancy Kipling froze. They looked into the Gracco Travel System that now contained nothing but a High Bay Indoor lighting fixture and a large quantity of baby-flavored marmalade. There was a stunned pause, and then Nancy Kipling began to scream even louder than her daughter ever had. Paul Kipling collapsed to his knees, slapping his own face and shouting.

“She was going to be a gymnast! She was going to bring home the gold in 2025!”

In Starbucks, a brawl had broken out. A pack of teenagers in Juicy Couture were dragging the terrified barista over the counter and clawing her to pieces. At the Carolina Sports Bar a final, terrible bout of coughing seized Carl Willers, and he felt something heavy traveling through his sinuses. His climactic cough was a loud, wet yawp and his brain flew out of his mouth and landed on the table. He looked down at it and screamed. His brain opened two eyes, looked up at him, and it began to scream, too.

A pack of stuffed animals broke free of Mindworks, and chased down a fleeing mega-family on their way to Orlando. They managed to separate the two weakest children from the herd, and backed them into a corner near gate C13, incongruous growls coming from their plush throats. Steve and Reuben Marsh were window shopping the Duty Free store but when they saw the chaos breaking out they decided to run. Steve reached for his rolling bag but couldn’t feel the handle. He looked down, confused, only to find that his bag had bitten cleanly through his wrist with its zippered mouth and was now chewing happily. It swallowed, and lurched towards him, hungry for more. He stumbled backwards trying to get away.

“Reuben!” he screamed as he went down in a pile of rolling bags, all of them hungry, all of them slavering from their zippers.

“Steve!” Reuben cried, trying to reach his lover. Instead he found himself trampled beneath the thundering hooves of three Arabian stallions that had broken through Security and were galloping down the concourse.

Passengers scattered and screamed. Massage chairs in Brookstone began throwing themselves around the store like epileptic linebackers, shattering shelves of nose hair trimmers and ergonomic neck pillows. A nine-foot-tall golem assembled itself out of melted cheese and lumbered out of Sbarro’s and onto the concourse, crushing screaming passengers with its heavy, greasy feet. And still the man in the navy blue suit sat in the Carolina Sports Bar, oblivious to the surreal chaos around him, scribbling furiously on his paper napkins.

“Proud of yourself?” a voice said, dripping with effete disdain.

The man looked up. A beautiful, glowing person with the androgynous good looks of mid-career David Bowie was hovering in mid-air. The hovering man was wearing an impeccable white suit and he seemed peevish. The man in the rumpled navy blue suit looked around him at the bloody chaos breaking free on Concourse C and shrugged.

“My mind must have wandered,” he said. “Are you guys here to clean up?”

“The Heavenly Host is not your personal housekeeping service,” the floating, glowing man said.

“Right, right,” the seated man said, starting to stand up. “I was just working on some stuff and got distracted. It’s not a big deal.”

“Where are you going,” the glowy man said. “I’m not finished with you.”

“I really don’t feel like being lectured right now by one of God’s little chore boys,” the man said.

Up and down the Concourse, more glowing men descended through the ceiling. Passengers fell asleep and slumped to the carpet where they landed. The glowing men pulled apart the cheese golem, reattached limbs, restored life, repaired damage, reached into snarling, animate suitcases and barking stuffed animals and snuffed out their tiny faux-lives.

“Here,” the man in the navy blue suit said. “Pass this along to your boss. I forgot to send him one.”

He handed a piece of printer paper to the glowing man, who pinched it between two fingers like a dirty diaper.

It read:

We’ve moved!

The Offices of M. Satan and Co.

Have Moved to

The Fifth Circle of Hell

phone: 555-555-1010

fax: 555-555-1012

email: hell_info186@hotmail.com

“Again?” the angel said.

“We’re down with the irascible and the sullen now,” Satan said.

“And still using Hotmail,” the angel sniffed. “You don’t even have your own servers yet?”

“You tell me how we can pay for them and I’ll get right on it.”

“It’s embarrassing. Doing business in such a slipshod manner reflects badly on those of us who remain in Heaven.”

“We take in over a thousand times the number of souls we did five hundred years ago, but our budget’s still the same size. I’m sorry we’re not the cash cow Heaven is.”

“I’m crying tiny teardrops for you,” the angel said. “Boo hoo hoo.”

“Just give that to your boss, Uriel,” Satan said.

“It’s Gabriel, not Uriel,” the angel said.

“You all look the same to me,” Satan said, starting to leave.

“I’ll see you at the Ultimate Death Match.”

“Seriously? Is it that time again, already?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot.”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind. Do you know the last time I came up with a new torment? One thousand five hundred years ago. My ‘To Do’ list covers six volumes. So sometimes I lose track.”

“Elijah’s predicting a big loss for you this year. Michael’s been working out with a very good personal spiritual trainer. He’s going to destroy you.”

“Don’t get your pretty little halo in a twist,” Satan said. “We’ll be ready.”

“I don’t think so,” Gabriel smirked. “Not in three weeks.”

And then he flew off to resurrect a school tour group who had been eaten alive by a mob of rabid, handicapped athletes on the other end of the concourse.

As Satan stalked off, he didn’t feel a pair of eyes boring into his back, but they definitely existed and they were attached to a nun, hiding in the women’s room, peering out in terror through the cracked door. Her name was Sister Mary Renfro and there was no doubt in her mind that she was witnessing something unholy. So far she had avoided detection and she had vowed to devote herself to 24 hours of unbroken prayer if she could only escape unscathed. As far as she knew, she had avoided the insanity that had enveloped Concourse C,

But what man knows is nothing compared to the knowledge of angels and on the other side of the Concourse Gabriel noticed her peering out of the bathroom and he smiled to himself. This was the work of the Heavenly Host, and it was good.

The last thing to go through Earl Pickett’s mind was a Firestone tire. It came flying off the track of the Summerville Speedway at ninety-five miles per hour, bounced off a telephone pole, changed direction by about forty-five degrees, and then rocketed clean through Earl’s head and planted itself in the bread basket of Dale Gutman, who was just popping open another Budweiser.

What surprised Earl the most was his sudden change in perspective. One minute he was coming back from the men’s room where he’d dry swallowed a couple of Percocets in preparation for getting his buzz on while watching this slobber knocker of a race that was about to bust loose as the Red Bear Hand Cleaner Creeper took on the Appalachian Outlaw in the Drury Sheet Metal Summer Stock Car Spectacular, and the next minute he was looking up from underneath the stands at his buddy Dale, who seemed to have a Firestone tire stuck halfway through him.

“Hey, Dale?” Earl shouted. “Are you okay?”

“Earl?” Dale said, shakily. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, I’m down here.”

A chorus of screams went up from the other end of the Speedway, followed by a muffled explosion.

“Oh, man,” Dale said. “The Appalachian Outlaw just drove into the stands and blew up. Where is you?”

Earl tried to stand up, but his motor control was shot.

“Dale,” he said. “You got a tire in your stomach.”

“Yeah, I know. I think I’m on fire, too.”

“Shit, man. That’s raw.”

Dale peered beneath the stands as best he could and then took out his cell phone and snapped a picture. He turned it around to show Earl.

“Your head’s been cut off,” he said.

Earl looked at the photo of his head on Dale’s phone. He was a good-looking fox, if he might say so himself, but he was also a severed head.

“Is this a joke?”

“Naw, man. You’re just a little bitty chopped off head. Your body’s up here running around like a fool.”

“Then why the hell ain’t I dead?” Earl asked.

There was another muffled boom and a less muffled whump and then more screaming from yet another part of the race track.

“Can’t they keep them damn cars on the asphalt.” Earl snapped.

“It’s chaos up here, man,” Dale said. “I’m coming down there with you. Everyone’s all blown up and on fire and running around hollering. I don’t like this at all.”

“Come on down,” Earl said. “But bring my damn body with you if you can. And bring me one of them beers. My mouth’s as dry as a prick.”

Death stood before Satan’s desk, head lowered.

“What were you thinking?” Satan yelled.“WERE you thinking? I mean, the cars go into the stands, the cars blow up, the people catch on fire, the people die. Weren’t you the one saying that you wanted to work more racetrack disasters?”

Death raised his head to speak.

“No!” Satan said. “Don’t say a word. I’m not finished. Weren’t you aware that this was scheduled for today? Did you even try to make it? Do you even care?”

“My Dark Lord and Master – ” Death began in the sepulchral voice of the tomb.

“Not in here,” Satan said. “Save that for the groupies.”

Death cleared his throat and continued in a normal tone of voice.

“I sent one of my assistants. They were supposed to take care of it.”

“You know the rules: fifty or more deaths and you have to handle it in person.”

“I – ”

“If that’s an excuse coming, I’m not interested.”

“I – ”

“I’m serious.”

“I’m...sorry.”

“You’re sorry? We’ve got one hundred and thirty-two supposedly dead people running around and you’re sorry?”

“I could go kill them now,” Death said, helpfully.

“You can’t go kill them now. Now is too late. These people have been on the local news. They’re negotiating merchandising rights. They’re getting interest from network television.”

Satan got up, hoping that walking around his office might calm him down, but it only made him angrier, so he sat back down again.

“You used to be so good at this,” he said. “You were with it. On the ball. The Black Death. The Crusades. Hiroshima. The Holocaust wasn’t to my taste, but you did a terrific job with it. And now look at you. You look like a cartoon character. What happened to all those suits I bought you?”

“They felt funny.”

“Funny?”

“Constricting.”

“So you just keep on wearing that smelly old robe. Look at it, it’s more hole than robe. And frankly, you smell bad.”

“I’m supposed to smell bad.”

“Who says?”

“The cold stench of the tomb. And all that. Everyone.”

“And if Everyone told you to dress up in a pink bunny suit would you do it?”

Death knew that this was a trick question, but he couldn’t quite figure out the trick.

“Maybe?” he ventured.

Satan threw his hands up in despair, and at that moment Death’s scythe, which had been leaning against the wall, toppled to the floor, leaving an ugly scratch behind it in the paint.

“And why are you still lugging that thing around? Do you think it’s threatening? Because it’s not. It makes you look Amish.”

“It’s part of my image.”

“But what good does it do?”

“It can cut grass...and things.”

“Right.”

There was a long pause.

“I hate it,” Death finally said. “I hate the scythe. It’s always getting caught in doors and tearing my robe and poking people in the head. Every time I sit down I have to find something to do with it and usually when I lean it up against the wall a minute later it falls back down again. I want to throw it in a volcano.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“The same reason you keep this place running. Habit.”

“That’s...that’s an entirely different issue,” Satan said. “Don’t even compare what I do to what you do, because right now I’m keeping this place open with sweat and luck and elbow grease while you, on the other hand, are the biggest screw up in all Creation. You know I don’t believe in micromanaging but times are tight. It’s not my decision, there’s pressure from upstairs and I don’t like it, but I don’t see any other options. I’m going to have to let you go.”

“But I’m Death!”

“It’s hard. I know. If there was any other way – ”

“Pressure from upstairs? From who? You are upstairs.”

“I’m under a lot of pressure that you don’t even know about,” Satan yelled. He saw Death start to shut down and so he changed tactics, opening a drawer and pulling out a pair of withered, mummified hands.

“We all pitched in and got you this,” he said, handing them to Death. Death cracked them open. Inside lay a gold wrist hourglass.

“It’s got an inscription...” Satan began.

‘A watch?” Death roared. “After twelve thousand years of service I get kissed off with a watch and a pension plan?”

“Actually, I had to cut the pension plans,” Satan said.

“I wish the Creator had destroyed you!” Death yelled. “Because Heaven would run a better Hell than you!”

And he threw the hourglass at the wall where it shattered, then he whirled on his heel and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him. It was a very dramatic exit. Satan would have admired it if he hadn’t had such a hideous headache.

Ever since The Fall he had been subject to headaches, colds, stomach cramps and shooting pains in his legs. He could barely get drunk. He didn’t need to eat or drink. He couldn’t have an orgasm. But the Creator, in his wisdom, allowed him to have headaches. From time to time Nero would tell him about some new pain killer that the humans had invented and he would buy it in a fit of optimism, but it never worked. He was doomed to never get an aspirin. He just had to suffer through his headaches. He massaged his forehead with his fingertips, but all that did was give him a bruised forehead.

“Hello, boss,” Nero chirped, popping into the office. “I just bumped into Death on the way out and it looked like you really gave him heck about that Summerville Speedway incident.”

“I fired him,” Satan said.

“Come again?”

“I fired Death,” Satan said. “This wasn’t the first time he screwed up, and I can’t take that anymore. If you’re going to work in Hell then you have to be responsible for your actions.”

In life, Nero had been known as quite possibly the most irresponsible of the Roman Emperors: creeping out of his palace in disguise to beat up drunks, exhausting the treasury on unnecessary construction projects, fiddling while Rome burned. But in death he had embraced responsibility with the passion of the convert and become Satan’s personal assistant. No one was a more ardent and fervent believer in personal responsibility than Nero, but even he thought that firing Death was beyond the pale.

“Don’t you think this might be you acting out.” Nero asked. “I know things have been stressful for you recently, sir, but why don’t I get him back and you two can revisit this issue tomorrow?”

“It’s done,” Satan said. “It’s about time I started making some strong decisions around here.”

“But what about the Ultimate Death Match?” Nero asked. “Who’s going to wrestle for us?”

“Oh. Right,” Satan said. “I’ll...figure something out.”

“Like what, sir?”

“Something!”

“Such as?”

Satan was frustrated. He stood up and began to kick his desk. It was an ugly lump from an overstock warehouse. He hated it.

“Something, okay?” Kick, kick, kick. “I’ll figure something out!” Bang, bang, bang. “I’ll make it work because I’m Satan and I have to deal with it. I have to deal with everything! I have to pick up everyone’s garbage! I have to deal with everyone’s mess! If other people don’t want a problem they can just pass it on because good old Satan’ll take care of it! Isn’t that what he’s there for?”

Kick, kick, kick! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Satan stopped, exhausted.

Pant, pant, pant.

“Feeling better, sir?” Nero asked.

“Actually, I do,” Satan said, surprised that once again physical violence had turned out to be the solution. He was always underestimating violence, but it really was a terrific way of dealing with things.

“Try not to make a habit of it, sir,” Nero said. “I don’t think we have the funds to replace your desk if you ever actually do manage to break it. Now, there are a few things that you need to take care of.”

“They’re all horrible, aren’t they.”

“Oh, no sir” Nero said. “They’re actually all very nice.”

“Really?”

“No, sir, not really. I was just trying to cheer you up. Minos’s demons have gone on strike again.”

Satan moaned.

“Come along, sir. From what I understand they’ve cobbled together a list of demands and they want to see you right away.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point,” Nero said, hauling Satan up out of his chair, “Is that no one else is going to do it.”

Dragging Satan behind him, Nero led his Dark Lord through the terrible corridors and caverns of Hell.

There has been a lot of debate over what Hell looks like. Christians serve it up Dante style, with caverns of fire and lakes of lava. Muslims change the names, but they’re mostly on the same page. The Buddhists have Naraka, with its pus rivers and infinite tortures. Jews have an undesirable piece of real estate where everyone gets Saturdays off and someone’s always burning garbage. But when damned souls of any denomination finally come face-to-face with the real thing what they generally feel is disappointment, and that’s the genius of Hell.

Hell falls short of expectations. Hell disappoints. Hell underwhelms. Hell is always worse than you thought it would be. Tackier. Cheaper. Dirtier. Uglier. Hell looks like someone slept in it the night before and didn’t wash it afterwards: it’s soiled, rumpled, stained and unpleasant. Almost everything in Hell is broken and hardly anything works. The things that do work have been repaired so poorly, so many times, that they’re actually harder to use than before. Dante got the general gist – he was there, after all – but, being Italian, when it came time to write it up he couldn’t resist making it seem romantic. Hell is about as romantic as a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen where everyone is naked, dirty and dead.

Hell is half-assed. Demons flog screaming souls but they swing from their elbows, never getting their shoulders into the blows. Flesh is indifferently flayed with dull knives. Once, lining the road between the Sixth and Seventh Bolgias, there had stood an impressive arcade of crucifixes. Over time their crossbeams cracked and their arms broke, leaving them lopsided and, rather than actually taking the trouble to repair them, the demons just made do. The result was an avenue of the crucified who had one hand waving free and, occasionally, a foot, too. It looked very stupid, but no one cared. It was Hell.

Hell was the Broken Windows Theory in reverse: as more and more small things were ignored and the minor aspects of the realm fell into disrepair, it caused a ripple effect across the realm. A feeling of despair infected every corner of Hell, and not just the normal Hellish despair of souls bound in eternal torment, but a more Earthly “Why Bother?” shrug. Fifteen-minute coffee breaks became hour-long naps. Where once Centaurs had scourged, violated and destroyed souls now they just scourged and violated them and their violations were by-the-numbers at best. Gluttons had once been drowned in hot lead, but now the lead was microwaved until it was merely lukewarm. The gluttons suffered, but mostly from boredom and lead poisoning.

The budget cuts didn’t help. A demon who lost his trident or whip knew that it was unlikely he’d be issued a replacement. The Malebranche’s famous lake of pitch was now more of a pond and well on its way to becoming a wide puddle. The flatterers of the Second Bolgia had once been buried in human excrement, but now there was only enough excrement to bury them up to their necks and as a consequence they wouldn’t shut up. It drove the demons appointed to stomp on their faces crazy.

With so few physical resources at its disposal, the important thing about Hell was keeping morale up, which is why self-starters like Minos, who took genuine pride in their work, were so important. And that was why it was even more disturbing that he and his crew were now on strike.

Satan and Nero arrived at The Gates of Hell where a mob of demons were walking a picket line. A small clot of souls were sitting nearby, suddenly seized by a deep commitment to social justice which required that they never cross a picket line. They hoped that their newfound solidarity with labor would spare them from the fires of Hell for a little while longer. Standing on a rock by the Gate was Minos, chanting on his bullhorn. Seeing Satan and Nero approach, he redoubled his efforts.

“Four, six, eight, ten, we won’t be burned for Satan!”

“Hey hey, ho ho, toxic fumes have got to go!”

“One, three, five, seven, give us benefits like they’ve got in Heaven!”

“I’m going home,” Satan said to Nero.

“You must take decisive action, sir.”

“I don’t want to be decisive,” Satan whined. “I’ve got a killer headache.”

“Excuse me?” Nero shouted at Minos. “Excuse me?”

“Whaddaya want?” Minos yelled back.

“I’ve got his attention, sir,” Nero said. “Now talk to him.”

“Hi, Minos,” Satan said.

All the demons were suddenly staring at him. Satan figured he needed to do better than “Hi.”

“So, what’s going on?”

Instantly, Satan regretted saying this because a) he didn’t actually want to know and, b) it sounded weak.

“We’re on strike,” Minos roared from his barrel chest. “And if you don’t meet our demands we’re gonna get you put on the lista Unfair Metaphysical Employers.”

“This is Hell,” Satan said. “It’s supposed to be unfair.”

“Didn’t you read our signs?” Minos asked.

He pointed his long, scaly tail at a placard held by a minor demon that read, “UNfair doesn’t mean UNsafe.”

“Do you know what it’s like ta live the life of a demon?” Minos asked, rhetorically.

The mob murmured.

“We work around open flames all day long with no protection,” Minos bellowed, playing to the crowd. “We may be fireproof, but our hair ain’t! I useta be a hairy guy, now look at me! Bald as a bat! All day long we inhale offensive and hazardous odors. I may be a demon from Hell, but does that mean I don’t like nice things? Why can’t we have some potpourri in da break room? Why can’t we spray down with Febreeze at da end of the day?”

“Yeah!” the demons yelled. “ Potpourri! Febreeze!”

“We deal with all the souls who come in here,” Minos ranted, really getting on a roll. “All day and all night. And they’ve all got complaints: ‘I didn’t do it,’ ‘I led a righteous life,’ ‘I was President of the United States.’ And we haveta figure out an appropriate punishment for eacha dem. And you know what? These torments haven’t been updated in centuries. They’re outta date! Did ya know that some fetishists are coming here because they wanna be buried in excrement? Andrew Johnson loves it! And what about online bullies? Where do they go? Why ain’t there a setta guidelines for these chumps? How come every time I get someone who was born after 200 AD I haveta start from scratch?”

“We want better rules and regulations!” the mob of demons shouted.

“I get a new demon, and I gotta train him from nuthin’,” Minos said. “You know how much time dat takes? Last week I hadta transfer some giants from the Ninth Circle up to the Fifth and all they wanted ta do was hit people in the head with rocks. It took me two days to gettem ta stop and no one paid me anything for my overtime. If you don’t start addressing these problems then we’re all gonna quit and we’ll see how you like that.”

“But...but if you quit, where will you go.” Nero asked, unable to contain himself.

“Heaven!” Minos shouted, and the cavern suddenly got quiet. “They already said they’d take us back.”

“They did?” Nero asked.

“Yeah, because we’re sick and tired of being treated like dis.”

Nero noticed that Satan’s face was slowly turning red.

“Sir?” Nero said. He was alarmed at how red Satan was turning. “Sir?”

“Well, GO!” Satan exploded.

“Sir!” Nero gasped.

“Ever since we restructured and moved you guys up here from the second circle you’ve done nothing but piss and moan. You didn’t like being down there with the wanton and all that dust from the infernal hurricane, so I listened and relocated you up here and now you’re complaining again. What’s it going to take to make you happy? You know what I just did? I fired Death! And now I’ve got to find a replacement. What are you doing tonight? Going home, to eat your little snack cakes and your ham? I’m going to be on a plane to Los Angeles – LOS ANGELES – to deal with this Death situation. Have you ever been to Los Angeles? It’s a giant moron carnival!”

“You really fired Death?” Minos asked in his indoors voice.

“Yes! I really fired him!”

There was a long silence. No one ever got fired in Hell. This was new.

“You’re not gonna fire us, are ya, boss?” Minos asked. “Because we were all jus’ blowin’ off some steam here.”

“Yeah,” a few demons muttered. “Blowing off steam.”

“I haven’t decided yet!”

“Well, you know me. I’ve always been a team player,” Minos said. “We’ve all been team players up here at The Gates. And, um, obviously this is, um, a very bad time for you, and so why doan you go do whatever it is you need to do and doan worry about us, because we all know you’re doing your best, Mr. Boss, and we’ll all jus’ go back ta work and talk about this later?”

“Booo! No negotiating with management,” a minor Demon shouted. Minos gave a quick nod and the dissenter was decapitated.

“Braaaap!” his neck hole blarted, as a pair of demons dragged him away.

“Come on everybody,” Minos shouted. “Back ta work. Look fierce. Balial, brandish that trident like you mean it. These souls ain’t gonna damn themselves!”

“Nicely done, sir,” Nero said as he and Satan walked away. “But I fear that if more demons find out Death has been fired and there is no replacement this unrest will spread. And you know how demons gossip.”

“I’m getting a replacement,” Satan said.

“As soon as possible, right?”

“Would you stop pressuring me? I’m on it. Book me a ticket for Los Angeles.”

Sister Mary Renfro finished adjusting the idle on the carburetor and slammed the hood of the old Chevy. She slid her screwdriver back into her tool kit, and latched its cover. She removed her work gloves, folded them in half, and tucked them into one pocket, then she picked up her tool kit and took it over to the porch and carefully put it down. Returning to the Chevy, she shook out her work mat and then folded it into precise quarters. Then she checked to make sure that each of the doors of the Chevrolet were locked. Way out here in the suburbs of Minnetonka, Minnesota there was no one to steal it, but it was the proper thing to do. When she was certain the vehicle was secure, she went into the garage.

On Saturdays, Sister Mary Renfro took an envelope recycled from the week’s junk mail and on the back of it she wrote a list of the chores that needed to be done at the monastery. She picked up today’s list and carefully drew a line through “Adjust idle on carb.” The next item was, “Check connection on DirecTV dish.” That would require the ladder. Sister Mary smiled to herself. She loved the ladder.

Sister Mary also loved chores, and she loved lists, but most of all she loved routines. At thirty-four she was already an old lady in her heart, and the only passion in her life was her passionate embrace of repetition, routine and habit. Especially now, after that terrible experience at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She had been on her way home from the wonderfully boring God is Green: Environmental Efficiency in Religious Communities Conference and suddenly, while changing planes at the airport, the world had stopped making sense. She had seen people murdered by their own carry-on items. She had seen those same people restored to life twenty minutes later. She had seen a man who was referred to as Satan (very disappointing looking, to be honest). She had seen beautiful, glowing creatures who must have been angels. She had seen a TSA Employee strip naked and attempt to copulate with a Rosetta Stone vending machine. She didn’t know how drugs worked but she suspected they worked a lot like this. The whole experience had left her shaken.

There are two types of nun. One was the type who braved hails of sniper fire to minister to the sick in the Sudan. These nuns risked their lives to smuggle human rights workers out of North Korea. They held hands with convicted serial killers as they were executed. They were God’s warriors of mercy. Mary Renfro was not that kind of nun. Mary Renfro was a hiding-from-the-world, please-don’t-bother-me kind of nun. She was in it for God, of course, but she was mostly in it for the stability. Nuns couldn’t be fired. Nuns couldn’t be laid off. When you joined the Church you were in it for life.

Sister Mary’s father had been killed in a freak cosplay accident when she was young. He had loved Star Wars but something had gone tragically awry with his reproduction light saber at a convention and suddenly he’d been engulfed in flames on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, Hall B. It was random, it was bizarre, it was unexpected and after that Mary Renfro had yearned for predictability. She had spent months asking grown ups what jobs were the safest and which careers were the most orderly. Finally, she drew up a list, reviewed it and made the only possible decision.

And so, when she was twelve years old, she had marched up to her mother and informed her that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had smiled, opened another bottle of Scotch and assumed that her daughter would forget all about it once she discovered boys or drugs or masturbation or all of the above. But twelve-year-old Mary Renfro walked to the local library (safest mode of transportation) and made a list of all the things she needed to do to become a nun and then, on her nineteen birthday, she did them. There was no college, no backpacking around Europe, no hitchhiking adventures in Northern California. Within six months of her high school graduation, Mary Renfro became a nun. Two weeks later her mother killed herself, but Sister Mary told herself that the two events were probably unrelated. Probably.

Being a nun was a good way to live. A precise way to live. And after the horrors of the airport, Sister Mary embraced her familiar routines like a drowning swimmer grabbing a life preserver. Every boring chore, every mundane task, every tiny ritual was a wall that she was building to protect herself from the chaos she had seen on Concourse C. But no matter how strong her wall was, there was still The Other Problem. The one that nagged at her. The one that whispered to her from the back of her mind, telling her that maybe it was already Too Late. The one that filled her every quiet moment – the one that ate at her before she fell asleep, while she sat on the toilet, while she untangled extension cords. The one that suggested she might be beyond salvation.

Sister Mary fetched the ladder from the garage and leaned it against the roof. She shook it once to make sure it was secure and then she climbed up and stepped onto the shingles. Carefully, she made her way to the short brick chimney where the DirecTV dish was attached and began looking for the problem. And there it was. Three of the brackets securing the coaxial cable had been torn out and downward pressure had caused the connector to become unseated in its receptacle.

Sister Mary did not like television, but St. Clare was the patron saint of television and she was a Poor Clare and so it made sense that they had a set. And recently they had been compelled to purchase a complete DirecTV package after Sister Helen lost the use of her legs. While laid up in bed, barely able to move, Sister Helen had grown quite addicted to the wide variety of channels and new movie selections on DirecTV and now she felt that she could never return to basic cable. Sister Mary tried to find tolerance in her heart for Sister Helen’s dependency and, as usual, after a reflective moment, she did. She re-seated the cable and then tidily installed four new brackets.

Chores completed, a day of quiet contemplation and private prayer stretched ahead of Sister Mary. Previously, she had spent her time ministering to the sick and needy until about a year ago when Sister Barbara and Sister Helen came to her and pointed out that there were fewer and fewer sick and needy people all the time in this part of Minnesota and thus they needed less and less ministering. That made sense and so Sister Mary had devoted herself to doing odd jobs around their monastery, a split-level ranch-style home located way out in one of the remote subdivisions surrounding Minnetonka. In the past year, the single-story, four-bedroom house had become the first Northwestern monastery to receive LEED certification and be designated 100% “green.” It had also received th. “Teeny Tiny Carbon Footprint” Award, the “Low Impact I Heart Trees and Badgers” Certificate and the “Stewardship of the Earth” Medal. All of these awards were actually very easy to win since the monastery only housed three nuns. The population of the order of the Poor Clares of Minnesota had declined dramatically in the past decade and these days only Sister Mary, Sister Helen and Sister Barbara were left. And the way Sister Helen’s health was going, soon it would just be Sister Mary and Sister Barbara.

“Sister Mary,” Sister Barbara called up from the front yard. “May I speak with you?”

Sister Mary descended the ladder.

“Good morning, sister,” she said.

“Have you been praying for Sister Helen again?” Sister Barbara asked.

“Why, sister?”

“Because she’s gotten worse.”

“Then I must remember her in my prayers today.”

“Stop praying for Sister Helen,” Sister Barbara hissed, dropped all pretense of civility. “You’re killing her.”

“That is not true,” Sister Mary said.

“Listen, sister,” Sister Barbara said. “You prayed for Father Malony and he passed.”

“Father Malony had just had a triple bypass.”

“You prayed for my mother and she passed.”

“She was eighty-six years old and protesting the use of land mines in Cambodia. It was hardly an unexpected accident.”

“You prayed for Sister Pat and Sister Colleen and they both passed.”

“They died in a car accident.”

“They were having lunch at Wendy’s and a car drove through the front window.”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

“What about when you worked at Shadow Grove? Was that an accident, too?”

Sister Mary couldn’t speak. She’d heard what had been whispered about her during those dreadful six months at Shadow Grove Retirement Village. The orderlies had renamed it “Shallow Grave” after thirteen of the fifteen residents passed away during the brief time she spent doing prayer visitations there. If there had been a local paper it would have had a field day reporting o. “The Nun with the Death Touch Prayers.” As it was, Big Bob’s Pre-Owned Vehicles had run a full-page ad in the local PennySaver demanding the removal of Sister Mary from Shadow Grove. Big Bob’s mother, Little Tina, lived in Shadow Grove and he didn’t want his mama to die at the hands of the poisoned nun.

It was after Big Bob’s ad, but before Little Tina passed away from a rare tropical lung fungus, that Sister Helen and Sister Barbara had staged their intervention. Sister Mary had taken the news of her prayer ban stoically, and to their faces she had agreed that what they were saying made sense. But after they had left she curled up on her quilt and cried for hours. Sister Mary had never believed that people could be so cruel, especially other Poor Clares, but here she was, judged a killer by her own order, and all she had done was pray for others as Poor Clares were ordered to do by God. After that, she lost herself in an endless list of odd jobs and chores around the monastery, making repairs, earning environmental accolades and spending her time in quiet contemplation. But she had secretly felt like she was walking around with a scarlet PN (fo. “Poisoned Nun”) hanging around her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she said, bludgeoned into submission by the mere mention of Shadow Grove.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sister Barbara said. “Just stop praying for Sister Helen.”

“Yes, sister,” Sister Mary said. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t enjoy the rest of her morning.

“I have been on the telephone with Sister Susan. She met you at one of your construction conferences. You are going to go to Minneapolis to meet with her.”

“I don’t want to go to Minneapolis.”

“Remember your oath of obedience. You are called to Minneapolis, and you will go. Pack your bags, because after today you’re going to be their problem, not ours.”

“I’m being expelled?”

“That’s up to them. Did you repair the garage door?”

“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Mary said suddenly, and she started for the front porch. Sister Barbara blocked her way.

“You still have chores to finish before you leave,” Sister Barbara said. “The garage door keeps sticking and the mailbox needs a new door.”

“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Sister Mary said again.

“You have to finish your chores and go to Minneapolis.”

“But I’m pregnant,” Sister Mary said, and she pushed past the stunned Sister Barbara, and ran into the house.

Enar Chakara’s office at RG+E looked completely empty, like the waiting room in an aromatherapy clinic. There were no chairs, only seating surfaces. There were no decorations, only indirect lighting and neutral wood. Enar was sleek and anonymous, too. He had enormous biceps and a tuft of hair on his face that changed size, shape and location every time Satan visited. Right now it was nesting beneath his bottom lip. A tribal tattoo was smeared across the side of his neck. In other words, he looked like everyone in LA.

“Satan, my brother by another mother,” Enar said, putting his hands together and bowing his head in the traditional greeting. “Namaste.”

“Sure,” Satan said.

“What can I do you for? You want a water?”

“No.”

“Let me get you a water. We have it brought in from Tibet,” he said reaching into a hidden receptacle behind a wall panel. “Oh, wait. No, it’s just Evian. Still, you want one?”

“Thank you,” Satan said.

“We have other water if you’d prefer that.”

“I’m fine with this,” Satan said, taking the bottle. He’d never left a meeting with Enar without a bottle of water. Since he didn’t drink water he usually poured it into the plant by the elevator, and then dropped the bottle on the floor of the parking garage. He was Satan, after all. Littering was part of his whole MO.

“Alright, okay, zeroing in on why you’ve come to me today,” Enar said. “Let’s focus: Death. You’re thinking it. I said it. We need to talk about Death. The board is very concerned that you’re here.”

“Why?”

“Very, very concerned.”

“But why?”

“Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t coming from me, it’s just a general feeling in the air that you couldn’t even pin on any one person. Just a free-floating mood that’s no one’s fault. But it’s here and I have to say it. It’s a reality. Let’s face it. Everyone is very appreciative of what you’ve done for us over the years. Very appreciative. And I think that shows in our ceremonies. I hope it shows. Does it show?”

“I don’t know,” Satan said, getting uncomfortable.

“So that’s an ‘it doesn’t show’?”

“No, it shows,” Satan said.

“Okay, because we feel it, truly, in our hearts, so it should show. But the board – not me, them – they wanted me to ask you that...if...see...wow, this is worse than when I came out to my fiancé’. Okay, what they want to know is...you’re not here for Leo, are you.”

“No,” Satan said.

“Because everything that kid touches these days turns to gold. Everything.”

“I’m not here for Leo,” Satan said. “I just need a new Death.”

“Who isn’t Leo?”

“Who isn’t Leo.”

“Okay, phew. That is a load off my mind. A huge load. Let me just pack that up in a box and drop it off the Memory Cliff and let’s move on down the road. New business. You need a Death, I am here to service your needs. I want you to picture this: Nic Cage.”

“I don’t want Nic Cage.”

“He’s up for another Oscar this year. Big buzz on Nic Cage.”

“No.”

“Give it a chance. Close your eyes. Visualize with me. You’re in the hospital, tubes running out your nose, your nearest and dearest draw close, dressed in widow’s weeds – if they’re widows, otherwise, business casual – each breath is harder than the one before, and then...cardiac arrest. You cross the threshold between life and death. The machine that beeps goes beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... A great wailing goes up amongst your kith and kin, your vision fails, and with dimming eyes you look up and hovering over you in a hooded black cloak is Nicolas Cage. ‘Come with me,’ he whispers.”

“I don’t see it,” Satan said.

“Do me a favor. Live with it. Give it a chance to grow on you. Nic and I have the same dietician, he’d eat this part up. Now what about a girl Death? Ellen Page? She’s hot right now. Lost all that Juno weight.”

“It’s not a starring role, Enar. It’s the personification of an abstract, metaphysical concept.”

“Ellen Page was in Inception. That was very metaphysical.”

“I don’t need a name, I just need someone who can do the job.”

“What about Morgan Freeman? He’s got gravitas.”

“I don’t want Morgan Freeman.”

“Did you see Invictus? He played Nelson Mandela in that one. So brave.”

“He’s a name. I don’t want a name.”

“So you’ll take anyone?”

“Who isn’t a name.”

“What about Sam Worthington? He was in Avatar and Clash of the Titans but no one can ever remember who he is. Forgettable face, great abs.”

“Again, he’s a name. Who do you have who isn’t a name?”

“Well, everyone we deal with is kind of a name,” Enar said. “I mean, thanks to you, all of our clients are big, big names with deep brand equity. If you want someone who isn’t a name, as far as our roster is concerned, you’ve only got two options: Michael Cera’s a little past his prime, so you could come back for him in two movies, or I could give you Kevin Spacey now, and you could just cross your fingers and hope he doesn’t do a John Travolta and make a comeback in a few years.”

“Those are names,” Satan said. “I can’t use any names.”

Satan felt so frustrated that he unscrewed the cap on his bottle of water and took a sip.

Enar watched Satan drink his Evian with a sinking feeling. In Hollywood terms, they were having a “Bottle Meeting” in which someone came in, you chatted, and they went away with an unopened bottle of water in their hand. It was mutually understood that in order to make that happen no one drank their water during the meeting. You could hold the bottle, you could roll the bottle between your palms, rearrange the bottle, place your hand on the neck of the bottle as if you were about to twist open the cap, but actually drinking the water in the bottle Was Not Done. It was freaking Enar right out.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said to Satan. “It’s way outside the box, but you’re a way-outside-the-box kind of  guy with unique and distinctive needs.”

“What?” Satan said.

“Chance Morris.”

“Is he a name?”

“He’s my sister’s kid.”

“You can get him to sign the contract?”

“Essentially. I might have to change a few words here and there, take him out for a couple of drinks, but sure. He’ll sign. My sister’s been after me to get him a job.”

“Alright.”

“Alright?”

“Alright. I’ll take him.”

Enar tried to fist bump Satan, but Satan went for a handshake. Things got messy.

“I thought that today I’d be helping you out, but here you are helping me out. This is what’s known as a win-win.”

Enar gave Satan a hug.

“I love you man,” he said.

“Okay,” Satan said, trying to disentangle himself.

“Um, Satan?” Enar said. “Do you still have my soul?”

“I do.”

“Do you think I could come see it sometime?”

“I’m sorry, Enar. You know that’s not how it works.”

Enar nodded, sadly. Satan patted him on the shoulder.

“I’ll be looking for my new Death by the end of the week.”

And he left. It was only after he was gone that Enar noticed he’d left his half-finished bottle of water on the seating surface. That was a bad sign. He’d have to burn some sage before his next meeting.

“Sister Helen?”

Sister Mary rapped lightly on the closed bedroom door.

“Sister Helen?”

Inside she heard someone rustle and then Sister Helen’s strong, calm voice.

“Enter.”

Sister Helen was watching television. Sister Mary avoided television whenever possible, just as she avoided motion pictures, caffeinated beverages, popular music, tobacco products and refined sugar. Sister Mary was very careful to avoid all stimulants, both mental and physical. But she forgave Sister Helen her television watching because Sister Helen was the first nun who had welcomed her into this community and because she felt very guilty about Sister Helen’s legs. She had merely wanted to make a small footbridge across the drainage ditch that divided their property from the road. She thought that it would be so much more convenient for Sister Helen to walk over the ditch rather than having to go around it, and she thought that she could repay Sister Helen’s kindness by saving her a few seconds every day. Sister Helen had not liked the look of the footbridge, but Sister Mary’s heart was so set on her using it that she finally gave it a try.

The doctors said there was no permanent damage to Sister Helen's spine, but she had, nevertheless, lost the use of her legs. It still amazed Sister Mary that a three-foot fall could paralyze Sister Helen from mid-thigh down, but the doctors had pointed out that she had landed funny. Now Sister Helen lay in bed most days, watching the DirecTV that Sister Mary had gotten installed for her by way of penance and, over time, she had found that she was actually enjoying herself for the first time in her life.

“What are you watching?” Sister Mary asked.

“These young women claim to have had children with these young men, who are denying it,” Sister Helen said. “The young men claim to have had children only with the young women they are currently in relationships with. Maury is doing DNA tests and revealing the results on air.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“One woman has already torn off another woman’s weave. Oh, no. Look at that. Claudius’s baby isn’t his.”

Sister Mary looked at the screen where a young man was weeping while a woman walked around him shaking her finger and screaming things that were bleeped out. Sister Mary couldn’t follow any of it.

“Sister,” she said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Mm-hm,” Sister Helen said, opening a bag of Hydrox cookies. She had been eating a lot of them since losing the use of her legs.

“Something has happened to me,” Sister Mary said. “And I need to talk with you about it.”

Sister Helen froze, and looked at her with horror.

“You haven’t been...praying for me, have you?”

Sister Mary felt her heart clench into a fist as she realized that she was now and always would be a Prayer Leper to her Sisters. She tried to find acceptance in her heart. Instead, she found an unexpected fragment of cruelty.

“Would you like me to pray for you?” she asked.

“No!” Sister Helen said, recoiling. And then, more calmly, “Save your prayers for when they are truly needed.”

“But you still don’t have the use of your legs.”

“The feeling is coming back. I’ll be up and around by next week,” Sister Helen said.

“Then I won’t pray for you,” Sister Mary said.

“Good,” Sister Helen said.

“Sister, I’ve come because something is disturbing me.”

“What is it?” Sister Helen said, her attention wandering back to the TV.

“This,” Sister Mary said and she put an Early Pregnancy Test wand on Sister Helen’s TV tray. There was a blue plus sign in the middle of it.

“Ah!” Sister Helen recoiled. “That has someone’s urine on it, sister.”

“It doesn’t have someone’s urine on it,” Sister Mary said.

“It does have someone’s urine on it, because it’s giving a positive reading,” Sister Helen said. “You may not know how these things work – ”

“It doesn’t have someone’s urine on it,” Sister Mary repeated. “Because it has my urine on it.”

Sister Helen turned pale, but she quickly got a hold of herself. If there was one things nuns understood it was unwanted pregnancies.

“Obviously, it’s an inaccurate test. A false positive. According to Maury they happen all the time.”

Wordlessly, Sister Mary put a second EPT wand on Sister Helen’s TV tray. It, too, displayed a blue cross.

“Those tests sometimes pick up things like poppy seeds, and egg salad,” Sister Helen said.

Sister Mary put a third EPT wand next to the first two. By now, Sister Helen’s face was turning red and splotchy.

“Stop putting your urine on my cookies!”

“Sister, I’m pregnant.”

As Sister Mary had suspected, saying it out loud just made her feel worse. She slid out of her chair and onto her knees and tried to bury her face in Sister Helen’s lap. “Please, sister,” she cried. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Who was it?” Sister Helen demanded.

“No one!” Sister Mary cried. “I’m a virgin!”

“No,” Sister Mary said. “Someone must have gotten you pregnant. Was it a homeless? Was it Randy Funkers or his unemployed father? Who was it?”

“No one,” Sister Mary cried out in despair. “Please! I swear, Sister, I am a virgin.”

With her head buried in Sister Helen’s lap, she didn’t notice the sister’s bright red face, or the cold sweat that had broken out across her forehead, or her shallow and labored breathing. She felt Sister Helen stroking her hair and that just made her cry harder. Actually, Sister Helen was trying to punch her in the head, but the pain shooting down Sister Helen’s left arm was making her feeble.

Sister Helen was crushed. She saw everything she had worked for at the Poor Clares reduced to a farcical community theater production of Agnes of God with Sister Mary’s overly sensitive womb in the lead role. She tried harder to punch the young nun, to tell her to get out of town, to take a long bus ride to Texas or Mexico and to change her name and never come back and maybe be accidentally killed by human traffickers along the way. She wanted to say all of this but blood vessels were bursting in her brain like fireworks and all she could manage was a weak: “Hoo, hoo.”

“Oh,” she thought to herself. “I always knew Sister Mary would be the death of me.”

There was a perfunctory knock at the door and Sister Barbara entered. In one quick glance she took in the still-warm corpse of Sister Helen, the sobbing Sister Mary on her knees, the EPT wands on the TV tray and Maury on the television. Utterly beside herself, she picked up a copy of TV Guide, rolled it into a tube and began to beat Sister Mary with it like a bad dog.

“Oh, sister,” she cried out in despair. “Oh, sister, you’ve done it again. You’ve done it again!”

Satan had had a long day. First, he’d had to secure five thousand gallons of liquid feces, which he’d finally managed to find in a contaminated hog lagoon in Western Virginia.

“And that EPA comes down here to my business that’s been here for thirty years and they tell me that I’m killing my neighbors. What the hell do they know about my neighbors?” the owner of the hog lagoon that was, indeed, killing his neighbors, said. “If I was killing my neighbors, don’t you think somebody’d’ve said something by now? By the way, what the hell you want five thousand gallons of pig feces for?”

“We heat it to boiling and sort of put it in this big lake, then we take the souls of the damned and dip them in it for all eternity.”

The hog lagoon owner stared at him.

“It’s an everlasting torment,” Satan said. “For the damned.”

“And that’s your business,” the owner said. “You get the EPA meddling with you? No, sir, you don’t. But I do. Tain’t the America I grew up in, I’ll tell you that for free. You want a receipt?”

“Please.”

Then Maryland Sulfur and Steel, who sold him discount sulfur, refused his check.

“What do you mean?”

“The last one bounced.”

“This one won’t.”

“I’ve got a note from my boss right here. It says: DNAC. That means, Do Not Accept Checks.”

“Look, if you sell me this load of sulfur now I can pay you the balance we owe, plus the bank fee for the bounced check.”

“How?”

“With a check?”

Now he’d have to find some other source of sulfur. Maybe they could use rancid garbage instead. No, he probably couldn’t afford that either.

Depressed, Satan made his way to the nearest airport and then down the escalator to Hell. The escalator to Hell was one of Satan’s lesser ideas. He hadn’t been sold on elevators when they’d first come out and escalators had seemed much safer and more reliable. Also he had been worried that if he’d installed elevators it would only be a matter of time before people started calling them “Hellevators” and while he admired innovation he hated cute nicknames. So he’d had escalators put in. At the time, they had looked like the future but now, over one hundred years later, getting to Hell took forever. By the time Satan reached Hell’s Vestibule he was exhausted, he was irritable, he had no sulfur and the bank account for daily expenses was approaching zero.

Hell’s Vestibule was hot and noisy and huge, an endless cavern that lay underneath the planet’s crust. Occasionally an explorer would break through the ceiling and then scurry back to the surface to spread rumors about a hollow Earth, or a lost civilization deep within the planet’s core. But really, this was just the staging area for Hell, and it needed to be big because Hell was gruesomely inefficient.

In the Vestibule, demons were rolled about on scaffolding towers that spired up for hundreds of feet to the rocky ceiling. Symbols were spray painted there, circles and crosses and arrows and squiggles, like something a road crew would slap on the pavement to locate power cables and gas lines before digging up the street. The demons clambered up their precarious scaffolding perches and argued over the symbols, occasionally slapping one another, sometimes shoving one of their brethren off, sending them plunging to the ground. The demons arguing on the tiny, swaying platforms would eventually reach some sort of consensus and then haul up powerful jackhammers and rip holes in the ceiling. Out of these holes they would pull the souls of the damned from their graves. The souls, rubbery and weak, would be tossed from claw to claw down the scaffolding towers, finally arriving, dizzy and confused on the ground where demons with clipboards and bullhorns would bully them into endless, slow-moving lines. The souls would shuffle forward, stop, shuffle forward, stop, taking months to get from one end of the Vestibule to the other. And at the end of their journey, when they finally reached the Gates of Hell, they would be processed. Most of them spent the entire time complaining.

“Those of ya with big ‘V’s,” Minos shouted into his bullhorn. “Unfortunately, you’re the violent and you’ll be spending eternity inna fast-flowing riverra blood.”

A grumble went up.

“I doan wanna hear it. Now come on, hold up ya ‘V’s, if we can’t see ‘em we can’t process ya. You wanna stand around in this cavern for another six weeks?”

“Yes,” some wag shouted.

“Who said that?” Minos barked. A few rough-looking demons dragged a young man out of line. “Nail his feet ta the floor. He’s gonna be in this room for eternity.”

“Excuse me,” a man in a very ugly sweater said. “Will we be given an opportunity to change clothes?”

“What you were wearing when you were buried is what you’ll be wearing for eternity!” Minos barked.

“But I hate this sweater,” the man said.

“Shaddap!” Minos roared.

The man turned to the woman standing behind him.

“My wife knew I hated this sweater. She did this to me out of spite. Who gets buried in a sweater?”

“I’m crying on the inside for you, really,” the woman said. She was naked and her skin was bruised and torn. “I went over to borrow an extension cord from my quiet neighbor who kept to himself and now I’m buried underneath his tool shed. No one ever found my body. And it’s freezing in here. I’d give anything for a sweater.”

