by Mark Cain
“I’ll put up with Nick correcting my grammar, but not you.”
“Sorry. Former academic. Old habits die hard.”
“Well, watch it.”
“Yessir.”
“Okay, so my system is unbreakable, and yet it’s not working. Have you come to any conclusions?”
“I, uh, well, I suspect foul play was involved.”
Beezy frowned at me. “This is Hell, you idiot. Of course there’s foul play. Any suspects?”
“A few, yes.”
“Who?”
My face felt warm. “I’d rather not say at the moment. I don’t want to besmirch anyone’s reputation.”
“Besmirch? What kind of a stupid word is that?”
“Well,” I said, taking the awl from my tool belt to clean my fingernails. I thought the nonchalant look was best at this moment. “Besmirch means … ”
“I KNOW what the hell besmirch means! It’s just a sissy word, and I don’t like it, okay?”
“Yes sir, boss! Anyway, I think whoever did this is trying to go toe-to-toe with Satan. So whoever he or she is will get into a hell of a lot of trouble with the Big Guy. For that reason, I don’t want to name the suspects until I’ve done a little more digging.”
“Suit yourself.” Beezy grabbed the awl from my hand and threw it at my chest.
“Ow!”
“Quit your whining, Minion. I was doing you a favor. I saw a red slug crawling out of your pocket, and I just skewered it.”
A red slug? Oh no!
I pulled the awl from where it was stuck in my pocket protector, and a little bit of my chest, truth be told. As I drew it away from me, I saw a small Bik impaled on the tool.
“Bik! Bik!” I screamed, gently pulling the awl from the body of the fire giant. “Are you okay?”
“Oooh,” Bik moaned. Apparently, fire giants were tougher than I thought. Bik had a hole in his chest, but it closed rapidly. He looked up at Beelzebub, shouted “Jævla drittsekk!” - a Norwegian obscenity, I think, though Scandinavian curses are among the few I haven’t mastered - and launched himself in the air, igniting as he left my palm. “I’ll show you red slug!”
“What the hell?” Beezy said, swatting at the flaming creature. Amazingly, Bik evaded Beezy’s swing, something I’d never seen any creature, sitting, standing or flying do before. Beelzebub was deadly accurate with a hand or a flyswatter.
“Lord Beelzebub, that’s Bik, Surtr’s grandson!”
Beezy swung at Bik again. Once more he missed; he was getting peeved. “I know who he is. I recognize him now. So tell the little cretin to back off, before I demolish him.”
“Right. Bik, stop it! That’s Beelzebub, the great Lord of the Flies himself! He’ll crush you like a coke can!”
“No he won’t. Nobody pushes me around. I’ll burn that smartass smirk right off his face.”
My initial impression of Bik as a generally well-tempered young fire giant might have been a bit off the mark. Certainly, his language was deteriorating the more time he spent around me. I decided in future to watch what was said around him. He was only two hundred years old and obviously still very impressionable.
“Kid,” Beelzebub said mildly, “you’ve got spunk.”
“Bik, don’t fly at his f … ”
Faster than thought, Beezy’s hand flew through the air, swatting Bik back to the desert floor.
“I hate spunk.”
“Oooh,” Bik repeated. His flame sputtered and died