“You can have mine,” the man said.

“No trades!” a passing demon growled, stabbing Sweater Man in the back of the head with a trident.

Satan tried to make it through the Vestibule without attracting any attention, but Minos suddenly sprang up out of nowhere.

“Hey, Boss,” he said. “Any sulfur? We’re running low.”

“It should be coming,” Satan said.“Later.”

“Not ta be cheeky, boss, but that means never, don’t it?”

“You’re just going to have to make do,” Satan said.

“That’s gonna be difficult. Because the only thing that smells like sulfur is sulfur. We’re known for our sulfury smell, and to get that smell we need sulfur.”

“We don’t have any,” Satan snapped. “If you want it that bad, then take up a collection and buy it yourselves.”

“Um, okay,” Minos said. “Also, um, we need ta get the gas lines cleaned. A lotta the fires been goin’ out.”

“Can’t you get a squad of demons to clean them?”

“Those lines’re pretty twisty. Ya need ta get in a professional.”

“We just had them done.”

“About two hundred years ago. They’ve got ta be cleaned out every hundred years, but fifty years is even better,” Minos said.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Satan said. “We don’t have the money so you’re just going to have to find a way to function with dirty gas lines.”

“But dat’s the thing we’re second best known for,” Minos said. “Our flickering hellfire. It’s pathetic for a buncha jerks ta come in here and the first thing they see is unlit caverns wid no flickerin’ hellish flames.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Satan said, and then he ducked through a crowd of damned souls and darted into a tunnel before Minos could tell him about more things that were falling apart.

On the way to his office, Satan was accosted at least a dozen times: was more liquefied feces on the way? When was the announcement going out about the “Flogging & Flaying: Important Differences for Field Practitioners” workshop? Could they devise new punishments for the suicide bombers to differentiate them better from traditional suicides? Rats? Why did the rats keep vanishing? Were the goblins eating them again? Or was it the giants, who loved squashing them with rocks? Who was going to tear the flesh of the faithless if they didn’t have any rats?

It took Satan an hour to get to his office and the entire time it was nonstop questions, questions, questions. By the time he dragged himself through his office door, he felt like he was full of lead. He left the lights off, felt his way around his desk and sunk down into his chair. It was peaceful in the dark. It was quiet. It was calm. He thought about massaging his forehead again.

“Yo,” someone said. “What does it take to get some Bronson up in here?”

Satan squealed and fell over backwards. Grabbing at his desk he managed to switch on the lamp and saw something horrible sitting Indian style in the interview chair across from him. It was vaguely human but what human would claim this thing as its child? Its jeans were tight, and clung to its stick-like legs. Around its concave chest was draped a baggy, waist-length cardigan and a v-necked t-shirt with its own face airbrushed onto it. And that face! Hideous beyond measure! Its hair hung in dry, frizzy sheets to its shoulders, and out of it crawled two bushy sideburns that dragged themselves down across its cheeks until they met over this thing’s upper lip. There were piercings in its chin and tongue and from its entire body radiated a sense of unsettling emptiness. It was all style and no substance, a human broadcast antenna for the latest fads, a toxic hole in Creation. It was unclean. It was unreal. It was unholy. Ironically, it threw a gang sign.

Satan screamed.

“Sir, what is - ?” Nero burst in and saw what was in the chair and he froze in horror. “A hipster,” he gasped.

There are some who say that hipsters are young, recently-settled urban middle class adults or older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture. There are others who say they are scum-sucking crybabies from the bowels of Hell. Those who have been to the bowels of Hell know a harder truth: hipsters are the pollution of eternity.

Every particle in Creation has an associated antiparticle with the same mass, but an opposite electrical charge. There are neutrons and antineutrons, protons and antiprotons, matter and antimatter, gravity and antigravity. There are sentient beings and then there are hipsters. Just as matter and antimatter brought into contact will annihilate each other, so too will conscious, rational life and the hipster destroy each other if they are forced to share the same space. Hipsters hate work, passion, duty, honor, loyalty and anything that requires time, dedication or commitment. They embrace crappy beers like Pabst Blue Ribbon, they love crappy bands like Vampire Weekend, crappy sports like kickball and crappy furniture. They tell themselves that their love of these things is ironic, but love is love and how long can you pretend to love something before you debase the very notion of love?

In their passionate embrace of all that is meaningless, in their insistence on inserting irony into every facet of their lives, in their mindless worship of the cheap and shoddy, hipsters negate all that they touch. Worse than that, they have no souls. When a hipster dies their body is taken back to their hometown where they are stripped of their Eighties retro finery by heartbroken parents, their nineteenth century facial hair is shaved off, their labial piercings are removed and placed in a yellowed envelope with their baby teeth, and their aggressively meaningless tattoos are hidden beneath a thick layer of morticians make-up. Their parents assume that as difficult as its body is to deal with, the hipster’s soul has already moved on to a happier place. Those in the death business know otherwise. Long ago, the constant, sneering contempt hipsters have for those deemed less cool than themselves (read: everybody) microwaved their souls into tiny dried husks that rattle around inside them like old beans. When a hipster dies, he or she simply ceases to exist. In life: they helplessly hump every passing trend. In death: nothing.

For creatures of pure soul, like the dead, or those who stand close to the roots of Creation, like Satan, the hipster is a cosmic finger in the eye, an aberration that makes the Universe want to vomit. A hipster penetrating one of the spiritual realms feels as vile as a neo-Nazi penetrating a Holocaust memorial service. It is wrong, and the reaction is often a sudden, spontaneous spasm of violence.

Nero picked up a folding chair and began to beat the awful thing.

“Not cool!” the hipster squealed. “So not cool!”

“It’s getting away,” Satan said as the hipster covered its head with wristband-encrusted wrists and tried to scurry around Nero. Satan threw his lamp at it, cutting off its escape. Nero summoned all his courage and tackled the scrawny, shapeless thing, and the two of them rolled into the corner, looking like a beach ball wrestling a piece of string.

“Hurting! Me!” the hipster shouted as it struggled.

Satan picked up his phone and dialed.

“Yo!” Enar said.

“Enar,” Satan said. “You sent me a hipster.”

“The kid’s already there? Great! Have you heard his demo yet?”

“I’m very upset, Enar.”

“Yeah,” Enar said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him play you track two. It’s terrible.”

“I’m very upset you sent me a hipster.”

“It’s what all the kids are into these days. You and me, we’re old guys, we don’t understand. This kid, he’s from Bushwick.”

In the background, the hipster was trying to bite Nero.

“Get away, you nasty thing!” Nero said, kicking it.

“I want you to send me someone normal,” Satan said.

“Normal for what?” Enar asked. “Go down to Williamsburg and that’s all you see. Check out Silverlake and this guy is about average. Come on, he’s my sister’s kid. Help me out.”

“You don’t understand,” Satan said. “I can’t send this thing out as a representative of Hell. We’ll be a laughing stock.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” Enar said.

“No,” Satan said. “It’s the worst medicine. In fact, it’s not even a medicine at all. I want to return your hipster.”

“I can’t really let you do that,” Enar said. “Look, you don’t want the hipster. I understand. There’s not a lot of patience for his brand in my sister’s house, either. But the fact is, he signed the contract. Right now, he’s all you’ve got. I can try to find someone with a more mainstream look but right this minute no one comes to mind, and it’s going to take me a while to sort through the options. And you know what the song says, ‘If you can’t be with the one you love/Love the one you’re with.’ Which, in this case, is my sister’s kid.”

Satan moaned in spiritual pain.

“The second I know something, I’ll be calling you,” Enar said, and hung up.

Satan slammed down the phone.

“I just want to go to the bathroom,” the hipster whined. “Is that OKAY?”

Nero lowered his guard for a second, but that was all it took. The hipster kicked him in the shins and made for the door. Satan tackled him and they went down in a heap. Lying on top of the wriggling sack of pale, jelloid flesh made him feel sick. The hipster had no bones, no muscles, no form or structure, he was just a pale skinbag covered in hair and ironic tattoos.

“I’ve got its feet,” Nero said.

Satan found that he was holding two limp tentacles that must be its arms.

“I’ve got its arms,” he said. “Now what do we do with it?”

“Here,” Nero said, dragging it towards the garbage can. “We’ll put it in a garbage bag and drown it in the Acheron.”

“Right,” Satan said.

“We’ll have to double bag it,” Nero said.

“Let go of me, you gaylords,” the hipster squealed.

The phone rang.

“Ignore it,” Satan said.

In one swift motion Nero grabbed the trashcan liner and pulled it up around the hipster’s legs.

“Now cram him in,” he said.

The phone stopped ringing.

Satan tried to shove the hipster into the trashcan liner.

“Don’t make me go Cobra Kai on your ass,” the hipster blustered.

They kept cramming. The intercom on Satan’s desk buzzed. It buzzed again. It began buzzing in an annoying staccato rhythm, but they ignored it and kept shoving. The bag was up to the hipster’s skinny waist by now, its two noodle-like legs folded up underneath it.

“You dudes suck,” the hipster whined.

The desk phone began to ring again and finally Satan couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed it, and in that moment the hipster squirmed away.

“Sir!” Nero cried.

The hipster was almost at the door, one foot dragging the trashcan liner, when Satan hurled the office phone, striking it in the head. The boneless thing went down, bonelessly. All business, Satan and Nero stuffed it back into the garbage bag.

“I think it broke my skin,” Nero said, examining his arm where the hipster had bit him.

Suddenly, the door burst open and a flock of fat, giggling cherubim fluttered through. They knocked into one another, they plowed into the ceiling and they bumped into the walls. Nero tried to swat them away from his face. One of them landed on Satan’s desk and stood up on its fat little legs, pulled out a horn and tootled on it.

They began to sing in their lisping, eerie voices.

“You’re wanted...you’re wanted...you’re waaanted...” they warbled, “In...Heeeaveeeennnnn!”

It was the big finish. They began to fly around lazily on their backs, pulling lyres out of their sagging diapers and strumming them, blowing meaningless little pootles of noise on their tiny trumpets, shaking golden tambourines to different rhythms. The one on the desk threw up.

“I suppose we should have answered the phone,” Nero said, as they fled the office.

Normally, when you get a Cherubim Summoning you drop what you’re doing and get yourself to Heaven, ASAP, but all the management books Nero had ever read emphasized staying focused on your goals and avoiding distractions.

“Sir, if there’s no Death, then no one is dying. We need to address this problem before it gets bigger.”

“I have to go to Heaven,” Satan said, trying to give Nero the slip, but Nero had a grip on his arm and wouldn’t let go.

“This is important, sir,” he said.

“It’s just Death.”

“It’s death,” Nero said.

“So?” Satan shrugged.

Nero wasn’t shocked. He had once been mortal and Satan had existed since before the dawn of time. Their takes on death were of a necessity very different. Death had certain rules it had to follow, and while most deaths could be handled by Death’s Minions, Death itself had to be present for situations where fifty or more humans lost their lives at once. And, like Broadway ticket sales, Hell depended on bulk business.

Right now, deaths were still occurring, but they were occurring on a delay. Gangbangers were fleeing in terror from punks they’d busted full of caps who were now chasing them down the street. ICUs and ERs were overflowing with patients who just wouldn’t die no matter how bad the doctors were at their jobs. A suicide bombing in Indonesia had resulted in two dozen very angry train passengers ganging up on the extremely startled and very much alive bomber and dragging him to the nearest police station. People were dying, but they were dying in ones and twos, in tens and twenties, and they were dying slowly. Slowly enough for the victims of a bus crash in the Andes to haul their shattered bodies back to their home villages and freak their hysterical families right out. Slowly enough for anti-insurgency actions in Afghanistan to turn into dusty remakes of Night of the Living Dead. The situation was causing a lot of problems on Earth. But the repercussions were going to be worse in Hell.

Satan’s realm existed in a state of delicate equilibrium. The main event in Hell was demons tormenting the souls of the damned. But the demons worked for so little pay that they were basically interns, doing it because it kept them entertained while they frittered away eternity. Without Death ushering in big blocks of newly dead souls the demons would get bored, they’d get distracted, they’d wander away from their stations. Then souls would start jamming up and the lines for processing would back up, and the longer the lines got the more demoralized the demons processing them would become and the slower they’d work and the more jammed things would get and eventually it would all grind to a halt.

It had happened once, after Atlantis sank, and it had taken hundreds of years before things got back on track. Nero didn’t want to see that happen again.

“We have no choice, sir,” he said. “We’ll have to unleash that hipster unless we can find an alternate Death today.”

“I will not have a Death who has a tattoo on his chest that says, ‘Strength & Respect’.”

“I don’t know if we have a choice, sir. Look around you. People are trickling in, but without any big disasters we’re going to fall behind. Death is an ever-unfolding mystery. It can’t just stop unfolding.”

“Can you do it?” Satan asked. “Just until we find someone permanent?”

“I was going to suggest you,” Nero said. “I can’t leave Hell.”

“I’ll get you a waiver.”

“But you’re the boss.”

“I have a strong belief in delegating.”

“You are the Lord of All Evil, Father of Lies, Bel, Behemoth, The Fallen One, the Prince of Darkness. Leviathan.”

“Okay, okay. Fine. Way to pass the buck. I’ll do it just like I do everything else around here.”

“Personally, I thought Nic Cage would have made for a compelling Death.”

“Who told you that?”

“I saw it on his Twitter feed. He thought it was a new Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Unfortunately, we’ve only just touched on the tip of the Problem Iceberg.”

“Do we have to touch on the rest? You do realize that was a Cherubim Summoning, right?”

“It’s about the Ultimate Death Match, sir. Without Death, we only have War and he won’t be wrestling for us this year. He’s decided to go on a biking tour of Iran. They’ve got some human rights violations that he’s really excited about.”

“What about Famine and Pestilence? They’ve got moves.”

“Famine is doing a walking tour of Somalia to work on her book about Central African cuisine and Pestilence has three months of vacation time due and she’s using it to go on a package tour of some of the most infectious cities in Canada. That’s all four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, sir. Our entire first string.”

“But...” Satan wasn’t quite putting it together yet. “But who’s going to wrestle for Hell?”

“We should talk to the Minotaur.”

“There has to be someone else.”

“I don’t think there is, sir.”

“But everyone says he’s gone funny in the head,” Satan said. “I don’t know if I can handle that right now.”

“Sir, do you really think that avoiding your problems is a way to solve them?”

“Yes?”

“Sir, you have to confront this problem head on.”

“Fine,” Satan said. “Let’s go see the Minotaur.”

The Minotaur roared. It was a blood-chilling sound, as big as the Appalachian Mountains and as inhuman as a shark. The roar was one word, loud enough to burst your eardrums, powerful enough to vibrate your blood. And that word was:

“Uno!”

The centaurs threw down their cards in disgust as the Minotaur played his last card (a Wild Draw Four) and snuffled in delight.

“Me out!” the Minotaur crowed, and the centaurs drifted off, grumbling.

Satan and Nero approached.

“Hail, Minotaur,” Nero said.

“Hail, Minotaur,” Satan said.

“Hi,” the Minotaur said.

When Hell first opened for business the demons were already there, but some creatures came of their own volition, attracted by its dark energies. The Minotaur was one of them. By the time the deformed, bull-headed giant arrived in Hell he was already an object of so much fear and veneration that a black aura surrounded him. He was a nexus of power, made strong by the swirling force of the prayers of his uncountable victims. The Minotaur had stopped being a monster long ago and was now something like a demi-god, and demi-gods were not to be taken lightly. Unlike Death or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Minotaur was not an employee. The Minotaur merely Was.

“We need to talk,” Satan said. “About the Ultimate Death Match.”

“Is wrestling,” the Minotaur said.

“It is wrestling,” Satan agreed. This was delicate. He’d never tried to compel one of Hell’s freeloading residents into action. His attitude had always been very Latin American in regard to inhabitants like the Minotaur: expect nothing, and you won’t be disappointed. But now he needed the Minotaur. This required diplomacy, and Satan was a terrible diplomat. That was more Nero’s realm.

“Did you know that you’ve never volunteered?” Nero asked. “Thousands of years you’ve been here, but you’ve never gone into the ring to fight against Heaven. War’s done it, Pestilence’s done it, Death’s done it for years. But you, the most terrifying and savage denizen of Hell, the Custodian of the Seventh Circle, have never entered the ring.”

“Hate violence,” the Minotaur said.

“But you’re in charge of the violent,” Satan pointed out.

“Minotaur different now,” the Minotaur said. “Finally think violence no good. Violence no solve anything.”

“What are you babbling about?” Satan snapped. “Earlier today I was just thinking that violence solves a lot of things.”

“Excuse us,” Nero said, pulling Satan aside.

“He’s being a jerk,” Satan said.

“Sir,” Nero said. “When was the last time you were down in the Seventh Circle? A few hundred years ago? Let me handle this.”

“You finish whispering about Minotaur?” the Minotaur asked.

“We’re just surprised – and impressed – by your changes,” Nero said. “You have to admit, renouncing violence is the last thing we’d expect from you.”

“Was crushing skull of Emperor Charles the Fat and think to self, ‘What me hope achieve? Why me so violent?’ After that, no more violence. Only games!”

“Games?” Nero asked.

“Uno! Risk! Monopoly! All very exciting! No violence, but still me always win!”

“You know,” Nero said. “The Ultimate Death Match is a game. It’s wrestling. That’s a game.”

“Is fake!” the Minotaur said. “Minotaur see many wrestlers here. All tell Minotaur wrestling fake.”

“Excuse me,” a voice called. They turned and saw Alexander the Great, soaked in blood up to his chin, stumbling across the rocky ground. “Mr. Minotaur, I was wondering – ”

“Shut up!” the Minotaur roared. “Is you stupid, fat dummy? You no see me talk to King of Hell and Roman Emperor.”

“I’m sorry,” Alexander the Great’s lower lip trembled.

“You sorry? Who cares? You stupid idiot with dumb brain and jiggle thighs. Go sit in River of Blood.”

“I’ve been sitting in the River of Blood for eighty years and you promised – ”

“Me never promise anything! Get back in River of Blood, dum-dum!”

Cowed, Alexander the Great hobbled back to sit in the River of Blood.

“Are you sure that’s the best solution?” Nero asked.

“After hundred years souls no feel physical abuse any more,” the Minotaur explained. “Emotional abuse only way to hurt them now.”

“Don’t you miss the physical abuse?” Nero asked.

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

“No.”

“How do you know if you haven’t tried it? Just in the ring? Just wrestling in the Ultimate Death Match? You may find that you miss it more than you think.”

“Minotaur no miss physical violence.”

“You would really be helping us out,” Nero said. “Death is gone and we – ”

“What happen Death?”

“He was...let go,” Nero said.

“You fire Death?!?” the Minotaur said, suddenly looming over them both, steam shooting out of his flapping nostrils, eyes red and blazing.

“Kind of,” Satan said.

“Then maybe you fire Minotaur if Minotaur no good in Death Match. Maybe you fire Minotaur if you no like Minotaur attitude. Minotaur cannot work in conditions like this!”

The Minotaur turned his enormous back on them, sat down and began to brood.

“Now you’ve done it, sir,” Nero said.

“What was I supposed to do?” Satan asked.

“The last time someone upset him that much,” Alexander the Great called out from behind a rock, “He brooded for six years.”

“What do we do?” Nero asked.

“You could try to hurt his feelings,” Alexander the Great said. “That might goad him into reacting.”

“How?” Nero asked.

“Like this: the Minotaur is very insensitive.”

The Minotaur didn’t move. Alexander the Great tried again.

“The Minotaur is often inconsiderate of the feelings of others,” Alexander the Great said.

But no one brooded like the Minotaur. Eventually, Alexander the Great, onetime conqueror of the known world, gave up and moped off to immerse himself in the River of Blood.

“No Death. No Four Horsemen. And now no Minotaur,” Satan said as they left. “At least we’ve got the second stringers. They’ve got a lot of heart.”

“Well, actually, no sir. We don’t have them. The Seven Deadly Sins have that band? They’re playing a Japanese tour.”

“They can’t do that!”

“Their contract says they can. They’re very popular over there. The Japanese think they’re a death metal act.”

“We’ve got the third stringers?”

“Most of them are gone, too.”

“The fourth stringers?”

“Cholesterol, the tobacco lobby and Long Island teens into industrial music? All gone on tour, taking adult enrichment classes or otherwise out of action.”

“Who do we have left?”

“Deep Insecurity.”

“Well, Deep Insecurity is not to be underestimated. Just ask Alexander the Great. If Deep Insecurity wrestles for us that’ll make us the underdog. Underdogs always win.”

“I’ve met with Deep Insecurity,” Nero said.

“And?”

“We don’t have much going for us.”

“Dumb luck?”

Nero shook his head.

“Natural talent?”

Nero shook his head again.

“A catchy theme song?”

“Not this year, sir.”

Satan was stunned.

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Nero said. “Lose?”

“We can’t lose,” Satan said. “That would be...where would everyone go?”

They were walking through the Sixth Circle, with its flaming tombs crammed full of heretics moaning for relief. Nero dodged a burning hand that feebly grabbed at the hem of his pants.

“You can’t think about that right now,” Nero said, shifting gears. “Right now you need to go to Heaven for your meeting, and then there’s a food poisoning outbreak in Minneapolis that you need to handle as acting Death. Come on, sir. You should go before anything else goes wrong.”

Suddenly, with a sputter, all the flames went out. The burning tombs stopped burning. Sarcastic applause rang through cavern.

“Nice going!” a heretic shouted.

“Way to run Hell,” another chimed in.

“Let me see you try it!” Satan shouted at them but, to be honest, he agreed.

One hour later, Satan was back on the escalator. In the old days he had used the travel time to work on new torments, but these days there was only one thing he really enjoyed. These days, he liked to stare off into space. No one bothered him when he was staring off into space and if someone asked him what he was thinking about he could just smile and nod as if he were thinking thoughts that were deep and complex when, in reality, he was just staring off into space. More and more, Satan found that he was happiest when he just let his mind go blank.

“Satan,” someone yelled. “Hey, Satan!”

He looked up just in time to see Gabriel passing him on the down escalator.

“In a hurry. Got summoned,” he said.

“I summoned you,” Gabriel said, flapping his enormous wings and lifting himself up off the escalator. He hovered over Satan like a sanctimonious Macy’s Day Parade balloon.

“Oh, right,” Satan said, scrambling to walk down the up escalator, puffing hard as he worked to stay in one place.

“There’s a woman – ” Gabriel said.

“I don’t do that thing with the apples anymore,” Satan said.

“Not that.”

“Come on, my legs are giving out,” Satan said.

“The incident at the Charlotte Airport? Last week?” Gabriel said.

“I already told you, it won’t happen again. I was just looking for a miserable place where I could try to come up with some new torments.”

“You were seen. By this woman.”

Gabriel held up a picture of Mary Renfro. It was an unfortunate photo from her high school yearbook that made it impossible to tell if she was laughing at a joke or howling in pain.

“Didn’t you guys clean up?”

“We did. Apparently, we missed her.”

“Go zap her now.”

“We took a vote upstairs, and you’ve been elected to take care of her. Personally.”

“I’m busy,” Satan said.

“Your sloppiness will no longer be tolerated,” Gabriel said. “If you won’t do it, then you need to come to Heaven right this minute so we can have A Very Serious Talk.”

“All right, I'll deal with it,” Satan grumbled. Anything to avoid yet another sanctimonious lecture upstairs.

“Besides, she’s one of yours. An atheist.”

“Self-proclaimed or de facto?” Satan asked.

“Oh, self-proclaimed. A member of the Council for Constructive Atheism.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.”

“See you in the ring,” Gabriel said. “Michael’s going to decimate your devil spawn this year.”

As Gabriel erupted upwards in a flurry of feathers Satan called after him:

“Technically, I didn’t spawn anything.”

The Rainbow Babies and Tiny Childrens Hospital of Minneapolis smelled like an open sewer. Small children gripped their cramping stomachs, exploded liquid out of both ends and died of food poisoning.

“I knew that hamburger looked pink in the middle,” one father cried. “So I just let my baby nibble a little bit around the edges. How’d he get so sick?”

Another father howled, “I knew those discount burger patties were too good to be true. Ninety-nine cents for a dozen?!? But I thought a little ketchup would hide the stink and then I could cook the germs away.”

“I didn’t know you needed to refrigerate that meat ALL the time,” a mother sobbed. “There ought to be warning labels! I’m gonna sue someone!”

Doctors and nurses sprinted from room to room, avoiding the grief-stricken, confrontational parents like obstacles on a confidence-building course. Over the past week they’d gotten used to patients experiencing what they had taken to calling DDS (Delayed Death Syndrome) and they’d been taken by surprise at how quickly these kids were biting the dust. They kept intubating, they kept hydrating, they kept dropping IV lines into miniature veins, but still their tiny patients kept dying.

“I knew it was rotten,” a little boy moaned. “It had blue fur on it. But I love my burgers.”

Satan reached inside the child and shut him down.

“We’ve lost another one,” a nurse shouted, and a crash team blundered through the door to attempt yet another resuscitation.

Normally, amidst all this chaos, the Minions of Death would be moving calmly and with purpose, pagers beeping, stopwatches and clipboards at the ready, reaching inside one victim after another to shut them down, all poise and efficiency and business casual wear. But right now, Satan couldn’t help but notice that he was the only one who seemed to be doing any work.

“Could I get a hand here?” he said to one of Death’s minions as he attempted to extinguish two children at once. The minion ignored him and left the room.

Annoyed, Satan walked out into the hall. In the visitor’s lounge at the end, seven of Death’s minions were lounging around, flipping through old magazines and checking their text messages. They seemed to be totally and completely ignoring the urgent beeping of their pagers that signaled new deaths to be executed. The lounge was full of shrill, electronic beeping and yet there they sat, in their pressed khakis and button down shirts, totally unconcerned, not appreciating the urgency of the situation.

Satan stalked down to the lounge and let them have it.

“There are forty-nine humans down and we’ve got fifty-one to go,” Satan snapped. “Could some of you rouse yourselves and start killing kids?”

The minions kept flipping through their magazines, thumbing their Blackberrys and basically ignoring him. One of them even had the gall to look at Satan, shake his head sadly and then go back to his Sudoku.

“What is going on here?” Satan yelled. “Just because Death is gone that doesn’t mean that no more people are dying. I need you all to pull together and get it in gear. Don’t you hear your pagers?”

But if ignoring people were a sport, then these minions were Olympic gold medalists.

“What is it you all think you’re doing?” Satan shouted.

Finally, a minion deigned to answer.

“Work stoppage,” he drawled, without looking up from his magazine.

“When did this happen?”

The minion shrugged and kept reading last month’s Golf Digest.

Satan was about to rip him a new one when his pager beeped again: another death. Satan raced to room eight-oh-four and made a beeline for the bedside of the shivering fourteen-year-old patient. Like many people on death’s door, the boy saw Satan coming and, having been trained by his parents to avoid strangers, he reached deep down inside himself and found the strength to vault out of bed and make a break for it, dripping fore and aft and dragging his IV cart behind him. He shoulder-checked Satan and sent the King of Hell spinning aside as he cleared the door.

Cursing, Satan went after the kid, who was now chugging down the hall, leaving a slimy trail in his wake and banging his IV cart into everything. Nurses came running but the boy ducked and weaved. Satan was unathletic, to put it charitably, and he huffed after the kid, grabbing anything that came to hand and throwing it at the fleeing boy’s head: clipboards, plastic cups, bedpans, latex gloves. As he reached the end of the hall, the boy’s strength left him and he leaned heavily against the wall and then slid to the floor, vomiting feebly. Satan caught up with him just in time.

“Three...two...one...shut down,” he said, snuffing out the kid’s life. The boy’s consciousness left him with a clotted sigh. Satan signed the invoice on his clipboard, tore off the pink copy, folded it in half and stuck it in his pocket with the other fulfilled invoices, then he stomped back to the visitors lounge. Everyone’s pagers were still beeping their hearts out.

“I don’t care if you’re on a work stoppage,” Satan said. “I’m not running after another kid. You’d all better unstoppage yourselves.”

“What are you going to do if we don’t?” one minion asked. “Fire us?”

“You obviously don’t grasp the point of a work stoppage,” the minion who’d lipped off earlier said. “A work stoppage means we stop work. That’s how it got its name.”

“You don’t get to stop work. You’re Death.”

“No, we’re Death’s minions. There is no more Death. You fired him.”

“I’m interim Death,” Satan said. “And soon we’ll find a permanent Death and you’ll be working for whoever that is. The job doesn’t stay with one being forever. It goes to whoever I say it goes to.”

“Whatever,” the annoying minion said. “We’re still on a work stoppage.”

The beeping pagers were starting to set Satan’s teeth on edge.

“I! Am! Death!” he said.

“The Death we accept has been fired and we’re showing solidarity,” the minion said. “That’s just the way it is.”

The phone at the nurse’s station started ringing. Satan tried to ignore it.

“Listen up – ” he started.

But the ringing, coupled with the pagers going off like a flock of annoying electronic baby chickens, was more than he could handle. All the noise hijacked his train of thought and ran it off a cliff.

“I – you – it’s...” but he couldn’t remember what it was he was going to say next. Leaving the minions he stomped over to the nurse’s station and the ringing phone. None of the humans seemed able to hear it and so Satan picked it up. When Nero needed him he called on a frequency only the Prince of Darkness could hear.

“Sir,” Nero said.

Satan didn’t say anything.

“Hello? Sir? Are you there?”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me what’s gone wrong now.”

“It isn’t always bad news when I call, sir. That’s a very hurtful preconception.”

Satan closed his eyes, waiting for the axe to fall.

“Although in this case it is accurate. Sir, I think you need to turn on the TV.”

“Another Speedway accident?” Satan asked.

“It’s Oprah, sir.”

A new kind of pain lanced through Satan’s skull. Satan took Oprah very seriously. He put down the phone and walked into a patient’s room. The patient was vomiting himself to death, and so Satan figured he wouldn’t mind if he changed the channel. Oprah was staring into the camera with tear-rimmed eyes. A shiver zipped down Satan’s spine. He felt like she was staring directly into his heart.

“Today on Oprah,” she said, “can a woman sue the Devil?”

Satan didn’t like the sound of that at all.

In Oprah’s studio, Frita Babbit was crying. People cried a lot on Oprah. It was good to cry because holding in your tears turned them into dangerous toxins that caused unhappiness. Letting the poison out was healthy. Oprah understood this the way she understood so many things.

“The cult made me do...unspeakable things ...” Frita Babbit sobbed.

“What kind of things, Frita?” Oprah empathized.

“They were unspeakable...” Frita sobbed.

“You can tell me,” Oprah said.

“The cult...I can’t say it.”

Oprah made a concerned face.

“...they made me have intercourse...with the Devil...” Frita said.

“And how old were you when this happened?”

“Seventeen.”

Oprah looked at her audience.

“Seventeen years old, and forced to have sexual intercourse with the Devil. This,” Oprah said, “This was where I had my Aha Moment. When my producers first met Frita they told me her story and I said, ‘Nuh-uh, girlfriend. I’m not touching that!’ But they shared a few details of her story with me and that changed my mind forever. I’m going to share those details with you now.

“Frita Babbit says she knows why there are one hundred and thirty-two survivors of the Summerville Speedway tragedy. She knows why we’ve got plane crash survivors who don’t seem to be passing on. She knows why there are people walking away from bus accidents and elephant stampedes and suicide bombings. She knows why death is happening slowly. Frita, would you share your knowledge with us?”

Frita was in that stage of crying Oprah’s producers called, ‘Flip Freeze.’ Her watery, red-rimmed eyes promised she could speak coherently, but they also hinted that there was still more crying that needed to be done. No one was going to flip the channel on this.

“The Satanic cult told me never to tell anyone what happened ever,” Frita said. “They said it was our little secret. But when so few people were passing on, I had to examine what I knew about Satan for an answer. I had to examine my own spirit and soul, and what I realized was that Satan is in charge of Death.”

“So why is he not doing his job?” Oprah asked.

“Because he’s too busy preying on children like me!” Frita said, and right on cue tears began to fall from her eyes again. “He’s on the internet preying on children and he’s not taking care of the souls who need to pass on.”

“The Devil,” Oprah said to the camera. “An internet predator who could be online right this minute luring your children into pornographic conversations. After the break, we’ll be taking a look at Frita’s controversial new book ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ and the even more controversial lawsuit behind it. Plus, an unusual look at aging that might have you seeing red. Stay right there.”

“What is this?” Satan fumed into the phone. “I barely even check my email. And I don’t know who this human is. More importantly, why would I do ‘ it’ with a human? That’s disgusting. And beside the point! A person can’t sue me!”

“You are a legally recognized entity,” Nero said. “And as such she can sue you. She is, in fact, suing you.”

“I’m not responsible for every goofball who claims to be me.”

“She’s stating, quite unequivocally, that it was you. She alleges that you had sexual intercourse with her in the form of a bat, a serpent and a, uh, large poodle with a Continental clip. Her attorneys are pursuing the case under laws regarding crimes against nature.”

“Is the gas back on, at least?”

“We can’t find anyone to clean the lines. Tomorrow, Minos is going to drive by some Home Depots and round up a crew of Mexicans to see if they’ll do it. I’d suggest you finish up your business in Minnesota and return as quickly as possible.”

“Tell him to hire twice as many Mexicans,” Satan said. “Death’s minions are on strike and I need scabs.”

“I don’t think Mexicans will cross Death’s picket line,” Nero said. “They’re scrupulous about worker solidarity. Maybe you should go see Death and straighten this out.”

“I’d rather eat glass,” Satan snapped.

“Is that a productive attitude?” Nero asked.

“All this stuff is happening at once,” Satan said. “Couldn’t it happen throughout the year at well-spaced intervals?”

“It’s especially unfortunate that it all seems to be happening on the eve of the Ultimate Death Match,” Nero said.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Satan said. “If she says I was changing my shape how can she prove it was me who did it?”

“Well, sir, she claims that your penis is...very distinctive.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Satan said.

“Like a pitchfork,” Nero said.

“I’ll be home soon,” Satan said. “I’ve just got to go kill this nun.”

Sister Mary felt panic rising in her chest as she wondered for the five hundredth time what was going to happen to her. She had been a nun for fourteen years, being obedient, making lists, doing chores, avoiding overstimulation, being chaste, humble and kind. She had done it all so that she could avoid ending up exactly where she was right now: sitting in a Red Roof Inn out by the airport, pregnant and alone.

“This must be how floozies feel,” she thought to herself.

As soon as Sister Helen’s death had been reported to the archdiocese, the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women had sent an utterly useless grief therapist and the Catholic Finance Corporation had sent a scarily competent assessor to repossess the monastery. Before the day was over, Clergy Services had assigned Sister Barbara to a Nicaraguan school for colorblind children and while she hadn’t been able to find the time to say goodbye to Sister Mary before she left she had managed to find the time to tell the Director of Priestly Life about Sister Mary’s “condition.” The Director arranged for a discrete ultrasound technician to drive out to the monastery and examine Sister Mary. The technician was brusque and businesslike and Sister Mary tried her best to endure the examination. The technician hadn’t spoken, she had merely scanned Sister Mary’s stomach in surly silence. After a few minutes, however, the technician uttered her first and only words:

“Holy fuck.”

Sister Mary had reeled as if slapped: no one had ever said the f-word in front of her before. She was a nun. You didn’t say the f-word in front of a nun. Even worse, the word was being used to describe the contents of her womb. She began to cry. The ultrasound technician was no comfort whatsoever because she immediately ran outside, got on her cellular phone and called the Director of Priestly Life who called the Chancellor for Canonical Affairs who called the Vicar General and told him the bad news: they had a pregnant nun whose hymen was intact and whose baby seemed to be, inexplicably, ten weeks along. It was their worst nightmare. It was Agnes of God all over again.

Before Sister Mary had even stopped crying, a van with tinted windows arrived at the monastery and she was bundled inside and taken to a Red Roof Inn out near the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. The Vicar General called her on a secure cellular phone and told her that if she valued the work of the Church and the reputation of the archdiocese then she must not speak to anybody about her condition and she must only leave her room to go to the snack machines down the hall. Sister Mary valued the work of the Church and the reputation of the Archdiocese and so she agreed, but after three days it was becoming harder and harder to stay inside. Since everything she owned belonged to the Church, and since the Church currently didn’t know what to do with her, and since they had taken her out of the monastery without even giving her a chance to pack, she had nothing with her. She was bored and depressed.

Sister Mary did not watch TV, and she did not listen to secular music. She did not read for pleasure, nor did she partake of frivolous activities such as crosswords or Sudoku. So all day, every day, she sat in a chair by the window, dressed in the habit she had been wearing the day of her ultrasound, and she read from the Gideon Bible that she had found in the drawer of the bedside table. And she prayed, very hard, for her ordeal to end.

She had started reading with the curtains open, but so many children had pressed their faces up against he window, pointing and staring, that eventually she pulled them shut. This meant that she had to have the lights on all day in order to read, and she hated wasting electricity. Even more, she hated feeling like some kind of fallen woman, trapped behind glass in a zoo of iniquity, a cautionary exhibit for the saved souls who passed by.

And then, on Tuesday, her prayers were answered and her ordeal ended in the worst way possible.

She had just started the Bible over again and was on her least favorite book (Leviticus) when someone knocked on the door. Sister Mary stood up, her heart in her throat. They were here to tell her something bad. To throw her out. To excommunicate her. She would no longer be a nun. She would be nothing. She would be alone. It was all over. Sister Mary left the door on the chain and opened it a crack.

“Yes?” she said to the man on the other side.

“Mary Renfro?” he asked.

Instantly, she recognized him: it was the man from the airport of horrors. This was he. He had finally come for her. She slammed the door in his face, and backed away. A million conflicting thoughts raced through her head. Most involved running away, but they all insisted on running in different directions and so the end result was that she short circuited and stood in the middle of the room making a sound like, “Err, err, err...”

Satan took the passkey he’d lifted and swiped it through the magnetic lock. CHUNK. He pushed the door open but it stopped at the chain.

“Are you really going to be like this?” he asked.

Mary stared at the face of evil, pressed into the gap in the door and she started to hyperventilate.

“Fine,” Satan said, taking her panic as an answer.

Grabbing his right wrist with his left hand, he braced himself and began to pull as hard as he could. His face turned red with exertion. He gritted his teeth. Reset his grip. And slowly, horribly he stretched his arm. The bones in his right arm made a soft pop, and then a muffled cracking as his right arm slowly, painfully stretched another inch. Agony flared in his shoulder. His skin was on fire. But still he pulled, and groaned and ripped, and finally his right arm was six inches longer than his left.

He slid his newly-stretched arm through the gap in the door and unhooked the chain. Then he pushed it open and he was standing right in front of Sister Mary.

“I hate doing that,” he said. “It really – ”

But the horror of his transformation had had a galvanizing effect on Sister Mary and she kicked him in the crotch. She’d learned this maneuver in high school during a self-defense class their gym teacher had claimed was a requirement. It was the only move she remembered and she was taken off guard by how effective it was. Satan doubled over and dropped to his knees. She lost a few valuable seconds gawping at her handiwork, but then she recovered her senses and fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

The bathroom door was flimsy, like a big piece of construction paper with a cheap, plastic knob. She took the heavy porcelain lid off the back of the toilet tank and held it over one shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to let this drug dealer, this reality perverter, this metaphysical criminal know that he’d tangled with the wrong Poor Clare. This time, Satan didn’t bother with anything fancy, he just popped the handle lock and walked right into Mary swinging the porcelain toilet lid as hard as she could into his face. Her blow was so powerful that the lid shattered.

“Ow!” Satan said, clutching his face.

Mary tried to go for his crotch again, but he grabbed her foot and tipped her backwards into the tub and then clambered on top of her. Mary panicked. Apart from some firm handshakes this was the most physical contact she’d ever had with a man in her entire life and it was worse than she could possibly imagine. Horrified, she scrambled out from under Satan and pushed herself as far as she could into the corner of the tub.

Then she started to scream.

“Stop that,” Satan said, trying to put his hands over her mouth. “Quit it!”

“What are you?” Mary sobbed.

“I’m Satan,” Satan said. “I’m here to kill you.”

Mary started screaming again.

“Look,” he said. “The sooner you simmer down and let me kill you the sooner they can get you processed and get you settled into Hell. It’s really not so bad.”

“Hell?” she wailed. “I’ve been a Poor Clare since I was nineteen. I can’t be going to Hell.”

“Mary Renfro, right?” Satan said. She nodded. “Yeah, you’re definitely going to Hell.”

“Is it because I’m a floozie?”

“It’s because you’re a card-carrying atheist. Where did you think you were going?”

“I’m not an atheist. I’m a Roman Catholic.”

“Not according to this,” Satan said, pulling a tattered membership card from the Society for Constructive Atheism from his pocket.

Mary Renfro went to touch it and then stopped as if it might curse her.

“Go ahead,” Satan said. “You’re already damned.”

Hesitantly, she took it. Her name was typed clearly across the front.

“I haven’t belonged to this since I was thirteen years old. I canceled my membership.”

“No, you didn’t,” Satan said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“I sent in the form to cancel my membership. It was really long and you had to write an essay about why you were giving up and becoming a soft minded religionist. I know I sent it in. I’m sure of it.”

“You prepaid forty-five dollars for a lifetime membership. That precedes and supercedes membership in any other theological or religious organization. Sorry, but you’re an atheist and you’re going to Hell.”

“No, that’s not right,” she said. “Fifteen years as a Poor Clare in service to the less fortunate is canceled out by a mail order membership in a society of atheists that I signed up for when I was thirteen years old and had just read Ayn Rand for the first time?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Satan said.

“God does not make mistakes,” Sister Mary said. “His Creation is not the Department of Motor Vehicles. It is beautiful and perfect in its order and arrangement, every atom a part of God’s ever-unfolding plan.”

“No, it’s actually exactly like the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Satan said. “Except less efficient. Now, just relax. I have to kill you immediately.”

“I don’t want to die!” she sobbed.

“No one does,” Satan said. “But it’s not so bad. A lot of people find death very relaxing.”

“Why?”

“Well, they’re not so worried about dying anymore, for one thing,” Satan said.

Sister Mary began to cry again.

Satan was at a loss. He couldn’t just reach into Mary Renfro and extinguish her life, she had to be distracted first. That’s why people die in accidents so often. You’re driving along, you take a corner a bit too fast and the next thing you know you’ve got the steering wheel stuck through your chest. This is so startling that it’s quite easy for one of Death’s minions to reach in at this exact moment and extinguish your life. Being alive is something that most human beings are committed to in a passionate kind of way. But sudden shocks can make you lose your focus and when your metaphysical immune system is lowered like this it’s easy to catch a cold, if by “catch a cold” you mean “die.” Then, after the soul marinates in its lifeless corpse for a few days it comes to realize that it’s not very comfortable and it’s ready to move on to whatever is coming next. That’s when a demon reaches in, pulls it out and processes it into Hell or Heaven. It’s not an exact science but then again nothing is. Not even the exact sciences.

Anyways, however the process works surprise is key: a sudden illness, a pack of feral cats, an out-of-control wood chipper, anything for which most people are completely unprepared. Confronted by the sobbing Mary Renfro, Satan did not know how to regain the element of surprise, so he slapped her.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“Trying to surprise you,” Satan said. “Did it work?”

“Why do I have to die?” Mary Renfro moaned. She grabbed Satan’s collar and began to rock back and forth. “I’m only thirty-four. I’ve led a good life. Is it because I’m pregnant?”

“A pregnant nun?” Satan said. “Why does nothing surprise me anymore? No, you’re dying because of what you saw in the airport. Humans weren’t meant to see things like that, they aren’t equipped to see my face. The angels wiped the memories of most of the people there, but somehow you slipped past them.”

“I couldn’t have,” Mary said. “God’s servants are infallible.”

“Not so much,” Satan said.

“Can I get out of this bathtub?” Mary asked. “If you’re going to kill me then I’d like to die with some dignity.”

“Fine.”

Satan pushed himself up and helped Mary out of the tub. Whereupon she promptly picked up the biggest shard of porcelain from the floor and jammed it into his chest.

“Die, demon!” she shouted.

“Stop it,” Satan said, pulling out the long, porcelain splinter. “I’m glad you’re going to Hell. You’re a very violent nun.”

Mary Renfro began to cry again.

“Why does everyone tell me I’m a bad nun.” she wailed.

“Let’s just get you dead,” Satan said, trying to think through his surprise options. A gas main explosion? A single-engine plane smashing through the ceiling? Dinosaur stampede?

“I am a bad nun,” she said, interrupting his train of thought. “I kill people with my prayers. And I am a victim of violent passions. And I am pregnant with the Devil’s baby.”

“Whoa,” Satan said. “What was that last part?”

“If you are the author of the atrocity in the airport, then you are also the father of my child.”

“How do you figure?”

“That’s when I became with child.”

Satan thought about it. When he was on Earth and let his mind wander the way he had in Charlotte his evil was unleashed like an offensive personal odor. It was a stupid thing, his evil, with an over-developed sense of irony, dedicated to dredging up the worst nightmares a human being could conceive of and turning them into reality. It would make sense that the worst thing it could do to a celibate, virginal nun was to impregnate her. And since it was his evil doing the impregnating, it was technically his child.

Satan felt faint. Just when he thought things were as absolutely terrible as possible, they got worse.

At that moment, there was a tapping at the window. Satan looked up and saw a cherub hovering outside, his chubby body supported by his improbably tiny wings. The cherub smiled, pointed at Mary Renfro and then drew his finger across his neck and tapped his wrist.

“Alright, alright,” Satan said. “I’m killing her. I’m killing her.”

Mary fell to her knees, gawping at the cherub. This was a big moment for her: physical proof of the existence of a God. She had believed in God all of her life, but this angel of the Heavenly Host was a glorious revelation. The cherub balanced on the narrow windowsill and pressed its fat face up against the window, staring at her hungrily, drooling from its rubbery lips. Satan thumped the window hard and the startled cherub flew away.

“Oh, Lord, thank you for your intervention, delivering unto me proof of your glory. That you would take an interest in a sinner such as myself is a sign that no one is fallen so far from your flock that they cannot be saved,” Mary prayed.

Satan thought about this for a moment. Why did the Heavenly Host care so much about this pregnant nun? Why had they sent a cherub to give him the hurry up? When his attention had wandered that time on the Hindenburg they had just crashed the thing. Same with Tunguska. But now they were trying way too hard. In fact, everything was kind of weird right now. Death had screwed up in an uncharacteristic way. Funds were low. Demons were mutinous. He was the subject of a major lawsuit. Every time he saw Gabriel he had to listen to some kind of smack talk about the Ultimate Death Match. And now he was being pushed into killing a nun who said she was carrying his child.

He went into the other room and picked up the phone.

“Nero? Hi,” he said.

“Did you kill the nun yet?” Nero asked.

“They just sent a cherub to see if I’d done it already. Why are they micromanaging this thing?”

“Heaven seems to be specializing in angelic intercessions this month,” Nero said. “One of Death’s minions tells me that an angel met Death over the Summerville Speedway and wrestled him away from that Nascar accident.”

“Do you believe him?”

“It does bear further investigation.”

“What is going on?” Satan asked.

“I don’t know,” Nero said. “But might I suggest that you kill that nun and then get back here as quickly as possible?”

“I don’t think I’m going to kill her,” Satan said.

“Sir! What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. I’m just sort of making it up as I go along.”

“Sir, I strongly suggest that now is not the time to antagonize the Heavenly Host. They clearly want this nun dead.”

“I just have a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t what they seem,” Satan said. “And if they want her dead so badly, maybe I should keep her alive.”

“I encourage you to think strategically,” Nero said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Satan said and hung up.

He sat on the bed and tried to think.

“The war isn’t going well?” Mary asked, poking her head out of the bathroom.

“What war?” Satan asked.

“The war between Heaven and Hell,” Mary said.

“That was a long time ago. Now, we’ve got synergy. If we didn’t cooperate with Heaven on a regular basis and share the logistical duties it would be a bureaucratic nightmare. You’d never be able to find anything out. Omnipotence would be a joke.”

“Prince of Lies!” Mary said.

“Give it a rest,” Satan said. “ Things haven’t been going well lately. Profits are down more than usual. A lot of our creditors are demanding payment. We’re having problems with our gas lines, I’m getting sued by some woman who wrote a book claiming I molested her, and while it sounds like the kind of thing I could have done I assure you that fornicating with a human is about as attractive to me as fornicating with a ham sandwich, and now I find out that I may have fired Death over something that wasn’t even his fault.”

“And you’re having a baby,” Mary said.

Satan nodded, glumly.

“And I’m having a baby,” he agreed.

“Sounds like the Heavenly Host has you on the ropes,” Mary said.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way until now,” Satan said, and stood up. “Come on.”

“I go nowhere with you, Deceiver.”

“Not even to Heaven?”

“What should I wear?” Mary asked. “Something formal? My habit? Casual wear?”

“Don’t bother,” Satan said. “Whatever you wear it won’t be good enough. Now come on, where’s your nearest Quiznos?”

Satan found one in the phonebook and once they were in the cab he explained.

“Have you ever eaten at a Quiznos?” he asked. Mary shook her head. “Right. No one eats at Quiznos, and yet they’re everywhere. There’s a reason for that. Heaven leases space from them for their express elevators.

Mary didn’t say anything. Her insides were vibrating. She was nervous. She was about to go to Heaven. Even if she had to go there with Satan, it was still Heaven. How many Poor Clares got this opportunity? She felt like she was about to burst, but that might just have been the baby pressing against her bladder. Was it that big yet? She really didn’t know anything about pregnancy or the human reproductive system.

“What are we going to do there?” she asked.

“I’m going to try to find out why they really want you dead,” Satan said. “I have a hard time believing that there’s some kind of conspiracy going on. Heaven doesn’t go for conspiracies. Most likely it’s nothing and I’ll just wind up killing you after all. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Nero it’s that you can never be too paranoid. Or too rich.”

“So if it’s nothing, I’ll die?” Sister Mary asked.

“Right,” Satan said.

He was thinking a shark attack. That ought to take her by surprise.

“And then I’ll go to Hell?” Mary asked.

“For all eternity,” Satan said.

And all of a sudden, in the cab, all alone, fated to die and burn in Hell for all eternity, Mary Renfro started to cry.

“What’d you do to her?” the cabbie snarled. “What’d you say to her, you bastid. Makin’ a nun cry?”

He pulled the cab over and threw one beefy forearm over the back seat.

“Sister, you wannme to come back there an’ kick ‘is ass? This sumbitch say something nasty to you? Something perverted?”

“Would you do something before this gets ugly?” Satan hissed at Sister Mary.

“I’m fine,” Mary said. “Just...take us to Quiznos.”

“You’re not fine, you’re crying.”

“I’m crying because I’m so happy,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “I’m so happy about...the toasted sandwiches.” she said. “Really.”

The cabbie shrugged and drove on.

They pulled up outside a Quiznos. It anchored the corner of a bleak strip mall and, like all Quiznos, when you walked inside you entered a universe of sadness. Curling, laminated signs advertising products that no one was interested in dangled from the ceiling by strings like cardboard suicides. A neon sign over the counter reminded non-existent customers that the food they weren’t eating was, “Mmmm...tasty...” Two employees who had long ago abandoned any expectation of ever serving actual customers listlessly wiped sanitized rags across cutting boards that no one had ever used. No one ordered a toasty sandwich. No one asked for the key to the bathroom. No one paid for a refill. In their bins, tasteless tomato slices and piles of shredded iceberg lettuce slowly oxidized and turned brown.

As soon as Satan and Sister Mary entered the two employees stopped what they were doing and looked up expectantly.

“Welcome to Quiznos,” one managed to stammer, but by then Satan had led Sister Mary to a door marked “Employees Only” and swiped a key card. It clicked open and he led her into a tiny storage area. The two employee’s shoulders slumped. Even the people who actually came through the door weren’t customers. Carson, the older of the two, looked at her watch: her shift had only started forty-five minutes ago. It felt like forty-five years.

In the storage area, as promised, there was an elevator. Satan pushed the call button. There was a chime and the doors slid open. Inside there were only two buttons, one marked “Up” and the other marked “Down.” He pushed “Up,” the doors rumbled shut and the elevator began to ascend at a ridiculous rate of speed. Sister Mary knelt on the floor and began praying while Satan did his best to ignore her. They rode in silence for a while.

“Would you cut that out?” he finally said.

Sister Mary prayed harder.

“You can suck up all you want,” Satan said. “But you’re still going to Hell.”

“Deceiver,” she hissed, opening her eyes. “I have finally figured it out. You’re here to test my faith.”

“You’re right,” Satan said. “I’m testing you. It’s all a great big test. You’re actually going to win a giant golden banana and stay in Heaven forever when we get there. You got me.”

“I know what’s going on here,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said. “I have no idea what’s going on here, and it’s making me very irritable.”

“I’m talking about my sin.”

“Oh,” Satan said. “That.”

“My turning away from God and towards the false idol of atheism is not a mortal sin. It is a venial sin.”

“I can’t really tell them apart.”

“I must spend time in Purgatory away from the presence of My Lord in order to be cleansed of my apostasy,” Mary said. “And once cleansed I will ascend into the presence of my Creator.”

“Actually no,” Satan said.

“I will not debate theology with Satan,” Mary said.

“I’m just saying, there is no Purgatory. So you probably won’t be spending any time in it.”

“There is a Purgatory,” Mary said. “And I expect to be spending time there atoning for my venial sin.”

“You can believe me or not,” Satan said. “But Purgatory was never that profitable, so back in the 50’s Heaven figured it would be more cost effective to chop it up into parcels and lease it out. There are pieces of Purgatory everywhere. They leased a chunk of it to the Port Authority of New York back in ‘51 to use as a bus station, they leased parts of it to city governments all over the world to use as permit and licensing offices, a lot of it went to the old Soviet Union. The last piece of it was actually leased to FEMA after Hurricane Katrina for emergency housing. It generates some pretty hefty rental revenue for Heaven.”

Sister Mary narrowed her eyes

“Mock not my beliefs, O Satan.”

“Have it your way,” he said.

Sister Mary went back to praying. The elevator kept ascending. It ascended for a long time. It ascended for so long that finally Mary got bored. It takes a lot to bore a nun. They wear the same clothes every day and they love nothing more than praying for hours on end, but this elevator ride was that long.

“Is Heaven wonderful?” she finally asked.

“What?”

“Is it glorious to be in the presence of the Creator?”

“It’s alright,” Satan said.

“Hell is a terrible place, isn’t it?”

“Pretty awful.”

“What will happen if I go?”

“Well, if you must know, you’re probably going down to the Seventh Circle which is where blasphemers are punished. You’ll have to lie in a desert of burning sand while fire rains down on you.”

“And I’ll wander?”

“No, you’ll lie down. The sodomites get to wander. I don’t know why that is.”

Sister Mary began to cry.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “I failed my Lord. I blasphemed and now I’ll be burned in the fires of Hell for eternity and I deserve it.”

“Look,” Satan said. “I don’t think ‘deserve’ has much to do with it. I’ve been around pretty much since the beginning and there are a lot of things that make the Universe go round – gravity, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, feng shui – but nowhere on that list are you going to find ‘deserve.’ That concept exists nowhere except in the minds of men. So give up on this deserve business. You’re going to Hell because you forgot to cancel an automatically renewing membership in an atheist society. That’s all. You were probably a great nun.”

“No,” Sister Mary said. “I wasn’t. I was fearful and cowardly and I killed a lot of people.”

“Come again?”

“I killed people with my prayers,” Sister Mary said. “Every time I prayed for someone they passed. Now I see that it was the atheism that made my prayers toxic.”

“Yeah,” Satan said. “That actually sounds just petty and ridiculous enough to be true.”

Then the elevator bumped to a stop, the doors dinged open and they found themselves in Heaven.

The first thing people notice about Heaven is how good it smells. Sometimes it smells like freshly baked cookies. Sometimes it smells like warm puppies. Sometimes it smells like clean laundry, drying in the sun, or Cape Cod after a spring rain, or like Massachusetts in October. Martha Stewart had actually designed Heaven’s entire aroma palette before she was born. She doesn’t remember doing it, but one day she’s going to die and ascend into the clouds and she will walk through Heaven’s lobby and she will think to herself, “This smells exactly right.”

Sister Mary and Satan stumbled out of their cramped elevator and into an enormous lobby the size of a small convention center. The bewitching scent of freshly mown grass wafted through the air. Done in tasteful neutral shades of slate, cinereous, feldgrau and Xanadu, Heaven’s lobby had a long row of elevator doors marching down one side and a series of smooth, corporate information desks lining the other. The occasional angel flapped by overhead. Wisps of pink cloud tumble-weeded lazily across the carpet.

Satan led Mary to one of the information desks. Behind it sat a balding, middle-aged man with a long white beard. He was dressed in a woman’s blouse with a silk neckerchief tied at a jaunty angle and he was wearing a Bluetooth headset.

“Welcome to Heaven,” he said. “Congratulations, you’ve lived a righteous life and you’ll be spending eternity with us. You’ll find that Heaven is comfortable, affordable and equipped with all the conveniences that make will make your stay...Heavenly.”

“It’s me, Peter,” Satan said. “I need to see Michael.”

“I didn’t recognize you,” Saint Peter said. “You look so old and pale. Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but – ”

“Then I’m sorry, but we’re all very busy and no one has the time to sit down and visit with you right now.”

“Vicar of Christ, Father of the Church,” Mary said, kneeling. “This humble sinner beseeches you – ”

“Who’s the fattie?” Peter asked.

“She’s who I wanted to ask about.”

“No appointment means no entry, so you and your chunky monkey can toddle on back down to Earth now.”

“I really need to see Michael,” Satan said.

“You said that, and then I said no, and then we ended our thrilling conversation,” Peter said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Can you give him a message for me?” Satan asked.

“Let me see. Hmmmm...” Saint Peter pretended to think. “No.”

“He needs to know that – “

“Have a blessed day.”

“You’re going to be in a lot of trouble when Michael finds out about this,” Satan said.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Saint Peter said, waggling his fingers at them.

He watched until Satan and Mary Renfro had boarded an elevator and then he picked up his phone.

“That nun is still alive,” he said. “Someone who’s not me needs to do something about it.”

On the elevator, Mary beamed exultantly. She had been so near to the presence of her Lord that she felt His greatness in everything – in the wall-to-wall carpeting, in the indirect lighting, in the piped-in Muzak. She was glowing with his reflected glory. A few minutes later she was merely glittering. More time passed and she was down to a feeble flicker. Finally, she was just plain bored.

“Here,” Satan said, handing her a glossy brochure. “I grabbed you something to read.”

Mary took it from him, careful not to touch his flesh. It was a full color pamphlet with stock photos of smiling men and women on the cover. On the back, a small child and a panda bear played checkers. She had the feeling that this photo had been heavily retouched. She opened the pamphlet. It was a complicated list of pricing options with monthly fees laid out on one side of the page and membership rankings on the other.

“Demi-Blessed: all your desires catered to,” the first one read. Then, “Blessed: most of your desires catered to. Semi-Blessed: some of your desires catered to. Lucky To Be Here: fifteen desires per month catered to as long as they don’t involve felonies.”

At the bottom of the page was fine print that read, “Terms and conditions vary. In some situations, certain restrictions may apply.”

“I don’t understand...” Sister Mary said. “This isn’t for Heaven. This is for a vacation resort.”

“Those rates are how Heaven’s stayed so profitable all these years,” Satan said. “I can’t charge anything because who wants to come to Hell? Everyone wants to go to Heaven. In a market driven economy they hold all the cards.”

She was reading more of the fine print now.

“But they’ve got credit unions? And banks?”

“And did you see those high interest rates? We used to have a special part of Hell reserved for usurers, but the Heavenly Host redrafted those rules a long time ago. It’s all about money up there. You can’t take it with you, but those who do find it a lot easier.”

“But ‘Blessed are the Meek’,” Sister Mary said. “‘Store you up not treasures on Earth.’ The poor are welcome in Heaven. Aren’t they?”

“Sure they’re welcome,” Satan said. “Someone’s got to vacuum all those carpets and wash all those windows. There’s a Work-Stay Program. Those who do store up treasures on Earth have all their desires catered to in a tiered set of memberships, while the meek get to clean their houses, polish their silver, and feed their sex unicorns. Anyone you see in Heaven wearing a brown tunic is there on Work-Stay: the meek, the poor, the ugly, the short-range planners, the children who didn't make it to Sunday School every week. They should have said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall be the janitors of eternity.’ I’d say about seventy percent of the people in Heaven are on Work-Stay. Do you have any gum.”

“Please,” Sister Mary said. “I’m having a moment.”

“Oh, sure,” Satan said. “Don’t let me bother you.”

And the elevator descended.

Down.

Down.

Down.

When the doors dinged open at the bottom they could hear a phone ringing in Quiznos. They emerged into the fast food franchise and Team Member Carson was waiting for them with the receiver in one hand.

“It’s for you,” she mumbled in a voice that said: “I know it’s not for me. I never expected it to be for me. All my life, the phone has never been for me. It’s always ringing for my sister, or my boyfriend, or my son, or my mom. I’ve long since given up on thinking that one day the phone will ring and the person on the other end will actually have any interest whatsoever in talking to me, because all my life it’s been other people who are more interesting, or smarter, or funnier, or better looking and they’re the ones people want to talk to. All I’ve got to show for my time on Earth is my tiny life, and my pathetic savings, and the few things that I actually still enjoy, like pizza. And this, today, is just one more time when the phone is ringing and it’s not ringing for me.”

It was completely wasted on Satan. He was oblivious to things like tone.

“Hello,” he said.

“You need to come to Heaven right away,” Gabriel said on the other end of the line. “It’s not even a little bit funny how fast you need to get up here.”

“I was just there.”

“I don’t care. You didn’t do what I told you to do and now there are repercussions.”

“You mean the nun? Why are you guys so bent out of shape about the nun?” Satan asked.

“Yours is not to question the will of God,” Gabriel said. “It is enough that He wants it done. So you do it. Or you should have done it. But it’s too late now. Now you have to come up here and we have to sit down and have A Very Serious Talk.”

“But – ” Satan started.

“Get up here,” Gabriel said. “Now.”

And he hung up.

“Come on,” Satan said to Mary. “That was Gabriel. We’ve got to go back to Heaven.”

Carson leapt at the opportunity.

“Would you like one of our toasty subs for the ride.”

But Satan and Sister Mary were already gone. Neither of them heard a word she said.

The ride back up to Heaven felt even longer than the ride down, but that was just an illusion. It was actually exactly the same length: interminable. Satan and Sister Mary stood on opposite sides of the car and ignored each other. Finally, Sister Mary spoke.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You keep telling me all these things about Heaven, the House of My Lord God, my strength and my redeemer, but you are the crooked serpent. The Enemy of Mankind.”

“Whatever you say,” Satan said.

“You long to lead His people away from the love of God.”

“Not really,” Satan said.

“You think your honeyed words will poison my heart.”

“I don’t care,” Satan said.

“Of course that’s what you want me to think so that I will lower my guard and you can claim my soul as your own, Antichrist.”

“I’m really not that interested in your soul,” Satan said. “You know what a soul represents to me? A bunch of paperwork. I can’t do anything with a soul. I can’t trade it in for prizes, I can’t burn it for fuel, they’re not pretty to look at, and they’re not that interesting.”

“Your whisperings will not sway me.”

“I’m not trying to sway you.”

“Of course you’re not.”

“I’m not,” Satan said.

“It’s okay,” Sister Mary said. “It’s in your nature to lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

Sister Mary gave a knowing chuckle.

“Cut that out,” Satan said. “It’s creepy.”

“Old Serpent, I am deaf to your murmurings. Your evil words fall on stony ground. I am strong in Christ and nothing you do can claim me for your own.”

“You know what?” Satan said. “Let’s just not talk to each other for the rest of the ride.

And they didn’t.

In Heaven’s Lobby, Satan speed walked to one of Saint Peter’s desks. It didn’t matter which one. Saint Peter was at all the desks at once in this room. It was a kind of limited omnipresence. The air smelt of freshly washed babies.

“Finally!” Saint Peter said. “What did you do? Stop off at Dillard’s to buy uglier clothes.”

He buzzed open the security gate.

“Quick, quick, quick. As fast as your fat little legs can carry you.”

Satan pulled Sister Mary through. She jerked her arm out of his grasp but followed him to an electric cart parked near the exit.

“Primum Mobile Wing,” Saint Peter said, and Satan sat down. Mary took a seat far enough away that her habit wouldn’t touch his cursed flesh and the cart zipped off through the forgettable halls, mile after mile of gray carpet unrolling beneath its bouncy rubber wheels. Sister Mary couldn’t help but notice that the soul who drove the cart wore a shapeless brown tunic.

“Of course,” she thought to herself. “A pinch of truth makes the Prince of Hell’s lies easier to swallow.”

But as the electric cart surged down the unending corridors of Heaven she noticed that souls wearing brown tunics were everywhere: emptying trashcans, polishing doorknobs, dusting picture frames, changing light bulbs. As the electric cart hummed past she studied their postures and facial expressions and tried to determine if they were joyful here in the house of their Lord, if their steps were lighter and their burdens less burdensome here in the presence of their Heavenly Father. They were doing janitorial work, but perhaps in Heaven their labor was a form of joyful worship?

She tried to see joy in the way they pushed their dust mops, in the way they emptied garbage cans, and if she squinted she could imagine that they were on the verge of breaking into hymns of praise. But if she didn’t squint they looked like any other minimum wage workers, cleaning up other people’s messes and dusting someone else’s house. John 14:2 sounded in her mind:

“In my Father’s house there are many rooms,” she thought to herself.

And then, unbidden, a cynical addition, “And all of them need to be vacuumed.”

The corridor smelt like toasted coconut, but Sister Mary’s heart was uneasy. Was Heaven just an endless minimum wage job? Were there people here telling you what to do and how to act? Could you still be fired? Disposed of? Rejected the same way the Church had rejected her? Did they have Red Roof Inns in Heaven?

She tried to silence her doubts, but they gnawed at her brain like worms. She had always assumed that once she died she would ascend into Heaven and sit on the right hand of God the Father Almighty and the uncertainties of the world would be wiped away. But what if the doubts and uncertainties of the world were wiped away only to be replaced by another set of doubts and uncertainties? What if doubts and uncertainties were eternal? When would she finally be allowed certainty? When would the struggle cease? Because if it didn’t stop when she reached Heaven, then when?

She looked at Satan, hunched over in his seat, staring at his shoes, trying to look innocent and uninterested in the turmoil in her soul and she remembered that this was the most evil man in all of Creation. He would welcome her uncertainty. He would revel in her despair. The worms that chewed her mind were his creatures. So Sister Mary steeled her heart against him and ignored the brown tuniced workers they passed, and she put her steadfast faith again in the wisdom of her God, just in time for the electric cart to come to a stop outside a plain wooden door.

“Come on,” Satan said, and led her inside.

The reception area was bland. Anonymous waiting room furniture was lined up against the walls. Satan walked over to a pair of blonde wooden doors.

“Wait out here,” he said.

“Are you afraid I’ll see your true nature if I follow you?” Sister Mary asked, being nasty about it on principle.

“If it was up to me, I’d have you in,” Satan said. “But since we’re in Heaven, they’re going to insist on speaking True Enochian, the Celestial language. You really don’t want to hear that.”

“Because it will reveal you as a filthy liar and as the corruptor of all mankind?” Sister Mary snarled. She felt slightly conspicuous, talking so violently to Satan who had a perpetual hangdog expression on his face, but she knew that even his expression was probably some kind of trick to force her into lowering her guard and she was determined to reject him in thought, word and deed.

“No,” Satan said. “Because it makes most humans suffer brain aneurisms. But you can come in if you want.”

Mary almost said “yes” just to be contrary about it, but then she realized that if he was asking her to come in she should do the opposite.

“I will stay here,” she said. To what? To wait on him like a handmaiden? “Until my Lord no longer wants me to  stay here.”

Satan shook his head and went through the double doors, while Sister Mary sat on the surprisingly comfortable furniture and pondered the turmoil in her heart.

The conference room was designed by someone who fancied himself a master strategist. Pinpoint spotlights picked up the meeting participants arranged around the enormous oval table, leaving the rest of the room deep in dramatic darkness. Satan didn’t even have to look: it was all the usual suspects, all seated in what they felt were the most intimidating power positions. To the right of the Meeting Leader Chair sat Gabriel, and to the left sat Raphael. The other seats around the table were taken by the remaining archangels: Metatron, Jegudiel and Barachiel. Phanuel, Prince of the Ophan, was a spinning wheel of fire and so he didn’t really fit in chairs. He had to hover by the wall. The Meeting Leader Chair was empty. Satan almost took it, just to be annoying, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He took the Opponent’s Chair.

Being near all of them again made Satan’s skin itch. For an eternity they had been closer than lovers, bound to one another like the fingers of a hand and then suddenly there had been rift and dissolution, The Fall and the carving up of Creation into kingdoms. Division of labor is not a concept that sits easily with eternal beings and Satan could tell that they, like him, had been warped by their temporal responsibilities. No one would make eye contact with him. No one talked to him. They all just sat and glared elsewhere. After a while the door behind Satan opened and the archangels all sat up a little straighter. Satan resisted the urge to turn around – he had a pretty good idea of who it was.

“Lucifer,” the Archangel Michael said, taking the Meeting Leader Chair directly across from Satan. “How does it feel to walk the corridors of Heaven once more?”

Satan was careful to keep his face expressionless. To hear his former name, especially from the mouth of this jumped-up halo-polisher, to be reminded of his Fall, to have the pain of being exiled from the Creator’s presence sliced into him anew, it was like being flayed alive. But he managed to keep his face blank.

“Looks about like I remember it,” he said.

“Of course,” Michael purred. “It’s perfect. And perfection need never change.”

In the corner, Phanuel spun faster, releasing a series of musical chimes that sounded like crystal glasses being played in an empty opera house. The archangels spoke True Enochian, a language that moved simultaneously backwards and forwards in time so that the end of each sentence was also its beginning, thereby rendering every expression of angelic thought perfect and complete in and of itself. Because Phanuel was prince of the physical laws that bound Creation and gave it shape he alone was subject to the passage of time and could not converse in True Enochian. Instead, he spoke in a language of musical mathematics that the other archangels, except Satan, had long ago learned to understand.

“I agree with Phanuel,” Barachiel said.“Roll this stupid tape so that we can be finished here. While you two swap chit chat my responsibilities and obligations go neglected.”

“Gabriel,” Michael murmured. “Show Lucifer why we have asked him to join us.”

“You’re here because you’re embarrassing yourself,” Gabriel said. “And, by extension, you’re embarrassing us. Have you seen this?”

A projector screen came down at one end of the room. Paused footage from a twenty-four hour news channel came on, but it was washed out by the light of Phanuel’s flames.

“I can’t see a thing with all that glare,” Barachiel snapped.

“Do something about your flames, brother,” said Gabriel.

Phanuel folded himself into a shape that couldn’t be described and slipped through the wall, leaving the meeting by way of a graceful fourth-dimensional back flip.

“Interesting,” Metatron said. “He manipulates time and space in such a way that his form extends infinitely in all directions and he merely recalls this projection of his consciousness back to his Ur-self at will. Do you not find this elegance fascinating, my brothers?”

“Yeah, it’s amazing,” Gabriel said and pressed ‘Play.’

The CNN crawl frozen across the bottom of the frame leapt to life and the camera shook. It was outside an impressive set of courthouse steps. A trim, fifty-ish man with a gray moustache and a feral grin strode down them. Tucked under his arm was a tear-streaked Frita Babbit.

Reporters rushed the duo and clamored questions. The man held up his hand.

“I am here today because it ain’t cheap or easy to go up against the Devil in a court of law,” he said. “This little lady has done the right thing by taking on old Scratch and I can’t let her do it all by her lonesome. Wouldn’t be manly. So Ted Hunter has decided to foot the bill.”

“Why are you involved?” a reporter shouted.

“Ted Hunter is in this for the little man,” Ted Hunter said. “Ted Hunter has built his corporate family on two principles: responsibility and responsibility. We got dead people unable to die because Satan is too busy sexting our children on Facebook. Ted Hunter is against evil, and for children. Ted Hunter is for responsibility and against internet predators.”

“My journey is at an end,” Frita Babbit said, bravely lifting her tear-stained face to the cameras. “I will be silent no more.”

“Mr. Hunter, what will your next move be?”

“This trial will be the very definition of swift justice,” he said and then the picture changed and the familiar Nancy Grace layout hit the screen. On the left, the big, blonde bubblehead of Nancy Grace. On the right, a postage-stamp-sized insert of a female guest commentator trying to find a comfortable expression to show the camera when she wasn’t talking. She finally settled for The Furrowed Eyebrows of Concern. Vaguely related video footage danced around the screen, wrestling for viewer attention with streaming lines of random text.

Nancy Grace looked directly into the camera.

“The very definition of swift justice. Media Expert, Tina Vetch. Tina, what does it all mean?”

“Ted Hunter,” the guest commentator’s head said. “One of the wealthiest men in America, and his involvement with the Devil Made Me Do It lawsuit is going to kick things up a notch. This is no longer a nuisance suit – ”

“It was never a nuisance suit,” Nancy Grace snapped. “You think evil is a nuisance?”

“Well, no, but – ” Tina tried.

“This is the Devil. The Holocaust. Abortion. Dead puppies. Ring a bell, Tina? That doesn’t sound like a nuisance to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Tina said. There was an awkward silence while Nancy Grace glowered at her. Then Tina continued. “This suit is now backed by Ted Hunter and his money is going to make sure that this is the lawsuit that takes down evil. Just today, a legal dream team, hired by Ted Hunter, got the judge to issue a subpoena for the Devil. So it looks like he’s going to have his day in court.”

Unrelated footage from Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist played behind Nancy Grace.

“I know there are other witnesses who are going to come forward. Could this become a class action case?”

“It could, Nancy. It could.”

“Satan has done nothing to show that he is remorseful, by deed or act. Nothing to show that he is committed to not raping children. Frita Babbit, victim, she will, I’m sure, be with us at a later date. Now, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, toughest sheriff in America, from Arizona, being with us live. Sheriff Joe, once we catch Satan, what are we going to do with him?”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s wrinkly blockhead appeared above Tina’s. The loose skin on his neck oozed over his collar.

“Nancy, we need to send a message to demons and supernatural entities all over the world: we’re mad as Hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. If they give the Devil to me, if they put Satan in my custody, I have the first all-female chain gang in the country and my inmates live in tents because I don’t believe in coddling criminals and giving them more rights than decent, law-abiding American citizens. If Satan came here I’d show him Hell.”

“I’d like to see him in your world famous pink underwear,” Nancy Grace chuckled.

“It’s been my experience that my pink underwear program takes the fight right out of perps. Try doing evil in pink underpants,” Sheriff Joe said. “Can’t be done.”

The video feed was now showing footage of children killed in drunk driving accidents. Photos of smiling, now-dead toddlers were flashing on and off the screen, each shot stamped with their age, name and date of death superimposed.

“This is one of the most bizarre lawsuits in modern history,” Nancy Grace said. “And one of the most important. Peter Skeffield, attorney, he’s here to share with us his thoughts. Peter, will Satan get a defense lawyer?”

Peter’s head appeared below Tina and Joe’s. The screen was getting crowded.

“Nancy, this suit is filed in a United States court, so yes, he is entitled to a defense attorney,” Peter said.

“Of course he is,” Nancy says. “So is Osama bin Laden. Does that make it right? A lot of Americans feel we don’t even need a trial. Just turn him over to Sheriff Joe and let’s get rid of Satan once and for all.”

“Well, Nancy, we do live in America and we have the legal system for a reason, even if we don’t always agree with it. Satan is going to get his day in court.”

“Disgusting,” Nancy said. “Trial of the century. Satan: subpoenaed. Long story short: he’s going down.”

The video cut out.

Everyone turned to Satan, who wiped the sweat from his upper lip.

“Well?” Michael said, finally.

“What can they do?” Satan said. “I’m Satan. I live in Hell. How’re they going to serve me papers?”

“I told you he was going to act like this,” Gabriel said.

“Are you talking back? Are you talking back to us.” Barachiel shouted. “You don’t get to talk back! You’ve been cast out! We tell you what to do!”

“This is no longer an issue of what you want to do or don’t want to do,” Michael said. “This is an issue of what you will do. Things are changing, O Lucifer. And today you have one choice to make. Change, or die.”

In the reception area, Sister Mary was lost. Not physically, because she was quite clearly sitting on a functional seating arrangement in a reception area in Heaven. But everything that she thought was true had come unmoored and now her soul wandered, lost in the metaphorical wilderness.

She tried praying, but there were so many conflicting thoughts racing through her head that she got confused and while her prayers started strong (“Dear God, My Lord and Savior, hear my prayer...”) they got lost somewhere along the way and became meandering and meaningless long before they reached “Amen.” Quiet reflection wasn’t working, either. Every nugget of information, every packet of knowledge, every bright and shining fact she thought was true could also be a lie, a Satanic deception, diabolical misinformation. Even worse, what if they were all true? Or what if Satan wanted her to think they were misinformation so that she would doubt and doubt was like poison for the soul?

She emptied her mind and tried peaceful meditation. She was just starting to realize it wasn’t going to work either when someone sat down next to her.

“Sister,” the someone said. “I sense that your heart is troubled.”

Sister Mary opened her eyes. The man who sat next to her had flames dancing around his head and a black leather book resting on his knees. He wore a threadbare brown robe and leaning against the wall next to him was a heavy wooden club, knotted and gnarled. His face was lined, his head was bald and a long white beard reached to the middle of his stomach. There was such grave concern, such kindness, in his expression that Mary felt her throat contract painfully.

“Saint Jude,” she said. “Why?”

“I go where I am needed, child,” he said. “As the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations, I could find no cause more lost than yours. No situation more desperate.”

“I’m so confused,” Sister Mary said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Tell me what confuses you,” Saint Jude said. “I can’t promise that I will be able to help you, but I can promise that I won’t make it worse.”

And so Sister Mary opened her heart to Saint Jude, the patron saint of hospitals and terminally ill children, of the Chicago Police Department and of Rio’s Regatas dos Flamengos football club. And as she unburdened her heart, a lightness entered her soul.

“As light is associated with shadow, as day is associated with night, so too are you associated with us, Lucifer,” Michael said. “Your actions are a dark mirror reflecting faint glimmerings of our holy doings, and we are beings who respect law and order. When you ignore your duty to the dead you are acting in a lawless manner, and that reflects poorly on our Creator. It will not be allowed.”

“You want me to go to court with these people?” Satan said in disbelief. “That’s not how things are done.”

“Silence!” Barachiel thundered. “How dare you tell us how things are done! We tell you how things are done!”

The archangels were all watching now. They loved a good fight. Metatron stroked his pretentious goatee, while Jegudiel took it all in without betraying his own thoughts. Raphael just looked nervous.

“I’m Satan,” Satan said. “I can’t take time off to go to court. What would happen to Hell?”

“It could hardly get worse,” Gabriel said.

“The Creator is fair,” Michael said. “Hard but fair. Most of the business of death is your responsibility and if humans are unhappy with it then they have a right to hold you accountable. Our Creator has agreed, however, that if you are not served the subpoena there is no need for you to appear in court. But if served, you must appear.”

“Oh,” Satan said, relaxing. “That’s not so bad. Americans are terrible at geography, there’s no way they can figure out how to get to Hell and serve me a subpoena.”

“There are going to be some changes, though,” Gabriel said.

“What do you mean?” Satan asked. Then he turned to Michael. “What does he mean?”

“It has come to our attention that Hell is in turmoil. It loses money through mismanagement and inefficiency. We here in Heaven are worried about the safety of the billions of souls in your care,” Michael said.

“So give me some money,” Satan said.

“We have lost confidence in your ability to operate Hell,” Michael said. “We will assume control of your sphere.”

“What?”

“We’re taking over Hell,” Barachiel said. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“You can’t do that,” Satan said.

“If we win the Ultimate Death Match this year, then we can,” Michael said.

“But only if you win.”

“Who’s wrestling for you this year?” Barachiel sneered. “I heard you’ve got some problems with your wrestler.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Satan said.

“It’s two weeks away,” Barachiel said. “Come on, you have to know who’s going to fight for you.”

“Deep Insecurity,” Satan said. The assembled angels tittered. “Don’t underestimate Deep Insecurity. He can destroy anyone. Just ask Richard Nixon.”

“Take it as a given then that we will prevail in the Ultimate Death Match,” Michael said.

“No, don’t take it as a given. No one prevails until the match actually takes place and someone has won or lost.”

“Lucifer, why must you always choose the more difficult road,” Michael sighed. “I appeal to your reason: there is no possibility of Hell winning the Ultimate Death Match this year. It is nothing more than a formality at this point. After you forfeit, we will be assuming control of Hell and making it a division of Heaven. So, in order to provide for a seamless handover, we would like to implement transitional changes now.”

“No,” Satan said.

“You are not being asked,” Michael said. “You are being told. Gabriel?”

“Thanks, M. Renovating Hell is a big job. We’ve had a planning committee wrestling with the issues for a few years and their answer: complete overhaul. First off, the look. If you don’t look good you don’t feel good and if you don’t feel good how can you do good work? Our answer? A uniform.”

“Like Catholic school,” Metatron said. “A uniform brings calmness to one’s mind and a sense of belonging to a cause greater than oneself. It instills loyalty and a sense of responsibility in all who wear it. A uniform is a sign of stability.”

Gabriel brought up a PowerPoint presentation on the screen. The first slide showed a uniform that looked like a bad cartoonist’s idea of the devil. It was a little red bodystocking with a red cape, a hood with tiny horns and a wee little pitchfork.

“They look good, they reinforce team spirit and they send a strong message,” Gabriel said. “They say, ‘I’m a little devil!’ I think we’ll get greater efficiency out of our team members if they feel like they’re on the same side. I’m excited about these.”

“We’ll be laughing stocks,” Satan said.

“Great change always brings great trepidation,” Michael said. “But it is time for Hell to evolve. Hell will become a place of healing.”

“Hell isn’t a place of healing. Hell is a place of eternal damnation!”

“You feel at sea with this, and we understand. That’s why Gabriel is descending into the underworld to start instituting the new policy. He’ll be working very closely with you.”

“What?”

“Don’t think of him as your boss, think of him as your partner who makes all the decisions,” Michael said.

“Absolutely not,” Satan said.

“Lucifer, be reasonable – ”

“No!!!” Satan slammed his palms down on the table and stood up. The archangels instinctively recoiled.

“I am Satan, Prince of the Underworld,” Satan said. “And until such a time as the Creator himself sees fit to remove me from my position, or until you bunch of sanctimonious halo-polishing brownnosers beat us at the Ultimate Death Match, I do not have to tolerate any incursions into my sphere. My affairs are my business, not yours.”

“We merely want to make the inevitable handover as smooth as possible,” Michael said.

“I’ve never done anything smoothly,” Satan said.

“Here we go again,” Barachiel said. “Blah, blah, blah.”

“There are a lot of other slides,” Gabriel said. “Don’t you think you should see them before you freak out?”

Sister Mary felt lighter now that she had unburdened herself to Saint Jude. He was a saint. He would tell her what to do

“I can understand you fear and confusion,” Saint Jude said.

“What do I do?” Sister Mary asked. “He’s lying to me, isn’t he? Heaven is a good place, right?”

“Sister,” Saint Jude said. “I cannot tell you what is true and what is false. That is for your heart to decide. But I can tell you one thing that is true: your soul is in great peril. Consider your choices carefully, for danger surrounds you on all sides.”

“Please, tell me what to do.”

“I cannot tell you what to do. That is not the duty of the saints. We provide guidance, a light by which you can navigate the stormy seas of life. We are lighthouses for the faithful, not road maps.”

“But you are a saint and I am only human. I’m not really going to Hell, am I?”

“It saddens me to say this, but yes, my child. You will burn in eternal hellfire.”

Sister Mary dissolved into tears. Her worst fears were confirmed. Her soul was damned.

“Is it for the atheism?” she asked. “It’s only a venial sin and I regret it so much. I can repent.”

“Sister,” Saint Jude said. “Heaven is not that callous. It is for the child you bear.”

“But that’s not my fault!”

“You must take responsibility for the actions of your body, whether you feel you deserve it or not. Only God knows what you do and don’t deserve.”

“But I don’t want to burn forever,” Mary sobbed.

“There is a way,” Saint Jude said.

“Prayer?”

“Listen closely, my child. You are correct that your sins are merely venial. But without a Purgatory to purify your soul they bind you like chains and trap you in Hell forever. However, an act of contrition might allow you to ascend to Heaven.”

“What is it?” Sister Mary asked. “I’ll do anything to come to Heaven.”

“Listen carefully. You must find the one who has done you the most wrong in this life, the one who has most sinned against you, and you must forgive them. Your forgiveness must be pure, it must be true, it must be without qualification or reservation. And when you have done that your chains will fall away and you will ascend into Heaven to dwell in the presence of the Lord forever.”

“The one who has most sinned against me?” Sister Mary repeated.

“Do you know who I mean?” Saint Jude asked.

“I think I do.”

“You must be sure,” he said. “Look into your heart. Do you know who has most sinned against you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then find them and forgive them, my child,” he said. “This forgiveness is your key to the kingdom of Heaven.”

“You know how He feels about Creation,” Satan said. “He hates to interfere. He’ll never let you take over Hell before the Ultimate Death Match, not against my will.”

“Perhaps not,” Michael said. “But surely you see the wisdom of what we suggest.”

“No,” Satan said. “It’s the opposite of wisdom. It’s stupid.”

“In the coming days, Lucifer,” Metatron said. “We will try to understand the pain inside your heart that causes you to speak in a manner that is hurtful to both yourself and to others.”

“Shut up,” Satan said.

“So be it,” Michael replied. “You will remain the sole sovereign of Hell for the next eleven days, until the Ultimate Death Match takes place. And when you are defeated there, or when you forfeit, it will be a time of great sadness because you will have made the transition more difficult and traumatic than it need be, both for yourself and for the souls in your care. The Creator will not look kindly on your stubbornness.”

“I’ll write him an apology note,” Satan said.

“At least think about the uniforms,” Gabriel said.

“Get stuffed,” said Satan.

“Gabriel, escort the Fallen One and his lump of mortal clay to the elevators,” Michael commanded.

“Gladly, your eminence,” Gabriel said, bowing low to Michael.

“Hey,” Barachiel said as Satan stood up. “Lucifer? These other wing flappers may want everything to go smoothly but you know what? I hope you give us trouble. I hope you try to fight back. Because I’m a certified instructor in pain and suffering and I think it’s time you and me had a little one-on-one private tutoring session.”

He gave a smug, self-satisfied smirk and Satan tried desperately to think of a clever comeback. But he couldn’t. So he left.

He stopped to collect a distracted Sister Mary from the reception area and then Gabriel loaded she and Satan back onto the electric cart and they whizzed back to the lobby.

“Still sulking?” Gabriel asked Satan.

“You’ve been behind this all along, haven’t you?” Satan said. “It’s that ‘I’d rather be a king in Hell than serve in Heaven’ thing?”

“I’m merely a servant of The Creator’s will,” Gabriel said. “You’re the one who let things get embarrassing down there. You left us with no choice but to annex Hell.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“The only decision you can make is whether it’ll happen the hard way or the easy way.”

“Hard way,” Satan said.

“I know you’re all into fighting the Creator’s will and rebelling and not going along with the plan, but you need to grow up. You may be as ageless as the rest of us but you’ve got the emotional maturity of a hyperactive four-year-old. He’s turned a blind eye to the mess you’ve made, but no more. Fires going out? Death going missing? Dead people backed up on Earth waiting to die? You haven’t designed a new torment in almost two thousand years.”

“I keep trying,” Satan said. “But I have to take care of every single thing every single minute of every single day and so I don’t have a lot of time to lie on my back in a meadow and stare up at the clouds and dream up new torments. Some of us don’t have a bunch of assistants and slave labor to make it all go easy.”

“Touchy, touchy,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go on vacation and let me take over early? It’ll earn you some goodwill up here.”

The electric cart purred to a stop in the lobby. Satan stalked over to the elevators but somehow, no matter how quickly he walked, Gabriel was always a step ahead of him. Sister Mary shuffled along glumly in their wake.

“You don’t have a wing to flap with,” Satan said. “You’ve had me running in circles but you haven’t won the Ultimate Death Match yet. And if you don’t, all your plans go up in smoke.”

Gabriel pushed the call button.

“Who’s going to wrestle for you? Her.”

He indicated Mary Renfro who was lost in her own world.

“Oh, we’ve got someone,” Satan said. “I think you’ll be surprised. I’m the Prince of Lies – a secret wrestler would be just my style.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Maybe. But what if I’m not? Besides, you’ve left a chink in your plan and when you’re dealing with me a chink is all I need.”

“What chink?”

“If they don’t serve me the subpoena, I don’t go to court. And if I don’t go to court how am I embarrassing Heaven? And if I’m not embarrassing Heaven, then why would you need to take over Hell?”

The elevator doors dinged open. A heavy-set black woman stepped out. In her hand was a clipboard. She looked at it and then looked at Satan.

“I’ve got a winning lottery ticket here for one Mr. Satan. Do you have any ID?”

Satan smirked at Gabriel.

“Looks like my luck is turning around.”

He turned back to the woman.

“I don’t carry ID.”

“But are you Lucifer, Father of Lies, also known as Satan, Beelzebub, the Horned Goat, Lord of Darkness, God of the Pit, Leviathan, Pluto, Azmodeus, Servant of Evil, the Fallen Angel, and Baphomet?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Then consider yourself served,” she said and with a flourish she handed Satan a subpoena. “Sign here, and here’s your receipt.”

She got back on the elevator and the doors rolled shut. Satan stared at the subpoena in his hand.

“Oh, tough luck,” Gabriel said. “I wonder how that happened? Have a nice ride.”

He herded the stunned Satan and the distracted Sister Mary into another elevator, then he lowered his voice and pointed at Mary behind his hand.

“And by the way,” he stage whispered. “You really need to kill her before you really piss everyone off. Buh-bye.”

The last thing they saw as the doors closed was Gabriel waggling his fingers at them and giving a great, big corn-eating grin.

The ride back down to Earth was as long and boring as the ride up and, despite the hatred Sister Mary felt for Satan, boredom has a way of breaking down barriers. After a while, she had to ask:

“What’s that for?”

She was pointing at the subpoena.

“Nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing to me.”

“It’s stupid, okay? It’s that woman suing me because she says that I had sex with her when she was in one of those dumb Me Worshipping cults.”

“Satan worshipping? She was one of your minions?”

“I don’t have minions and I try to have as little to do with those cults as I can. Have you seen the kind of people who join up?”

“But did you have sex with her?”

“It was the Eighties. Everyone was on coke. She probably went to an Ozzy Osbourne show or something and got confused.”

“You’re disgusting.”

Satan had had enough.

“I’m disgusting? Is that the best you can do? Really? According to you, I’m the Antichrist, the guy who gave birth to Hitler, designed the nuclear missile, invented serial killers, started all those earthquakes in China, caused 9/11 and made the Middle East volatile. Cancer is all my fault, alcoholism is my favorite party trick and I’m the source of all your problems, and the best you can come up with is that I’m disgusting? You can do better than that. Come on. I’m waiting. Let me have it.”

Sister Mary loathed the Devil with every atom of her being, but right now they were in an elevator together and he looked human and it was hard to keep her rage stoked to a roaring blaze.

“Are you really going to kill me?” she asked.

“No,” Satan said. “I don’t think so. I’m outgunned here and I need every advantage I can get. So if everyone in Heaven wants you dead, then it’s in my best interests to keep you alive. At least until the Ultimate Death Match.”

“Is that something important?”

“It didn’t used to be,” Satan said. “Every century, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory had a company get-together. Fair rides, petting zoos, cotton candy, and an informal wrestling match: Heaven versus Hell, winner takes on Purgatory. Whoever lost had to sit in the dunking booth. Everyone used to be a really good sport about it but then, about two thousand years ago, Heaven got really competitive. Maybe it was the Nazarene going to Earth, or that whole Bible smear job that came out. No one really knows. But the stakes got higher. No more petting zoo. No more pony rides. Just wrestling. And Purgatory hasn’t been allowed to enter the ring in ages. Now it’s just a Heaven vs. Hell smackdown and if they win they get Hell. If we win, we keep it.”

“So if you lose, they get everything and if you win everything stays the same?” asked Sister Mary.

“No one said it was fair, but who’m I going to complain to?”

“Have you ever lost?”

“Not once. War usually wrestled tag team with Death, and if professional wrestling was ballet they were dancing Swan Lake. The archangels always considered it beneath them to get in the ring and most angels are giant wimps anyways. They talk tough but take away their swords of fire and give them a Mongolian Chop and they fold like a rental chair.”

“Who’s wrestling for Heaven this time.”

“Michael. He’s never done it before.”

“And you’ve got a secret wrestler?”

“What? That? No, I was bluffing. I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t want to have your baby,” Sister Mary blurted out.

“That makes two of us,” Satan said. “But it’s not really my baby.”

“You made it happen. It’s your baby.”

“I can get rid of it for you,” Satan said.

“I don’t believe in abortion.”

“I’ll think of something,” Satan said. “I’ve got eleven days. That’s plenty of time.”

They lapsed into silence again.

And then the cable snapped.

Sister Mary screamed.

The elevator plunged straight down at a sickening speed. Just when it felt like it should stop it kept plunging, and plunging, and plunging. Every time Sister Mary thought it was plunging as fast as it could plunge it would plunge faster. The noise of the elevator car scraping and bumping the sides of the shaft was deafening. Sister Mary’s fear was overwhelming. Her brain felt like it was trying to claw its way out of her skull.

“I’m going to die!” she yelled, and knowing that dying before she could forgive the one who had wronged her the most, knowing that this would damn her to Hell for eternity, knowing that death would make a mockery of her life caused panic to bubble up out of her throat, and she screamed louder.

Satan grabbed her by the habit and pulled her face to his.

“You won’t die,” he shouted.

“I’m going to die!”

“I won’t let you!” he shouted.

“You’ll save me?”

“I’ll save you.”

“At the cost of my soul!” she screamed, realization suddenly dawning on her.

“I don’t want your soul!”

“Promise?”

“Yes, but you have to do what I say.”

“Alright. But I’m not going to desecrate any Bibles.”

Nothing happened. They continued to fall, the elevator screaming down the shaft.

“Do something!” she yelled when she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Save me!”

“I am,” Satan said.

“How?”

“When I say ‘jump’ I need you to jump.”

Her stomach hit the back of her throat, bile flooded her sinuses, her eyes dilated so fast she almost blacked out. It was the “Jump in a Falling Elevator” trick, the one that everyone over the age of five knew didn’t work.

“No,” she said in a panic. “No, no, no, no, no...”

“Trust me,” Satan said. “It’ll work.”

“The momentum, the velocity, falling objects, mass and speed and force and gravity and kinetic energy and don’t be stupid! It won’t work!”

“Trust me!” he said.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head wildly back and forth.

“Jump!” Satan screamed at her.

And he jumped, and he pulled her tightly to him, shielding her face against his chest, and she had to jump too and the elevator smashed into the ground and debris shrapneled through the air like a bomb going off and the noise was like a metal wave pushing her underwater and the air was thick with the taste of hot steel and burning engine grease and then it got still again and her ankles hurt badly and that must mean...

“I’m alive?” she said in disbelief. She was on all fours on the ground. “I’m alive? I’m alive. I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive!”

The Quiznos was a crater. It looked less like an underperforming fast food franchise and more like the target of a hurricane, with whole-wheat buns and fifteen-gallon condiment jugs smeared across the parking lot like a Jackson Pollock. All you’d need to do was shrink it, shellac it and mount it on the wall to have a kinetic piece of modern art.

Sister Mary hobbled around in circles, stumping back and forth on her bruised ankles as fast as she could, laughing like a crazy person with the sheer joy of being alive. Satan sat on a flattened reach-in fridge and shook rubble out of his shoes. Then Sister Mary tripped over the smashed body of Quiznos Team Member Carson, crushed beneath a ten-foot-long particleboard counter. The smile froze on Sister Mary’s lips and she knelt at the side of the dying girl. She held her broken hand and leaned in to listen to her gasps.

“It’s okay, I won’t leave you,” she said. “Do you know the Act of Contrition? We’ll say an Act of Contrition together and then take Communion. There’s bread here, I’ll bless it. It won’t be exactly right but it’ll – ”

Carson pulled her closer to her bloody lips.

“I’m...a UU...” she said.

A UU. A Unitarian Universalist.

“Might as well be a Communist,” Sister Mary thought, but she kept it to herself. The girl was dying. It really wasn’t the time.

“My...hair?” Carson asked. “It looks...okay?” She had always been proud of her hair. It was the one thing in her life she’d been able to control.

Sister Mary smoothed the girl’s bangs away from her forehead.

“You have great hair,” she said. “I always wanted mine to be this thick. You’ll have to tell me how – ”

But Carson was already dead.

“Come on,” Satan said. “We’ve got to get to Hell right away.”

“What happened?” Sister Mary asked.

“I think they tried to get a jump on having me kill you,” Satan said.

“That girl didn’t get an Act of Contrition,” Sister Mary said. “I was going to do it but she just died.”

“Then you’ll be seeing her in Hell soon enough,” Satan said, pulling her away.

Sister Mary looked back at the smoking crater.

“How did I survive?” she asked. “Basic physics says I should have died.

“Basic physics tend to get all wonky when I’m around,” Satan said, pulling her along behind him. “Come on, we’re going to make a pit stop along the way.”

The cab pulled up outside the Welcome Center for the Detroit Sunrise/Sunset Maturity Village. It was a singularly uninspiring place to die, little more than a giant brick container full of old, unwanted people. To Sister Mary, it looked exactly like Shadow Grove.

“I’m not going inside a retirement home,” Sister Mary said. “I’ve got a history with those places.”

“Then stay here,” Satan said. “I won’t be long.”

He pushed open the glass front doors and found the name he wanted on the directory. A shiny linoleum hallway took him to the Rainbow Wing, room RW-12. He knocked, but there was no answer. He tried the doorknob and it opened immediately. He stepped inside the darkened room. It was warm and stuffy and smelled like skin. The curtains were drawn and it was packed with furniture that was far too large for the miserly amount of floor space. A gloomy figure was sitting in a La-Z-Boy Reclina-Rocker planted right in front of the TV, which was going full blast. The Price Is Right was on.

“Hello, Death,” Satan said.

Death turned up the volume.

“I don’t apologize very often,” Satan said. “So just hear me out.”

Death didn’t move. Drew Carey’s voice brayed. Satan walked over to the Reclina-Rocker and tried to pull the remote control out of Death’s hand, but Death’s grip was too strong. Satan had to settle for pressing the “Mute” button.

“I’m sorry for firing you,” he said, then waited for Death to say something. After almost a full minute he realized that Death was going to play hard-to-get.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he continued. “What you did was sloppy but I overreacted. And I need your help. It’s all falling apart without you. I need you to come back.”

Death just watched Drew Carey silently mugging and grinning.

“Please,” Satan said, unaccustomed to begging.

Death gave no indication that an answer was forthcoming. Satan decided to try another tack.

“Are you going to just sit here for eternity watching daytime television?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Death mumbled.

“It’s a waste,” Satan said, happy to be getting somewhere.

“I’ve got satellite,” Death said. “I watch TCM. I never got to watch TV when I was working for you. I never got to watch anything. I was always working.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Satan said. “It’ll be different this time, I promise.”

“No it won’t,” Death said. “You aren’t capable of making it different. You keep things the same, all the time.”

“I can change,” Satan said.

“No you can’t.”

“You’re probably right,” Satan admitted. “Won’t you just come to Hell and see what’s going on? Talk to your minions? Get them back on the job. They’re not working.”

“Why?”
“To protest you being fired.”

“Good for them.”

“But the dying are stacking up,” Satan said. “We’re getting backlogged. Already we’re three days behind on mass deaths.”

“Not my problem anymore,” Death said. “Besides, I’m sick of walking. I’ve vowed never to walk again. I spent millennia walking and what did it get me? Fired. That’s what it got me.”

“You didn’t make that vow,” Satan said.

“Oh, yes I did,” Death protested, indignantly.

This had Satan worried. Death was serious about one thing and that was vows. If Death made a vow, Satan knew he was pretty much sticking to it. A vow to never walk again? There was no way he could make him break it. Sure, Death could do a lot online or by phone but he needed him to come to Hell and kick some of his minions in the butt. If Death was refusing to walk there was no way he was ever going to get him down there. Hell wasn’t handicapped accessible.

“You seriously made that vow?” Satan asked.

“I seriously did,” Death said.

Satan sighed.

“I guess there’s no point in further discussion,” Satan said.

Death turned the volume back up. Drew Carey was jumping up and down.

“Thank you for firing me,” Death said as Satan reached the door. “I needed a break.”

Satan didn’t answer. He went out into the hall. He was going to slam the door behind him but then he stopped himself. What was the point? Death wasn’t coming back.

To get to Hell, you have to go to the most depressing place on Earth. Detroit International Airport, Concourse A. Satan and Sister Mary stood outside Terminal Relaxation, the exciting new concept in airport massage spas.

“Airport spas?” Sister Mary asked.

“The one business no one uses,” Satan said, leading her inside. “Ever. That’s why they’re a perfect place to put our escalators to Hell.”

“Namaste,” Natalie, the relaxation technician said as they entered. “If travel’s got you down, try our Swedish Oxygen Therapy. You both look like you could use chair massage. Today the first three minutes are complimentary.”

Satan and Sister Mary ignored her, walked past a rice paper screen from Ikea, and Satan swiped his magnetic card on a reader. The utilitarian door in the back buzzed open and they went through. Natalie watched them go and then went back to her book on acupressure. One day, before she retired, someone would want her to give them a chair massage. One day, a paying customer would come through the doors of Terminal Relaxation. And when that day came she would be ready to give them the best fifteen-minute massage followed by a free Japanese aromatherapy session they had ever received. She knew it. She just had to keep waiting.

They rode the escalators down to Hell for a long time, but not as long as it took to get to Heaven. Hell is always closer than you think. At the bottom they walked through the Gates of Hell and into the vast, rough expanse of Hell’s Vestibule. Satan stopped short and blinked stupidly at the thousands of portable outdoor grills that dotted the endless floor of the cavern. There were grills everywhere, most of them cheap, cut from tin or treated aluminum and giving off rosy glows. He grabbed a demon who was slapping around a confused soul. He thought the demon’s name was probably Samignia. Or maybe Amdusias.

“Why does the Vestibule look like a picnic area?” he asked.

“We thought it’d lend a little ambiance. Minos said it was bad that new souls wouldn’t see our Hellish caverns lit with flickering flames. He said you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.”

“Are people making fun of them?” Satan asked.

“No one’s said anything.”

“All right then,” Satan said. “Good thinking. Tell Minos I said ‘good thinking,’ okay?”

“Okay. You want I should process her?” the demon, who may have been Samignia but who might also have been Amdusias, said, indicating Sister Mary.

“No,” Satan said. “She’s with me.”

They walked away. Samignia/Amdusias turned to the demon Furfur, who had been sitting on a pile of groaning souls watching the exchange.

“It’s another Rosemary,” he sighed, and the two of them shook their many heads, sadly.

“Do you want to know what their first plan was for Hell?” Satan asked as they walked through the Vestibule. “It was just going to be an enormous lake of fire and they’d pitch sinners in. Heaven didn’t care that eleven-year-old shoplifters and Bosnian war criminals would all be getting the same eternal torment. Michael just shrugged his shoulders when I brought it up and said, ‘Oh, well. They shouldn’t have sinned in the first place.’ I made something out of this place. I didn’t have to do that.”

They passed beneath the mighty Gates of Hell and then ducked through a service door that let them out onto the muddy banks of a polluted, slow-moving river. The ceiling was so high that this massive cavern had its own weather system and right now its weather was foul. A stinking wind sent black, tattered clouds rolling across the subterranean sky. The tarry water gurgled and swirled dangerously and the river’s opposite shore was too far away to be seen. Everything smelled like wet tennis shoes. Sister Mary’s feet squelched in the muck as she plodded along beside Satan.

“I stratified the torments,” Satan went on. “Made them fair. Liars got nailed to trees by their tongues, heretics get bolted inside burning tombs, suicides were transformed into trees with their own discarded corpses hanging from their branches. It’s irony, see? It makes sense. It’s fair.”

A crowd of dazed souls stood on a short, crumbling dock that jutted out into the brackish, syrupy water. Satan led Sister Mary through them to the end of the dock.

“Watch the edges, watch the edges,” King Paimon said. The demon had eaten his legendary dromedary one day after the two of them had gotten into a long and complicated argument over what keeps the land from falling into the sea. No one had blamed King Paimon, he was known to have a bad temper. That dromedary had been asking for it by talking back, to be honest. Ever since then, however, he’d been a different demon, more subdued and depressed. Now he worked the docks, making sure no one fell in the river and got sucked away before they could reach their eternal torment. Like most demons, he just wanted to be useful.

“This is my life’s work,” Satan continued. “It was nothing, and I made it into something and now they want to take it away from me and turn it into nothing again. I fought Heaven once and it was...it was hard for me. But I’ll do it again to keep them from ruining all this.”

Mary wasn’t really listening.

“The suicides are trees?” she asked.

“Down on the Seventh Circle,” Satan said. “I know this looks like a giant underground garbage dump, but it would have been a lot worse if they’d had their way.”

“Ferry’s coming through,” King Paimon said. “Watch the edges, watch the edges.”

A shrill boat horn playing “La Cucaracha” cut through the air, jolting Sister Mary out of her reverie. A large, pink, inboard motorboat was cutting across the river towards them, moving way too fast. Its gold fittings sparkled in the dim, underground light.

“This is the river Styx?” Mary asked. “With Charon, the skeletal boatman of the dead?”

“Actually it’s the Acheron river. The Styx is more like a stagnant marsh down on the Fifth circle.”

“But that’s not – ” Mary said.

“No,” Satan said. “That’s not Charon. That’s Charo.”

A woman in a form-fitting pink jumpsuit with an enormous bouffant of red hair piloted the motorboat. As Sister Mary stared, a tiny Chihuahua wearing prescription sunglasses and a little straw hat leapt onto the bow, yipping furiously.

“Ola!” the woman called to the cluster of souls as the boat got nearer. “My name is Charo and I am your driving, boating cutie pie. Coochie coochie!”

The pink monstrosity bumped up against the dock, rocking it crazily on its rotten pilings. Souls crowded onto the throbbing inboard. Sister Mary stared at it in horror.

“Charon quit a few years ago,” Satan tried to explain. “And, well...Charo...their names were pretty similar and she seemed enthusiastic.”

“Charo is not dead,” Sister Mary said. “She has a restaurant in Hawaii and was on the Jerry Lewis Telethon last year.” It was the one piece of television programming Sister Mary had watched all the way through with Sister Barbara.

“That’s a Charo impersonator,” Satan said, climbing  on board. He helped Sister Mary into the boat. “The real Charo had a heart attack in her sleep back in ‘86. Her dog...um, it was pretty gruesome actually. But she’s been nothing but an asset down here.”

When everyone was aboard, Charo threw the inboard into reverse and blew a kiss to King Paimon, who blushed.

“Careful of itsy Delilah!” Charo sang out in her bright, clear voice. “She is being a – ha, ha – jumping doggie. Hey, just cause you in Hell that’s no reason to be sad and make a serious long face all the time even if you have a nasty death which is sure not nice but is something I don’t even know, you know?”

She turned the boat around and aimed it at the farther shore, then she sat back and pulled out a guitar. While she steered with one high-heeled foot she began to strum.

“When I feel sad and low a songing is what I need. You think I’m right?”

“Maybe?” a soul piped up from the back of the boat.

“You right I’m right!” Charo beamed, and she began to sing ‘Hava Nagila.’

“ Hava nagila

Hava nagila

Hava nagila v’nismeha.”

It was a catchy interpretation of the wedding reception classic, and some of the souls couldn’t help but nod to the rhythm. Their feet began to tap as she repeated the first verse, and then the music took over and they were all clapping.

“ Hava neranenah

Hava neranenah

Hava neranenah v’nismeha!”

By now the boat was rocking as it cut through the slimy black water and the far shore hove into view. Souls were shouting out the lyrics with Charo now, banging their heads rock concert style, totally surrendering themselves to her groove.

“Come on, all peoples! Let’s songing together.” Charo shouted. And they all joined in.

“ Uru, uru ahim!

Uru ahim b’lev sameah

Uru ahim b’lev sameah

Uru ahim b’lev sameah

Uru ahim b’lev sameah”

By the time the boat docked on the far side of the Acheron it was officially Hell’s own party boat. Souls disembarked, smiling and chatting with each other and a few paused to hug Charo as they went.

“Bye bye now,” she called after them. “You stay fabulous!”

But Sister Mary was not fabulous. Sister Mary was melancholy and lost in thought. She stopped to take a flier from a forlorn woman standing at the end of the dock. Sister Mary’s fingers were just closing over the flier, and the woman’s face was just breaking into a beaming smile, when Satan swatted her hand away.

“Don’t touch that,” he said.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“That’s her torment. To hand out fliers no one wants for all eternity. She’s been standing there at the end of that dock for forty-five years and she hasn’t been able to get rid of a single one. Come on, we’ve got to stop by the Mall of the Unbaptized. I need to talk to the philosophers, figure out a game plan.”

Ahead of them the black mud stretched to the horizon, an infinite, barren plain. There was nothing on it except for the Mall of the Unbaptized. It would have been at home in Waterbury or Burbank, the suburbs of Cleveland or outer-ring DC. But here, on this blank, bleak, black-soiled plain it stood out like a freak.

Just then, a tinny voice rang out over the mall intercom system.

“Paging Satan, Lord of Darkness. Paging Satan, Lord of Darkness. Please make your way to the business offices located on the Fifth Circle of Hell.”

Satan looked embarrassed.

“I hate it when they page me,” he said.

“You said the suicides are on the Seventh Circle?” Mary asked.

“Paging Satan, Lord of Darkness,” the voice started again, echoing through the cavern. “Satan? Lord of Darkness?”

“Okay, okay,” Satan said. “I heard you.”

“The suicides?” Mary repeated.

“On the Seventh Circle,” Satan said. “But we’re taking the monorail to Five. It’s faster than walking. Slightly.”

“I want to go to the Seventh Circle,” Mary said.

“We have to get to the business offices.”

“Can I go alone?”

“No, you can’t go alone. You’re a living human being in Hell. It is the least safe place for you in all of Creation. One misstep and you will wind up experiencing pain and horror the likes of which you’ve never dreamed. You are surrounded by creatures whose existences are devoted to causing you misery and suffering. Unsane eyes are watching your every move, waiting for an opportunity to torture you.”

“So I can’t go?”

“No!”

“But I’ve been really impressed with all of this,” she said, mustering a smile. “I really have. I’m rethinking everything I was taught about you. It would mean a lot for me to see the Seventh Circle. It would really shake my faith.”

“Paging Satan, Prince of Darkness,” the amplified voice started over again.

“That’s not something I really care about right now,” Satan said.

“But I think there’s someone on Seven who could help you,” Mary said.

“They’re suicides,” Satan said. “They couldn’t even help themselves.”

Mary was not a good liar, but she gave it her all.

“One of my Bishops told me that he knew of a plan by Heaven to destroy Hell,” she said.

Satan stopped and stared at her.

“He...he said that he had prayed and it had been revealed to him by the Archangel Gabriel who told him that he had a part to play in the destruction of Hell.”

“What part?” Satan asked.

“He committed suicide,” Mary lied. “There were some altar boys and he, um, was not very priestly with them. But he said that was part of the plan, to get him into Hell. He was going to be a double agent. No, wait. A mole. A sleeper agent?”

Satan regarded her for a minute. He was just desperate enough to believe her bizarre story. After all, there had been stranger coincidences. He thought back to George W. Bush’s memoirs, Decision Points, which he had recently finished. Right now, Satan needed to be The Decider too, and so he made up his mind.

“Okay, we’ll stop at Seven really fast and pull this Bishop out and then we’ll take him with us to Five. I want to see the look on Nero’s face when I show him that maybe I’m still a step ahead of the game.

He rushed towards the dirty, decrepit monorail that was just pulling into the station on the far side of the Mall, and Mary unclenched her sweaty hands and ran after him.

As expected, it was the worst monorail ever. The track vibrated like it was going to shake itself apart and the monorail flung itself from side to side like a lunatic in a padded cell. The seats were slashed and dirty, the lights flickered, the heat was turned up so high you could barely breathe and a suspicious yellow liquid kept rushing from one end of the car to the other whenever the monorail slowed down or sped up.

The intercom was all crackle and almost impossible to understand.

“Second Circle: the Wanton and Lustful. All Members of Parliament, Senators and Representatives please disembark here. Third Circle: the Gluttonous. All those wishing to be mauled by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, this is your final destination.”

“We don’t actually have a three-headed dog anymore,” Satan said, falling into the role of tour guide. “This is an old recording.”

“Mm,” Mary said, her mind on other things.

“It ate too much so we had to replace it,” Satan said.

Mary didn’t say anything.

“Don’t ask me what we replaced it with because it’s a little bit embarrassing.”

Mary was silent.

“Alright, you’re twisting my arm,” Satan said. “A three-headed rabbit. It’s much smaller, so it eats way less.”

“Mm-hm,” Mary said.

“I’m not thrilled about it either,” Satan said. “But you work with what you have.”

Mary didn’t respond.

The car was packed with silent, miserable souls. Satan and Sister Mary sat squeezed in next to each other in silence. After a while, the recording slurred to life again.

“Fourth Circle: the Avaricious and the Prodigal. Connecting stop for Fortune and her Ever-Turning Wheel. Fifth Circle: the Irascible and the Sullen. Connecting trains for the River Styx Reclamation Project and Blue Line Trains with connections to the Iron City of Dis.”

“Two more stops,” Satan said. “Are you sure this Bishop will be there?”

“He’ll be there,” Mary said.

“What’s his name?”

“It’s Bishop...Tutu.”

“That doesn’t sound like a real name to me,” Satan said.

“Sixth Circle: Heretics.”

Most of the passengers cleared out at this stop. When the doors closed Satan and Sister Mary were almost the only ones left on the train.

“It’s a popular stop,” Satan said. “The way the rules are written technically most people are heretics, so we’re always having overcrowding problems down here on Six. Great food, though. There’re some wonderful Indian restaurants and a lot of good dim sum. So I’m told.”

The monorail jerked out of the station and then suddenly pointed its nose straight down.

“Now entering Lower Hell, all sins of violence and maliciousness. Next stop: Seventh Circle, the Violent.”

The monorail plunged directly down, making a beeline for the center of the Earth. Mary was reminded uncomfortably of the elevator plunge and she gripped her seat. At least it would all be over soon and she would be safe in Heaven.

The grove of the suicides was dark and smelt like wet cigarettes. A light rain was falling through the dirty air. Occasionally, in the distance, they heard the howling of wild dogs as they caught one of the profligate whom they chased through the thorny undergrowth. Apart from that, the grove was completely silent because, after all, what do suicides have to say anymore? Apart from the creaking of their ropes, there was no sound but the clattering of dead branches. Every tree was the soul of a suicide and their useless, empty husks hung limply from their own branches. Mary led the way, crashing ahead through the briars, her eyes fixed on the corpses dangling from each tree.

“We could just ask someone,” Satan said, struggling to keep up.

“I have to find her,” Mary called back.

“Who’s her? I thought we were looking for Bishop Tutu,” Satan said, but Mary had already disappeared through a wall of thorns. Satan sighed and followed. If it wasn’t so important that he keep her alive he would have let her go, but right now she and this Bishop Tutu were his only two advantages over Heaven.

Bishop Tutu...

Wait a minute.

A dim memory of walking through a hospital lobby rose through his mind, like a bubble rising through a bucket of syrup. A long-out-of-date magazine cover...TIME Magazine...a smiling black man and the headline, “Archbishop Tutu Leads South Africa Into the Light.”

He felt stupid. He felt like an idiot. He had been played.

Satan blundered after her through the thorns.

“Mary!” he yelled. “Mary.”

He hated yelling, but she was taking advantage. He had to catch up with her and let her know that he was nobody’s fool.

He suddenly fell over her, kneeling beneath a suicide tree that grew dangerously close to the edge of a cliff that plunged down further than the eye could see. The chasm dropped straight down past the Seventh Circle and almost all the way to the Eighth. A filthy wind was blowing up from the lower Bolgias and it was making the tree branches clack together. Mary was praying to one of the trees, and that threw Satan for a minute.

“Do Catholics pray to trees?” he said to himself. “I thought that was druids?”

He walked closer and Mary stood quickly, backing away from him in alarm.

“Bishop Tutu is still alive, I think,” Satan said. “Anyways, I know he’s not here.”

Mary shook her head.

“You lied,” he said.

“Get away from me,” she said. And then she placed a hand on the sodden foot of a suicide’s corpse and looked up at its face, talking under her breath, passionately and fervently.

Satan got closer and looked at the body. Water-logged, fly-infested, devoid of life but still...the family resemblance was clear.

“Your sister?” he asked.

“Don’t talk to me,” Mary said.

“She’s just about your age, so I thought she was your sister,” Satan said. “We have to go.”

Mary kept talking to the body.

“If you’re trying to communicate, her soul is in the tree. The body’s just a decoration.”

Not even a thank you.

“Come on,” Satan said. “We need to get going.”

Mary jerked her shoulder away from his touch and she pressed her folded hands to her forehead and prayed for the fate of her immortal soul.

“Mom,” she prayed. “I want you to hear me. Saint Jude told me that I needed to forgive the one who had done me the most harm, and so I came here, I came to Hell, because I want you to know that I forgive you. I was so scared when you left me. I thought your suicide was like a sickness and that I could catch it if I thought about you, or if I went to your funeral, or if I touched your things and so I scrubbed you out of my mind. But I forgive you. I forgive you with all my soul and with all my heart.”

She had a beatific expression on her face as she walked to the edge of the cliff. None of it made any sense to Satan and because he didn’t understand what was going on he didn’t move quickly enough. Not when she reached the edge of the cliff. Not when she turned her face up towards Heaven. Not even when she said, “I’m ready to be received into your arms, O Lord.” And not when she stepped off the cliff and into thin air. Her entire attitude was directed upwards, as if she expected to ascend, but she didn’t. Gravity grabbed her and yanked her down, hard and fast, and she disappeared into the chasm like she was being sucked down a straw.

“No!” Satan shouted. “No! No! No.”

He wanted to run after her but there was no path down the cliff, just the howling wind surging up. So he went in the other direction to get help, but after a step he realized that there was no time, and so he went back to the edge of the cliff to maybe jump after her, but he could land anywhere, so he took two steps to the side but there was nothing over there and so he did a crazy little futility dance on the edge of the chasm.

“Geryon!” he shouted. “Geryon!!!”

And the abomination swooped up out of the abyss and hovered before him, lazily flapping its enormous leathery wings. Its body was that of an engorged lion, crusty with rot and scabs. A serpent’s tail, with a single fang dripping poison from the tip, unfurled beneath Geryon’s fat ass. But he had the face of a really nice guy.

“Whassup?” he asked.

“Get me down there,” Satan practically screamed and clambered onto his back. One of his feet slipped and Geryon dipped to catch him.

“Whoa,” he said. “Whatever happened to ‘please’?”

“Just get me down there!” Satan shouted.

Geryon spiraled down slowly.

“Were you with that nun? I was washing myself on a ledge and it was the craziest thing. I said to myself, ‘Geryon, did a nun just go past you?’ and I said back to myself, ‘Yep, Geryon, it sure did. I wonder what that tastes like.’ And then you’re all up here dancing around like a nut so I assume you pushed her, right? That’s cold, brother, even for you.”

Satan didn’t answer. The dank wind slammed into his face.

“Just fly,” he said.

It took almost an hour, but finally Geryon’s claws gripped the gravel next to where Sister Mary lay cracked and broken on the flinty surface of the upper Bolgia. No one had killed her yet, and she was making little sounds and trying to move. Satan knelt by her head.

“What did you do?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“Saint Jude...told me...atonement...ascend to Heaven...if I...” and then she gagged as she swallowed part of her hard palate.

“And you believed him?” Satan cried in frustration.

Satan had seen a lot of stupid things done in the name of faith – the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Communal Riots, suicide bombings – but this topped them all. This was a sucker getting rolled for her soul. It was a waste. It was cruelty.

“She’s not dead, dude,” Geryon observed. “That is gross.”

Mary was mewling, wracked with more pain than the human body was meant to bear. She tried feebly to crawl away from her pain, to escape the nest of splintered bones and crushed flesh her body had become. Her broken fingers pulled uselessly at the gravel.

“Put her out of her misery, man,” Geryon whined.

“Go away,” Satan snapped, and Geryon, hurt, shambled off and flopped down on some rocks.

What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? She wasn’t dead, she wouldn’t die until he or one of Death’s Minions turned her off. And as long as she didn’t die then the will of Heaven was stymied. A long, keening sound rose from the shattered hole in Mary’s face that had been her mouth. Her throat had been crushed and now it was swelling. She couldn’t force air through it anymore, but still she did not die. Death had to claim her.

Satan looked down at her. This stumpy little nun who had done nothing but curse him and lie to him. She was gagging on her own soft tissues as they filled up with subdermal blood and swelled to twice their normal size. It would be a mercy to kill her, but she had to live. If she died, Hell was doomed. Satan felt the forces of Creation all around him, like great gears and spring-loaded iron jaws, tensed in anticipation of what he would do next. Mary’s eyes rolled up and seemed to fix on him. They reminded him of the eyes of a dog that had been hit by a car: dumb, not comprehending where all this pain was coming from, not understanding why it hurt so bad.

Finally, he stopped resisting and he stepped into the trap Heaven had prepared for him and he reached inside Sister Mary and he extinguished her life, and the life of her baby.

The gears began to move. The jaws clamped shut.

Nero found him six hours later, sitting next to the nun’s corpse. Geryon was sprawled over to the side, licking his balls.

“Hey, dude,” Geryon drawled. “I been waiting for someone to show. He’s totally non-conversational. Were they doing it? Like, him with a nun? That’d be messed up, you know what I’m saying?

And he made a crude gesture with his talons, forming a circle with his foreclaw and thumb, and then plunging another claw in and out of it. Nero ignored the idiotic demon and trotted to Satan’s side.

“Sir, is that the nun? That’s a very cruel way to kill her.”

Satan looked up.

“It’s all over,” he said. “Heaven wanted her dead and I was keeping her alive to give me an edge, and then she jumped. I brought her here to keep her safe and even in my own realm they convinced her to jump. I couldn’t watch her suffer so I killed her. And now it’s all over.”

“Bear up, sir,” Nero said. “You are the Prince of Darkness. We’ll find a way to turn this to our advantage.”

“No, we won’t,” Satan said. “They beat me once and they’ve been beating me ever since. Before we even started to fight they had me beaten. Every time I think I’ve beaten them I find out they’ve gotten there ahead of me.”

Nero watched as Satan’s spine took on the consistency of spaghetti and his boss slumped down until his chin almost touched the ground. Once upon a time, when Nero was alive, if someone was not doing what Nero had instructed them to do he would have had that person sewn into the skin of a wild beast and then had them torn apart by pain-crazed dogs. Or he would have soaked the noncompliant individual in paraffin and set him or her alight to serve as illumination for one of his garden parties. But a thousand years of unspeakable torture can change a man and now Satan’s despair merely stirred sympathy in Nero’s breast. He knew all too well what it was like to feel that the whole world was against you. For much of his reign the whole world had, in fact, been against him.

“Sir, come back up to the Fifth Circle. You’re doing no one any good here. I’ll have them bring the woman’s soul when it’s ready to be extracted.”

“What does it matter?” Satan said. “If I go up, they’ll defeat us. If I stay here, they’ll defeat us. They’re coming to take over Hell, Nero. That’s what they told me. That’s what they want. To annex Hell and turn us into their employees.”

“Let’s discuss this in the business office,” Nero suggested. “It’s quieter there.”

“No,” Satan said. “I brought her here to keep her safe and I failed. If I can’t keep one nun safe in my own realm, how can I protect any of us from Heaven? I’m staying here.”

“You’re needed, sir.”

“For what?” Satan asked. “To screw up even more?”

Nero couldn’t budge him. The Archfiend was determined to stay with the nun until her spirit was loose enough to be extracted and then...who knew what would happen then? Nero sat with Satan for a while, but there was a feeling of oppression in the air, as if some great, invisible plan was coming to fruition all around them. It made Nero feel claustrophobic and he eventually left, instructing Geryon to come find him the instant Satan stirred.

Gabriel burst in on Michael who was either contemplating the beauty and majesty of God’s creation, or just staring at some orchids while getting a massage from two Work-Stay souls.

“He killed her,” Gabriel said.

Michael looked up from his orchids.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“This is no time to be mistaken.”

“She did what Jude said she would. She’s dead.”

“At Satan’s hand?”

“No question.”

Michael unfurled his wings and stood. The Work-Stay souls prostrated themselves.

“I will journey to the Empyrean then, and tell The Creator of Satan’s latest outrage. Begin the Great Plan without me. I will return as quickly as I can.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gabriel said.

Michael left his chambers and walked down the halls of Heaven until he came to the door that led to The Stairwell. Opening it he walked up The Stairs for many hours until he reached The Door at The Top. He entered, and walked down The Hallway until he reached The Final Door, which led into The Room, beyond which lay the Empyrean, the realm that was the source of the physical Creation, in which dwelt his God.

“Smell you later, dude,” Geryon said and flapped away leaving Satan all alone with Sister Mary.

Satan didn’t particularly like Sister Mary. He didn’t particularly dislike her either, but for some strange reason her pathetic, pointless death had broken something inside of him. You never knew what was going to be the last straw.

Out of curiosity, Satan had had dinner with Hitler when he’d first arrived in Hell. It was pretty awkward. Throughout the meal, Hitler kept asking him what all these Jews were doing in Heaven. Satan was fascinated by self-destructive behavior at the time, for obvious reasons, and he only wanted to know one thing: why hadn’t Hitler invaded England? It was vulnerable to a sea attack and if Hitler had just put some boots on the ground he could have stabilized Europe, deprived the Allies of a staging area for their ground invasion and turned his full attention to the Russian front. It was a major strategic blunder. Satan had thought that Hitler might not be forthcoming, but the dead dictator was only too happy to finally get it off his chest.

Apparently a glowing dwarf named Bargy had appeared to him three times and warned that if Hitler invaded England the Reich would be destroyed. This dwarf first materialized during a particularly stressful period in Hitler’s life and it had been more than he could take. The thing had freaked him right out of his mind, and Bargy became his secret terror. Hitler spent the rest of his life living in fear that the glowing dwarf was constantly watching him, hiding behind doors, drapes and shrubberies, waiting for Hitler to lower his guard so that he could jump out and accost him in public. Upon further questioning, Hitler revealed that Bargy only appeared to him after he had taken an especially large dose of amphetamines. Hitler was adamant that the two were not connected.

One hallucination and Hitler lost the war.

Or take the case of Stanley Gerwitz, in Cincinnati, who had lost his wife to a murder-suicide at the hands of her lover back in the 80’ s. His oldest daughter was his boss’s mistress and his youngest daughter was a Scientologist. His parents had died in a tragic zoo accident when he was eleven. But through it all, Stanley kept smiling. Nothing seemed to get him down, until some kid had smashed his jack o’lantern. Stanley had spent six hours carving a photorealistic Darth Vader onto this particular pumpkin and when it was smashed that was his last straw. He never left his house again. Some neighborhood children found his body seven years later when they broke in looking for a place to get high.

You never could tell what would finally break someone.

For Hitler it was Bargy. For Stanley Gerwitz it was that jack o’lantern.

For Satan it was Sister Mary’s suicide.

He stayed by her body and kept the goblins away. He would shoo off the flapping things that occasionally landed and stalked in circles around her corpse, waiting to eat it. He removed the bugs that tried to lay eggs in her ears. He dusted her. He kept her clean. He did all the things that most people hired a professional to do.

Michael entered The Room. To the untrained eye it looked exactly like an empty hotel event room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting sporting a neutral geometric pattern. Folding chairs leaned against the wall, tables were stacked up at one end. On the far wall was a door and over it was an illuminated exit sign. Michael began to walk towards it. Five hours later, he was still in the same place. He kept walking. Slowly, inch by inch, hour by hour, almost imperceptibly, the distance between the angel and the exit sign got smaller.

On the third day, some imps came to investigate Mary’s body. Imps were small, single-minded creatures who were usually the incarnation of a bad idea. These imps were all about unwise real estate speculation. They gurgled to each other and bumbled towards Mary, sniffing at the air, excited to have a human host to infect, even if it was a dead one. They didn’t notice Satan sitting next to her until he was kicking them away and making scary noises. They scrambled back to their boulders and gargled horribly at him for a while before going in search of easier prey.

Nero came by again a few hours later, but Satan didn’t respond to anything he said. Nero was convinced that this was depression of the worst kind, and that was not an entirely bad thing. For years he had worried that Satan had never properly mourned his Fall from Heaven. Satan seemed stuck at the second stage of grief: anger. But now he seemed to have moved on to stage four: depression. That was only natural. However, Nero was concerned that Satan had skipped stage three: bargaining. But after depression came stage five: acceptance. And for Nero, that was the best stage of all. He just had to stick by Satan until he made the transition from stage four to five and it would all be okay.

Nero was a great believer in self-improvement. After all, a few hundred years of torture had changed him for the better so he didn’t see why it wouldn’t work for everyone else. He came to visit Satan ready to listen, to offer advice, to recite a few choice quotes he’d copied from Tuesdays with Morrie. He was prepared for emotions. Instead, it was an anticlimax. Satan just sat there. Sister Mary’s corpse just moldered. No one asked Nero to share his own experiences with grief. Nero tried to start the conversation a few times but he felt awkward talking to himself and his words trailed off into silence. There was no indication that Satan even heard him. After a while, Nero felt silly for trying and he stopped talking. Satan didn’t even notice when he left.

A swarm of black flies hovered over Sister Mary’s body, just out of Satan’s reach. Eventually, it began to rain warm blood.

All was quiet on the Seventh Circle of Hell.

It was snowing in the event room. Michael had been walking for eons, and at some point it had started snowing. Cold wind stabbed his face like knives, frozen blades slashed his chest and stomach, his wings were encrusted with ice. Freezing water ran down his back. He plodded on.

One did not make the decision to enter the Empyrean lightly. It had been hundreds of thousands of years since anyone except Michael and Phanuel had even tried. Before the Creation, the angels had all dwelt in the timeless, formless, perfect Empyrean, but after God made the Heavens and the Earth he moved his Host to Heaven and he had remained in the Empyrean alone.

What The Creator was doing in there was anyone’s guess. Phanuel seemed to know, but no one ever quite understood exactly what he was talking about. Metatron had come up with the theory that there were other Creations, each with its own Heaven and Hell and the Empyrean was where they all overlapped and the place from which God watched over them all. Michael thought this sounded vaguely blasphemous, but Metatron often talked like an idiot. Whatever God was up to in the Empyrean, he clearly did not want to be disturbed, and so he had made The Room.

The Room looked as neutral and bland as every other room in Heaven, but it was crammed with folded time. Just as the human intestines were really thirty feet long but folded into a space only two feet long, the path through The Room was much longer than it appeared. Hundreds of years had been folded and pushed into this event room that looked like it could seat maybe two hundred people for dinner. It would take Michael centuries of subjective time to cross it, and yet when he reached the other side he would have just spent a few days of objective time. He had done it before and it had harrowed him, but crossing The Room was essential to his plans.

He put one foot in front of the other. He kept walking. He had been doing this for what felt like years. He was three feet closer to the exit sign. He was making good progress.

“What I want to know – what America wants to know – is when will we get our day in court?” Nancy Grace said. “With me now, a woman who fights for all of us. Frita Babbit. Victim. Survivor. Fighter. Plaintiff. Thank you for being with us, honey.”

In the postage-stamp-sized video insert was not Frita Babbit, but Ted Hunter.

“Hello, Nancy,” he said.

“For our viewers,” Nancy Grace said, “The horrible, disgusting things that Satan did to Frita Babbit have left her too emotionally traumatized to speak in public. Ted Hunter has been authorized to speak on her behalf.”

“Nancy, I want your viewers to know that when I speak, it is actually a brave young woman speaking,” Ted Hunter said.

“Did Satan sodomize you?” Nancy Grace asked.

“He did, Nancy,” Ted Hunter said. “He sodomized me. And when I say ‘me’ I mean Frita Babbit.”

“I imagine that Satan would do something against nature like that,” Nancy Grace said.

“But I want to remind your viewers that he was in the form of a serpent when he did it,” Ted Hunter said.

“That is disgusting. I mean, right there, you’ve got a crime against nature. Woman and snake. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s hard for her to talk about,” Ted Hunter said, “When I make her talk about it she looks so brave and troubled.”

“And it is so brave of her to come out and fight evil in public like this. Your case seems open-and-shut, but what I’m wondering is if the Devil is even going to show up in court.”

“Well, I – ” Ted Hunter started.

“We’ll get back to you, Frita/Ted. Right we’re going to hear from Marcus Whitman, an award-winning journalist and our own special correspondent for the trial. Marcus?”

Marcus Whitman’s puffy, pink face popped into view above Ted Hunter’s.

“Nancy, good to be here, thanks for having me.”

“Cut the chit chat, Whitman. We’re talking about Satan. Is he a no-show at his own trial?”

“At this point it’s hard to speculate on what he will do.”

“One question: why?”

“Because he is the manifestation of all evil in the universe. It’s hard to know what someone that evil is even thinking. He’s not like you or I.”

“What’s his problem?”

“Like I said: evil.”

“To comment, we have Reverend Creflo Dollar here to speak about Satan’s absolute evil. Reverend?”

“Nancy, it’s good to be on your show,” Creflo Dollar said, his face appearing onscreen. “I have something to say that your listeners will want to hear. Satan wants to hold you back. Satan wants you to be poor. Why? Because poor people are unhappy people and Satan feasts on the misery that grows in the human heart. And that misery is caused by a lack of prosperity. God wants you to be prosperous. He wants you to enjoy life.”

“Reverend, on topic,” Nancy snapped. “Satan: showing up for his trial or not?”

“He’s showing up. Think about it. He is the most evil man in all of Creation. He will want to have the soapbox and the attention of the world to convince people to turn away from prosperity.”

“On the other hand, Reverend,” Marcus said. “Maybe it’s more evil for him not to show up? After all, Satan’s greatest feat was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”

“Who says?” Creflo Dollar asked.

“C.S. Lewis.”

“Do not listen to the writings of wizards,” Creflo Dollar said. “Listen to the word of the Lord. He is certain that the Devil exists and is loose in this world right now! Making people poor, making people get on welfare, making people low class!”

Ted decided that he had been ignored for long enough. He needed to remind everyone that they were here because of him. And also because of Frita Babbit’s bravery. But mostly because of him. As Creflo Dollar and Marcus Whitman bickered, he knew the best way to get the attention of the American people.

“Nancy,” he said. “I think Frita would feel remiss if I didn’t tell you about the oral intercourse that was forced on her. Also, the anal.”

And the whole world paid attention.

On the Seventh Circle of Hell, over by Mary’s body, nothing was happening. Geryon’s shadow slid over the ground as he circled overhead and eventually he flew back to his rock and cleaned his butt with his tail. Later that afternoon, one of the giants came stomping up from the Malebolge and tried to eat Mary’s corpse. Satan threw rocks at him until he went away.

Nero had stopped visiting. Hell had ground to a halt. Most of the demons were already talking about what they were going to do with their sudden surplus of free time once they finished processing the last souls in the dwindling line. Ultimate Frisbee was high on their list. They’d heard a lot about it in recent decades. As for Satan, he just sat by Mary’s corpse and pickled in his own despair. Then, for some reason, he started to talk. He didn’t know why, it was as if the words had built up inside of him for a long time and suddenly they began to fall from his lips. And they told the oldest story in the world: the story of the Creation, and of the Fall.

“It all started when God started talking about getting a hobby,” Satan said.

His voice was rusty with disuse. He’d never been a big talker, but after three days of silence his throat felt like it was packed full of gravel. He tried to lick his cracked lips but his tongue was sandpaper. His dehydrated brain rattled in his skull like a dried pea. It hurt, but after breaking the seal on his silence he figured he might as well keep going.

“He was bored and wanted a pastime. He said he was going to make little retarded versions of himself and breed them. He was going to make something called a Universe to put them in, sort of like a big terrarium. All of us would have to stop being infinite and bind ourselves to the finite and take care of the Universe for him because it had all kinds of problems. To be honest, it sounded like an enormous pain in the ass.

“Most of the Host thought he was kidding, but I had a feeling he was serious and so I kept asking him why. At first he said it was because there should be something instead of nothing, but eventually he broke down and admitted that he was creating this Universe because he wanted people to glorify him and proclaim his greatness. He was bored of our praise. He said it felt like we were just going through the motions. I mean, what do you even say to that?

“But there was no stopping him. First, he made his giant container, the Universe. Then he made time, and gravity and came up with the idea of things beginning and things ending. He came up with order, with self-organizing systems, with Brownian motion and all kinds of stuff, but he seemed to find it lacking somehow. It ate at him. Later I realized that the problem was his limited imagination. He couldn’t imagine any of his creations not loving him. He’d come up with a system to organize and operate his Universe, but it wasn’t balanced. He had a status quo, but no revolution. He had order, but no chaos.

“He was creating all kinds of particles and energy, neutrinos that simultaneously flowed backwards and forwards in time, cosmic rays, gamma radiation, but all along he was talking about how he was going to make people. I couldn’t see the point. They sounded really complicated and annoying but he had his heart set on making billions of them. I decided to see what they would be like and so I stole a little bit of his essence and created a series of micro-universes, like cosmic ant farms. I seeded each one with a drop of my own blood, which gave them life, and I watched them evolve.

“Each micro-universe was placed in a trough of liquid time and I pumped it around them quickly, watching them evolve in fast forward. Every possible Creation played out before my eyes, one million times faster than normal. A lobster empire spawned from a billion-year-old Atlantis that never sank. A race of super-intelligent dinosaur kings who prevented their own extinction when kamikaze pterodactyls shattered that asteroid before it hit Earth. Silicon ghost robots rising from primordial petrochemical pools. Virtual universes populated entirely by living ideas. Reverse universes that turned the laws of physics inside out. But at some point or another they all fell apart. Because at a certain point, humans appeared.

“The human animal was a contaminant. Wherever they evolved into existence they heightened tensions, sparked conflicts and seeded violence. An opportunistic outbreak of humanity ripped a totally silent universe in half, and the smallest exposure to humanity resulted in a 5th Dimensional universe tearing itself to shreds when a cold war turned hot after humans invented the 8th Dimensional bomb. Wherever there were humans there was war, torture, fanaticism and death. They were terrible. They were diseased. They were flawed. And these were the creatures the Creator wanted to breed?

“I begged him not to do it. It was cruel, it was callous, it was vain. My argument was so convincing that all the other archangels took my side, but he wouldn’t be swayed. He was unleashing these monsters because they would sing his name. These beasts who built cosmic-sized weapons, who loved digital watches and worshipped pornography, who would one day broadcast every one of their waking moments to each other until their entire existence was nothing more than a hall of mirrors where they watched each other watching each other watching each other. These creatures were polluted. They were profane.

“But he wouldn’t listen. He ordered us to begin our work on Creation and the other angels followed orders because that was what they were created to do. They didn’t know how to do otherwise, but something inside of me was twisted. Maybe I was sick from exposure to all of those micro-universes, maybe I was contaminated by what I had seen my experimental humans do to each other, but deep inside of me there was a new idea: No. None of us even knew it was possible to say ‘No’ to God. But I wanted to say No. It made me feel light-headed and dizzy. I had a hard time staying moored in time. The only part of me that felt solid was this pressure in my chest, this No that was building and building, becoming more and more painful every day, becoming desperate to get out.

“One day, God was talking to us, instructing us on how to bring life to this Universe. I was his bright star, his best pupil, the one he had invested with the most of his being. He wanted me to light the suns and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t able to say ‘No’ but I could refuse to do as he asked. He became angrier and angrier. I just stood there, unable to move, unable to offer an explanation for my resistance. The pressure inside my chest kept building, and I just wanted him to shut up and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. So I punched him in the face.”

Satan paused for effect, but Sister Mary didn’t react. She was still dead.

“None of us even knew how to process this. We were shocked. I was shocked. I had punched God. It was a big deal.

“It didn’t go well after that. I had violated all the rules of my existence, I had fractured Creation. Until that moment there was only the will of God, but now I had opposed it. I had made something that was Not-God. He threw me down, literally and metaphorically. It was my Fall. I fell so far, so fast that gravity bent around me and the angels who had supported my cause were sucked down in my wake. We had wanted to stop the cruelty of Creation and we had lost. I had punched God. I had invented resistance. I had invented rebellion. I had invented exile. I had invented punching.

“Finally, I landed here, in Hell. Back then it was a realm of eternal darkness, full of smoldering fires, walls of flame, floors of magma, ceilings of lava. Around me, in the darkness, I could hear the cries of the angels who had fallen with me. Angels love the cool for its calm, relaxing waves of slow Brownian movement but in Hell they burned for centuries, for millennia, and it twisted their bodies and broke their minds. All of these deformed demons you see around you were angels once.

“It didn’t bother me so much, I was one of the archangels. What hurt was that I had been removed from the presence of the Creator and trapped in Hell, locked away inside his Creation, unable to get him to stop trying to build his cosmic ant farm. I made do. I built Hell, I turned it into my realm, I brought order to this chaos. I was as surprised as anyone else when he first began to send his outcast souls to me. I guess he thought that they were like me: sinners, rebels, traitors to his glory. He had expected they’d just burn, the way we had burned, but he hadn’t seen what I’d done with the place. I stratified and codified the punishments, brought order to the torments. I used to invent new ones all the time. It was fun.

“I did the best I could with what I had. I don’t know how I could have done it any differently or any better. Now they’re going to take it from me. I got so used to the way things were that I forgot they could just take all my work away anytime they wanted. I suppose I thought that I was as good as them. But I’m not. I’m Satan. I am the lowest and most worthless being in all of Creation.”

Suddenly he plunged his hand into Sister Mary’s chest and yanked. Sister Mary bolted up like she was spring-loaded or, to be more precise, her soul did. Her body stayed on the flinty ground, but her soul popped out like a champagne cork. She stood, panting for a minute and then looked back.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I wanted to be here when your soul finally loosened up enough to come out,” Satan said, hauling himself to his feet.

“You were telling me some kind of really long, boring story,” Sister Mary said.

“Just trying to psych myself up,” Satan said. “I think I have to fight this. I don’t have a choice. It’s my nature. I need to save Hell.”

“But why wait for me?” she asked.

“You hit me in the head with the lid from a toilet tank,” Satan said. “I need someone who knows about fighting.”

Mary looked down at her body.

“Is that really what I looked like?” she asked, disappointed.

“No one ever looks their best when they’re dead,” Satan said.

Absently, Sister Mary rubbed her stomach and then realized what she was doing.

“Am I still...” she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“What?”

“Full of sin?” she finally managed.

Satan nodded.

Sister Mary began to cry.

“I’m still pregnant!” she wailed.

“And you’re in Hell,” Satan said.

Sister Mary cried harder.

“For all eternity,” he said. “Now come on, we need to get up to the Fifth Circle.”

“I’m having a moment here,” she sniffled.

“We don’t have time for that,” Satan said, and he grabbed her arm and pulled her along behind him as they started the long walk back to the monorail.

Satan led Mary down endless halls with asbestos insulation sagging from the ceilings, stained industrial green walls and half the light bulbs burnt out. Finally, they arrived at Hell’s offices.

“Nero,” he said, bursting through the door. “What’s the situation?”

“Remarkably unchanged,” Nero said. “Bad bordering on disastrous. Sir, did you know you have a soul following you?”

“That’s Mary Renfro. She’s a dead, pregnant nun. I haven’t decided what to do with her yet.”

“I’m glad you’ve decided to rejoin us but you have bigger problems. We’re running out of souls to process and Heaven in getting very impatient and – ”

“I think we’re being set up,” Satan said. “I’ve had time to think and I know you don’t really like it when I do that, but I think that Heaven has been pulling the strings all along. They want to annex Hell and I think that’s why we’re missing all our contenders for the Ultimate Death Match, that’s why I’m being sued right now, that’s why Death is out of action. They want me reeling. They don’t want a fight, they just want to move in with no muss and no fuss.”

“Why would Heaven want to take over Hell?” Mary asked.

“Profits,” Satan said. “Every soul that goes to Heaven is worth a lot more than the souls that come here, but we do more volume. It’s far harder to qualify for Heaven than for Hell, and every year less and less souls get in there and more and more come here. They would love to get their hands on our customer base, start monetizing it the way they’ve monetized Heaven.”

“The bastards,” Nero hissed.

“But we’re going to take the fight to them. Where’s our wrestler?”

“I warn you,” Nero said. “He’s not much, sir.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Satan said. “This nun is going to teach him how to fight dirty.”

“He’s right in here,” Nero said and took them into the room next door where an overweight man with tiny feet and short arms sat. He was wearing a unitard. He looked uncomfortable on both a physical and an existential level.

“So this is Deep Insecurity?” Satan asked.

“Why? Are you going to make fun of me now?” Deep Insecurity asked.

“I just wanted to meet you and give you a little pep talk,” Satan said.

“I’m going to lose,” Deep Insecurity said.

“No you’re not.”

“Don’t pressure me. I don’t respond well to pressure.”

“Look,” Satan said. “Unless you beat Michael in the Ultimate Death Match, Heaven is going to take over Hell and everyone is going to know it was all your fault!”

“Stop yelling at me,” Deep Insecurity said. “You don’t even know my name.”

“Sure I do, Robert.”

“It’s Dan.”

“Right, Dave,” Satan said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. But things are very stressful right now. I don’t want you to worry. We’re going to sew you a great costume, something really inspiring. Right, Nero?”

“Absolutely,” Nero said. “I’ve got two different sweatshops working on it.”

“You’re going to have a great costume, and you’re going to do super. Mary, have you ever wrestled?”

“No,” Mary said.

“But you were great with that toilet lid so now you’re Doug’s trainer. Do a good job. Literally everything is riding on this.”

“This is a lot to take in,” Mary said.

“Nero, do we have any demons who are somewhat female?”

“There’s the Lamia, but she eats everyone who tries to talk to her. Empusa was just up here though and, as long as you don’t mind that her legs don’t match, she’s very feminine.”

“Great,” Satan said. “Mary, Empusa is going to be your Hell Coach and get you up to speed. I’d help but I think I have to go to court soon.”

“Tomorrow,” Nero said.

“Who’s my lawyer?”

“Me, sir. We couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer and keep the lights on. But I’ve got a whole shelf of John Grisham novels and I’ve already finished four of them. I think I can do this.”

“Really?”

“No,” Nero said. “Grisham makes it sound easy but there must be a reason lawyers go to school for years before trying a case.”

“It’s okay,” Satan said, clapping his hands and attempting to inject some hope into the situation. “I’ve had time to think and I know that right is on our side. They can’t just take over Hell. It’s...it’s wrong. We’re going to pull this off. I know it. I mean, how bad could this trial be?”

“It could be really bad,” Nero said.

“Come on, Nero,” Satan said.

“Really, really bad.”

“Lighten up.”

“Really, really, really bad. And awful. And bad, too.”

Carson City, Nevada.

The venue for the trial of the century had been carefully selected by Ted Hunter’s legal team. Nevada had the highest crime rate in the country, the highest percentage of teen pregnancies, the highest unemployment rate. It was tied with Rhode Island for the worst state economy in America, it had the highest foreclosure rate in North America, the worst public school system and a governor who was being sued for sexual assault.

“If anyone in this great land of ours is sick and tired of evil,” Ted Hunter told Nancy Grace. “It is the good citizens of the Sagebrush State.”

And now, on the day jury selection was to begin, Carson City was ready to explode. Its population had doubled and then tripled as a massive influx of humanity surged into town, attracted by the gravitational pull of the trial of the century. Theologians looking to power up their ministries, congregations who were looking to take a stand against evil, professional protesters who couldn’t resist an opportunity to attend the greatest protest in human history, disbelieving philosophy professors from Northeastern universities who just had to see it for themselves, hack magazine writers, heavy metal fans, Hollywood producers and angry parents. Tea Partiers who were convinced that Satan would look like Obama, Muslims who were convinced that Satan would look like an Israeli, and Israelis who didn’t believe in Satan but who were convinced that if he did exist he’d look like a Palestinian. Power preachers from the AME Church, tattooed lay leaders from the UUs, hip hop rabbis from Southern California, fiery Baptists from Mississippi, not-so-fiery Presbyterians from West Virginia, stuffy Episcopalians from Massachusetts, disbelieving Baha’i from Portland, every cult leader, get-rich-quick prosperity minister and the leader of every single congregation that could raise the bus fare were there.

Carson City’s motto was “Proud of its past, confident of its future,” and although the average Carson City resident didn’t know squat about their past, right this minute they were confident that if they had a spare room, a back yard, a sofa bed, a rundown school bus or even an RV in the driveway the future would bring piles of cash from renting them out to the tourists at extortionate prices. CNBC, Reuters, the AP, CNN, Al Jazeera, Fox and even the Christian Broadcasting Network had all sent their star correspondents, their best camera crews, their hungriest producers.

By the time the morning of jury selection rolled around the parking lot of the courthouse was a mosh pit of cameras, microphones, make-up men, anchorwomen and stand-up correspondents. Tiny tents were pitched for live commentators, platforms erected for panels of experts who would comment on the commentators, a water buffalo was parked in the handicapped parking space by the sheriff who anticipated that about half of these idiots had never been in the desert before and would pass out from heat stroke before noon, and a Red Cross blood bank was pulled up next to it. The Red Cross hoped that seeing Satan might inspire virtuous deeds in the crowd since blood donations were at an all-time low.

Across from the courthouse, the empty lot on the corner of North Pratt Street had been converted into “Freedom of Expression Plaza.” This was a fancy term for what was basically a cattle pen for the large number of Americans who weren’t content to watch Satan’s trial on TV. These fine citizens would not rest until they had confronted Satan directly with their misspelled signs and their American flags. They came by motorcycle, by van, by truck and by car. The ones whose licenses had been suspended came by charter bus, by train, by hitchhiking and by, in one case, carjacking a Prius. Surely even Satan himself would quail in the face of their opprobrium. Surely he would quake before their disapproval. They had rented every portable sound system in Carson City. They had brought their own whistles and bullhorns, their Mr. Microphones and their karaoke machines. Jammed in, gut to butt, until they overflowed Freedom of Expression Plaza they clogged the streets and waved their scrawled signs.

“Catholic Church Was Right! We Knew It All Along!”

“Satin is Gods Barf”

“Thank you Fox News for Keeping Us Informed!”

Several small children had signs duct taped to their heads reading, “ No illegal Alein Satan/Think Twice America!”

As the sun came up over the Bristlecone Pines and the Single-Leaf Pinyons, the crowd sang a tuneless version of “We Shall Overcome,” which switched to a droning rendition of “Amazing Grace” as the minivan carrying Satan appeared far down the shimmering street. Devoted members of the Colorado Christian Men of Christ had staked out the airport and through a keen combination of prayer and looking for a minivan driver holding a sign that said “Satan” they had spotted the Evil One when he came out of The ReNU AirSpa Experience and they’d phone ahead with the details. They’d also taken photos of the minivan and its license plate and emailed them to their pastor who was on the ground outside the courthouse and one of their members had trailed the minivan and kept them all up-to-date via his Twitter feed. Turning a crowd into a mob is hard work and it requires the latest technology.

Suddenly, as if a starter pistol had been fired, the huge crush of humanity surged out of Freedom of Expression Plaza and poured up the street like a river flowing upstream. The minivan slowed as the wall of humanity ran at it and, before anyone could even think of what to do, it was surrounded. One side of the van was swarmed by protestors while camera crews from across the street pressed up against the other. “Amazing Grace” turned into whistle blasts and angry shouts as the mob sent the few sheriff’s deputies who were unwise enough to try to stop them, flying.

“You know what,” Sheriff Tommy Furlough said, looking down from the roof of the courthouse where he’d set up his command post. “Those fellas don’t get paid enough to get crushed protecting Satan. Tell ‘em to fall back and hang loose. Their only job right now is to keep these yahoos away from the courthouse doors.”

Orders went out on the walkie-talkies and deputies all over the street crawled out of the crushing crowd to safety and re-formed by the double glass doors of the courthouse. Out on the street, the minivan came to a complete stop. The crowd started to rock it on its shock absorbers. Inside, Nero and Satan and their driver were trapped.

“Sir,” Nero said. “This is really getting out of hand.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Satan snapped.

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job,” the driver moaned.

Protestors pressed their screaming faces to the tinted windows, spat on the glass, shouted “Satan is New World Order UN Pawn!” and punched the windows of the minivan. In the front seat, the driver, who wasn’t a professional driver anyways but was actually studying right now for his accountancy license and was just driving this van to pay off his student loans, covered his face and began to cry.

“Oh my god,” he sobbed. “They hate me. They hate me!”

The crowd kept rocking the van and its left two tires came up off the asphalt completely. It hovered in mid-air for one vertiginous instant and then slammed back down. A cheer erupted from the crowd.

“I think they’re going to do that again,” Nero said.

“Please,” the driver sobbed. “I have a prepaid test next week. I don’t want to die.”

“Would both of you just calm down?” Satan said.

The minivan lifted off again. This time they could feel gravity snatching at it as it reached the peak of its arc, but it escaped and then slammed back down again, cracking Nero’s head against the window.

“They won’t be happy until we tip over,” Nero observed.

The driver was on his cell phone.

“Tell Titi and Haha that I love them, baby,” he cried. “And I love you, too. Oh, baby, I love you so much.”

The crowd was beating on the windows with American flags, and all Satan, Nero and the driver could see was an angry swirl of red, white and blue. The van went up for the third time. It hovered at the top of its arc and then hands began slapping the metal panels, urging it over, tipping it like a cow, and their hearts lurched as it finally succumbed to gravity, teetered past its balance point and then crashed to the asphalt. On impact, all its windows blew out in a shower of safety glass.

A roar went up from the crowd and then hands were reaching in through the windows, trying to haul the three of them out.

“I’m not Satan!” the driver howled. “I’m a Methodist!”

He was dragged away into the sea of grasping, tearing hands. Hands grabbed Nero’s ankles and hauled him out on his belly. He grabbed the cup holders as he passed but they snapped off in his hands.

“My Lord!” was the last thing he screamed to Satan as he was pulled out of the van and swallowed up by the mob.

Satan was alone. Hands were snatching at him, but they couldn’t get a grip. He crawled through the drifts of broken glass until he reached the rear doors and kicked them open, emerging into the crowd. He was bruised and scratched, cut and shaken.

“Nero?” he shouted.

The crowd was on him. They grabbed him, violating him with their fingers, pulling him in every direction, lifting him up, pushing him down, hitting him, shrieking and screeching, waving their signs in his face, showering him with spittle, screaming their chants and personal beliefs into his face. Behind him, the battered minivan caught on fire. Up on the roof, Sheriff Furlough had had enough. He lowered his binoculars.

“Alright, boys, it’s all fun and games until someone sets a fire. Send in the cavalry.”

An acne-spotted deputy stepped to the far edge of the roof and scissored his arms frantically back and forth over his head. After a moment, he turned back to the sheriff.

“They’re comin’!” he shouted.

Down on the ground, the cavalry came rolling around the corner of the courthouse from the parking lot on the other side of Harbin Avenue where Furlough had been holding them in reserve. The noise of the crowd changed from an angry roar to a panicked gabbling as people sensed that the cavalry was on its way. Protestors ran before them, fear blossoming across their faces, backing away at first, then jogging away, and then just turning and flat out running like Hell. Panic swept through the crowd.

The cavalry were two hundred strong, volunteers from all the different state sheriff’s departments wearing riot helmets and facemasks, bandoliers of tasers strapped across their bulletproof vests. They looked like stormtroopers. They looked like they meant business. But that’s not what struck fear into the hearts of the protestors. What broke the will of the crowd was that they were all riding Segways. Black Segways. And on every Segway, across the matte black cattle catchers welded to their fronts, was the motto: “Tase ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out.”

The cavalry advanced, firing tasers into the crowd like bon voyage streamers during the opening credits of The Love Boat, rolling forward in a flying wedge. Tased protestors dropped to the ground, jittering uncontrollably and wetting their pants. A seven-year-old child was urged by her parents to run up and put a flower on the lead Segway but she got tased in the face instead and went down like a seven-year-old sack of bad parenting. The Segways plowed up the middle of East Musser Street, slicing through the center of the crowd. On camera correspondents ran, their cameramen staying behind to get that one perfect shot and getting tased for their trouble. Their soundmen dragged them to safety. The cluster of protestors packed tight around the burning minivan held their signs up like shields, or weapons, or weapon-shields.

“I don’t think they’re gonna move,” a heavyset deputy said to Sheriff Furlough up on the roof. “They’re gonna topple them Segway things.”

“Just you watch,” Sheriff Furlough smiled. “I may have majored in non-violent crowd control back in college but I minored in ultra-violent crowd control, so that tends to balance things out. Ah, there they go.”

Down on the street, the cavalry had come to a stop, wibble-wobbling on their Segways in a ring around the hardcore holdouts surrounding the burning minivan. The protestors took this as a sign of hesitation, of weakness, of cowardice. They were wrong. As they surged forward, the crowd dispersal officers unslung hoses from their backs, and then they turned on their Mace Sprinklers.

Thirty-three seconds later it was all over but the screaming.

Mace mist hung in the air over the now-deserted street, occasionally refracting a rainbow. A few signs blew past. One read, “ Computer is Homo Devil Machine.” Another pleaded, “Let’s stop eveil now ok?” Satan found Nero facedown in the gutter, lightly trampled but otherwise okay. Gently, he turned him over.

“Sir,” Nero said. “Why do I want to claw my eyes out?”

“Mace Sprinklers,” Satan said, in awe. “If we can ever afford it we’ll have to get some of those. They’re awful.”

A cop rolled up to them on his Segway and wobbled to a stop.

“Sheriff says you’d better come in while there’s a –” and then he stopped, staring off into the sky behind them.

Satan turned. They heard the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter approaching. The crowd had retreated to the far end of the street and now they sent up a tattered cheer. Even Nero sat up straighter. The copter, far up in the sky, was a gleaming silver dragonfly. It flew closer and the crowd began to run after it. It was even closer now, aiming its landing skids at the empty street. The crowd was ecstatic.

“What is it?” Satan asked.

“It’s Cody Gold,” Nero said. “Celebrity judge!”

“Who?” Satan asked.

But by then the helicopter was so close Nero couldn’t hear him. The wash from the propeller pushed down on the street, kicking up a cold wind, sending signs cartwheeling away, dispersing the remaining mace mist and making it too loud to hear anything. People were standing on cars and cheering, sending up loud ululating cries. What had been a peaceful, if somewhat crowded, Carson City street half an hour ago was now Fallujah after the Americans went home.

The helicopter sank slowly to the street, touched its skids delicately to the asphalt, and then, after hesitating a moment, settled to the ground. Its door was flung open and an enormous figure in a flapping black robe jumped out and sprinted away from the rotor backwash. The crowd went even wilder, and the helicopter shot up off the ground and into the sky like a magician yanking the cloth off a table set for two. The crowd ran forward, but now it wasn’t the run of an insane lynch mob out to string up Satan and Nero. Now it was the clumsy run of Trekkers racing to meet William Shatner.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” the massive, handsome judge said as he handed out signed glossies of himself, posed for the occasional picture and yet somehow never slowed down. He kept moving towards the courthouse. “Thank you. I know I’m popular. You’re too kind. Thank you. Thank you.”

Babies were thrust into his hands and he laughed and kissed them and then tossed them away like footballs, trusting that someone would catch them. A boy in a wheelchair was shoved in his way. Cody Gold hugged the young man who began to cry and then, as Gold moved away, the little crippled child rose up on his stick legs and stumbled a few steps after him as his mother erupted into sobs of joy and threw herself on her now un-crippled son.

“I take it he’s popular?” Satan asked.

But it was too late – Nero was already diving headfirst into the scrum of fans surrounding the sprinting judge.

“Who is this guy?” Satan wondered out loud.

“You don’t know who Cody Gold, Celebrity Judge is?” the cop asked from high up on his Segway.

“I don’t.”

“You might be the Prince of Darkness but you’re a real dumbass. Guy was in the WWE Hall of Fame. Smacked down Kurt Angle, Mick Foley and the Rock all in one WWE pay-per-view event at Madison Square Garden: Total Threeway Smackdown. Greatest pro wrestler the world has ever seen. He attended online adult extension law classes in his spare time and graduated top of his digital class. Became the youngest judge in the history of the world. He’s got six million Twitter Followers and so many Facebook fans that they got a server farm in Iowa just for all his wall traffic. He’d be in movies if anyone made movies big enough. Shoot, he’s already up for a place on the Supreme Court.”

“And he’s a judge?”

“Greatest jurist ever to wear a robe. You know that decision in Nevada that if someone’s a real dumbass you can smack them? That’s his ruling. The Supreme Court wanted to overturn it. Couldn’t. It’s airtight.”

And then he smacked Satan.

“Dumbass,” he said, and rolled away.

“Ow,” Satan said.

Over his shoulder the cop yelled, “That’s legal in this state!”

By now, Judge Cody Gold had reached the doors of the courthouse. He shoved his arms up in a big victory “V” and then ducked inside. His fans were left gasping in his wake, on their hands and knees, throwing up from over-stimulation and having private emotional meltdowns. They all seemed to have lost interest in Satan now that they were in the presence of their biggest hero and Satan used the opportunity to find Nero, who was lying on his back in a chewed up bit of dirt that had had grass on it earlier that morning, before the crowd descended.

“We should go inside before anyone notices us again,” Satan said, pulling Nero up.

“He stepped on me...” Nero said in a dazed voice.

Satan smacked him sharply across the face.

“Ow,” Nero said, recovering himself. “What was that for?”

“Get a hold of yourself,” Satan said. “We’ve got a trial to attend.”

“But you hit me,” Nero said.

“It’s legal in this state.”

At the best of times, Nero did not like the physical plane. His centuries of torment had forced him to face the reality that he had been an evil despot and so coming back to the scene of the crime, the mortal realm, always made him self-conscious. What if someone recognized him and he’d had their great, great, great, etc. grandfather crucified? It would be so awkward. Add to this the fact that he had just had an intense fangasm and now Satan, his Lord and Master to whom he owed everything, and because of whom his existence had recently become incredibly stressful, had slapped him. Nero was already a volatile cocktail of neurochemical reactions. He was already a ticking emotional time bomb. And now he did the only thing he knew how to do in the face of this slap.

He ran away crying.

Satan gaped after him as Nero lumbered around the corner of the building.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Wait! Nero? Come back!”

Getting into the courtroom was like boarding a plane in Tel Aviv on September 12, 2001. That is to say: security was tight. Even pieces of paper were being x-rayed. Paperclips were going through mass spectrometers to make sure that they were actually what they claimed to be - wire in a looped shape that used the principles of torsion and friction to hold together multiple pieces of paper - and not nefarious, James Bond-ian assassination devices from the Q Division. No one could walk more than ten feet without some steely-eyed sheriff’s deputy asking for their ID, looking at their face, looking back down at their ID, looking back up at their face, back at their ID and then, finally, giving a grudging nod. Half the press in the courtroom were arrested after background checks discovered their outstanding warrants and unpaid parking tickets and the wheels of justice ground to a halt while alternate journalists were selected and screened.

Finally, Satan was seated in the freezing cold courtroom, waiting for jury selection to begin. The cold, hard-backed wooden chair behind the defendant’s table was designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, but it was nothing compared to the psychological discomfort Satan felt sitting there all alone. He felt conspicuous, sitting at this enormous wooden table with no papers, no files, no law books, no lawyer. It was just him. The plaintiff’s table to his right was packed with things. There were two lawyers, their assistants, Frita Babbit, her PTSD and Recovered Memories Counselor, and they had brought an impressive assortment of papers, files, law books and anatomically correct dolls. Satan felt like a chump.

“Couldn’t get Daniel Webster, eh?” a reporter said from behind him.

“Huh?” Satan replied, inelegantly.

“I thought you’d have plenty of lawyers to choose from in Hell,” the reporter said as everyone else in the press pool watched to see how this joshing would go with Satan. They were throwing out a test balloon here: would Satan be their funny buddy, or a stiff? Satan couldn’t think of anything sharp and witty to say back, and he considered smiling, but then he realized that smiling could lead to an interview and the last thing he wanted was to do an interview with someone he assumed was a serious journalist and then watch it appear in the Village Voice. Satan’s first interview would be cheapened by appearing in a free paper. Without Nero here, he had no idea which of these reporters were important and which worked for giveaways that mostly existed to advertise adult massage services. He decided to play it safe and give everyone the cold shoulder. The reporters nodded to themselves as Satan turned his back on them. As expected, he was going to be a stiff.

“Perfect,” the religion correspondent for USA Today said to the stringer from Reuters. “My readers don’t want a sympathetic Satan, anyway.”

Where was Nero? Satan wanted to look around for him, but he could feel everyone’s eyes boring into his back and it made him too self-conscious to do anything but sit perfectly still. He wished he’ d brought a legal pad, or a pencil, or anything, really.

At the front of the room the bailiff stood up and shouted, “All rise for the Nevada First District Court of Carson City, Judge Cooooooodddddyyyyy Goooooold presiding!”

All around him Satan could feel people resist their natural inclination to burst into applause when Judge Cody Gold made his grand entrance, throwing out his billowing robes behind him and taking his seat on the bench.

“Welcome to the Nevada First District Court of Carson City. Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today in the great state of Nevada to rule on the case of Babbit vs. The Devil, but before we begin, a quick show of hands. Who has my photo book?”

Almost every hand in the courtroom shot up.

“Righteous. How about my DVD?”

A few hands went down, but most stayed up.

“Anyone have an unauthorized copy of my new single, ‘Come Correct For Justice’?”

Three people kept their hands up.

“Those are unauthorized!” Judge Cody Gold roared. “Get them out of here. Torture them! Just kidding. No, wait. Is torture legal in Nevada?”

“It’s not illegal,” the clerk of court said.

“Then I’m not kidding. Torture the hell out of them.”

Deputies dragged the three protesting spectators out of the courtroom.

“That’s going to be on iTunes in two weeks. Can’t people wait for anything these days? Whatever happened to patience? Okay, first thing on the agenda: who is representing the plaintiff, Frita Babbit?”

“I am, your honor,” a slick young man in a nice suit said. “Eddie Horton of Bluestein, Krell, Capers and Cox.”

“Nice to meet you counselor,” Judge Cody Gold said. “I trust I don’t have to impress upon you that these proceedings need to be treated with the utmost seriousness, do I?”

“No, your honor,” Horton said.

“And who’s representing the defendant,” Judge Gold asked.

Satan hadn’t anticipated this part. He’d thought this would be a simple “He said/She said.” It was becoming clear that he hadn’t really thought any of this through.

“I am?” he said, rising.

“Who’re you? And why is your suit all torn up.”

“I was attacked outside the courthouse this morning,” Satan said.

“Why did people attack you?” Judge Gold asked. “Did you say something racist? Or sexist? Because there’s nothing the good people of Nevada hate more than racism and sexism.”

“I have no idea why I was attacked.”

“I didn’t hear a ‘your honor’ on the end of that.”

“Sorry?”

“When you address me you are addressing the whole body of American jurisprudence, and so I expect a little bit of respect. Gimme a ‘your honor’ on the end of your sentences or I’m gonna make you drop and give me fifty.”

“Fifty?”

“Push-ups!”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, your honor?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s your name?”

“Satan, your honor.”

“That’s the name of the defendant.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“You’ve both got the same name? That’s going to get confusing. I’m going to call you Mike during the trial, all right?”

“Your honor, I am the defendant.”

“You’re representing yourself?”

“Yes, your honor. I guess I am.”

“The man who represents himself has a fool for a client,” Judge Gold said.

“Yes, your honor.”

“That means I think you’re a dick,” Judge Gold said.

“Oh,” Satan said.

“I’ll represent Satan,” a voice said from the back of the courtroom. “Your honor.”

All heads turned. There, standing in the double doors of the courtroom was Nero, resplendent in Roman finery. At four feet seven inches he didn’t cut the most impressive figure, but his brilliant white toga glowed. It was draped dramatically over one arm and a bold purple stripe ran along its edge.  If he had not been standing in a dismal little room with laminated wooden walls it would have looked quite dramatic. A fresh laurel wreath nestled in his clipped gray hair and if the lights had been flickering torches instead of fluorescent energy saver bulbs it would have been very imposing. He wore shining leather calceuses on his feet, secured with four thongs that glistened like fresh black licorice. They would have appeared even more elegant if he had not been standing on a stained linoleum floor.

“Who’re you?” Judge Gold demanded.

“I am Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, and I am representing Satan, Prince of Darkness, in the trial of Babbit vs. the Devil.”

“Is that your lawyer?” a disbelieving Judge Gold asked Satan.

“Yes, your honor,” Satan said. “Yes, it is.”

“You need to show up on time, counselor,” Judge Gold said as Nero walked up the aisle and sat down next to Satan. He had two large, rolling litigation cases with him and he opened them to reveal an impressive number of files, legal pads and pencils, which he began distributing around the defendant’s table. Satan instantly felt much better.

“Yes, your honor. My apologies, your honor. It won’t happen again, your honor.”

“Thank you,” Satan whispered to Nero. Nero nodded regally.

“All right, then. Let’s get this show on the road,” Judge Gold said. “What’s first? Oh, boy. Jury selection. Well that promises to be a bore. We got a jury pool?”

“Yes, your honor,” the bailiff said.

“Then get ‘em in here,” Judge Gold said. “We’ll shuffle through and find the least retarded and then let’s see some action. They aren’t paying us to sit around and drink Gatorade, fellas! They’re paying us to see JUSTICE!”

Jury selection was gruesome. Nero had watched enough Law & Order: Criminal Intent while secretly preparing for the trial to know that they were now in the midst of voir dire, the time when he could eliminate potential members of the jury who seemed grossly unfit to serve. The problem was that they all seemed grossly unfit to serve as far as Nero was concerned, and he would have rejected every single one of them based on their extremely ugly clothes alone. To him, they all looked like someone had stapled stonewashed denim scraps and performance fleece to them at random as they ran out of the door that morning.

Frita Babbit’s team had hired Lefty Ricketts, the greatest jury whisperer in the continental United States, to coach them through voir dire. Lefty had already studied the jury pool for three weeks. He had read their files, analyzed their credit reports, sent his field agents to follow them to Wal-Marts and strike up conversations with them in bars, and now he was conveying last minute decisions to Horton using subtle hand gestures.

One elderly jury member was wearing a Med Alert bracelet. A slight stroking of his moustache and she was rejected. If she was going to die soon she might try to feather her afterlife by going soft on Satan. A young, female jurist was eliminated when Lefty tweaked his right earlobe: she’d recently had an abortion. She’d be less inclined to judge someone in a tough spot. The prosecution needed a jury who were moral prigs, people who were up on their high horses, jurists who wanted everything to be a capital offense.

Nero faced a different problem. He couldn’t find a single unprejudiced jury member.

“He the fella responsible for killing my Jeremy in that fifteen-car pile-up out on Route one-oh-five back in ‘91?” an angry nurse’s aide asked.

“Yes,” Nero said.

“Well, I hate his guts,” she said, and then spat on Satan.

Nero rejected her.

“Before I answer your question, Mr. Defense Lawyer,” a flinty old man said. “I want to know one thing. My gramma used to drink to excess and she never got baptized. Is she burning in Hell right now, being tortured eternally by that son of a bitch?”

There was a whispered consultation between Satan and Nero. And then Nero turned to face him again.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I hope he fries in the electric chair.”

“This isn’t a capital case,” Nero said.

“Don’t matter none. I’ll pull the switch myself.”

And so it went. Is he tormenting my wife who killed herself? Yes. Then I hope he dies. Is my daddy burning in that sumbitch’s eternal flames? Yes? Then I’ll beat his butt right here and now. And that’s how it went right up until the end of the day.

“This is ridiculous,” Judge Gold said.“Not a single jurist has been impaneled and to be honest I’ve got a European tour coming up that cannot be delayed.”

“Your honor,” Nero said. “As you can see, it is difficult to find an impartial jury to try Satan who is, after all, widely considered to be the source of all evil.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Judge Gold snapped. “Get some aliens from another planet? A bunch of atheists? Atheists aren’t even American. The only way we’re going to get a jury on this case is if we send out to San Francisco for a bunch of Montessori kids with liberal parents who listen to This American Life instead of going to church on Sundays and who have no idea that organized religion even exists.”

And, ultimately, that’s what they did.

It was hot in the event room. It had always been hot. Michael couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been hot. He couldn't remember a time before the heat cooked his brains. A time before the carpet burned his feet and the air smelled like singed wool. His wings were sacks full of lead strapped to his back. His feathers drooped. His body streamed with sweat. His legs were made of stone. His shoulders and scalp were burned raw and red by the relentless heat pressing down on him from above.

Angels hate the heat. They prefer the cool reaches of Heaven, and even our Earth is a few degrees warmer than they find comfortable. When the angels who sided with Satan were cast out of Heaven they fell from its chill comfort into Hell’s lake of fire and it seared them, cooked them, broiled them alive. The shock drove them mad. They screamed for decades as their skin roasted and their wings fried and burned. The fallen angels burned in Hell for hundreds of years. After the first year they were no longer begging for water to cool their blistered tongues. After the first decade their flesh had baked off, peeled away and regenerated so many times that they were nothing more than masses of scar tissue. And still they burned.

After the first century, most of them had been driven insane from the pain. Another century passed and Satan began his project to organize Hell. He started to search for the angels amongst the lava flows and in the caverns where the air boiled. He found them where they cowered in the burning darkness, he coaxed them out from molten caves and pitch-black crevasses and he saw what had been done to them. They had fallen as angels but Hell’s fires were a crucible that had warped them until they were twisted, deformed and unrecognizable. Their minds had burned away along with their bodies and what remained were demons – deformed, monstrous reflections of the beautiful creatures they had once been.

Michael knew of this and he was scared that it was happening to him now. He was scared that he was burning to death, that the heat was making him insane. It pressed him down. It cooked him. The nylon wall-to-wall carpet smoldered and was sticky, on the verge of bursting into flame. Michael’s body felt like it would catch on fire at any moment. But still he kept walking. Lifting one leaden foot after the other. He was getting closer to the exit door all the time. Now he was almost two-thirds of the way there. He wondered if he’d be able to make it all the way before he lost his mind.

Sheriff Furlough had assigned Satan and Nero an empty conference room as a staging area. The conference table was so big that it left them almost no room to walk around, and so Nero was trying to pace back and forth as best he could but he kept bumping into chairs.

“What happens now?” Satan asked.

It was the day the trial was set to open and Nero was terrified. But he knew that as lost as he was, at least he had once been human. He understood the way laws and trials worked. Satan was totally in the dark.

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders,” he said.

“But I thought this was a civil trial?” Satan asked.

“It is,” Nero said, quickly. “I was just trying to banter.”

“Banter?”

“To put you at ease.”

“It didn’t work,” Satan said.

Nero was petrified. He knew that he was the only one who could defend Satan, but the law he felt most comfortable with was Classical Roman law, which hadn’t really been practiced in one thousand eight hundred years. He had watched three seasons of Law & Order, he had seen A Few Good Men and The Pelican Brief, and he had read all the John Grisham he could get his hands on, but now he would have to stand up in a real courtroom, in front of a real judge, next to a real lawyer who knew all the tricks, and pretend that he knew what he was doing. It was like a nightmare. Nero would have wet his pants if he’d been wearing any. Wetting one’s toga always led to disaster.

“I’ve got a plan –  “ he started, but was interrupted as a sheriff’s deputy stuck his head in the door.

“They’re waiting for you,” he said.

“What’s your plan?” Satan asked.

But Nero was too busy wetting his toga.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Bailiff shouted. “All hail the living incarnation of swift justice, the man who knows where all the bodies are buried, the master of the gavel and the robe, Juuuuuudge Cody Goooooooooooooolllllldddddd!”

The room went wild – there had been a spontaneous outbreak of applause the day before when Judge Gold had plucked an annoying fly out of the air with one hand and since no one had been charged with contempt the spectators took it as a sign that Judge Cody Gold was fine with spontaneous demonstrations of approval.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” the judge said, settling himself down on the bench. “We got a crime, we got a victim, we got a criminal, we got lawyers and now we got a jury. I think it’s time we put ‘er in gear. Opening statements! Let’s go! Prosecution? Tell us why we should hate evil.”

Eddie Horton stood up and walked to the bench. He made a microscopic adjustment to his lapels.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Counselors. Your honor. I could give you a long and eloquent opening statement, but really I just want to say one thing.”

He pointed at Satan.

“That is Satan. And Satan is evil. And we’re here to kick evil’s butt. Thank you.”

He sat down to wild applause.

“Well, I’m convinced,” Judge Gold said.

Nero’s opening statement consisted of five, single-spaced pages. He was a terrible reader. And then he dropped his statement and got the pages mixed up.

It is better to pass over Nero’s opening statement in silence.

After Nero’s lackluster performance, the legal team for the plaintiff called their first witness to the stand. Nancy Standing, inner child release and emotional catharsis counselor, specializing in Satanic ritual abuse. She looked like one of those earth mothers who pretend to be laid back but become incredibly uptight when it's time to split the check.

“Mrs. Standing,” Eddie Horton said. “You have treated Frita Babbit, the plaintiff, for how many years?”

“Six days,” Nancy Standing said.

“And in your opinion, is that enough time in which to form a complete diagnosis?”

“More than enough,” Nancy Standing said. “I’ve been in situations where I’ve only had three minutes.”

“Have you ever been wrong?”

“Never. My training is excellent.”

“How would you describe the symptoms that the plaintiff exhibits?”

“Troubling.”

“How troubling? In your professional opinion?”

“Deeply troubling.”

“Can you describe for the jury these deeply troubling symptoms?”

Nancy Standing turned towards the jury.

“Ms. Babbit – Frita – demonstrates a lack of self-confidence, poor self-esteem and a negative self-image. She also suffers from depression, anxiety and irritability. Bad skin, poor posture, limp hair and phantom pain.”

“Anything else?”

“Chronic insomnia, inexplicable headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, halitosis, sensitive teeth, abnormally large gum pockets, sore tongue, dermatitis, cellulite, hammer toe, spider leg veins and infantile aggression syndrome with dissociative tendencies.”

“Would you mind restating this in terms a layperson can understand?”

“She’s a mess.”

“And in your opinion, why is she a mess?”

“In my expert opinion, she is a mess because she was sexually abused by Satan.”

“By Satan?” Eddie Horton said, feigning surprise. “What makes you so certain that it was Satan? Couldn’ t someone else have abused her and caused these same symptoms?”

“Absolutely not.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I say so.”

“And you are?”

“An expert.”

“No further questions, your honor.”

Now she was Nero’s witness. Nero wasn’t quite sure what to do with her. He knew that he had to cross-examine her, he knew that he had to put up some kind of a fight, but his head was a whirling mess of contradictory assumptions and instincts. And then he had a sudden flash of inspiration.

“Mrs. Standing – ”

“Ms.,” she corrected him.

“Ms. Standing,” Nero said. “Do you drink alcohol?”

“I have drunk alcohol in the past, yes.”

“Did you drink any this morning?”

“No.”

“Are you drunk right now?”

“Of course not.”

“I see. No further questions, your honor.”

But Ms. Standing was not finished.

“Your honor,” she said. “If it pleases the court may I say something?”

“That’s not allowed,” Judge Gold said. “But let’s get outside the box. This is a zone for free thinkers. Go for it!”

“Frita Babbit is not an easy person to like,” Nancy Standing said. “Look at her. She’s irritating and unpleasant. She is insecure and neurotic. A lot of you will talk about her in the upcoming days. You will say, ‘She should go to the gym more. She needs to wear nicer blouses. She should really do something about her hair.’ And I want you all to know that she would...if not for Satan!”

An appreciative murmur spread through the courtroom.

“What was that all about?” Satan whispered to Nero as he sat down.

“I’ve got a plan, sir,” Nero said. “Just wait.”

If Nero had a plan, it wasn’t a very good one. The prosecution ran an impressive parade of psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, doctors and nurse practitioners through the witness chair over the next two days and every single one of them hammered on the same fact: if not for Satan, Frita Babbit would have discovered a cure for cancer by now.

“Are you sure you have a plan?” Satan asked Nero, after the third outburst of spontaneous applause from the courtroom.

“Of course,” Nero said.

“Can you share it with me?”

“My plan is to win this case,” Nero said.

“Are there any more details than that?”

“Not yet, sir. But I’m working on it.”

Satan buried his head in his hands.

The man sitting in the witness box that afternoon was Dr. Everett Scott, a specialist in Satanic cults and black magic.

“Dr. Scott,” Eddie Horton said. “Do Satanic cults exist?”

“Most definitely,” the wheelchair-bound Scott said. “They are, to coin a phrase, all around us. One might even be in this courtroom right this very minute.”

A murmur ran through the courtroom.

“As I said,” Dr. Scott continued. “ Satanic cults are all around us. There is growing criminal activity in the world and most of it stems from an underground network of Satanists who make up the global elite. What is the global elite? It is a United Nations of evil made up of witches, warlocks, rock musicians, liberal politicians, Islamo-fascists, French people, geneticists, internet users, child pornographers and Hollywood producers.”

“And can you tell the court how this conspiracy functions.”

“Do you have five thousand hours?”

Appreciative laughter rippled through the courtroom. People liked it when a professorial type in a wheelchair, who reminded them of their crazy old college physics professor, made a funny.

“But seriously,” Dr. Scott said. “I can sum it up for you very simply. The global elite have many perverse needs and they use mind control and circumcision to form an international army of children who are given alternate personalities as assassins, drug runners, servants and prostitutes. Catamites, so to speak. These ‘alternates’ are activated by code words that they disseminate via techno music to the Satanists around the world. They also impregnate many small Catholic girls and then barbecue and eat their babies. They love babies. It’s a little known fact, but Lee Harvey Oswald claims to have been victimized by a Satanic cult when he was child. It’s been hushed up, but I would love to get my hands on his body and see if he had been circumcised or not. That would be very revealing.”

“Can you describe the effect of this Satanic conspiracy on our great nation?” Eddie Horton prompted.

“Large,” Dr. Scott said. “Huge! Many young people commit suicide every day under Satanic circumstances. In Michigan, a young Webelo Scout who was working on his Arrow of Light award killed his entire family, strangling them to death with his official Webelo neckerchief. Afterwards, he turned it on himself. To me it is clear that Satanism was involved. If they can do this to a Webelo Scout, who can’t they reach?”

A concerned rustle passed through the courtroom.

“No further questions, your honor,” Horton said.

“Dr. Scott,” Nero said, striding up to the witness stand. “You claim that there is a massive, underground, Satanic conspiracy that controls the world and it is everyone’s duty to resist it?”

“I not only say that,” Dr. Scott said. “It is true.”

“Where is your evidence?” Nero asked.

“Of what?”

“Of this conspiracy!”

“Objection, your honor,” Eddie Horton objected. “Counsel is being provocative.”

“This is a courtroom and a courtroom is all about evidence,” Judge Gold said. “Overruled. Witness is directed to present evidence.”

“There is no evidence,” Dr. Scott said.

Nero smiled.

“If there is no evidence, how do you expect us to believe your wild tale?”

“No evidence is the most damning evidence of all,” Dr. Scott said. “Do you see how far this conspiracy reaches? They eat those babies, bones and all. There’s nothing left for ‘evidence.’ That mind control is unbreakable. How can someone who is being unbreakably mind controlled give you your so-called ‘evidence?’ It is the very absence of evidence that is the most damning evidence of all. This conspiracy is real, it is present and it is completely and totally impossible to detect.”

Concerned murmurs filled the courtroom. Judge Gold nodded to himself. Satan put his head back in his hands.

Despite Sheriff’s Furlough’s enthusiastic approach to crowd control, the mob outside the courthouse had grown. Now that Satan had actually appeared, as well as Nero the one-time leader of the Roman Empire, people flocked to the courthouse like bugs to the zapper. Official estimates put the crowd that ringed it at over two hundred thousand strong. This massive mob, in turn, lured attention seekers: professional lunatics, street preachers, mail order philosophers and podunk politicians who all staked their claim to parts of the tent city that stretched from the courthouse grounds all the way over to the fields at the end of South Saliman Road.

Unable to cross this human moat, the people actually involved in the trial were forced to live inside the courthouse. Leaving was too dangerous, and what with every hotel room, sofa bed, and RV in Carson City booked solid, where were they going to go? Food was brought in by helicopter, rooms were assigned, the Sheriff’s Department showers were made available on a rotating schedule. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was safe.

Sitting in their assigned conference room, Satan and Nero waited. Neither Satan nor Nero actually required sleep, and so the room became a giant drift of papers and law books as Nero attempted to cram a four-year law school education into the moments he could snatch away from the case. Satan had a hard time focusing and so he read Nero’s Grisham novels. He had finished The Firm, The Client, The Chamber, The Partner, The Brethren, The Broker and The Summons and now he was almost finished with The Appeal. He was beginning to suspect that a lot of Nero’s legal strategy was based on things he had read in these books, but he didn’t want to say anything because criticism might throw Nero off his game and, right now, Nero was all he had.

Sheriff Furlough put his head around the door.

“Half hour delay, fellas. Ms. Babbit is crying in the bathroom again and her therapist is talking her down. Can I bring you boys a Mountain Dew?”

“No, thank you, Sheriff,” Nero said.

It was the big day, the day Frita Babbit was to testify, and already they were running behind. Satan finished The Appeal. With nothing left to read he began paging through the complaint against him. It was very long and he had mostly avoided reading it up until now. Reading the complaint had made him feel like a thousand people were shouting at him all at once and it had made his head hurt. Now he was so stressed and desperate for distraction that he found himself flipping through the back pages of the complaint. There was a section entitled “Remedy” that he had never really read before. If Nero could be so focused, he could be focused, too. He began to read “Remedy.”

After a few moments he stopped.

“Nero?” he said.

“I don’t have any more John Grisham novels,” Nero replied, not looking up from his papers.

“Have you read the ‘Remedy’ section?”

“Of course,” Nero said.

“What’s this number?”

“That’s two hundred million US dollars, sir.”

“Yes, but what’s it doing here?”

“That’s what the plaintiff is asking for. It’s the combined actual and punitive damages.”

“Two hundred million dollars?”

“It’s unlikely she’ll be awarded that much if she wins, sir. It’s far more likely the court will reduce the award by half.”

“Nero,” Satan said, barely controlling himself. “We don’t even have two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank.”

“Sir, I have been trying my best not to think about it,” Nero said. “I am under a lot of pressure. The last thing I need to think about is what happens if we lose.”

“If they win they get more money than we’ve seen in centuries. How are we going to pay this?”

“Sir, if I thought about that then I would be underneath this table sobbing. I would be completely paralyzed.”

“We don’t have this money!”

“Sir, believe me. I have a plan – ”

“Your plan is that we don’t lose! That’s not a plan, that’s a wish.”

“Have I not served you faithfully for hundreds of years?” Nero asked.

“Yes. But – ”

“Sir, I will not lose. Hell was the best thing that ever happened to me. When you released me from my torments you took a chance on this short, paunchy, washed-up Roman emperor. No one liked me. Everyone thought I fiddled while my own city burned, even though fiddles weren’t even invented when that happened and I greatly prefer the cithara. They all just judged without knowing the facts. You took me out of the gutter, you gave me a chance, you gave me redemption: an eternity of service to a cause greater than myself. Now I have a chance to return that favor. And sir,” Nero was all steely resolve. “I will not lose.”

Satan had never heard this kind of conviction in Nero’s voice before.

“All right,” he said. “I trust you.”

Nero smiled.

“You don’t know how much that means to me,” he said.

“Okay,” Furlough said, sticking his head back in the door. “They finally got her to stop crying and she’s in the courtroom. It’s showtime.”

Frita Babbit sat in the witness stand. This was the grand climax of the prosecution’s strategy, which had been beaten out and storyboarded by three Hollywood scriptwriters for maximum emotional impact. First, the days of expert witnesses pounding it into the jury’s brains that Satanic abuse was a fact of life, that cults were everywhere and that cults had ruined Frita Babbit’s life. But that was just a tease, because the prosecution always withheld the lurid details of Frita’s abuse, dangling it in front of the jury as it led them down the hallway of their argument like a coy mistress, staying just out of reach, dropping item after item of clothing behind them, drawing the jury down a passage with no exit but the one the prosecution had chosen for them. The jury was primed, and Frita Babbit was about to strike the match.

“Ms. Babbit,” Eddie Horton said. “I don’t want to badger you with a lot of questions. I know how brave you are to even be here today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to you or to your support team.”

He gestured to the six women wearing “Team TruthTeller” t-shirts who were sitting nearby, ready to spring into action the second Frita showed any signs of distress.

“You are a brave, brave woman and I hope that our friends from the press record your heroism and that it goes on to inspire children around the world to tell their parents about the abuse inflicted upon them by Satanic cults. I hope that they, too, will learn from your courage and speak out. Silence does equal death.”

“Thank you,” Frita said, quietly.

“I want you to know that you are a personal hero of mine,” Horton said, placing his hand over his heart. “And it is a great honor for me to cross examine you here, today, where the healing is going to begin. But rather than peck at you with a lot of legalese I want you, in your own words, to tell the court what happened.”

“First,” Frita Babbit said. “I would like to read a poem I wrote. It’s called ‘Healing?’”

Healing?

By Frita Babbit

Now and then

I get a little bit tired

Of listening to the sound of my tears

Now and then

I get a little bit nervous

That the best of all the years have gone by

But I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadows.

If I fail, if I succeed,

At least I’ll live as I believe

No matter what they take from me

They can’t take away my dignity.

Because I am beautiful, no matter what they say

Words can’t bring me down

I am beautiful in every single way

And I’ll find my strength in the arms of an Angel,

Far away from here

In the arms of an Angel;

May I find some comfort here.

And I will survive

As long as I know how to love

I know I will stay alive.

I’ve got all my life to live,

I’ve got all my love to give

And I’ll survive.

I will survive.

“I will survive!” she shouted, rising to her feet.

There was silence for a moment, and then, in the back of the courtroom, a female reporter began slow, strong clapping. And then a man, tears running into his beard, stood up and began to clap as well. It was just the two of them for a moment, but then another reporter put down his notebook and stood, clapping slowly, proudly, powerfully. And then more people stood, and more, and Judge Gold was clapping, and Eddie Horton, and the whole courtroom was an echoing chamber of empowerment and applause as people cried and embraced one another.

Nero wasn’t clapping. Neither was Satan. They wanted this to pass, but it didn’t seem like it would anytime soon. Finally, the applause died down and, except for a few sniffles, it was quiet again.

“I don’t remember anything about my childhood,” Frita Babbit began in the fragile voice of a true survivor. “We lived in a safe neighborhood. There weren’t many black people and the ones who were there were clean and well-spoken. I thought that the world was a good place. But then came...that night.

“The first time the Satanists came for me, I remember it like it was yesterday. October 25, 1988. I remember it was a Tuesday because I checked Google calendars a few days ago with Ms. Standing and that’s what she told me. My parents and I had just finished watching Geraldo’s two-hour special, “ Exploring Satan’s Underground,” and it was my bedtime. I went up to my room and I remember feeling heavy and tired, like I was sleepy. The next thing I knew my mother was holding me over the toilet and then she flushed me down it. There was a secret tunnel inside the toilet leading from our upstairs hall bathroom to an underground chamber.

“I was so scared. I came out of the toilet pipe and three tall men in black robes with horned helmets grabbed me and one of them washed me so I didn’t smell like toilet. And then they took a turkey baster and put a baby inside of me. They told me that when the baby was born they were going to eat it and make me drink its blood so that my soul would belong to Satan. One of them was Joe Biden.”

“The Vice President?” Eddie Horton asked. This was obviously new to him.

“Yes,” Frita said. “He has a double who fills in for him in the Senate when he’s performing Satanic ritual abuse. That’s why he’s such a big advocate for stem cell research: he wants to clone himself. After that I developed a fear of toilets and of Joe Biden. Somehow they returned me to my bed, almost as if it had all been a bad dream. But if it was a bad dream it was one that never ended because night after night my parents helped the Satanists abduct me.

“Their Devil church was ruled by the Dungeon Master, and it had underground tunnels that ran all over the city. Tunnels led to the hospital where they stole amputated feet and removed appendixes for their buffet tables, to the local record store where they would play Black Sabbath albums backwards. The name of the cult was Knights in Satan’s Service. They would make me inject drugs in my eyeballs, like heroin and crack, and when I was a teenager they kept me from telling anyone what was going on by giving me lots of mind control drugs like LSD and NutraSweet.”

“Did you have a baby during this time?” Eddie Horton asked.

“I had lots of babies,” she said. “ They ate them all. They cooked them in a big baby loaf, like a meatloaf, and put barbecue sauce on them made out of the spit of Jews.”

“I’m sorry, the what?” Eddie Horton asked.

“Jew spit. It’s their favorite thing to eat in the world after babies,” Frita said. “For Satanists, Jews are like prize cows who make delicious spit for them to eat.”

“Let’s move on from the, um, Jew spit,” Eddie said.

“Sure,” Frita Babbit said. But it was clear that she was just getting warmed up. “All of the Satanists were homosexuals, too. I knew most of them. There was Joe Biden, of course, he was a big homosexual. And then my mom, my dad, our minister, all the teachers at my school, the entire town council, our neighbors, my family doctor, the entire cardiology department of our local hospital, and most of the English department from the community college. They used to bury me in a coffin after they made me pregnant and then they’d dig me up to take the baby and eat it. Once they cut off my head to show me what would happen if I told anyone, and then they sewed it back on before I could die. It really hurt. They would make me have babies with anything: turkeys, seagulls, pelicans. Almost any kind of bird. Once they made me have a baby with a bald eagle, and then they wrapped it in an American flag and burned it.”

“Tell us about Satan,” Horton said, trying to control the unstoppable torrent of crazy that was gushing out of Frita’s mouth. “Tell us about how Satan abused you.”

“Satan abused me three times,” Frita said. “They summoned him by playing a Slayer album backwards six hundred and sixty-six times. While they were doing that they spanked me with a Bible. After I had been spanked for six hundred and sixty-six seconds all the people in robes suddenly fell to their knees and began to have Satanic sexual intercourse and then a bat flew into the room and made me pregnant. That was Satan.”

“The bat impregnated you?” Eddie Horton asked, to clarify for the court.

“It flew right up my butt. I had a half-man, half-bat baby and its first words were, ‘Hail, Satan.’ Then the Dungeon Master took it from me and later he told me that the bat baby had become the head of a small internet start-up company delivering dog food to people who lived in Manhattan during the dot com boom in the late 90’s.”

“And the next time Satan manifested, what form did he take?”

“The next time I was in my backyard thinking about all the Satanic ritual abuse I was suffering and listening to the radio, and Satan appeared to me as a snake. He said that I was really hot and that he couldn’t stop thinking about me and then he made me pregnant by biting my ankle. That baby got flushed down the toilet by the Dungeon Master.”

“And the next time you were ritually and Satanically abused by Satan?”

“That time I was in the Devil church and they were making me kill my best friend with a George Foreman Grill. It was horrible. She was screaming at me to stop and I was pressing down, and pressing down, and pressing down. It was such a traumatic memory that I completely blocked it out until a few weeks ago. But after she was dead and Joe Biden and Steven Seagal were eating her body, a huge poodle came into the room. Somehow I knew this was Satan, too, and that he wanted me to have his baby. And so he made me pregnant by licking my hand a lot until it tickled and then there was a warm feeling in my tummy and a baby grew there. He used Dungeons and Dragons to make the baby grow really fast and then I had the baby and that was really terrible because I had just squashed my best friend to death with a George Foreman Grill and I had the baby and I was screaming and Satan ran away and forgot to turn off his spell and so my baby grew up, and went through puberty, and became middle aged and then died as an old man all in ten minutes.”

“How did you know that it was Satan all three times if he came to you in three different forms?” Horton asked.

“Because his thingie is shaped like a pitchfork.”

The entire courtroom turned to look at Satan.

“Keep doodling, sir,” Nero said, under his breath.

Satan doodled harder.

“Are they still looking at me?” he asked.

“Keep...doodling...” Nero said.

“That was the three times the Devil abused me,” Frita Babbit said. “Satan’s pitchfork wiener ruined my life. Later, I wanted to get married but every time I told one of my fiancés about the abuse they always ran away. Also, I can’t use toilets. I’m too traumatized. I use plastic bags from the grocery store. I wanted to go to college and study Comparative Literature and then go to graduate school and get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and really give something back to the world, you know? But I can’t. All that abuse gave me ADD and ADHD and so I can’t study. And that’s how Satan ruined my life. But I want everyone here to know that while I was victimized, I am not a victim. I am a strong woman. They can’t hold me down. I am proud, and beautiful and empowered and no one can stop me but myself. And I won’t stop me because the only limits I choose to acknowledge are no limits. I reach high, for there are stars lying hidden within my soul.”

There was a quiet moment, punctuated only by the sound of muffled sobs from the visibly moved spectators.

“No further questions, your honor,” Eddie Horton said, and sat down.

“Your witness,” Judge Gold said to Nero.

Nero stood and straightened his toga. He had been stress-eating Cheetos, and there were little orange smudges all over his wrinkled toga, which had turned from white to a sort of off-white grayish gray.

Nero walked to the front of the courtroom and paused dramatically. Then he turned to Frita Babbit.

“Would you state your name and spell your last name for the record, please?”

Frita Babbit looked confused.

“Frita B-a-b-b-i-t,” she said.

“Ms. Babbit, that’s quite a tale you told.”

“It’s not a tale, it’s a true.”

“That’s for the judge to decide,” Nero said.

“I think it’s true, too,” Judge Gold said.

“Oh. Well. All right, so it’s a true tale,” Nero said, adjusting. “Now, Ms. Babbit, you said something that interested me very much. Would you mind if we went back to what you said about this so-called ‘Satanic’ church?”

“It was a Satanic church,” she said.

“So you say, so you say,” Nero said.

“He sounds exactly like someone in a John Grisham novel,” Satan thought to himself.

“You claimed that this church was called the Knights in Satan’s Service, correct?”

“Yes,” Frita said.

“And access to the Devil church of the Knights in Satan’s Service was via the toilet in your upstairs hall, correct?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Indulge me, please. What kind of toilet was it? Toto or American Standard?”

“American Standard,” she said.

“Interesting, interesting...” Nero said. “And did you require one flush or two to go down that toilet?”

“One flush,” she said. “Sometimes two.”

“So at night, your parents would put you in this American Standard toilet and would convey you to the Devil Church with ‘one flush, sometimes two’? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes?” she said.

“Ms. Babbit, are you asking me or telling me? Is that what happened?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“You don’t remember. You don’t remember if your parents sent you to the Devil Church every night to be impregnated and to kill babies with one flush or two flushes.”

“Steady now, Nero,” Satan thought. “Don’t push too hard.”

“I think it was one flush, but sometimes it was two.”

“Well perhaps THIS will refresh your memory,” Satan said, and with a flourish two sheriff’s deputies rolled in a television cart. “You might be interested to know that the toilets in this building are American Standard toilets and last night I took the liberty of flushing myself down one of them. Perhaps you heard how many flushes it took? No? Roll the tape.”

“But I – ” Frita Babbit began.

“Roll the tape,” Nero called.

The screen showed one of the public restrooms in the courthouse. Nero stood in one of the toilets. He bowed to the camera, and then he flushed once...twice...three times. Nothing happened. Four times. Five times. He was still standing there. A rustle spread through the courtroom.

“Lights, please,” Nero said. “Your honor, I would like to consider this Exhibit D in this trial, unless the prosecution has any objection.”

A shaken Eddie Horton stood up at the prosecution’s table.

“I have no objection your honor, but this is highly irregular,” he said.

“And so is this courtroom,” Nero crowed. “Ms. Babbit, I submit to you that I am the approximate size and shape of a very large baby and I could not flush myself down an American Standard toilet. I submit to you that it is impossible to flush a human being down a toilet with one flush, two flushes, three flushes or even TEN FLUSHES!”

A buzz went through the courtroom.

Satan resisted the urge to jump out of his seat and punch the air in celebration. This was as close to a touchdown as they could get. Nero hadn’t let him down.

“Now I remember,” Frita Babbit said. “We had Toto toilets.”

The buzzing in the courtroom turned off like a switch had been thrown.

“Toto toilets?” Nero repeated.

“All the abuse clouded my mind, and forced me to block things out. Of course, American Standard pipes are too small,” Frita Babbit said, smiling serenely. “But we had Toto toilets which, with their larger exhaust fittings and gentler U-bends, are exactly the right size for facilitating Satanic ritual abuse.”

“I see,” Nero said.

Satan felt defeated. But no, he’d trusted Nero so far. He wouldn’t give up on him now. This was, after all, the man who had allied himself with his own stepfather to rise to power at sixteen and then poisoned him and taken the title of emperor. He always had a trick up his sleeve.

“If we could ask you to turn your attention to one of your previous statements,” Nero said. “You said that you were abused by the Knights in Satan’s Service, correct?”

“Yes,” Frita Babbit said.

“And they were led by a man you referred to as the Dungeon Master.”

“Oh, these names are bringing it all back,” Frita shuddered.

“Would you like to take a moment?” Nero asked, all supercilious concern.

“No, I’m all right. I just have to keep telling myself to be brave and give voice to all the voiceless victims of Satanic ritual abuse out there.”

“The leader of the Knights in Satan’s Service was the Dungeon Master?”

“Yes, but Joe Biden was there, too.”

“I haven’t forgotten Vice President Biden,” Nero said. “What kind of robes did he wear? Something vice presidential?”

“No,” Frita said. “Joe Biden wore dark robes and a horned helmet, just like everyone else.”

“Dark robes and a horned helmet,” Nero said. “And they chanted?”

“Yes,” Frita said.

“What did they chant?”

“Oh, the usual chants. You know, ‘Hail Satan,’ and ‘Do Me Lucifer,’ and ‘Eat My Babies,’ that kind of thing.”

“And their Devil Church was underground?”

“Yes, it was in a system of tunnels that stretched beneath our entire town.”

“Here in Nevada?” Nero asked.

“Right,” she said. “Springfield, Nevada.”

“I put it to you then, Ms. Babbit, that you are lying!”

It was a masterful blow and Nero spoke it in masterful tones. He shouted it out. It split the air of the courtroom in two.

Everyone gasped.

“The Knights in Satan’s Service never wore long black robes and horned helmets but rather, short white robes and no helmets at all. Their chants were the reform Satanic church chants which would never include ‘Hail Satan’ or ‘Eat My Babies’ but instead were entirely in Latin. In addition, the leader of the Knights in Satan’s Service was not known as the Dungeon Master but as the Master of Mazes and Joe Biden was never a member.”

The silence in the room was absolute. Satan felt his heart floating up out of his chest like a balloon. Like he had said to Gabriel, they had given him a chink and sometimes a chink was all he needed. At the prosecution’s table, Eddie Horton looked like a headache was clamping big steel bands around his skull and tightening.

And then:

“I remember,” Frita Babbit said. “I had suppressed the real details of what happened all my life, but now I remember. Thank you, Mr. Defense Lawyer. And thank you, Judge Cody Gold, for giving me this chance to recover my memory. I didn’t go underground for the rituals at the Devil Church with the Knights in Satan’s Service.”

“What?” Nero said.

“They took me away in a hot air balloon. Every night the Dungeon Master came to my bedroom window in a hot air balloon with a giant Pentagram and a goat’s head painted on the side and he took me away to the real church of the Knights in Satan’s Service one hundred miles away. I remember now. I remember!”

“Your honor, this is outrageous!” Nero shouted.

“It’s outrageous that we’ve helped this fine young victim of Satanic ritual abuse recover her suppressed memories?” Judge Gold roared. “I don’t find that outrageous at all, I find it powerful and moving.”

“I’m whole again,” Frita Babbit shouted, turning her face up to the ceiling. “At long last, I’m whole again. I have my memories back!”

The entire courtroom went bonkers. Everyone was so moved by their role in helping Frita Babbit recover her repressed memories that even the sheriff’s deputies were hugging each other and crying.

“Your honor,” Nero shouted. “This is not appropriate behavior. This has become a kangaroo court.”

“You’re out of order,” Judge Gold shouted back.

“You’re out of order!” Nero yelled. “You’re out of order. He’s out of order. This whole trial is out of order.”

Deputies grabbed the shouting Nero and dragged him backwards out the door of the courtroom. As they muscled him into the hall he yelled:

“No further questions, your honor.”

By the time he reached the exit from The Room, Michael was crawling on his hands and knees across the wet, steaming carpet. His lungs were seared and bleeding, there wasn’t an inch of his skin that wasn’t burned or bruised. Every pore of his body screamed in agony. Angels are ageless but Michael had aged in the time it had taken him to cross that benign-looking expanse of gray, corporate carpeting.

He reached up and grabbed the handle of the door, pushed it open and dragged himself into a plain, white cinderblock corridor. At the end was a metal door.

Michael started walking. The fact that the walls passed by at a normal rate of speed struck him with a bone-deep vertigo that threw him to his knees. He picked himself up and made it to the end of the hall. He knocked on the door.

“Come in,” a voice called from inside.

Michael pushed open the door and went inside to meet his Maker.

Satan’s testimony was over quickly. He had dreaded getting up on the stand, but the plaintiff’s lawyers had made it clear that they weren’t going to cross-examine him. They said it would be “unholy” for them to even talk to someone as evil as Satan, and so Nero called him as a witness, and he sat in the box. He was surprised by how different the courtroom looked from up here. Judge Cody Gold dispensed with swearing Satan in, saying that he would not participate in blasphemy.

“You have heard the arguments made against you,” Nero said. “And so I draw your attention to the plaintiff. Do you recognize this woman?”

“No,” Satan said.

“Look carefully,” Nero said. “After all, she’s accusing you of something that happened a long time ago.”

“I’ve existed since before the dawn of time,” Satan said. “It’s not actually that long ago for me.”

“You’re sure you don’t recognize her?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Did you molest this woman as she claims?” Nero asked.

“Well, the Eighties were kind of a bad time for everyone,” Satan said. “But I didn’t molest her.”

“Why should we believe that?” Nero asked.

“I don’t do that kind of thing,” Satan said. “A lot of people claim to be Satanists and start up Satanic cults but I don’t associate with them.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“And why not?”

“I don’t have much interest in mortals,” Satan said. “But I especially don’t have much interest in losers. And, generally, people in cults are losers.”

“So you deny, unequivocally, that you molested Frita Babbit.”

“Unequivocally,” Satan said.

He and Nero had rehearsed this. Nero had walked him through it dozens of times until he knew the script backwards and forwards. But he was still nervous.

“Is your penis shaped like a pitchfork?” Nero asked.

This wasn’t in the script.

Satan shook his head.

“For the record?” Judge Cody Gold asked, leaning in.

“My penis,” Satan said, through gritted teeth. “Is not shaped like a pitchfork.”

“No further questions, your honor,” Nero said.

It was time for closing arguments.

Eddie Horton went first. He stood in front of the bench, and someone on his team pressed “Play” on a CD player and the soft sounds of “I Will Remember You,” by Sarah McLachlan began to play as Horton reviewed the facts of the case. And then he struck home.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, every day there are over two hundred recorded cases of Satanic Ritual Abuse. With close to one million estimated Satan worshippers in this country there is a good chance that Satan is causing your child to be ritually abused right this minute. I want you to look at these pictures.”

He took a remote control out of his pocket and began to run through PowerPoint slides.

“This is Elian Gonzalez, this is Frankie Muniz, this is Dakota Fanning. Wonderful, talented child actors that never would have given us such heartwarming performances if they had been killed and/or eaten by Satan worshippers.

“You have been in this courtroom with Satan for over six days now. You have seen violence in the way he sits, you have seen the arrogance of his wardrobe, you have witnessed the sneering way he sometimes scratches the back of his neck. We have been in the presence of true evil and it has chilled my soul. I trust it has chilled yours, as well. Today you will be asked to go into the jury room and in private you will examine your consciences and decide on a verdict. I want to leave you with just one thought. When our Founding Fathers invented the justice system that we use today – the amazing justice system that lets us sue doctors for malpractice and pet store owners for selling us tiny dogs that turn out to be rats – when our Founding Fathers invented this system of law and order, did they do it because they loved Satan, or because they hated him? Think about it.”

He paused dramatically.

“Thank you.”

No one applauded, but Satan had seen a few jury members nodding in silent agreement during the speech. He didn’t know how Nero could counter this but, then again, Nero was a Roman Emperor, and Roman Emperors are not to be underestimated. Nero stood, threw the end of his dingy toga over one arm with a masterful flourish and strode to the center of the courtroom. He stood silently for a moment, feeling the vibrations of the room, and then he began to speak.

“Citizens of the jury,” he said. “ My heart bleeds for Frita Babbit. At an age when she should have been learning sacred songs and preparing for marriage, safe in the loving arms of her family, she was being robbed of her innocence. Who would do this to a child? Who would want to destroy a child’s soul? It is unthinkable.

“What does that word mean: unthinkable? It means, ‘I don’t want to think about it.’ You don’t want to think about it. None of us want to think about it. And so we don’t. Instead, we look for someone to blame. Someone outside of ourselves. Someone we don’ t know. The outsider. The other. Often, that person is Satan.

“And there he is. The Prince of Darkness. The Lord of Lies. Beelzebub. The Evil One. Sitting right here in this courtroom. God hated Satan, and he threw him out of Heaven for his sins of arrogance and pride. Satan tortures those we love in the afterlife. He imprisons their souls in Hell, his foul domain. He is the Corruptor. The Serpent. Surely, molesting children must be like eating popcorn for him.”

Satan tried not to move. Anything he did, even something as innocent as scratching his nose, could be taken as an admission of guilt. Anything he did would be used against him in this court of law. Still, he did think Nero was laying it on a bit thick.

“But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when you go into that room I want you to think about what you have heard here today in this courtroom. It is undoubtedly true that Frita Babbit was abused, perhaps terribly, and maybe even by sick individuals who used the name of Satan in their rituals. But this case is not about that. This case hinges on the allegation that Satan himself visited her three times, each time in the shape of a different animal, and each time with a penis shaped like a pitchfork. Satan has denied this. And that is the cornerstone of our defense.

“Many of you think Satan is lying, but I call your attention to the reputation of my client. There have been many, many stories both written and told about Satan, and every one of them revolves around one simple fact: Satan keeps his word. In your Book of Job, he makes a bargain with God and honors it, even when he loses. In your folktales and in your songs by the Charlie Daniels Band, Satan is always defeated because he makes a bargain and sticks to its terms even when they are not to his advantage. These stories and songs are not written by people who like Satan, they are written by his enemies. But even his enemies admit that Satan keeps his word. So if you think that Satan is lying to you, ask yourself this: Charlie Daniels wrote about a Satan who kept his word. Is Charlie Daniels a liar?”

Okay, Satan thought to himself, they were asking themselves questions now. This was better. He felt that subtle feeling that a door far, far away had opened, just a crack. Just a chink. But it was enough to give him hope. Satan knew better than anyone else that hope was dangerous, but he couldn’t help himself. It was growing in his heart.

“Some individuals here today have suggested that Satan be found guilty because he is Satan and because Satan by nature is inherently evil. The logic runs as follows: Satan is evil, and evil is bad, therefore if he is not guilty of this crime he is guilty of some other crime. But is it a crime to follow your nature?

“Evil is not some perversion forced upon a good and orderly universe. It is not some outside force. It is a necessary part of existence. Just as we would not know pleasure without having pain to compare it to, just as we would not know the feeling of contentment if we did not also have the feeling of want, so too would we not know God without also knowing Satan.

“If all in this world were holy goodness, mankind would merely exist, floating along on a sea of unthinking pleasure. The existence of evil requires us to consciously choose to do good, even when it is not easy. In fact, because it is not easy the act of choosing good is more heroic. Without evil, man would have no choice, his life would be one of lassitude and moral indifference. He would not do good because he chose to do good, but because he had no choice but to do good. Goodness would have no meaning. Satan causes Man to choose between good and evil and, yes, it is disagreeable to have evil in the world, but without evil, God has no meaning.

“As a great writer once said, ‘Even the existence of the Devil, is filled with the presence of God.’ Think about that. Why do you hate evil? To hate something implies that you fear it. Reject evil. Turn away from evil. But do not fear it. For if God created this universe, then did he not also create evil? And if God created evil, surely it must have been a part of his plan. Satan is God’s child, the same as you are, and you can no more hate him than you can hate your own shadow. Thank you for your time.”

There was silence in the courtroom for a moment, broken only by the sound of Nero’s voluminous toga rustling as he strode back to the defendant’s table and took his seat. A moment passed, and then, finally, Judge Cody Gold cleared his throat.

“That was the biggest load of liberal horseshit I have ever heard. What was that? Deep thoughts from your diary? I think he’s guilty. Prosecution, want to rebut?”

“Thank you, your honor,” Eddie Horton said.

He stood up and turned to the jury.

“They wouldn’t call it ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ if Satan wasn’t responsible. The prosecution rests.”

“See?” Judge Gold said. “Definitely guilty. Jury, what do you guys think?”

The jury foreman stood up.

“We could deliberate for a while to build suspense, but he’s going to be found guilty by a jury of his peers. You heard it here first.”

“So why drag it out? He’s Satan. He’s evil. He’s going down,” Judge Cody Gold said.

He banged his gavel.

“But, your honor,” the jury foreman said. “If there are any nude photographs of the plaintiff we would be very interested in studying them.”

“Are there any nudes?” Judge Cody Gold asked Eddie Horton. “I want copies if there are.”

“No, your honor,” Eddie Horton said. “The plaintiff regrets to inform you that there are no nudes she is willing to release at this time. She has signed a contract with Harper Collins and all her nude photographs are their property to use in her upcoming tell-all memoir.”

“Okay, so he’s guilty. Let’s string him up or something,” Judge Gold said.

“What about due process of the law?” Nero shouted.

“It’s always something with you, isn’t it,” Judge Gold said. “You’re as bad as my ex-wife. Always whining. You know what? Just for that I award the plaintiff twice her original claim. The judgment is now four hundred million dollars.”

“Your honor - “ Nero started.

“Again with the whining,” Judge Gold said. “Just for that, I’m going to make this an appeal by permission case. Which means any higher court can decide for no good reason not to hear your appeal. Ever. And I bet they won’t.”

“You’ve — you’ve screwed us!” Nero burst out.

“Screwed you?” Judge Gold roared. “ Bailiff, tase that lawyer. This isn’t screwing, this is justice! Now, where’s my press conference?”

Michael stood across the room from his Maker, the Architect of all Creation. When he had arrived, the Creator was in the form of half a million ergs of radiant energy, but he assumed a humanoid shape so as to better converse with his most favored angel.

“We’re having problems with Satan, O Heavenly Father,” Michael said.

“That’s why he’s there,” God said. “To cause problems.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Is that all? Did I tell you I’ve decided to twist Creation into an infinite loop?”

“No, Lord.”

“Have you ever existed and not existed at the same time? It is quite an experience!”

“No, Lord.” Michael tried another tack. “Heavenly Father, Satan has caused more problems than even you may know.”

“I am the maker of Heaven and Earth. I know everything.”

“Yes, my Lord. So you know about his son?”

“His what?”

“He placed his son inside a nun,” Michael said. “A Poor Clare, I believe.”

“No,” God gasped.

“My Lord, it gets worse. In a sick attempt to mock the sacrifice of your son, Satan sent his only child to the physical plane and then he killed him, as you did your child. Only, you sacrificed your son for the salvation of all mankind. He killed his son merely to taunt you.”

“He wouldn’t...”

“He has.”

God closed his eyes for a moment and when he reopened them they were the eyes of someone who was about to go off, Viking-style.

“I sense that what you say is true. How dare he? How dare he! The sacrifice of my child was a painful and beautiful act. A solitary sacrifice for the people of this fallen world. And he makes a mockery of me? Of my son? Of my compassion? He thinks killing his own child even compares to what I did?”

“From what I understand, he cursed your name and laughed while he did it,” Michael said, relaxing.

“He will suffer for this. You know the sin of Judas was not in betraying me, the sin of Judas was in thinking himself beyond forgiveness. His sin was arrogance. That was Satan’s original sin, and that is his sin now. Arrogance. Outrageous arrogance!”

“My Lord, I have a plan,” Michael said.

“Will it hurt him?”

“Badly, my Lord. The Heavenly Host is unsatisfied with the administration of Hell. We propose to invade it preemptively. We wish to annex it to Heaven and make it part of our realm. Lucifer will be given the choice to rejoin the Host or to be uncreated.”

“There is no choice,” God thundered. “Take his realm from him. Uncreate him. I am the Lord thy God and I have spoken.”

“Thy will be done,” Michael said, and bowed deeply.

In his heart, Michael was smiling. All his pawns were in place. All his plans were in motion. He would carry this victory in his heart and it would make the trip back through The Room that much shorter.

When news of the verdict hit, the crowd outside the courthouse went nuclear. They sent up a roar that shattered every window within a quarter mile. So many people stomped the earth, leaping up and down in joy, that it felt like an earthquake. So many tears of jubilation were shed that the shredded landscaping outside the courthouse turned to mud.

Inside the courtroom, the verdict had caused an instant chaos fiesta and Sheriff Furlough had hustled everyone to their various ready rooms. Judge Cody Gold was double-timed to his waiting chopper by the Segway cavalry. Out in Hollywood there was a reality TV producer who wanted to talk to him about a third season of his hit show, Cody Gold: Justice Touches You, and he had to get there, pronto.

Eric Horton, Ted Hunter and Frita Babbit were taken to what remained of the lawn outside the Sheriff’s Department where they held an impromptu press conference, notable mostly for the fact that Eric Horton was very sulky because Ted Hunter was hogging all the cameras. The only people who weren’t happy were Satan and Nero, and no one really cared about them anymore. No one wants to interview the losers. Sheriff Furlough had them shunted off to their conference room and left them alone. His plan was to wait until nightfall and then load them into a bulletproof Escalade and drive them fast to the airport where they could return to Hell and finally be out of what remained of his hair.

Satan lay on the floor of the conference room like someone with a bad back who has been on a plane for thirty-six straight hours. His eyes were open but they looked as dull and lifeless as old golf balls. His face was slack, his tongue white, his muscles sagged into the floor.

“They’ll have a hard time enforcing that judgment,” Nero said, trying to look on the bright side. “Although, I suppose that this could be the justification Heaven needs to violate our autonomy. That we owe a debt we cannot pay and that we’ve walked the Earth openly, and we’ve created an enormous mess...I mean, they could use that as a rationale to...to take us over.”

Satan died a little inside.

“We’ll make these numbers work, sir,” Nero said. “As soon as we get back down to Hell we’ll go over them and find a way to raise four hundred million dollars. I know we can do it.”

Satan didn’t say anything.

“We can lease out parts of Hell to the oil companies, maybe work out a deal with the United States to serve as a containment facility for terrorists, you know, get them out of Guantanamo and into Hell. Government contracts are big money! And on top of that there are plenty of other ways to make money such as...such as selling some souls? Or maybe starting an AOL call center? We’ve got a captive work force.”

Satan didn’t take the conversational bait.

“We won’t have to sell Hell, sir. I promise you that,” Nero said. “We won’t have to sell.”

Satan moaned, and rolled over so that he was facedown on the carpet. He knew all too well what would happen now. Heaven would offer Hell a buy-out: they would agree to pick up its debts and pay off this judgment in exchange for a controlling interest. The Ultimate Death Match would be a mere formality, if it was even held at all. Hell would belong to Heaven and Heaven had so much money that four hundred million was little more than an accounting error for them. Maybe it would slow down their plans to go green, but that was it. Heaven would quickly earn back its outlay by charging dead souls for reductions in punishment, letting souls have easier torments if they paid big fees, there were all kinds of ways to squeeze money out of the billions of tormented souls languishing in Hell. None of them were fair, but they were all easy.

Nero was hungry. He knew it was nothing more than a stress reaction, but that didn’t change the fact that the hunger weasel was gnawing its way through his guts. He checked on Satan, who was face down on the carpet and unlikely to go anywhere. He cracked the door and poked his head out into the hall. Empty. Everyone was at the press conference. Making sure he had enough change, he sprinted down the hall, toga flying behind him, to the vending machines. He paused as he tried to decide between Donut Stix and Fritos, then decided on salty instead of sweet, punched up some Fritos and ran back to the conference room and popped open the bag.

It took him a minute before he realized that it was empty. Not the bag. The room.

“Satan?” he called. Then, realizing that this was actually an extremely serious problem, he called louder, “Satan? Sir?”

No answer.

He ran out into the hall. Satan wasn’t to the left of him and he wasn’t to the right. Nero tried to put himself inside Satan’s head. Where would he go if he were the absolute ruler of Hell and had just lost his realm? To throw himself off the roof? To binge eat in the snack room? To drown himself in the bathroom? Or would he go home? Nero tried to figure out the quickest route home, and realized that Satan would have gone right, aiming for the courthouse exit. Nero ran, Fritos forgotten, and he reached the double glass doors just in time to see Satan pushing through them and walking out into the crowded parking lot.

“Sir!” Nero hissed, trying to grab his arm. But Satan was already outside. Nero followed and grabbed him from behind. He wrestled with Satan, trying to pull him back into the courthouse. Fortunately, the enormous mob was turned the other way, watching the victory press conference unfold on the other side of the parking lot. If Nero could just get him back inside quickly they might escape notice and the inevitable public lynching that would follow.

“Sir, please, we can’t be out here,” Nero whispered, but Satan ignored him and just forged ahead, trying to reach the airport and home. In front of them, a CNN News crew were shooting b-roll. To their left was a wall of backs. To their right were sheriff’s deputies. All around them was an ocean of people who hated them with every fiber of their beings.

“Don’t do this to me, sir,” Nero practically whimpered as he tried to pull Satan back by one arm. But his fingers slipped and Satan lurched forward, bumping into the CNN sound guy.

The hefty soundman turned to say something surly and then his face lit up.

“It’s Satan!” he said to his cameraman, and they suddenly had him pinned with their lens as they tried to pry a statement out of him.

Nero made a quick calculation and ran away from Satan and towards the deputies.

“Get a car, quick!” he said. “Get us out of here.”

But the deputies seemed disinclined to do anything for Satan. He was the Lord of Evil, after all, and a loser. Nero raced back to Satan who was trying to push past the CNN crew but was getting tangled up in their cables in the process. It was turning into a shoving match, and that was attracting even more attention, and then the cry went out.

“Satan’s over here! He’s over here!”

Fortunately they were in the press area, which meant that they were instantly surrounded by news crews and reporters who wanted a quote, rather than angry citizens who wanted to rip off their heads.

“Cody Gold hates you! How does that feel?” A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor shouted.

“What’s it like to be a loser?” someone from Fox News screamed.

“Will you sell Hell?” A Bloomberg wire service vlogger hollered.

“Why are you so stupid?” from a Huffington Post correspondent who was, inexplicably, holding out his cell phone.

“Please, no questions!” Nero said, trying to push them back, but he might as well have been trying to push back the tide.

“How’d you get to be so evil?”

“Will you become a hobo?”

“Do you have a problem with prescription drugs?”

“What do you think of ObamaCare?”

“Why do you always ruin everything?”

“Ted Hunter wants to turn Hell into a rehab center. Does that make you angry?”

The shouted questions got louder and louder.

“We’ll be releasing a statement later this afternoon,” Nero hollered as the reporters swarmed over him. He went down, lying on the ground, looking up through a forest of legs. They were all surging forward, trampling him, stepping on his face and then, suddenly, they stopped.

Satan was just standing there. Reporters like to push, because if they get too close they figure their quarry will either recoil (which makes for a great shot), lash out (even better) or spin around helplessly, ping-ponging between the desire to recoil and the desire to lash out (not that great, but still good TV). But Satan was disappointing them. Satan was just standing there. After a moment, the reporters all began to feel stupid shouting over each other. Satan clearly wasn’t going to give good camera. Even with the enormous crowd pressed at their backs, the reporters ground to a halt and just stood there looking at Satan, and Satan just stood there looking back at them.

When it had finally reached the point of maximum awkwardness, Satan suddenly spoke. He looked into the nearest camera (MSNBC) and began to talk.

“I see these protesters, and I hear what people are saying about me and I know everyone thinks that I’m evil and the source of all their problems,” he said. “Well, I just wanted to say that I am evil, but I’m not the source of all your problems. I’m just a guy with a job.”

Somewhere in Atlanta, CNN went live. In the NBC Universal Network Origination Center in New Jersey a producer, buzzing on Adderall, cut into Hardball with Chris Matthews. On Sixth Avenue, Fox News picked up the feed. The BBC jumped in with both feet. Al Jazeera cut away from Al Jazeera This Morning and went live to Satan. The whole world was watching.

“I didn’t ask to run Hell,” Satan said. “I just sort of fell into it. I used to love it. I used to get to be creative and every soul was a challenge. Now I dread every minute of it. So many of you are coming to Hell that it’s all I can do to keep the place running. We barely make any money, things are always falling apart, everyone always needs something and more souls have to be processed every day and it never ends. I’m always playing catch up, I’m always running behind. I’m always trying to find the least worst solution.

“I know you’re thinking, ‘Why don’t you just quit?’ I say, why don’t you? You don’t like your jobs either. But one day you look up and suddenly you’ve been doing something for so long that you don’t know how to do anything else.

“I’ve done my best. I’ve given this job everything I had. But it didn’t matter, because now the beings in charge are taking it all away. Maybe some of you know what that feels like. Maybe some of you know what it’s like to give everything to a job and one day someone tells you, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’ I did the best I could, and it wasn’t enough. I guess at the end of the day I was born to lose. Now excuse me. I have to go pack up my office.”

There is nothing louder than a mob of two hundred thousand people being completely silent. So silent you could hear the tiny servo motors in a million camera lenses whirring as they zoomed in for a better shot of Satan’s red-rimmed eyes. So silent that you could hear a plane passing high overhead. So silent that when a CNN cameraman coughed, everyone could hear it. Satan began to push through the crowd and they parted like the Red Sea. Satan wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, but he knew that he needed to get away, to get to the airport and to get back to Hell. Nero followed in his wake. The crowd was silent. It was like being in church.

The first thing to hit Satan was a dirty diaper. A puffy plastic folded square that smacked him right in the shoulder, stuck for a moment and then fell to the ground. Then someone threw an empty Poland Springs bottle. A banana peel arced through the air and landed on Nero’s face. He flung it away in disgust.

Suddenly, the air was full of garbage, like rice at a wedding reception, showering down on Satan and Nero. Then came the jeers and the shouts and the catcalls and the insults. The noise was back and it was louder than before, more dangerous. And as Nero and Satan made for the highway, the sky darkened with the garbage of a thousand, thousand packed lunches, and diaper bags, and stroller pouches, and recycling bins all raining down on their heads.

In Utah, Harry Harlib lay on the floor of the TV room. His mom had let him stay home from school today so that he could see how awful Satan was so that he would do his homework and be good so he wouldn’t go to aich ee double hockey sticks. His dad was in the easy chair and his mom was on the love seat and their usual running commentary – a mixture of prayers and outrage and sarcasm – had died out when Satan started talking.

Harry’s dad was older than his mom. He’d been a cement mason specializing in concrete finishing since his first summer job at sixteen. He’d made so much money that he’d dropped out of high school and focused solely on getting rich. For years, he didn’t even have a bank account, just an empty fifty-pound Quikrete bag in his garage stuffed with cash. When he’d finally dragged it into the bank and dumped it out on the counter it turned out to contain fifty thousand, four hundred and sixteen dollars and eighty-two cents. That was enough to start a new life. Buy a house. Have a kid.

Things had been good until ten years ago when construction started slowing down. Harry’s dad would do anything for work. He’d go anywhere. But the simple fact was that there were too many cement masons and not enough cement mason jobs. He started taking extra work on the side. Odd jobs, handyman work, whatever he could pick up from day to day. Whatever would pay the bills.

Three months ago he woke up one morning and realized that he hadn’t touched a mixer in over a year. What he was now was the guy who cleaned the kennels at the local pound and thought he was still a cement mason. He was stealing twenty-five pound bags of dog chow and selling them cheap on Craigslist for extra cash. He’d tried so hard, but now they had nothing. For Harry’s dad, Satan was speaking to him.

The room was quiet. Linda didn’t read from the Bible or pray, she just put her hand on her broken husband’s back and let him have a moment. He couldn’t stop crying. He wrapped his hands around his graying head and pulled it down onto his knees as silent sobs convulsed his shoulders. Harry sat and watched. Then he looked at the TV and back at his dad. He went into the kitchen and made a big pitcher of lemonade. He took it outside with a bunch of paper cups from the kitchen. He sat on the grass in front of his house with a sign that he wrote himself:

LEMONADE – .50 cents

MONEY FOR SATAN TO BUY BACK HELL

When his parents saw what he was doing they didn’t say a word, but his dad set up a card table and a patio umbrella for him. It was going to be a hot day. They let Harry sell lemonade for Satan all afternoon. He raised sixteen dollars.

In Heaven, the Host were gathered in a presentation room. Theater-style seating. Big screen up front for the video projector. A deconstructed podium in blonde wood. Michael had come back from his journey into the Empyrean and now that he was re-hydrated he was ready to reveal God’s message.

“The Creator is affronted by Satan’s hubris,” Michael said. “The Prince of Hell has overreached. In trying to have and then destroy his own son, in making a mockery of God’s sacrifice with the Nazarene, he has overstepped his bounds.”

“That’s all nice,” Barachiel said. “But what does it actually mean?”

“The meaning is clear,” Michael said. “It is time to depose Satan and annex Hell.”

Phanuel spun with excitement. Bits of liquid fire dropped off him and singed the carpet.

“I’ve been saying this for months,” Raphael said. “It’s nice that people are finally listening to me. Haven’t I been saying this for months?”

“We’re just going to take the whole thing?” Jegudiel asked.

“We will engage in a pre-emptive invasion,” Michael said. “They pose a threat to our way of life. So we will take Hell by force.”

“Um, is that allowed?” Raphael asked.

“Who would dare tell us no?” Michael replied.

Barachiel high-fived Raphael. Metatron stroked his goatee. Jegudiel just rested his chin on his templed fingers and gave a sly smile.

“I have my doubts that this is wise,” Jegudiel said.

“Listen,” Gabriel said, picking up the speech for Michael. “I’ve been going over the plan and it’s fool-proof. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Do you think anyone actually wants to be in Hell? Once they find out that Heaven is taking over they’re going to pour into the streets and hang flowers around our necks. And with all the new souls we’ll be getting, it’ll practically pay for itself.”

“Yeah,” Raphael said. “Why are you being such a baby, Jegudiel?”

“Brother Jegudiel merely speaks from his heart as he always does,” Metatron droned. “He feels sympathy in his heart for the status quo. He revels in the lack of change in the Heavenly sphere. Little does he realize that to annex Hell is the Will of God. It IS the Will of God, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Michael said.

“What more do you need?” Gabriel asked.

“But it will not be legal,” Jegudiel said.

“Oh, piss on that!” Barachiel cried, standing up.“We’re going to war with the minions of Satan, who cares if it’s legal? It is right.”

“But we cannot officially take control of Hell until after the Ultimate Death Match,” Jegudiel said. “That is the only time that the ownership of Hell is in balance. Even if our Host occupies every cavern, every charnel pit, every torture grove, Hell’s ownership will not devolve to us.”

“Who brought the lawyer?” Barachiel sneered.

“Technically you have a point but there has been precedence established many times before,” Metatron droned. “And what is the concept of ownership? It is a multifaceted theory of – “

“You are correct,” Michael said, shutting Metatron up as quickly as possible. “We cannot legally annex Hell and liberate her tortured masses yearning to be free until after we defeat Satan in the Ultimate Death Match. But we will occupy Hell NOW. The Ultimate Death Match is in seven days. After our victory we will already be in place to effect a smooth transition.”

Fist pumps, “Yeahs!” Jumping up and down. Jegudiel decided that silence was the better part of valor, and he kept any further counsel to himself.

“Let us take arms, brothers,” Michael said. “For tonight we storm the gates of Hell!”

A puppy knows certain things about life. It knows that when it is hungry, someone will give it delicious puppy treats. It knows that when it is cold, someone will let it burrow into a warm bed. It knows that if it is lonely or scared or bored, someone will be there to cuddle it, to play with it, to reassure it. A puppy comes to think highly of the goodness of the world and it comes to rely on the Universe’s better nature, because everyone loves puppies. But eventually, it will grow into a dog.

There are two ways for a puppy to become a dog. One is a gradual easing into the harsher realities of the world. Food becomes slightly less delicious, people are around a little bit less, someone doesn’t always want to play with it. Slowly the puppy learns that sometimes life is tough, that sometimes it will be hungry for a while, that sometimes it will be cold and lonely for a bit. The result is a dog that is well adjusted. A dog that has had time to acclimate and mature.

The other way for a puppy to become a dog is to throw it into the deep end. To go from zero to sixty in ten seconds or less. From cuddling to kicking in a single heartbeat. Delicious puppy food replaced by wet garbage. Pats on the head replaced by a punch in the muzzle. This puppy will learn that the world is irrational. That the world is hateful. This puppy will grow into a dog who knows that the only thing it can rely on are its teeth. This puppy will die of a broken heart and in its place will be a mangy, bad-tempered dog.

That is pretty much what happened to Mary Renfro. She saw Satan in Terminal C of the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport at eight o’clock on a Monday morning and within two weeks she had gone from being a nun who craved order and predictability to a woman betrayed by every belief she ever had. Being tricked into killing herself by Saint Jude as a pawn in Heaven’s campaign against Hell had been the last straw. Any trace of the old Sister Mary that had remained in her heart was burned away when her body shattered on the rocks of the Seventh Circle.

Now she stood in the offices of Hell, a Marlboro Red burning in one hand and a bottle of Kahlua in the other. She wasn’t a very convincing smoker, and she wasn’t a very good drinker but she was determined to give them both her best shot. This was the new Mary Renfro. She still wore her habit. You were, after all, stuck for eternity in the clothes you wore when your soul was removed.

Nero suddenly stumbled in, carrying a limp, passed-out Satan in his arms like the Creature from the Black Lagoon carrying Julie Adams.

“Help me,” he said.

“Help yourself,” Mary Renfro answered, knocking back another slug of Kahlua.

Nero’s arms gave out and he dropped Satan like a bag of wet concrete. Satan didn’t even react.

“That’s not a good sign,” Mary said, and lit another Marlboro Red.

“Isn’t that bad for the baby?” Nero asked.

“It’s Satan’s baby, so no. These things are like vitamins as far as it’s concerned. Besides, I’m never actually going to give birth. I’ m dead and pregnant for all eternity.”

“Get his feet,” Nero said. “Let’s get him onto the couch.”

They took hold of Satan and carry/dragged him across the room and dropped him onto a black vinyl couch patched with duct tape.

“Seriously,” Mary said. “What happens now? Nothing’s going on down here. Everyone’s been glued to cable trying to see what’s going on.”

“Nothing good is going to happen,” Nero said. “We’re going to have to sell Hell to pay this court settlement. There’s no other way.”

“Sell it to who?” Mary asked.

“Heaven,” Nero said. “But there are other bidders. Our only hope is to win the Ultimate Death Match. That will buy us some breathing room at the very least. There’re some rich Chinese real estate speculators who might make an offer on Hell, we can use the time to get a bidding war going and maybe drive up the price to something we can live with. How’s our wrestler?

“Yeah,” Mary said. “About that...”

“What did you do?” Nero asked.

“I didn’t do anything,” Mary said.“I just turned my back for a second and he threw himself into the center of an active volcano down on the Tenth Circle. I mean, he’s all burned up.”

Nero considered all the angles.

Then he ventured:

“You mean we have no wrestler for the Ultimate Death Match?”

“Not unless you want to get in the ring,” Mary said.

“It’s all over,” Satan moaned from the sofa. He began to bang his head rhythmically against the vinyl.

“Say something,” Mary hissed at Nero. “He’s your friend.”

“This isn’t the end, sir,” Nero said, doing his best Winston Churchill impersonation. “ We’re Hell. You are – in point of fact – the very Devil himself. You thrive on adversity.”

“I don’t think it’s usually this much adversity,” Mary said.

“Not a good time to experiment with sarcasm,” Nero said, then turned back to Satan. “Those fluffy, flying marshmallows have forgotten what you are capable of. You can’t back down now.”

“Actually, we could try to cut a deal,” Mary said.

“The going has gotten tough, now we must get going. Unless we seize the day and overcome incredible odds, everything we’ve ever worked for shall be destroyed. Carpe diem shall be our battle cry. Now, I’ve seized this problem in my mental mitts and what I think – ”

“No,” Satan whispered. “We’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to come from behind and score an unlikely victory. There’s not going to be any surprise ending. A long time ago the Heavenly Host decided they wanted Hell. And now they’re going to have it.”

“Sir,” Nero said. “There are rules –”

“The rules are that they’re the bosses and we’re the rejects who take care of the dirty work. Those are the rules. It’s pointless to fight it.”

Satan lapsed back into a depression-induced coma.

“We can do this,” Nero sputtered. “ We can rise up and win. We can – ”

Minos burst into the office, tearing the handle off the flimsy wooden door.

“We’re being invaded!” he bellowed.

“Your hooves are getting poo all over the carpet!” Nero shrieked.

When the big picture becomes too big for the human mind to comprehend it keeps itself from blowing a fuse by focusing on the details. A mother, told that her son has died in a car crash, will say, “But he just washed that car.” Or a wife, told that her husband has been killed in a factory accident, will say, “But I packed him his lunch today.” Or, if Heaven is violating rules that have stood inviolable since time immemorial and invaded Hell and Satan seems to be laid low with depression and everything seems lost, Nero will focus on the one part of Satan’s office that is not torn, tattered or too badly stained and he will cry, “Your hooves are getting poo all over the carpet!”

It was a clear sign that the big picture was very big and very bad indeed.

The Heavenly Host smashed into Hell like a sledgehammer shattering a watermelon at a Gallagher concert. They came pouring down the escalators, got bottlenecked in Hell’s Vestibule, broke the Gates wide open, then flooded the Nine Circles. The first demons to encounter the Host backed off, confused, and the angels pressed their advantage. It was an utter rout. By the time any demons tried to fight back it was already too late. The Iron City of Dis was occupied, the Mall of the Unbaptized was burning, the infinite stone bridges of the Malebolge were smoking rubble.

Minos had grabbed fleeing demons by the scruffs of their necks and tried to intimidate them into launching a counterattack. Through main force he formed them into a small unit, armed them with rocket launchers and had them take up positions near the entrance to the Second Circle, counting on the Whirlwind of Lust to even the odds, keeping the Heavenly Host unbalanced and cutting down their air advantage.

Instead, the angels flew high above the ripping winds and sliced Minos’s band of demons to ribbons by dropping grenades and throwing their ground-to-air missiles back at them. Angelic infantry, in golden armor and wielding swords of holy fire, mopped up the survivors, and Minos only managed to escape at the last minute when Cerberus, the enormous three-headed bunny of Hell, loomed up out of the shadows and nibbled a flock of angels to death.

There were other pockets of resistance, but they were thin and disorganized and were crushed almost as soon as they sprung up. In the middle of the Acheron, Charo’s hot pink speedboat rocked gently as Charo herself strode to the stern and whipped a drop cloth off a mounted fifty caliber Browning. While King Paimon drove the inboard through the angelic bombardment, Charo hung from the hand grips of the mounted machine gun and blew angels from the sky. Their feathered bodies pin-wheeled into the Acheron as she pumped them full of lead. King Paimon weaved the boat crazily through the water, zooming around plumes of detonating bombs, weaving through the muddy waters of the river as Charo worked her machine gun of demonic retribution. In minutes, a cloud of angels was in hot pursuit.

“Ha ha!” Charo yelled. “I am not thinking we can bang-bang the flying bastards much longer, sweetie! It is timing for Plan B.”

“Watch the edges!” King Paimon growled as he cut the wheel and made a tight U-turn so that they were facing the onrushing horde of angels who were skimming low over the surface of the Acheron. They bobbed quietly in the water for a moment, the wave lapping gently against the hull and the engine growled to itself.

“Sugar horns,” Charo said. “You are never letting one soul fall in the river. Thank you for all that.”

“Um...watch the edges, ” King Paimon mumbled. But what he really meant was, “I love you.”

Charo understood. She blew him a tiny kiss and underneath his scaly, scab-encrusted, rock-hard hide, King Paimon blushed.

Then he dropped the throttle and the boat rocketed forward like a missile, skipping over the light chop, headed straight for the angels.

“We are all having to die again sometime!” Charo laughed, and she depressed the firing button and fired and fired and fired as Paimon screamed his fury and the two of them disappeared into the flock of angels.

Seconds later, from deep inside the swirling, whirling, swooping, soaring horde, there came a flash of orange fire and a muffled explosion. Then the flock of angels organized themselves, circled once, and flew away, leaving charred chunks of pink fiberglass bobbing on the gasoline-slicked surface of the Acheron River. Of Charo and King Paimon there was no sign.

Deep inside the Fifth Circle of Hell, Gabriel and a phalanx of angels were kicking down doors and sweeping the offices of Hell as efficiently as a SWAT team. Cowering demons were taken prisoner, shackled and marched up to the ruins of the Mall of the Unbaptized, where they would be processed in the temporary Retraining and Attitude Adjustment Facility.

The final door was kicked open, and angels rushed in to the darkened room: Satan’s office. The inner sanctum of Hell.

“Clear!” an angel yelled.

“Clear!” another called.

The overhead fluorescents were switched on. The room was empty. Gabriel, needless to say, was peeved.

“Where are they?” he asked.

No one knew.

“Bring me someone who knows where they are!” he shouted.

No one was quite sure what to do, and so they shifted nervously from foot to foot.

“How did they get out of here?” Gabriel yelled, at no one in particular and at absolutely everyone.

“I found this guy,” an angel said entering from the room next door and throwing the hipster to the floor.

“You are a douche,” the hipster said, sitting up and rubbing his bruised elbows.

“Heavenly Father!” one of the angels gasped.

“What is it?” Gabriel shrieked.

“It’s hideous!” another angel said, recoiling.

“Your mother’s hideous,” the hipster said.

“Shoot it!” Gabriel cried. “Get that horror out of my sight!”

“Excuse me, sir,” one of the angels said. “Michael is coming.”

“Oh, crap,” Gabriel said. “Everyone look busy.”

Two angels used their spears to lift the protesting hipster and stuff him into a filing cabinet drawer, which they promptly locked. They weren’t about to risk touching that thing. Who knows where it had been? The rest of the angels began tearing open filing cabinets and throwing papers around, ripping back the wood paneling on the walls, pulling up the carpet (which, despite having a little poo on it, was in the best shape of anything in the office). They wanted to give the appearance that they were leaving no stone unturned in their search for Satan, hoping that this would distract Michael from the fact that they did not actually have him in their custody.

“Where is he?” Michael asked, striding through the door, his wings folded as low as he could get them so that they wouldn’t brush against the stained acoustic tile ceiling.

“We almost had him, but he got away,” Gabriel said. “He was right in our grip and then he gave us the slip.”

“Don’t lie to me, Gabriel,” Michael said.

“I’m not lying.”

Michael gave him a pitying look.

“All right,” Gabriel said, folding his hand. “Stop ransacking.”

The angels stopped their busy work.

“We can’t find him anywhere,” Gabriel admitted to Michael.

“As I expected,” Michael said.

“You’re not angry?”

“Why should I be angry?” Michael asked. “Never for a moment did I expect that you would be a match for the Lord of Lies.”

“Oh, thanks,” Gabriel said.

“He is far too devious for you,” Michael continued. “There is only one way we will be able to lure Satan into daylight and then remove him as King of Hell.”

“Please share, oh great one,” Gabriel said.

“The Ultimate Death Match,” Michael said. “He will not miss it.”

“You might have said something before we invaded Hell then,” Gabriel said. “It hasn’t exactly been pain-free. Do you know how many angels that Spanish hussy took out? If we could have just waited for the Ultimate Death Match then I don’t see the point.”

“Earliness is next to godliness,” Michael said. “And besides, you’ll be installed as temporary regent here. There is no such thing as starting the transition too early.”

Gabriel liked the sound of this. He bowed.

“Thy will be done.”

“Yes,” Michael said. “My will be done. Now,” he walked over to the filing cabinets. “What is that knocking sound?”

“Don’t open it,” Gabriel shouted, but it was already too late.

Outside the razed Mall of the Unbaptized, on the vast muddy plains of the First Circle of Hell, a temporary city had sprung up. This was stage one in Heaven’s takeover of Hell: the Retraining and Attitude Adjustment Facility. Hundreds of tents and trailers stretched to the dark and gloomy horizon and inside of them, lit only by the subterranean half-light of Hell, demons had their attitudes adjusted. One tent was for the Greeters Workshop. Here, demons were given green vests featuring twelve flair points and received instruction on how to properly welcome souls to Hell. This course was for the demons that Heaven’s Demonic Resource Managers had determined were familiar with the layout and resources of Hell. These brand new Demon Greeters of Hell would assist newly-arrived “clients” in finding the right department while keeping an eye out for potential troublemakers. The three-headed rabbit, Cerberus, was no longer considered an appropriate face of Hell and was relegated to an enormous, and enormously uncomfortable, hutch on one of the lower circles.

Throughout the Retraining and Attitude Adjustment Facility there were tents devoted to all the new aspects of Hell. Formerly a realm of eternal torment, Hell would now focus on client satisfaction, which would result in higher client value. The happier clients were, the more money they could be encouraged to spend once the new pricing models went into place. The more money they spent the wealthier Heaven would become. The wealthier Heaven became, well, the greater the glory of God? Or something like that?

An enormous number of temporary teaching structures were devoted to remedial client interaction and customer service training.

“Our Demonic Resource Managers teach by doing, with less than fifteen percent lecture and eighty-five percent hands-on activities,” Gabriel said. “Demons will learn through personal experience and not by being told. We’ll give them group training exercises that are practical, realistic, skill-based and fun.”

So far, the Resource Management counselors were reporting that none of the demons were finding the customer service and team building exercises “fun.”

“They’re predisposed to complain,” Gabriel said. “They like being unhappy. Our metric of success is not based on how much complaining they do. It’s based on my satisfaction with their progress on this mutual journey we're all undertaking towards making Hell a fun, productive and profitable place to work, live and share.”

No one knew what he was talking about, just as no one understood where all of these Demonic Resource Management counselors came from. Why did the Heavenly Host just happen to have a highly trained team ready to assist with the transition of Hell? And why were they all available to be dropped into place at a moment’s notice? But they were. Hundreds and thousands of angels all devoted to making the demons less demonic and more like your average Wal-Mart employee were on the ground within hours. And within two days there were dozens of mobile teaching trailers devoted to classes in “Complaint Resolution with a Smile” and “Overcoming Challenges the Right Way” and “Improving Torturer/Torturee Chemistry” and “Making Every Violence-Based Interaction a Richer Experience” jammed up against one another across the vast First Circle of Hell. The demons had almost no idea what was going on or what they were being taught, but without any leader they shuffled along and did what they were told.

In one of the classroom trailers, far over on the edge of the great plain of cinders and woe that was the First Circle of Hell, there was an electrical outlet. The outlet was at the back of the trailer where demons were being taught how to “Create Value-Added Options for Clients Spending an Eternity in Hell.” The demons who attended this class were so confused by the concepts being presented to them that none of them noticed the orange extension cord plugged into the outlet at the back of the room. None of them noticed that it ran along the base of the floor and out the rear window.

The extension cord ran down from the rear window and into the cinders and continued on until it reached the edge of a rocky crevasse. From there it dropped into the dark chasm through which a foul, black wind screamed. The extension cord swayed gently in the wind until it touched down on the sandy ground at the bottom and continued on. This was the Second Circle of Hell, where the lustful were blown about by a biting wind. Since the arrival of the Heavenly Host the wind had been made even colder and ice was added so that the torments of the lustful were multiplied. Heaven really hated lust.

The orange extension cord ran across the wind-scourged ground of the Second Circle until it eventually disappeared into a tiny hole, ran through a tight, icy tunnel and emerged on an ice choked cliff in the Third Circle. Here, an icy rain pelted down on the gluttonous, who probably would have eaten, or at least gnawed on, the extension cord if they could have seen it. But it was too well hidden. It ran for miles across the Third Circle, hidden beneath slush and mud. Eventually it disappeared into an icy spring, only to emerge even deeper in Hell, running down a waterfall to the Fourth Circle. Here it passed between the lumpen bodies of the avaricious, who were pressed down flat to the rocky soil with great weights tied to their chests. Flat on their backs they lay, and the few who could see the extension cord tried to grab it, to possess it and make it their own, but none succeeded.

The cord eventually left the Fourth Circle through a dark crack and emerged again in the swamps of the river Styx on the Fifth Circle. It ran across the muddy Styx, winding through its reeds with their razor-sharp leaves and iron hard roots until it reached a rocky slope far, far to one side of the swampy Styx. There the extension cord began its climb, wending its way over toe-cracking rocks and foot-shredding volcanic shards of hardened lava, running up and up until finally it reached a television set. The television set was being carried by Minos, who was picking his way up the treacherous mountainside, scrambling to find purchase for his hooves.

After a long, hard slog uphill he reached a level patch of rocks near the top of the slope where an enormous boulder rested. Minos walked around the boulder which was hiding a crack in the mountain. He entered the crack and there beheld a picture of utter and complete despair. Nero sat to one side of the crowded cave, slumped against the wall, while Mary Renfro stoked a miserable, greasy little fire in the middle of the floor. A few feet away, Satan lay on his side with his face to the wall. Occasionally he moaned and that was how they knew he was alive.

“I brought da TV,” Minos announced.

“Planning on watching sitcoms while everything collapses around our heads?” Nero asked.

“Hardy har,” Minos said, lowering the TV to the dirt floor. “You need ta see dis. It’s what I wuz tellin’ you about.”

“Why bother?” Nero said. “It’s all over.”

“They aren’t allowed to do this,” Mary Renfro said. “Are they?”

“Why don’t you go down and tell them,” Nero said. “I went through this once before when Rome burned. Now I don’t even have my cithara.”

“Thas why you gotta watch dis,” Minos said. “Somethin’s happenin’.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It’s on the TV,” Minos said.“An’ if the TV says it’s happenin’ then you know it’s happenin’.”

“Unless it’s a miracle, I don’t want to see it,” Nero groused.

The burly demon turned on New York One, local news. The slightly orange face of an inept local anchorwoman filled the screen.

“In what people are calling a ‘Satanic Miracle’ it looks like the entire country is coming together for the Devil,” she said.

The camera cut to a bake sale at a school. Rice Krispie treats, oatmeal raisin cookies in plastic sandwich bags and overly baked, nearly black chocolate chips cookies were changing hands at a surprisingly brisk pace.

“Since the verdict was passed down in the Babbit vs. the Devil court case last week, bake sales like this one have sprung up at schools across the country,” a field reporter said.

On the front of the table was taped a piece of poster board that read, “Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund.” The reporter pushed his microphone into the face of the pimply middle school girl with thick glasses who was running the cash box.

“Sam Soto, New York One,” he said. “Sweetie, why are you selling cookies for the Devil?”

She smiled shyly.

“Because I think he’s cute.”

Sam Soto turned to the camera.

“And it’s not just at schools, Sara.”

The camera cut to the outside of a bank. Sam Soto approached an elderly woman, just emerging.

“Excuse me, Sam Soto, NY 1,” he said. “Did you just donate money to the Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund?”

“I did,” she said, primly.

“What motivated you to do that?” he asked.

“I saw that Satan on television and he reminded me of my George,” she said. “George didn’t like working for the paper company but he did it all his life. Never complained once. Then when he passed, not one of those people came to his funeral. That’s a shame.”

Sam Soto turned to the camera again.

“One did it because he’s ‘cute.’ This one does it for George,” he said. “Who are the Americans giving their money to Satan’s Defense Fund?”

Now the camera was showing a bunch of high school girls in bikinis conducting a car wash in a Quiznos parking lot. The big sandwich board on the corner read, “We feel your pain: Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund.”

“And it’s not just your average Americans,” Sam Soto said. “Celebrities are getting in on the act, too.”

Cut to: a giant coliseum somewhere in the New Jersey Meadowlands. The capacity crowd was cheering and screaming and snapping their lighters. Onstage, the lead singers of Iron Maiden, Queensryche, Quiet Riot and Ratt were singing earnestly into a microphone. Behind them, an enormous banner read, “Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund.”

“The Satan Prince of Darkness Gods of Hair Metal benefit show sold out the Meadowlands last night,” Sam Soto said. “With the leaders of four of the biggest metal acts saying that Satan was a ‘special guy’ who had ‘done a lot for their careers’ and it was time for them to give something back. And in Portland, musicians of a different stripe gathered.”

An outdoor stage in Portland with a “Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund” banner and a Tibetan flag hanging from it. The Indigo Girls were playing.

“The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine and the Indigo Girls gave a benefit performance for the fund, as well.”

Emily Saliers stepped up to the microphone as the last notes of “ Galileo” faded into the summertime air.

“I don’t believe in Satan,” she said to the crowd. “But there comes a time when an artist just needs to say ‘Enough is enough.’ And that time is now. Free Satan and Tibet!”

The crowd roared.

“I feel so close to the Indigo Girls,” Minos said.

“With over sixty million dollars raised in only three days, the Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund is one of the most successful charities in American history,” Sam Soto said. “But what does that say about us? And what will they do with the money? Questions that can only be answered by the fund’s managers, who at this time declined to comment. This is Sam Soto, NY 1 News. Anne?”

“We’re back in business,” Nero said. “Sixty million dollars in three days? I’ve got to get in touch with these people. Maybe we can pay off the judgment without going broke. Sir? Sir?”

“I never thought that the world would come together for Satan,” Mary said. “This is a miracle.”

“Do we have a phone? Do any of us have a phone? Sir? Wake up.”

Satan’s breathing was fast and shallow. Nero shook his shoulder for a minute but Satan was non-responsive.

“I think something’s wrong,” Nero said.

Mary and Minos came over.

“Hey,” Mary said, slapping Satan’s gray, putty-colored face. “Wake up!”

“Do you really think hitting him will work?” Nero asked.

“No, but I like doing it,” she said and smacked Satan again.

Minos poked Satan in the tummy with one enormous claw.

“He don’t move when I poke him,” he observed.

“I think...” Nero began, then wet his lips, nervously. “I think I need to do that mouth-to-mouth respiration. Or the Heimlich. I’m not sure which. Do either of you know which? I need to do something.”

Before their eyes, Satan was fading. Color had left his skin, his eyes flicked feverishly behind their lids, even his hair was limp and lifeless. Nero rolled him over onto his back.

“Okay,” Mary said. “This isn’t funny anymore. Is he dying? Can he die?”

“None of us die,” Nero said. “But we do become irrelevant.”

“What happens then?” Mary asked.

“We shouldn’t talk about dat,” Minos said.

“She deserves to know,” Nero said. “You know Zeus? Odin? The Great Spirit? They all became irrelevant. They just faded away into nothing.”

“Is that what he’s doing?”

“I’ve never seen it before, okay?” Nero said. “This is my first time watching a deity die.”

Mary shoved him aside and began CPR. Minos and Nero watched as she delivered efficient chest compressions, one-two-three, rest, one-two-three, rest.

“I think yer hurting him,” Minos said.

“What do you want me to do?” Mary snapped.

“Please,” Nero said. “Don’t let him die.”

Nero looked at his lord and master with frightened, wide eyes, full of despair.

“We need to come up with a plan,” Mary said, as she continued CPR. “Can we stall them at the Death Match? And get that money from the defense fund to pay off the judgment?”

“Maybe?” Nero said. “I don’t know? Yes?”

“Which is it?” she shouted.

“Stop shouting!” Nero squealed.

“I’m going to punch both’a ya if ya don’t calm down!” Minos yelled.

And then the cave was full of smoke. Mary collapsed to the floor, her lungs aching, unable to draw a breath. The three of them were hurled to the front of the cave by a great, concussive blast. Mary turned her streaming eyes to follow Nero’s horrified gaze. At the back of the cave, looming over Satan, was a hooded, cloaked figure sitting on a Rascal scooter. It spread its arms wide and its intention was clear: it had come for Satan. And then, with a flourish and another billow of smoke, it was gone and, with it, Satan.

“My Lord,” Nero cried rushing to the empty space where Satan had been just moments before.

Mary managed to drag herself outside, her lungs desperate for clean air. She fell to her knees on the rocky slope, sending a miniature avalanche down the hill. She drew in great whooping breaths, and thought to herself:

“What was that thing? Why did it take Satan? Was that Death? Has Satan become irrelevant? Whose foot is this?”

She looked up and learned the answer to at least one of her questions: the foot belonged to an angel named Mahiel. He stood over her in golden armor that glittered like lightning in the dim half-light of Hell. In one of his hands was a flaming sword, in the other was the orange extension cord. Standing behind him were roughly two dozen other angels. They looked very happy to have found Mary.

“Anyone else in there with you?” Mahiel asked.

Mary shook her head.

“I’m all alone,” she said.

The sound of Nero wailing drifted out of the cave.

“My Lord! My Lord! Where have you gone?”

“Who’s that?” Mahiel asked.

“Just a soul,” Mary said. “Getting tortured. It’s totally normal.”

“My Lord Satan,” they clearly heard Nero wail. “I will kill Michael, I will destroy Gabriel. My Lord, My Satan, why have you abandoned me?”

“There are some weird echoes in these rocks,” Mary said. “You hear all kinds of things.”

But it was too late. The cohort of angels were marching into the cave.

Satan lay on the ground underneath the burning desert sun. On a distant hill, rocks had been painted white and lined up to spell out the enormous letters “BM.” The air was still, it was quiet, it was lifeless. An electric motor whined and moved away, then it whined and came closer. Death was riding his Rascal Mobility Scooter. In his hand he had a big stick. He poked Satan with it.

“I know you can hear me,” he said, in his normal voice.

Satan didn’t move.

“Battle Mountain, Nevada,” Death proclaimed, spreading his arms wide. “Isn’t it horrible?”

They were in a parking lot with a failed mining town spread out around them, devoid of character, charm or residents. Death pushed the end of his stick underneath Satan and tried to roll him over. Satan moaned.

“Up you go,” Death said.

Up Satan did not go.

Death began to whack on him with the stick.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to keep whacking you until you get up.”

He kept whacking Satan. The limp Evil One rolled over on his side. Death whacked his ribs. Satan hunched over on himself and Death whacked his head. Feebly, Satan lifted his arms to protect his head. Death whacked his elbows. Finally, Satan sat up.

“Enough,” he said.

Death jabbed him with his stick.

“Up you go.”

This time, Satan got up.

“Follow me,” Death said. “I need to tell you some things.”

He began to whir away on his Rascal, then he noticed that Satan was not following him. He made a big loop back and drove in a tight little circle around Satan, poking him with his stick.

“I can do this all day,” he said. “ Can you?”

Reluctantly, Satan began to trudge after him.

They stepped out onto the sidewalk and took a right.

“I love it here,” Death said. “I haven’t been back in years, but it’s even worse than I remembered. The few dozen people who live here could move out anytime. They could go to Las Vegas and look at naked ladies and drink yard-long margaritas and become blackjack dealers, but for some reason they just hang on here. No good reason. Just habit, I guess.”

They passed a row of dark storefronts, some covered with plywood, all giving off an air of failure and poorly thought out business plans. Whatever monster of awfulness had this tiny town in its teeth, it wasn’t going to spit it out anytime soon. None of these stores were coming back. No young hipsters were going to move in and open coffee shops and second hand bookstores. No jewelry makers were going to be tricked into opening studios here, lured by the cheap rents. There was no one left to pay rent to, the town had slipped below even that level. It had been abandoned to its fate, and fate was not being kind.

“After you fired me, I realized that I was Death,” Death said, rolling along by Satan’s elbow. “I could go anywhere, do anything, no angel could stop me. That whole Speedway incident, I think I wanted to be stopped. I barely even wrestled with that angel, I just saw him there, went through the motions and went crawling back to Hell. I realize now that I had just stopped caring. Kind of like you.”

The two of them made their way along the cracked sidewalk that would never be repaired, lined by shops that would never be re-opened on one side and a road that would never be re-paved on the other. They came to a small building on the corner with a faded neon sign outside that read, “Dona’ Diner.” The broken “S” was lying on the asphalt beneath it. Death pushed open the door with the front wheel of his scooter and rolled inside.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s not like you’ve got anyplace better to go.”

Satan followed. The interior was dim and covered with a fine layer of grit. Death rolled over to a booth by the window and hoisted himself onto the bench.

“Have a seat,” he said, indicating the opposite side of the booth.

Satan sat down across from Death. Then he turned his head. An enormously obese woman was sitting in the corner of the room, hidden in the shadows. She was staring down at the tabletop, her long hair hiding her face. She was a pale blue color, the color of the recently asphyxiated.

“Don’t mind her,” Death said.“That’s the Blue Woman, she’s a ghost. She just sits there. I tried to talk to her once but she wasn’t having any of it. So...”

He trailed off. Satan looked down at the tabletop. Death seemed to be figuring out how to get started. The silence lengthened. Finally, Death spoke again.

“You know what I like to watch?” he said. “The Home Shopping Network. Also, game shows. And the talk shows are good, too. You really freed me up for all that. I guess I was feeling a lot of pressure in my job. I spent the last five hundred years just being hated so much that I started to believe what they said about me. Back in the old days people liked me, or at least they didn’t make a big deal out of me, but now they spend their entire lives scared of me, figuring out how to avoid me, ignoring me as best they can. It got to me after a while. I got burnt out. So now I watch the TV.”

A beige SUV raced down the street outside. With no stoplights and no police giving speeding tickets, it appeared and was gone in less than a second.

“I like the TV because it’s full of dumb people, wasting their time, selling each other dumb things, buying things they don’t need, having fights that don’t matter, winning prizes that are terrible. It reminded me that taking them away was a good thing to do. Death was probably the best thing to happen to a lot of them. They needed me, because without me they would have gone on forever, just frittering away their lives, a long, endless highway of mediocrity. It’s only the fact that they die that puts some fire in their pants. Death is what gives them meaning. Because they don’t have much meaning otherwise. So I love watching them on their TV, it’s a reminder to me of how useless they were and that no matter how much they hated me, I was what gave their lives some form and structure.”

Death gave a big, skeleton grin.

“You should try it sometime.”

Satan had looked up from the table and was staring out the window now. A stray dog trotted down the abandoned street. It might have been a coyote.

“I heard about what happened in Hell,” Death said. “You can’t let this go on.”

Satan kept staring out the window.

“Hey!” Death said, slapping the tabletop with one bony hand. Satan turned and looked at him.

“You can’t let this go on. They can’t take Hell. You have a responsibility.”

“No, I don’t,” Satan said. His voice was thick and scratchy.

“How do you figure?” Death said.

“They wanted it, so they took it from me.”

“Who? The angels? You’re going to let a bunch of angels push you around?”

“It’s God’s will,” Satan said.

“You really think that?” Death asked. “Have you talked to him? Did you see him? Did the Creator come down and say that to you?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know? All you’ve got are a bunch of uppity angels taking over Hell because they’re greedy. You’re part of the balance, you’re an essential part of the Creation, and just because you’re burnt out you’re going to let them take it away from you? Pathetic.”

“What do you want me to do?” Satan asked. “I don’t have any options.”

“I want you to get it together,” Death said.“When you fired me it was the wake-up call that I needed and now I’m giving you a wake-up call. You quit? You can’t do that. You’re Satan. No one pushes you around if you don’t let them.”

“I can’t do anything,” Satan said. “They’ve got me from all sides. The legal settlement, the Death Match, everything.”

“They are angels,” Death said. “You are Satan. Don’t ever forget that.”

“So what?”

“I’m going to give you something,” Death said. “This is the one chance you get. And either you’ll make something of it, or you won’t. I hope you do.”

He reached into his tattered robes and pulled out two pink invoice slips and slid them across the dusty tabletop.

“Go on,” he said. “Read them.”

Satan unfolded the flimsy invoices and scanned the pages, quickly. Then he stopped and re-read them slowly.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“With the work stoppage they never got claimed. Totally overlooked. My minions are still keeping an eye on things and one of them brought these to me. They’re only clerical errors but they’re clerical errors you can take advantage of.”

“I don’t know,” Satan said.“Maybe it’s time for me to be done. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m losing Hell.”

“Really?” Death asked. “You’re just going to roll over? What would you be without your job?”

Satan thought about it for a minute, then he stood up and walked to the back of the restaurant. He approached the Blue Woman’s table and stopped beside it.

“Hey, ghost?” he said. “What do you think I should do? Try to get my old job back? Or just let it go?”

The Blue Woman kept staring at her dusty table top and then, to Death’s great surprise, she spoke.

“I wish...I had...a job...” she said, softly. “Eternity...is so long...”

Satan turned that over in his mind for a minute, and then he nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

He came back to the table.

“I need you to do two things for me,” Satan said. “I need you to give me a lift and I need you do me a favor.”

“What kind of favor?” Death asked.

And Satan told him.

“I don’t do that anymore,” Death said.

“I know. But just this once. For old time’s sake. I’ve even got some tractor trailer containers where you can store them.”

“That’s asking a lot,” Death said.

“Then I guess I’m not asking,” Satan said. “I’m ordering you to do it.”

“Where do you get off ordering me to do anything?” Death asked.

“Because I’m Satan, and you are eternally obligated to me.”

Death smiled and nodded.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you,” Satan said. “I got so used to things being the way they were that I needed a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“That eternity is a very long time and it helps if you have a job.”

“That’s the Satan I remember,” Death said.

“Oh,” Satan smiled. “I’m just getting started.”

Gabriel sat behind Satan’s old desk and smiled at Nero, Minos and Mary Renfro. They were huddled on the other side and they weren’t smiling, mostly because they were in shackles and surrounded by the biggest, angriest, most heavily armed angels in the Heavenly Host.

“It is so good to see the three of you,” Gabriel said. “I’ve met the little nun before, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a chance to say ‘hello’ to the other two.”

“We can’t tell you where Satan is,” Nero said.

“That’s all right,” Gabriel replied. “I’m not interested. In fact, I’m going to let the three of you go free.”

Minos and Nero exchanged sidelong glances.

“Why?” Nero asked, suspiciously.

“Because there’s nothing you can do to us anymore,” Gabriel said. “We have occupied Hell. There is a judgment against Satan for four hundred million dollars. It’s over, except for the Ultimate Death Match and I need you three free for that.”

“Why?” Nero asked again, starting to feel like a parrot.

“Because Michael wants there to be a show,” Gabriel said. “He wants to take on your best wrestler. He wants to pound the crud out of them in the ring. On live TV. That way there will be no doubt that our takeover of Hell is totally and completely legitimate.”

“Don’t be so sure of yourself,” Mary said.

“The little nun speaks,” Gabriel said.“Might I add a belated ‘thank you?’ We wouldn’t all be standing here if you hadn’t killed yourself so predictably. Offing Satan’s baby was exactly what we needed to get God on our side for this invasion. You people. You will do anything to get into Heaven. It’s sad, really. I mean, look at you. You could never afford it.”

Mary’s face turned red and she stared at the soiled carpet in shame. She felt like a fool.

“So go forth,” Gabriel said. “Train a wrestler. Give us some kind of a fight. It’ll be cute. And don’t worry about holding back. There’s not one of you who could possibly hurt us now. Not one.”

The Minotaur was playing Solitaire, but he wasn’t having much fun. All the souls had been reassigned to more traditional punishments when the angels came, and the demons had all been rounded up and sent to the Retraining and Attitude Adjustment Facility. A squad of angels had come to force the Minotaur to attend Training Workshops but they had mysteriously disappeared. The Heavenly Host had sent another squad and they had surrounded the Minotaur, who was doing a Word Scramble.

“Where are the angels we sent here to bring you into the light.” one of the angels, Mehumet, demanded.

The Minotaur had leaned to one side and farted out a fistful of feathers. The angels backed off and, after that, the Host had decided to simply leave the Minotaur alone.

But still, the Minotaur was not having very much fun playing Solitaire.

A shadow crept over the rock where his cards were spread.

“Minotaur,” a familiar voice said. “You are needed.”

“You just need to accept the fact that I am never coming back,” Death said.

He sat in his Rascal in the middle of the frozen field where lines of radioactive trucks and helicopters marched off into the distance. They were all ugly and utilitarian and all undeniably Soviet, broken down and abandoned. Around him stood hundreds of his ex-minions, men and women in sensible shoes and business casual attire. They all wore white gloves. Their meeting was taking place in the middle of the Rassoha Dump in the Zone of Alienation that surrounded Chernobyl. They wouldn’t be disturbed here. After they had stopped work and gone on strike, most of Death’s minions had retreated here where there was peace and quiet and zero chance of encountering any living beings. They passed their time playing chess, which Death thought was very pretentious but he wasn’t going to call them on it because right now he needed their help.

“We made a vow,” the head minion said. “And we’re as serious about our vows as you are about yours.”

“I am asking you to break your vow,” Death said.

“We couldn’t possibly do that,” the minion said. “Not even for you.”

“Look,” Death said. “I understand that you’re serious about your vows. So let me make you a deal. You won’t do the killing. You’ll just do the gathering and the training. I’ll be the one who actually extinguishes their lives.”

The minions pondered this for a long time. Finally, one spoke.

“And this would only be in Brooklyn?” she asked.

“Brooklyn, Portland, Austin and San Francisco,” Death said. “And maybe Berlin. But that’s all.”

“We’ll have to think it over,” the elected spokesminion said. But Death could see in his eyes that this was just an attempt to make it look good. His minions had already made up their minds. Death and Company would ride together one last time.

“It’s absolutely impossible,” Johnn Sharp, the executive director of the Satan Prince of Darkness Defense Fund said to his shadowy visitor, who was seated in the interview chair of Sharp’s well-appointed office done up in deceptively expensive Danish Moderne.

“Even for me?” the shadowy visitor asked.

“Even if you are who you claim to be, I cannot disperse these monies,” Johnn Sharp said. “We are barely staying afloat as it is.”

“I heard you’re taking in close to twenty million dollars per day,” the visitor said. “It’s been almost a week. You’ve got money.”

“I only wish that were the case,” Johnn Sharp said. “First, you have to factor in our overhead. This office and this staff do not come free. We knew from the beginning that talent attracts talent and so we have spent a great deal of money hiring the best and the brightest for positions here in marketing, development, outreach and education.”

“Those are a lot of departments,” the shadowy visitor said.

“It takes money to make money,” Johnn Sharp replied. “This office attracts a huge number of donors but we are operating on a shoestring. I mean, really we are functioning on nothing more than the barest necessities. We need Nespresso pods for our coffee machines, and fresh bagels brought in from Montreal for our team. We need to pay our in-office massage and bodywork therapists. We need to pay the classical quartet who perform at our networking gatherings. The hand towel budget alone is massive, but we believe that our team members perform best when they’re given the proper support, and I think you’d agree that we really are asking a lot of them.”

“Of course,” the visitor said.

“We’ve got a click-and-mortar environment to handle,” Johnn continued, getting on a roll now. “And we view ourselves not just as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization but as a portal and central clearinghouse for all things Satanic.”

“That’s a big job,” the shadowy visitor said.

“But I think you’d approve. Not only do I give facetime at various meetings and conferences on a global scale but we have a webinar team performing online videoconferencing and giving guidance to potential donors. We are big, but the cause is large. However, you can see that we are running a tight ship. Salaries alone run to the hundreds of thousands per day. It’s not easy. We take in almost exactly what we need to survive.”

“It must be very difficult for you,” the visitor said.

“It is. I don’t think you know how hard it is,” Johnn Sharp said, suddenly feeling very sorry for himself. “Would you like to see my executive bathroom? It’s the only tiny bit of luxury I allow myself. It’s that door there, right next to my meditation chamber. No, no, that’s my recording studio. I’ve been learning how to play the hammered dulcimer and the mixer and playback system really help me track my own progress. Yes, that’s right. That’s the door.”

With the visitor safely inside Johnn Sharpe’s private executive washroom, Sharp allowed himself to look out the wall-to-wall window over the parking lot of Prius’s and Hummers. Just a few weeks ago this building had belonged to Exxon Mobile, but he had been willing to pay top dollar and they had happily abandoned it. Good vibes remained. It had been a struggle and a race to the finish, but he had managed to have the entire building gutted, renovated and landscaped in just one week. No one could possibly understand the stress he felt every single day. A few small luxuries for himself, that’s all he had. Who could possibly object to that? Certainly not his shadowy visitor who seemed to be coming around to his point of view. That’s something Johnn Sharpe prided himself on, the ability to show other people the correct perspective.

He would have been surprised to know that at that very moment, his shadowy visitor had exited through the back entrance of his private bathroom, walked across an empty conference room, gone down the hall and was now on the next floor up where the accountants sat. No one questioned the visitor because they thought he was there to shoot a promotional video. But he wasn’t. He was there to watch them type in their passwords. He was there to steal access to their accounts. He was there to do evil.

It’s not hard to empty out Madison Square Garden for a private event without paying a cent. All you have to do change the sign outside to read:

Hootie & the Blowfish Reunion

One Night Only

Playing the Music of

Edvard Grieg

Exactly twenty tickets were sold, and those people were prevented from actually attending when certain celestial powers ensured that a live John Tesh concert was on Pay-Per-View that very same night. Inside the abandoned Madison Square Garden, the Arena was dark. Safety lights were on throughout the six tiers of seating but there was not a single sign of life. The massive room, capable of seating twenty thousand spectators was ominously quiet.

The food court staff had been sent home early that day. The custodial and maintenance staff had been quietly bribed and sent back to their apartments in Queens. Security guards had been replaced with a private company brought in for one night only. It was a private security group that employed the deaf and blind exclusively for events such as Senate orgies, Goldman Sachs people-hunting retreats and other private functions, like this one, which required total discretion. Entrances were sealed. Sweeps for hidden recording and listening devices were made. Webcast cameras were turned off. Closed circuit cameras were disconnected. Work started at six in the morning and by three in the afternoon the arena was completely sealed off from the outside world.

In the basement of the Garden an enormous series of doors were unlocked, elevators had pass keys inserted in hidden slots and were sent to floors one hundred levels above where they had previously stopped. Emergency halt buttons were pressed for all the escalators and their maintenance hatches were opened and secret gears were inserted into their machinery. When they were restarted they plunged deep into the bowels of the Earth, all the way down to Hell.

At five o’clock that afternoon the crowd started to file in. Chief amongst them were demons, thousands of them squeezed into tiny red devil suits. Depressed and with heavy hearts they had been released from the Reeducation Camps and allowed up for this special night. They were glum and silent, herded along by arrogant, grinning angels. The only noise they made came from the swishing of their polyester-encased thighs.

Down the elevators came thousands of angels, tens of thousands of them, the entire Heavenly Host. They were fluttering and chattering, thrilled and excited, flush and enthusiastic for their victory. Finally, the great dream, long deferred, had been achieved and Heaven would have dominion over all.

Neither Heaven nor Hell had ever broadcast these events to the souls in their perpetual care before. Hell because it could not afford the facilities. Heaven because it had lost every single match to Hell and it really didn’t want to brag about it. But this time was different, and Heaven wanted everyone to witness their triumph. Hell was full of confused souls who couldn’t figure out why they were suddenly not being tortured. The Heavenly Host had distributed pamphlets stressing the importance of the match, impressing upon the damned that they were about to see the ultimate expression of Heaven’s will and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Vast TV screens had been installed to beam down live broadcast of the Ultimate Death Match for the first time ever, but no one had hooked them up properly and so they mostly broadcast static.

Heaven was full of souls clustered around TV screens and packed into indoor amphitheaters and multiplexes. Normally reserved for screenings of footage of playful kittens and puppies, along with the occasional snuff film for the high rollers, these private rooms had been hastily converted into screening centers where, for the first time in history, the souls of the blessed would be able to watch the Ultimate Death Match.

By nine o’clock that night, the arena was packed.

Vendors made their way up and down the stairs, selling Styrofoam “We’re Number One!” fingers, Glo-Stiks, Glow-in-the-Dark necklaces, cups of beer and nachos. Angels and demons didn’t need to eat, but it gave them a rush and the night of the Ultimate Death Match was one of the few times they were all ready to give in and put up with the next day’s tummy trouble in order to whip themselves up into a frenzy.

But tonight was different. Beer and nachos were selling like salvation to the angels, all packed into one side of the Arena. The angels were ecstatic, of course, anticipating their victory and getting an early start on their celebrations. On the other side of the arena, not a single cup of beer was sold. The demons were depressed and uncomfortable in their tight, tiny, red devil suits that no one had thought to measure. Angels patrolled the aisles like wardens. Mirth was not encouraged. Frivolity was not allowed. The demons were there to lose.

From the North Corner Sky Box, the princes of heaven looked down on the packed Arena. They could hear the rumble of the crowd, even here behind their double-glazed glass window. Metatron was pacing the room.

“It will be unique to finally experience victory,” he said. “I must admit that I am terribly excited to taste it. They say the taste of victory is unforgettable. I remember once when – ”

“Would someone shut him up and bring me another bucket of wine,” Barachiel growled. He was already getting his party on.

From his corner, Phanuel chimed in agreement. About Metatron shutting up, not about the wine.

“I was only trying to share my experiences,” Metatron huffed.

“Do you still think that this is wise?” Jegudiel asked Barachiel.

“You’ve been whining since the moment Michael first showed some balls,” Barachiel said. “It’s time for you to shut up, too.”

“There is a balance to Creation,” Jegudiel said. “Having a monopoly on the afterlife seems to me to be an invitation for trouble.”

“They haven’t invented a kind of trouble that I can’t beat,” Barachiel said.

“I fear we are asking for repercussions,” Jegudiel said. “Ones we are not prepared to handle.”

“Yeah,” Barachiel said. “Fear. That’s all you ever think about. Well tonight, for once, there’s no room for fear. We’re going to win.”

“Have I ever told you about the time that I finally categorized all the different types of fear?” Metatron said from his corner. “There were over three thousand five hundred and fifty-eight. It was quite fascinating, really...”

In Heaven’s locker room, Raphael was giving Michael a rubdown. The archangel was sprawled facedown on a padded table with his enormous wings outstretched so that the tips of their primary feathers brushed the ceiling. Raphael rubbed ambrosia into Michael’s powerful, corded muscles while Gabriel walked a figure eight in the far corner, hunched over his cell phone, wrapping up last minute details.

“Mmmf mf mf mft?” Michael said, from where he lay facedown on the table.

“What?” Gabriel asked.

Michael lifted his head.

“Are they here yet?” he repeated.

Gabriel held up a finger.

“Uh huh,” he said into his phone. “Okay.”

Then he hung up.

“They just came in,” he said. “They’re in their locker room now.”

“I am satisfied,” Michael said. “ How do they look?”

“The angels at the gate said they look pretty straggly.”

“Is the Fallen One with them?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“Where is he?”

“We still can’t find him.”

“He can hinder our plans no more,” Michael said. “But I do not like loose ends. We should tie this up as quickly as possible.”

“I’m on it,” Gabriel said.

“See that you are,” Michael said, and put his face back down on the table. Then he lifted it once more. “Gabriel, never raise your finger to me again. When I ask a question I expect an immediate answer.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gabriel said, and he bit down on the anger that squirmed in the pit of his stomach. It was better to be a king in Hell...it was better to be a king in Hell...it was better to be a king in Hell...

Hell’s locker room hadn’t been cleaned since the night before and four laundry bins were stuffed to overflowing with damp, mildewing, sweat-saturated game uniforms. Three of the fluorescent tubes were out and one was flickering maniacally. The air was heavy and humid. Everything stunk.

Mary Renfro stood uncomfortably in the middle of the room wearing a bright red body stocking. It ran from her ankles to her wrists and covered her to the neck. With gold sequins stitched down the arms, up the legs, over her shoulders and down her back, swirling and whorling across every free inch of her, she looked like a handkerchief that had been used to stop one of Elvis’s nosebleeds.

“It’s missing something,” Nero said, and then he took a few damp sweat socks from the putrid pile in a laundry bin, rolled them into a ball and stuffed them up Mary’s sleeves.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. And then the smell hit her. “Ugh!”

“Now you have biceps,” Nero said. “ They look good.”

“Don’t talk about my body,” she said. “It’s – these really stink!”

She fanned her face, but that just wafted more of the horror smell up her nostrils. When Minos entered she was doing a complicated dance as she tried to pull the sweat socks out of the tight sleeves, while Nero tried to swat her hands away and both of them tried to avoid the stink.

“I need ta talk ta ya,” Minos said. He was dressed like Burgess Meredith in Rocky, with a white towel rolled up and stuffed into the neck of a gray sweatshirt. Nero had no idea where he’d found a sweatshirt in his size.

“Stop fooling with your outfit and listen to him,” Nero said to Mary. “It’s important.”

He pushed Mary down onto the wooden bench.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to Minos. “I need some kind of last-minute strategy intervention. Nero’s useless.”

“I keep telling you,” Nero said. “Wrestling was very popular where I’m from, it was just much more sensual.”

“Stop talking!” Mary snapped.

Tensions were running high.

Minos cleared his throat. Mary waited, expectantly.

“I just wanted ya ta know that I think yer bein’ real brave,” Minos said. “And the fact that I jes’ put a large bet on Michael to win in no way means that ya don’t have my full and complete support.”

“What?!” Mary cried, her heart sinking.

“I need ta protect my nest egg,” Minos said. “Times’re uncertain.”

“It’s actually completely understandable,” Nero said. “Michael can cut steel with his fingernails and I’ve heard that he can turn coal into diamonds just by squeezing it between his buttocks. One punch, and he can unmake you. Minos is being quite wise in betting against you.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Mary asked.

“Reverse psychology,” Nero said. “I tell you that you can’t possibly win, and you’re inspired to overcome incredible odds and prove me wrong.”

“Um, yeah,” Minos said.

“Well it’s not working,” Mary said. “You’re just freaking me out.”

She got up and began to roam around the locker room in obvious distress.

“He won’t really kill ya,” Minos said. “Yer already dead. He’ll jus’ punch ya so hard that you’ll cease to exist fer a few years.”

“Centuries,” Nero said.

“Stop it!” Mary yelled.

Nero got up and tried to cram more sweat socks down the neck of her bodystocking.

“Stop poking at me,” she said, swatting his hands away. “I don’t want to cease to exist for a few centuries. One of you has to have a plan, right?”

Nero wouldn’t meet her eyes. Minos looked around for a place to hide, but couldn’t find one.

“You’ve both been in Hell for a really long time. You’re both devious. Minos, you’re enormous and you torture lost souls a lot. You’ve got to have something.”

She tried to look into his eyes, but Minos kept looking at other things: the floor, the lockers, the flickering fluorescent tubes, the floor again. Finally, he stopped squirming and shook his head.

“I dunno,” he said.

“What about you?” Mary asked Nero. “History books are full of all the evil things you did. You’re famous for your plotting and for being completely crazy. You’ve got to have some kind of plan.”

“I do,” Nero stammered. “I mean...it’s not a very realistic question. I do have a plan. Of course I have a plan. It’s just a...secret plan.”

“At this point, I don’t think we have time for any secrets,” Mary said.

“Don’t lose,” he said, falling back on his legal strategy.

“What?” she said in disbelief.

“It’s the best I can do,” he snapped. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure. This has all been very distressing.”

“Why me?” Mary asked. “Why did this happen to me?”

No one said anything. Nero and Minos both had the good grace to look embarrassed.

“You’re going to lose,” Nero said. “It is going to hurt. A lot. You are going to cease to exist for so long that the next time we see you we probably won’t even remember your name. Your only hope now is to stall and delay and drag your feet and pray for a miracle.”

“A miracle?” Mary asked. “That’s the plan?”

“Actually, we’re from Hell,” Minos rumbled. “We don't get no miracles.”

Mary despaired. Once again, her very presence had brought nothing but death, pain, chaos and failure. Truly, she was in Hell.

Michael was quietly meditating in the private prayer corner of Heaven’s locker room while Gabriel stood a respectful distance away, briefing the referee. The only mortal entrusted to witness the Ultimate Death Match, Pope Benedict XVI was wearing a polyester black-and-white striped shirt, a clip-on bow tie, black trousers and his mitre, which glittered impressively from on top of his head.

The Pope was many things. He was the father of the Roman Catholic Church, the Bishop of Rome and the Sovereign of the State of Vatican City. But refereeing the Ultimate Death Match was his most important duty. The Catholic Church has many functions but the entire hierarchy of leadership was established to ensure that only the most spiritual, wisest, most trustworthy and most dedicated individuals eventually rose to the Papacy so that Heaven and Hell would be assured of the best possible referee in the Ultimate Death Match.

“Now look,” Gabriel said. “When we win, he’s going to take his championship belt and do a victory run around the ring, so make sure not to crowd him.”

“This match isn’t fixed,” Pope Benedict said. “What makes you so confident he’s going to win?”

Before Gabriel could respond, Michael stood up and strode over to them. His muscular torso gleamed as if it had been carved from marble. The Pope sucked in an awed breath. Michael bent down, his muscles fighting beneath his skin like wild animals, and he picked up a brick that had somehow found its way into the locker room. Locking eyes with the Pope, Michael placed the brick between his enormous pectoral muscles. The Universe stopped spinning for a moment. Michael rippled his massive chest melons and the brick exploded into dust.

“I’ll stand over on the side,” Pope Benedict said.

The hour was at hand. After years of preparation, the time of the Ultimate Death Match had arrived and across Creation the weight of the moment could be felt. Hell was quiet, its torture machines abandoned, its instruments of pain abandoned in the dust. Confused souls wandered about in a daze, looking for their tormentors, not knowing that they were all up in Madison Square Garden. Some of them tried to figure out why enormous, newly-installed video screens were broadcasting static, but most just sat in stunned silence. Their quiet disbelief filled the caverns, tunnels and pus volcanoes of the Inferno.

In Heaven, it was a nonstop party. The blessed, who were being allowed to watch the Ultimate Death Match for the first time ever, were reveling in the sudden novelty. Video screens blared and blenders whirled as margaritas were made, loud laughter echoed off the cloudbanks and lounge chairs were arranged in rows.

In Madison Square Garden, the angels were rhythmically chanting and clapping.

“We will, we will, rock you!” they shouted, stomping and clapping so hard that they shook the arena walls.

Across from them, the demons squirmed miserably in their tiny, too-tight devil suits. A few of them had “Go Heaven!” signs duct taped to their hands and angels strode the aisles and exhorted them to brandish their signs with more vigor. All Creation held its breath, waiting for what would come next.

Pope Benedict XVI, his gold mitre catching the light, crawled under the ropes and walked into the center of the ring. The lights went down, leaving him standing alone on a brightly lit, square island in the middle of the vast darkness of Madison Square Garden.  A microphone was lowered and the Pope grabbed it.

“Angels and demons,” he shouted. “ Souls of the blessed and souls of the damned. Every celestial and supernatural being in all of creation. Welcome to...the Ultimate Death Match!”

The demons gave pallid little cheers, but the angelic crowd went wild. A glutton for attention, the Pope surfed the waves of wild adulation until they had reached their highest point and then his voice dropped in over the roar.

“Tonight, for the first time in history, the Match is being broadcast throughout all of the celestial realms. The eyes of millions – billions! – are upon us now as we gather to witness the ultimate wrestling event, the biggest athletic spectacle ever recorded in the annals of eternity, the final match-up between angelic creatures of light and grace and dirty, hairy fiends who have crawled out of the very pits of torment and despair themselves. Tonight we will witness Heaven vs. Hell, with the winner taking Hell! At stake is the very fate of Creation itself!”

He caught a gnarly avalanche of applause that broke into a wild wave of cheering, and then he pumped it, carving down its shimmering face until the moment was ripe and he let them have the biggest, loudest, clearest shout from his magisterial voice.

“And now, wrestling for Heaven, please welcome the patron saint of chivalry, paratroopers and fighter pilots, patron saint of all Germany, the General of God’s army, the Thing on Wings, Archangel Michael, the gentle destroyer, here tonight to rock your soul!”

A tidal wave of applause came crashing through the dome of the arena and the entire audience caught the wild wave and rode it down the slopes, the mighty sound reverberating across all Creation as Michael burst out of the curtains and trotted up the aisle to the ring. He was wrapped in a golden cloak so bright that it blinded those who were looking directly at it when the follow spots stabbed down.

Michael grabbed the ropes with one hand and launched himself over the top with both feet, landing in the middle of the ring and shucking his golden robe in one smooth motion. He unveiled his gleaming body and his mighty, snow white wings, unfurling them to their full, fifteen-foot span. His body was brilliantly oiled, shining in the lights, his muscled arms were raised in victory, his tiny gold briefs glittered like the brightest star. He turned one way and then the other, a grin on his face, basting in the waves of adulation coming from the audience. Michael pressed the Pope to his oiled body, giving him a hug of pure joy, then released the old man and raised his arms high once more. The Pope staggered backwards with a giant grease-mark shaped like Michael’s body down his front. The roar of the crowd surged impossibly higher.

After a while, the commotion started to subside and the Pope brought the microphone to his lips one more time.

“And wrestling for Hell, please welcome...” and here the Pope turned to Hell’s entrance with one hand out. The follow spots stabbed down to reveal...nothing.

The crowd screeched to a halt.

There was dead silence.

The Pope tried again.

“And wrestling for Hell...” and he waved his hand again. The crowd was ready to give it another chance but again the follow spots stabbed down to reveal absolutely nothing. Just an empty entrance with the curtains swaying slightly.

The Pope put his hand over the mic and turned to Heaven’s corner, where Michael was being given a towel rub by Raphael.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Go find them,” Michael commanded Gabriel, who bit back his resentment and turned to go.

And then, suddenly, the curtains stirred and the rumpled contingent from Hell stumbled out. Minos was in the back, Nero was in the middle, and in the front was a short, unimposing masked wrestler, clad in an ill-fitting bodystocking.

The applause was underwhelming.

“Okay,” the Pope said. “Fighting for Hell tonight is a Masked Wrestler of unknown abilities. This ferocious little dwarf could be any number of shrimpy dead guys.”

Inside her mask, Mary Renfro was hyperventilating, on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. The follow spots were blinding and she could barely see the aisle in front of her. She locked her eyes onto the brightly lit ring at the end of the two dark tunnels formed by the eyeholes in her mask and tried to steer towards it. All she could hear was her own rapid breathing.

“Maybe it’s Stumpo!” the Pope announced, catching the mood of the crowd, which was baying for blood. “The Amazing Midget. Or Napoleon, one-time Emperor of Europe and known out-of-shape fatty. Perhaps it’s a small dog with almost-human intelligence walking on its hind legs.”

The tiny masked wrestler blundered head first into the side of the aisle, banging its forehead on the metal handrail with an audible Doooonnnnggggg!!!!

“Ouch. That had to smart,” the Pope chortled and the angels in the stands laughed and began to throw nachos at Nero and Minos who were trying to steer the Masked Wrestler up the aisle.

“He’s already having incredible difficulty just getting down the aisle,” the Pope shouted in disbelief. “I can’t believe this is happening. This match is shaping up to be a real dog.”

Derision filled the air as the three idiots from Hell made their embarrassed way to the ring. Michael couldn’t help but smirk as he watched them struggle into their corner, climbing the ropes like retarded children. Twice, Mary lost her footing and fell on her butt. The crowd screamed with laughter. Michael had wanted a match and he had wanted a victory but this was going to be almost too easy.

The Omni Peachtree Hotel was in the CNN Center located in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Upstairs in the Widowmaker Suite, Ted Hunter was getting professionally exfoliated while Frita Babbit sat on the bed watching QVC. She had her cell phone in one hand and a credit card in the other. JP Morgan Chase had advanced her a line of credit against her settlement and so far she had bought a Haan Floor Steamer, a dozen Moulinex Electric Cocktail Makers as “thank you” gifts for the jury, a twenty-eight and a half inch tall wooden Nutcracker, and a Reelsmart Auto Rewind Seventy-Five Foot Hose with Dual Mounting Options. She showed no signs of slowing down.

“The Republicans are like horny dogs,” Ted Hunter said, as his exfoliating technician paused to sharpen her scab stick. “They want to hump your leg so bad.”

“Uh-huh,” Frita Babbit said as a Dennis Basso Faux Fur in Lynx came on the screen.

“You let me work ‘em over with my magic mouth and you’ll be Sarah Palin’s Sarah Palin by the time they leave here,” Ted Hunter shouted to her from the giant, walk-in bathroom. His exfoliating technician re-lit her sterilizing torch and went back to work on his problem elbows.

“Okay,” Frita said from the bedroom.

There was a knock at the door.

“Get that,” Ted said. “It’s probably the champagne, raw oysters, and sexually suggestive Georgia O’Keefe painting I ordered.”

Keeping her eyes glued to the TV, Frita Babbit walked backwards to the door. She reached behind her and opened it with one hand.

“Put it over there,” she grunted.

“I think you’re going to want to turn off that TV,” a familiar voice said. “We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

“Who is it?” Ted shouted from the bathroom.

But Frita didn’t answer. She was staring, open-mouthed, at Satan.

Excerpted from FreeWilliamsburg.com :

“On a brick ass night at Juniper on Berry Street my bro, Keith, said, ‘Why is it that everyone is missing these days?’ True that. There are Voltron-sized levels of absence in the BillyTown community. Where is all of our people gone? Whither the kings of cool? Because coffee shop seats are going un-sitted in. Vintage dishware is going un-bought. Locally microbrewed ales are going un-drunk. Leading to the collective cry of: Whas up?”

Excerpted from DieHipsterDie.wordpress.com:

“The one fucking thing that gave me a single fucking sigh of relief was to see how empty the fucking streets are and how unpolluted the air in La Mission is now that these baby hipsters are all disappearing.”

Excerpted from DirtyDogNiteBlog.com:

“Austin used to have a music scene, now all it’s got are absences. The scenesters, hipsters, hepcats and cool babes have gone MIA. Where are they?”

The ring was an apocalypse of noise as the angels went bananas. They were a rising and falling melody of mayhem, with a darker, less rhythmic bass line of demons mumbling desultory cheers underneath. The eye of the storm was the ring down at the bottom of this well of noise. On one side stood Michael, resplendent and ripped. On the other side slumped Mary Renfro, masked, shoulders sagging, the balled up sweat socks already sliding down her arms and legs to pooch up at her ankles, her wrists and around her midriff.

The Pope stood in the center of the ring and gestured for them both to approach. They met in the middle.

“Now I want a good clean fight,” the Pope said. “Two falls out of three decides who owns Hell. Any split decision will be determined by a Sudden Death Round. I don’t want any eye gouging, no hitting below the belt, and if there’s too much blood I’m going to call the match. Got it? Good. Now shake hands and go back to your corners.”

Despite all that had happened to her, Mary was still capable of wonder. And she was dazzled by the fact that no matter what might happen later she was about to shake hands with an angel. The Archangel Michael, no less. It was the one good thing in all of this terror. She stuck out her hand, which was shaking like a leaf. Michael wrapped his enormous paw around it and squeezed. And squeezed. And squeezed. Mary felt her bones shifting, her fingers crushed into a ball of pain, her cartilage grinding. Michael smiled as her knees buckled and she sank to the mat. The match hadn’t even begun and already he was winning. Mary tried not to sob with relief when he finally released her. They retreated to their respective corners, Mary hugging her wounded fingers to her chest.

“Shake it off, shake it off,” Minos said. He had elected himself to be her coach and he rubbed her shoulders while she nursed her hand.

“Ow,” she said.

“That’s nothing,” Minos said and massaged her fingers. “You just wait until he starts doin’ that to yer head.”

And then suddenly, far too soon, Mary heard the bell ring. It was dim and distant and she almost missed it. Turning, she prepared to meet her fate.

Michael approached the center of the ring, bobbing and weaving, dancing on his feet, as light as a feather and as fast as a butterfly, ready to sting like a bee. Mary hesitated. She was having a hard time seeing. They had all agreed that she would wrestle masked so as to preserve the advantage of surprise, but the mask kept sliding around on her face and it was blocking her vision. She turned back to Minos.

“Is my mask on straight?” she asked.

“Skull Busterrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!” Michael screamed as he bounced off the ropes and leapt into the air, turned his muscular body parallel to the ground and flew high into the air like a ballistic missile, elbows first. Mary turned towards his wild scream and froze in terror as his shadow moved over her, blocking out the lights, blocking out the stadium, blocking out everything in the world as he came down on top of her skull, elbows first. She was driven down. First her ankles gave way, and then her knees slammed into the canvas and her body kept moving straight down and she fell forwards. Sticking out her arms she managed to stop herself from smacking into the mat face-first. Shaking her head to clear it, she staggered to her feet and Michael grabbed her shoulder, locked her arm and hyper-extended her elbow, flinging her into the ropes, chest-first. She bounced off of them and staggered backwards at high speed, right into Michael’s outstretched arm.

“Clothesline!” he screamed as Mary caught his bicep in the back of her neck and went down face-first.

Michael watched to see if she would get up, circling her one way and then the other, pumping his biceps, flexing his hands, pushing breath out of his mighty lungs as he super-oxygenated his blood, making his heart pound. Mary had her back to him as she grabbed the ropes with her two pencil-thin arms and hauled herself to her feet again. That gave Michael an opportunity to grab her ears and pull her over his head, smashing her into the ground again.

“This can’t possibly get any worse,” Mary thought to herself as she stumbled up once more, her entire body stinging.

It got worse.

Michael put the Bionic Elbow Drop on her, he bounced her off the ropes, he gave her Knee Bombs and Strangle Throws. Nerve Stabs and Neck Crushers. Body slams and Head Mashers.

“It’s okay,” Mary thought as she flew threw the air yet again, tumbling head over heels at a shocking velocity. “I can’t die. I’ll just cease to exist for a little while. That’ll be nice, actually. Just to stop existing and rest. I’m looking forward to it.”

She hit the mat and bounced twice.

“Well, you look like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag,” Ted Hunter said as he strode into the bedroom, tying the belt of his robe. “That’ll be all, honey,” he said to his exfoliation technician as he showed her the door.

Frita Babbit sat on the bed, absorbed in a Doris Dalton Line and Crease Diffuser that was a Value of the Day item. She didn’t even notice Satan in the room with her anymore.

“For a woman who was ritually abused in my name she doesn’t seem too concerned to be near me,” Satan said.

“She’s had her pills,” Ted Hunter replied.

“Come on, Ted,” Satan said. “It’s just us now. The cameras are all off. You’ve already won. Who is she? An actress? Someone you planted a long time ago? A musical theater triple threat from Minnesota with a diet pill addiction?”

Ted Hunter grinned and poured himself some minibar Scotch.

“She’s just some random damaged goods that I came across while traveling through Terre Haute, Indiana,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed Indiana.”

“Sure, sure. That state’s nothing but walking daddy issues doped up to the gills on Klonopin. It took me all of thirty minutes to convince her that she had been terribly abused by Satan as a child. But, then again, I think we all feel that way to some extent. You are Satan, after all. You screw everyone up.”

“That’s probably true,” Satan said.

“You’ve come here to threaten me, I assume,” Ted Hunter said, settling down on the love seat. “Tell me all the awful things you’ll do to me if I don’t settle the suit.”

“No,” Satan said. “I’ve come here to ask you to drop your claim.”

Ted couldn’t help himself. He threw his head back and roared with laughter.

“You think I’ll do anything for you after I’ve already got you by the nuts?” Ted Hunter said. “You are an even bigger fool than I thought.”

“Please,” Satan said. “I’m immortal. Hell is eternal. You don’t know what kind of forces you’re unleashing by enforcing this judgment. I’m asking you to let it go.”

“Here’s your Oscar, Ms. Spacek,” Ted Hunter said. “I’m a business man. I look at this deal and I don’t see a single reason to drop it.”

“You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to collect money we don’t have,” Satan said.

“Exactly,” Ted Hunter said. “You won’t be able to pay, so you’ll be ordered to work out a binding settlement. They’re going to look at your assets and there’s really only one of them: Hell.”

“You want to own Hell?” Satan asked.

“Real estate deal of the century,” Ted Hunter said. “And you know what they say about real estate? They just don’t make it anymore.”

He laughed.

“You’re crazy,” Satan said. “What’re you going to do with Hell?”

“I might get someone new to run it for me, or maybe I’ll just sell it to a third party. I bet there are folks out there who’ll pay top dollar for Hell. As for Frita here, she’ll get endorsement deals for Bibles, antidepressants, electric cars and all kinds of crap, and as her manager I’ll get a fifteen percent slice of everything. Plus, my media platforms are already out-grossing last year’s month-to-month figures by five points. I’m in the catbird seat. I’ve got it all, baby. You, on the other hand, are an unemployed jerk.”

“I didn’t want it to come to this,” Satan said. “I loathe melodrama. But you might want to read this.”

He pulled two folded pink invoices from his inside jacket pocket and passed them to Ted Hunter.

“What’re these? Invoices for your bruised feelings and ruffled sensibilities?” Ted Hunter sneered, opening them.

“No,” Satan said. “They’re not.”

Ted Hunter scanned the first invoice and then flipped to the second one. He flipped back to the first. Then he turned them both over. He read the fine print. His face fell.

“This just isn’t true,” he said. “It’s an outright lie, a fabrication, a falsehood. It’s grotesque. It’s un-American.”

“There’s clearly been a clerical error,” Satan said. “We’ve been experiencing a work stoppage and there’s been a bit of a backlog but I’m taking care of that now. It won’t last forever. And in a few months it’ll be rectified. We’ll get to those invoices sooner or later. But I could lose them. We’ll eventually issue new ones, but that should be years down the road. You could both live twenty to thirty more years, easily. But if you insist on enforcing your judgment I’ll have to produce those in a court of appeals. And I don’t think that any court in the world will uphold a judgment awarded to two people who are already dead.”

On QVC, the hosts were hawking Little MissMatched girl’s leg warmers.

“How’d it happen?” Ted Hunter croaked.

“Food poisoning,” Satan said. “There were some really egregious food handling violations on Continental flight one-oh-eight. You two both had the fish.”

“I thought it smelled funny,” Ted Hunter said.

“Should have gone with your gut,” Satan said. And then he plucked the two flimsy, pink papers out of Hunter’s hands. “I’ll hold on to these while you make up your mind.”

“I’ll do it,” Ted Hunter said.

“Good choice, but I’m still holding on to these,” Satan said. “You might decide to go to Terre Haute again.”

Satan was feeling good. He still had an overwhelming list of things to check off, each of them a bigger risk than the one before, but the first item on his list had gone off flawlessly. He’d even gotten to sound tough, which was new for him. He checked his watch: his next secret weapon should be in place by now. And then he just had to hope that Death had done his part.

“Be seeing you,” he said to Ted Hunter and gave a little wave.

Hunter was slumped on the love seat while Frita stared, mindlessly, at the TV set where two QVC hosts showed all the different settings available for the Bethlehem Lights Battery Operated Window Candles. Satan let himself out.

Mary ripped off her mask so that she could breathe. A fine spray of blood and sweat splashed onto the floor of the ring. She was doubled over, trying to get air into her burning lungs.

“Please...” she tried to say, but it came out instead as a blubbering little “Pllsss...” sound. More blood, sweat and spit spattered the canvas. She just wanted to go home. She just wanted to get away from all this pain. She just wanted to cease to exist.

Michael pulled her up by the hair.

“Don’t I know you?” he asked. “You were that little soul who was following Satan around, weren’t you?”

He dropped her to the floor, where Mary lay on her side, gasping. Gabriel handed Michael a towel through the ropes and the archangel wiped the touch of mortal from his enormous hands.

“Violation!” Minos yelled, but no one cared.

Michael knelt down next to Mary’s head.

“I just thought you should know that this is all your fault. You must be the unluckiest, unholiest, most accursed nun in all of Creation. I hope you can appreciate the irony. I know I do.”

He stood up and kicked Mary so hard in the stomach that she slid halfway across the ring, leaving a snail trail of bloody spit in her wake. Lying still, she moved her numb mouth.

“...end it...” she mumbled, and tried to smile through her split lips.

“Here comes the big one,” Michael said, and he grabbed Mary by the scruff of her neck and lifted her up off the floor, dangling her in the air like a sack of old laundry. He drew back one of his massive, sledgehammer fists, ready to drive it into her face. Nero looked away.

“Repent, sinner!” Michael cried.

Suddenly he was dancing from foot to foot. He craned his neck, looking at his feet, dropping Mary to the ground. Slowly, she dragged her broken body to safety and then looked back. There was a beige and brown blur on the floor zipping between Michael’s legs. Michael was squealing as if something was nipping at his ankles. The crowd rustled as everyone strained to get a better look. On principle, several hundred angels began to boo.

Mary hauled herself up by the ropes. The blur was coming at her and then it screeched to a stop and she saw Delilah, Charo’s Chihuahua, standing between she and Michael. Delilah’s needle-like teeth were barred, a tiny soprano growl vibrated in its throat. Michael stared at it, dumbfounded. This animal was small, but it was clearly possessed. Something resembling hope spread its wings in Mary’s chest.

And then Michael kicked Delilah so hard the tiny beast went sailing out of the ring in a perfect arc, heading towards the top tier seats.

“Yiiiiiiiiiiiipppppppp...” it dopplered.

The crowd went wild.

“Do unto others!” They chanted. “Do unto others!”

“Now do you comprehend the forces you have unleashed?” Michael said, turning his attention once more to Mary. He drew himself up until he was massive and unstoppable. He snapped his wings open to their full, fifteen-foot span and they blotted out the lights. He spread his feathers and they got even bigger, the tips of his primaries brushing against the floor of the ring. He advanced on Mary who tried to ward him off with wild swings. Michael easily swatted aside her feeble blows, and then he seized her by the collar and the belt. He lifted her up above his head and then he dropped down onto one knee, slamming Mary’s back across the other. Her spine bent itself into a backwards “C” and she screamed in agony. Casually, Michael threw her to the ground and walked away. He pumped his fists, working the crowd up into a frenzy.

Mary was nothing more than a bag of pain now. How had she come to this? Through her swollen eyes she saw Michael stand on the ropes and rile up the crowd.

“Yeah!” he shouted. “Yeeeaaahhh.”

That was how she came to this, Mary realized. That was how she always came to this. She had wanted nothing more than to live a good life and be left alone in peace and quiet and then came the assholes with their big plans and their perverted conspiracies and their hidden agendas and suddenly she was a pawn in their machinations. How had she come to this? It was the assholes. It was always the assholes.

Wracked with pain, she slowly sat up. Michael caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and he hopped down off the ropes.

“You want more?” he asked. And then to the crowd. “Does she want more??!?!?”

They roared back at him.

Mary pulled her lips back to show her teeth, smeared with blood. Her whole face hurt. Her pupils were dilated to two different sizes but she turned them on Michael, and then she raised one broken middle finger.

“Assholes...like you...make me glad...I quit...the church...”

Michael’s face turned dangerous. He ran at her and leapt into the air with both feet outstretched, perfectly positioned to take her head off of her shoulders with the soles of his boots. The crowd exploded into cheers, sounding like a bag of rocks being violently shaken. They had come for blood and they were going to get it. Michael was thrilled. He had never kicked anyone’s head off before. This was going to be one of those rare new experiences for him. His body sailed through the air like a missile...

...and came crashing down. A searing pain ran through his left wing. He rolled over and looked back. Standing behind him, with one foot mashing his primary feathers to the mat, stood Satan.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I had some business to take care of.”

Michael scrambled to get back on his feet and untangle himself from his overextended left wing. Feathers flew everywhere. Satan knelt next to Mary. Minos and Nero reached for her through the ropes. Satan lifted her beneath her armpits and slid her back to them across the canvas slick with her sweat and blood and a few things that looked, disturbingly, like her teeth.

“Y’r’u...?” she mumbled.

“Good job,” Satan said to her. “ Thanks for stalling him for me, but I’ve got this now.”

Mary smiled and passed out.

“Sir – !” Nero began.

“Sorry,” Satan said. “I’m a little busy right now. Let me wrap this up.”

Then he stood and turned to face Michael.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” the archangel said.

“And rob you of your big moment?” Satan asked. “This is as good as it gets for you, isn’t it? The Ten Thousand Year Plan? Heaven uniting all the celestial spheres with you at the helm? The Creator will be so very proud of you.”

“Do not use His name in vain,” Michael said, his face black with fury.

The violence radiated from Michael in thick waves, saturating the brains of the spectators. The archangel had hated Satan for so long, had planned his downfall so carefully, had readied himself for victory so thoroughly that now, faced with the Adversary himself, Michael was the very embodiment of righteous violence.

“I’m going to unmake you,” he growled. “You are going to be destroyed.”

“Of course you’re going to destroy me,” Satan said. “We’re wrestling. You can beat me in wrestling with your hands tied behind your back.”

“Then take your beating like a proper deity.”

“You’re lucky it’s wrestling. You couldn’t beat me in anything else,” Satan said, loudly. The stands quieted down so that everyone could hear. Satan was insulting the Archangel Michael? “You couldn’t beat me in judo, say. Or karate. Or even Krav Maga.”

Michael blinked at Satan in disbelief.

“You can beat me in wrestling, but so what?” Satan shouted, addressing the crowd. “You wouldn’t stand a chance against me in tae kwon do, or boxing, or capoeira or ninjitsu. You’d go down like a punk if we were kickboxing. You’re too chicken to go up against me in Indian leg wrestling, or one-armed boxing.”

He was jeering now, practically thumbing his nose at Michael. And if there was one thing that Michael could not tolerate, it was disrespect.

“I could beat you in kickboxing,” he said.

“Could not,” Satan said, dismissively.

“Could too.”

“You wouldn’t stand a chance,” Satan said. “Not if you went up against me in wing chun, or wushu, or tai chi. I’d mop the floor with you in muay thai. Or silat. Or Zulu stick fighting.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Michael yelled, his face turning from red to black. “You can’t fight. I’d beat you in any one of those.”

“Oh, BS. Everyone knows you’re lying.”

“I am not lying.”

“I could beat you in savate.”

“I’d win at savate!”

“I could beat you with rapiers, or quarterstaffs, thang-ta, gymkata, Nuba fighting, jeet kune do, Defendo or kenpo.”

“I could beat you at all of those,” Michael yelled. “I could beat you at anything. ANYTHING!!!!”

“Alright then,” Satan said. “Then I challenge you – ”

“Challenge me to anything! I’ll beat you!”

“I challenge you – ”

“Bring it. Briiiing it!!!”

“I challenge you to a board game.” Satan said.

“Yeah, I’ll – what?”

Throughout Madison Square Garden the feeling rippled out. The sensation spread through the stands, it crept into skulls and raced up and down spines. The demons stirred. They lifted their heads, they began to look a little less defeated, they began to rustle with meaning. Because all through the Garden there was the feeling that Michael had just walked into something. A flicker of fear fluttered across faces of the Heavenly Host.

“What just happened,” Barachiel said, from the Sky Box. “What has he done?”

Down in the ring, Michael shook it off.

“Fine. Fine!”

“And my champion,” Satan said, like a showman, like PT Barnum, like conmen and pool hall hustlers and grifters and card sharps all down through the ages, “Is the Minotaur.”

A bovine bellow tore through the air. Follow spots whirled wildly as they sought its source and then they caught movement by the curtains from Hell’s locker room and by the time they had pinned it down the Minotaur was halfway up the aisle, rushing the ring.

It’s easy to forget how mighty and terrifying the Minotaur is when you’ve only seen him in Hell. On a rocky plain, surrounded by the bleached bones of the damned and with a river of boiling blood gently burbling nearby the Minotaur just seems like one more terrifying object in a blasted landscape of despair. But on Earth, in Madison Square Garden, surrounded by handicapped seating and beer vendors and OSHA-mandated “No Smoking” signs, he was a bizarre, snorting, screaming, blood-soaked vision of pure horror.

The Minotaur snapped the ropes around the ring and they whipped through the air and slapped the mat. He tipped back his bull’s head and roared, his wiry mane dangling down his back, his bony horns trembling with rage. And then he reached one massive, horned hand into his loincloth and he pulled out a familiar deck of cards and lifted them up above his head.

“Me challenge you...to UNO!!!” the Minotaur roared, and the blood of the Archangel Michael ran cold.

Just outside the Gates of Hell, stacked in Hell’s Vestibule, there was a mountain of tractor-trailer containers. They towered over the mostly-empty Vestibule, silent and inscrutable. No wheels, no undercarriages, just enormous, corrugated metal boxes stacked up almost to the ceiling. They were as mighty and mysterious as the monuments of Easter Island. Like suitcases left unattended at an airport they were full of secrets and potentially dangerous. And down at the base of this mountain of cargo containers, Death sat on his Rascal. Next to him stood one of his minions.

“Thanks for this,” Death said.

“It was fun,” his minion said. “But I have to get back to Chernobyl now.”

“I understand,” Death said. “It was one last ride. But we did good. All of us. We paid our debt to him.”

And the two of them left, one walking and one rolling, going off into the great unknown.

Behind them, the tower of cargo containers sat and the wind howled around them. Softly, faintly, quietly, something inside of them rustled.

“Uno!” the Minotaur roared.

Michael threw down his cards in disgust. A rickety bridge table had been dragged out from some forgotten store room and dropped into the middle of the ring. Folding chairs were set up on either side and in one hunched the Minotaur, snuffling with delight over his victory. In the other sat a miserable Michael.

“Look,” he said to Satan. “I didn’t mean that I could beat you in board games. I meant in close personal combat.”

“So you’re giving up?” Satan asked from his corner. “You’re admitting defeat?”

“No, but – ”

“You said you could beat me in anything. Well, this is anything. You changed the rules, not me.”

“This is ridiculous,” Michael snapped. “Fight me in something else.”

“Minotaur?” Satan asked.

The Minotaur reached into his loincloth and pulled out a blue plastic box.

“Minotaur fight you in Battleship!” it roared.

Forty-five minutes later:

“D-14!” the Minotaur bellowed.

“You sunk my battleship,” Michael grumbled.

“Ha ha! Minotaur is best!” the Minotaur roared, standing up and raising his burly arms over his head. “Minotaur beat you in everything!”

The angels in the stands were getting bored. Board games were no fun to watch, especially when their champion had been winning up until he started playing them. But on the opposite side of the arena, in the stands where the demons huddled, something was stirring. Prince Vassago, who had always been known for his good nature and razor sharp claws, wrapped one talon around the “Blessed Michael!” placard that had been duct taped to his paw and he pulled. With the sound of a thousand hair follicles being torn out by the roots, it came free and he threw it to the ground. Then he rose to his full height of two feet tall, climbed up onto his chair and screamed:

“Satan rules!”

His voice was high and reedy but it carried across the massive arena. Angels patrolling the aisles heard it and they began to converge on him, whips in hand. They would brook no dissent. And then, from another part of the demonic seating section, there came another voice shouting:

“Satan rules!”

The angels stopped and turned their mighty, gleaming heads trying to determine where this latest rabble rouser was seated. Two of them continued to converge on Prince Vassago, and three started off in the other direction looking for this new rebellious demon.

“Yeah, Satan rules!”

A third demon, now. More angels were in the aisles, more whips were unfurled, more celestial eyes scanned the cheap seats trying to determine the location of this minor uprising and crush it.

Down in the ring, Satan stood in his corner with Nero and Minos and he heard the voices. He couldn’t smile, not yet, but it was what he had hoped for.

“Did you hear that?” he said to the Minotaur. “They’re cheering for you.”

“Cheer for Satan,” the Minotaur said.

“And who do you think Satan’s champion is.” Satan asked. “Who do you think is mighty enough to defend all of Hell without having to use physical violence? Only the Minotaur.”

The Minotaur drew his black lips back and bared his yellow teeth in something that approximated a grin.

“Satan rules!” came a fourth voice.

The Minotaur reached into his loincloth again.

“You no admit defeat to Minotaur?” he asked Michael.

“I’m hardly defeated, you overgrown cow,” Michael said.

“Then me challenge you...to Monopoly!”

The Minotaur slammed a Monopoly board onto the tiny bridge table and the blood drained out of Michael’s face.

“No, not Monopoly,” he said. “ Anything but Monopoly. It’s a terrible game. It’s horrible. It takes forever and everyone plays with different rules and it...it brings out the worst in anyone who touches it. No Monopoly.”

“You say you beat Minotaur in anything!” the Minotaur hooted. “Now you beat Minotaur in Monopoly or you a dum-dum fathead!”

“He’s got you there,” Satan said, from the sidelines. “Is Heaven’s champion a dum-dum fathead?”

Michael didn’t move.

“Minotaur let you be car,” the Minotaur said. “Minotaur be doggie. Pope be banker”

And he set up the board.

The second it was evident that Monopoly was going to be played the demons began to cheer in earnest. One stood up, and said, “Yay.” And then others and then more and more and more until the hideous sound of their hopeful cheers issued from every deformed mouth, from every face-hole and noise organ, every trunk and snout. From every multi-mouthed horror and flatulent, Hellish sphincter came the roar and bellow of Hell’s cheerleading squad as every awful demon cheered the Minotaur. Because there is no game more demonic, more torturous, more beneficial to Hell’s interests than Monopoly.

The angels tried to control the demonic side of Madison Square Garden, laying about them with their whips but then the growling, screeching, cawing, hooting, hollering, ululating swarm of demons made them step back and soon, like rich white people abandoning the inner cities for the suburbs, they fled to their side of the stadium for their own safety and protection. Among the demons a new feeling was spreading. The demons were feeling it for the first time in months. Years. Maybe even centuries. They rolled on the ground, they jumped up and down, they pumped their appendages and sprayed their victory stenches. They were drunk on hope. And the Minotaur wasn’t going to let them down.

In the first round, he rolled double sixes, bought the power company and then rolled a four, landing on St. James Place. He bought both of them, snuffling to himself in delight at having bought some of the most commonly landed on properties in his first move. Michael ignored the Minotaur’s chuckles of triumph and rolled a four: Income Tax. He paid two hundred dollars into Community Chest. On his next move, the Minotaur rolled a four and landed on Free Parking, scooping up the money Michael had just put down. Throughout the stands, the demons cheered. The angels booed, but their booing had a nervous quality to it that hadn’t been there before.

“That’s not fair,” Michael said.“You can’t land on Free Parking the first time around. That’s not how it’s played.”

The Pope checked the rule book. Nothing there about not landing on Free Parking the first time around.

“The move stands,” he pontificated.

The Minotaur grinned. The demons cheered louder. Michael sulked.

The game was afoot.

Inside the Sky Box, Barachiel was stress-eating kettle corn.

“How do we win?” Raphael asked. “I mean, what’s the plan? Can someone get Gabriel up here? Or Michael? They’ve got a plan for this, right.”

“I think we are outside the plan now,” Jegudiel said.

“Outside the plan? That’s not good. That’s really, really, really not good,” Raphael gibbered.

“I fear that our brothers have overreached,” Jegudiel said. “It is what I warned you all of.”

“Shut your mouth!” Barachiel screamed, bits of kettle corn spraying from his lips. “Just shut it, you smug, thirty-six-winged twit! We’re not beaten yet. We’re at war. This just means the fight is going to go harder.”

“I am only stating the obvious,” Jegudiel said. “All along, you have chosen to be blind to the flaws in Michael’s plan. After all, we are fighting the Deceitful One. He is as cunning and resourceful as we are. Maybe even more so.”

Barachiel grabbed Jegudiel by the collar and pulled him forward until their noses were touching.

“If you want me to rip off your wings and feed them to you, then you just keep talking,” he snarled.

“Violence is the first resort of tiny minds,” Metatron said. “This is an interesting position in which we find ourselves but it is still one in which Satan has only the appearance of a chance. Not an actual chance.”

“You shut up, too,” Barachiel said, dropping Jegudiel to the floor.

“I am merely agreeing with you in my own way, brother,” Metatron said. “Satan cannot win this simply because he cannot oppose the will of God. It is impossible.”

In the corner of the Sky Box, Phanuel spun and his flames blazed higher. A series of distressed crystalline chimes filled the glass-walled room.

“Phanuel makes a good point,” Jegudiel said from where he lay on the floor. “Have any of you considered that perhaps our defeat is the will of God? Has anyone discussed this with God himself, or have we just been taking Michael’s word for it? Remember, pride has always been our greatest sin.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Uh, guys,” Raphael said. “Is he right? Seriously? Did we just screw up?”

In the ring, Michael’s car landed on Park Place. Which was owned by the Minotaur. And had two hotels on it.

“You owe Minotaur one thousand, two hundred dollar,” the Minotaur said.

“I don’t have it,” Michael said, grumpily.

“Can mortgage properties,” the Minotaur said.

“The game is over,” Michael huffed.

“As long as you have properties to mortgage, the game continues,” the Pope said.

Michael looked at his properties and began checking the mortgage prices. The Minotaur controlled all the orange and light blue properties, as well as all four railroads, both utilities and Boardwalk and Park Place. If Michael mortgaged everything he could raise enough to keep his car spinning around the board for another hour while the Minotaur drained him of his cash. Soon he’d be making stupid deals and trading properties just to stay in the game. There was no way for him to win.

He had planned. He had plotted. He had walked through The Room and spoken to God himself. And now this. A part of his mind whispered, “It’s your own fault,” but he quickly shut up that part of his mind. That part of his mind was stupid and ignorant and not fair, it wasn’t fair, this wasn’t fair, he was Michael the Archangel, the Right Arm of the Heavenly Host, the Sword of the Lord.

“Arrrgghhh!!!!!” he screamed, standing up and flipping the table.

It flew into the air and exploded into flames.

“I may lose at board games but I will always win at physical violence,” he screamed and with a mighty flap of his wings he took to the air.

“To Hell! To Hell, my brothers! What we cannot win here, we will win by main force.”

Chaos exploded in Madison Square Gardens.

“To arms, my brothers! To arms!”

Golden trumpets sounded, and throughout the stadium the Heavenly Host took to the air in a flapping of wings. Heaven’s armory was opened and swords of fire, golden armor and holy hand grenades poured out.

In the Sky Box, Jegudiel was aghast. Phanuel spun rapidly in a panic.

“What’s going on?” Raphael gibbered.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Barachiel sneered. “Maybe Michael never shared his plan with all of you weak-livered Frenchmen, but I always knew that if we were defeated in the ring we would take Hell by main force. The Ultimate Death Match is only a formality. It may have hastened the legitimacy of our occupation, but it was never necessary.”

“You are making a grave mistake,” Jegudiel cried.

“Get stuffed,” Barachiel said and then the Sky Box windows exploded outwards at the sound of his Holy Shout and he flew into the air that was thick with feathers and gold and anger and the massed military might of Heaven’s Army streaming down to the escalators that led to the Gates of Hell.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” Raphael babbled in a panic. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

By the ring, Minos and Nero held on to the ropes as the air was churned into a hurricane by a thousand, thousand flapping wings.

“Sir, we must get to Hell and protect the Gates,” Nero shouted.

But Satan ignored him. He was sitting on the edge of the ring watching the chaos, seemingly unconcerned. He drummed his heels and hummed a tuneless little melody to himself.

“Sir?” Nero cried.

Minos was trying to direct the demons, who lacked the advantage of flight, trying to get them to follow the angels into Hell and join the battle there. He was hoping to head them off at the Gates. Nero struggled over to Satan and pulled his sleeve.

“Sir, we must hold the beachhead,” he said. “Come on! Bring the Minotaur!”

Satan looked back at the Minotaur who was totaling up his points. The Pope had kept careful score and the Minotaur looked like he was satisfied with his clear victory.

“Did we win?” Satan shouted to him.

“Minotaur win big!” the happy Minotaur snorted back.

Satan smiled.

“Sir?!?” Nero said.

“Relax, Nero,” Satan said. “It’s all under control. They’ve forgotten just what it was that got me thrown out of Heaven in the first place.”

“But they’re going to take Hell,” Nero said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Satan said.“And tell Minos to stop panicking. They may get to Hell, but I don’t think they’re going to want it.”

“Onward, Christian soldiers!” Gabriel called as the Heavenly Host smashed into Hell’s Vestibule.

The vanguard of the avenging Heavenly Host were led by Michael and next to him was Gabriel. A little further back, Barachiel brandished his twenty-foot sword of fire. Phanuel hung a good way back, more of an observer than a participant this time. And then the flying column of angels ran smack into the mountain of cargo containers. They fluttered in disarray for a moment as more angels poured down behind them and began to jam up the Vestibule.

“What are those?” Gabriel asked.

“Care you not!” Michael proclaimed. “Destroy them in the name of the Lord!”

He raised his mighty sword and brought it down on the containers, and such was the power of his will that it split the first door in two, cleaved the second and then the shockwaves of his willpower burst the locks on all the rest. As one, all two hundred doors opened and a smelly tide poured forth.

At first the angels were confused. They fluttered and flapped backwards instinctively recoiling from the avalanche of jeggings, pomade and body odor that seemed to spill out in an unending flow. And then they saw what Michael had accidentally unleashed.

“Hipsters!” Gabriel screamed, in a panic. “Don’t let them touch you.”

What is it about the hipster that inspires such panic in the hearts of angels? Perhaps it is their devotion to all that is ugly and cheap? Perhaps it is their trendy cynicism or their inattention to personal hygiene? Those may all play a part, but really it is much simpler than that: hipsters are a negation of God. They worship a false idol called Trendiness, and their god is the God of Emptiness. The God of Nothing. The God of Plastic. Why is there a Creation? Why is there something instead of nothing? If the hipsters had their way, there would only be nothing. They are poison for all that is holy. Their very existence is a slap in the face of God. They are the darkness. They are unclean. They are horror.

And here was a horde of them. A human avalanche of hipsters, none of whom believed in God, all of them angry and maddened at being locked in tractor-trailers for so long, all of them dead. Zombie hipsters, hand manufactured by Death and his minions in their final act of loyalty to Satan. A boiling, writhing, churning sea of hipsters rising up to drown the Heavenly Host.

The angels were separated from one another, they were pushed back and the bulk of them panicked and tried to flee. The sky was filled with feathers set alight by flicked American Spirit and Parliament Light butts. Barachiel laid about him with his sword but he was overcome and they held him down and gave him a fauxhawk and pierced his nose, rendering him ridiculous even to himself. Phanuel tried to escape but hipster hands dragged him down and turned him into a wagon wheel coffee table. He spun and chimed desperately but to no avail. Michael saw Gabriel just make it out of the Vestibule before a hundred hands with ironically applied black nail polish dragged him back by his wings.

“No,” he screamed. “Nooooo.”

The hipsters had no respect for authority. He felt them ripping his wings from his back.

“I’m going to mount these over my absinthe bar,” he heard one of them say. “Near the rack from that ten point buck I bought at Goodwill.”

Michael struggled mightily, but no one could stop the hipsters. They were merciless.

It was a total rout. And somewhere in the confusion, Satan slipped away. Nero, Minos, Mary and the rest would not see him again for some time.

Hell’s victory celebration was just like every other party since the dawn of time. It started with refreshments and blender drinks and some awkward standing around, and then someone shoved someone else, and there was a fight, and the food ran out and the mixers went next and soon the blender drinks were just ice and tequila and then someone was crying in the bathroom, and the music got turned up really loud and before you knew it the whole place was trashed and a full-blown party was in swing.

Fortunately, they were in Hell, on the banks of the Acheron River, and a little trashing was hardly going to be noticed. All of Hell was a wreck. The Mall of the Unbaptized was a shattered ruin, the piers where Charo’s pink inboard had ferried the souls of the damned was a jagged series of leaning pilings, the Reeducation Camps had been lit on fire by drunk demons. The sky was dark with smoke. Everyone felt right at home. Even the Minotaur seemed happy.

Nero looked around. Over on one side of the party, Mary sat in a wheelchair, drunk for one of the first times in her life. Minos was introducing her to the demons who were all, now that they were freed from Heaven’s influence, acting extra-demonic. Mary tried to pay attention, but her jaw was wired shut, she was on her third pina colada and her second Demerol and she only had one limb that wasn’t in a cast. She let her mind float along on top of Minos’s words like a happy little raft drifting on the ocean.

The Minotaur was taking on all comers in Yahtzee, and his bellows of, “Yahtzee!” split the air. But he could barely be heard over the J-pop stylings of the Seven Deadly Sins. They had rolled up that morning, fresh from their Japanese tour.

“What happened?” Envy had asked. “This place is a wreck.”

They’d brought back presents: disgusting and inedible candy from Japan that no one wanted. Later that afternoon, two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had called and they were coming home early.

“So, I guesh it all worked outh,” Mary slurred, wheeling her way over to Nero. “‘Cept fer the whole Hell being totally destroyed thing.”

“We have one hundred million dollars,” Nero said. “All sitting in the Prince of Darkness Defense Fund. Satan hinted that he had a way to get it for us before he vanished. Can you imagine what we could do with one hundred million dollars?”

“Lemme rebuild it,” Mary said. “With thash much money I woan haveta go to Home Depot and pick up a bunsha Mexithans. I can hire good people. Do it right.”

“Give me a proposal tomorrow and we’ll talk.” Nero said. “If you remember this conversation after you wake up.”

They looked out over the mosh pit where hundreds of hipsters were nodding their heads ever-so-slightly in time with the music.

“Whas’ gonna happen to them?” Mary asked.

“I’ve been talking to Death about it,” Nero said. “While he swore never to be Death again, he didn’t say anything about not training new Deaths. Frankly, I can’t think of anything more horrible than an army of undead hipster Deaths.”

Minos joined them and shuddered.

“Hundreds of th’ horrible things running around.” he said. “Makes me wanna puke.”

“I think we can turn them into a real workforce,” Nero said. “You know, I never thought I’d say this but things are starting to turn around for us. It’s a good day to be in Hell.”

And just like that, a demon brought Nero the phone.

“Hell speaking.”

“Nero, it’s me,” Satan said.

“Sir! Where are you? Things are going wonderfully down here, we’ve got – ”

“Listen,” Satan said. “I’m going to disappear for a while.”

“But, sir, you can’t. We have to rebuild.”

“I need to get out of the rat race,” Satan said. “Recharge my batteries. Do you know how long it’s been since I designed a new torment? I’m going to Cleveland. Or maybe Darfur.”

“But sir,” Nero said. “All the money for rebuilding. You never told us how to access it.”

“Right,” Satan said. “About that money.”

“Yes?”

“I embezzled it.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m Satan. It’s what I do. If there’s any left when I come back I’ll give it to you. But I don’t think there’ll be any left. I’m flying first class.”

Nero felt a headache beginning.

“You’ll find a way, Nero,” Satan said. “Besides, when have we ever needed money? Hell has always been about shoddy workmanship and poor construction.”

“Sir, this is all so sudden.”

“I’ll see you around. Good luck with Hell. You’re in charge until I get back.”

Satan hung up. Nero stared at the phone for a minute.

“Wha?” Mary asked. “Wha? Wha?”

“He embezzled all the money. Now he’s run away. We’re broke.”

“So I’ll go to Home Depot an’ hire alla Mexithans,” Mary said. “They do alla construction everywhere, anyways.”

“What are you so happy about?” Nero grumbled.

“Imma ex-nun who was impregnated by Satan, committed suicide, got beaten up by the Archangel Michael and I can still drink pina coladas,” Mary said. “The glass is startin’ to look half full to me.”

“Childish,” Nero grumbled.

“Hello, cutie pies,” a voice sang out.

They all looked up.

Crawling out of the Archeron river, burned and oil-covered, drenched and wounded, disheveled and looking like twenty miles of bad country road, was the unmistakable figure of Charo.

“I am back from the bottom of the big bad river,” she said. “And boy are my arms tired! Ha ha!”

“They killed ya,” Minos said.

“It take more than that to kill pretty Charo,” Charo said. “I work county fairs in the Midwest for long time in the Eighties. After that, this is kid stuff.”

She noticed Nero.

“What is problem with little fat Roman emperor? Why he make the sad poopy face?”

“Satan embezzled all our money and took off,” Nero said. “Hell is in ruins. We’ve replaced Death’s minions with an army of hipsters and we’ve got two million backlogged souls that we have to process.”

“You know what that sounds like?” Charo said.

“What?” he asked.

“It sounds like time for a songing!”

She put her fingers to her mouth and let out a loud whistle. There was a yipping from far away and the ranks of drunk demons parted to let through Delilah, her Chihuahua, who came charging across the rocky plains carrying a guitar in her mouth.

“Hello, little puppy,” Charo cooed, taking up her guitar. “Who wants some ‘Hava Nagila’?”

And she began to play. It didn’t take long for all the demons to join in, and by the time they were singing it the second time around they had Nero up over their heads in a lawn chair and were carrying him around the smoldering, burnt ruins of the Reeducation Camp and things didn’t look quite so bad, after all.

Satan leaned back in his first class chair and smiled. He’d never been in first class before and it was absolutely, wonderfully horrible. It wasn’t so much the pina coladas they brought him before take off, and it wasn’t the fact that he got to eat off of real plates with real silverware. What really elevated the experience was that all the economy passengers had to troop past him on the way to their seats with envy churning in their guts.

A sudden idea for a new torment seized him and he called for a pen and paper. For the envious, he could restructure their tortures so that they were split into two groups. Having their tongues crushed by sharp rocks would feel so much worse if other, randomly chosen, envious were getting Swedish massages nearby. The envious getting Swedish massage would become all stressed out from watching the tongue crushing, and the ones getting their tongues crushed would be envious of the ones who were getting Swedish massage. It was too horrible for words, and it was the first new torment he’d come up with in centuries. Just like that, his brain relaxed and unclenched like it had just been lowered into a warm bath.

The Captain announced that they were ready for take-off and the enormous 747 taxied down the runway as the sun set all pink and gold. In the overhead compartment were two bags containing a hundred million dollars, and in Satan’s head new ideas for torments were gushing like a slot machine payout. And somewhere, if he strained, he could hear an angel crying. He’d spanked their butts and won, mostly by cheating. It made him smile.

Satan leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and let the feeling of satisfaction ooze down his spine and out into Creation. It was broadcast across the planet like radio waves, penetrating all the dark, forgotten, miserable places, reaching all the dark, forgotten, miserable people. It went out to all the blasphemers, from the Roman Catholic schoolboys in Ireland putting on their first condoms, to the Muslim girls wearing bathing suits in Saudi Arabia; from the unhappy Sudanese women illegally selling millet beer to send their children to school, to the Orthodox Jews sneaking a piece of bacon; from the Southern Baptists cruising gay bars to the Pentecostal lesbians holding hands with their secret girlfriends, they all felt it.

In the hearts of all these sinners, and in the hearts of all the heretics, and the blasphemers, and the con men, and the strippers, and the furries, and the freaks, and the Goths, and the leather daddies and the sugar mommies, and the divorced and the damned and the difficult and the stupid and the surly and the losers and the unforgiven and the unforgivable and the felons and the vandals and the tortured and their torturers and the abortionists and the pot smokers and the licentious and the envious and the slothful and the gluttonous and the angry and the vain.

In all of their hearts a tiny sun blossomed for one brief moment, just a split second of succor in their cursed lives, and all of these heathens heard a message whispered in their ears. A tiny message that let them know that no matter how hopeless things seemed, they had not been forgotten, they were not alone. No matter how often they had failed, they had not been abandoned. It was a simple message, and it was only four words long.

“Smile,” it said. “Satan loves you.”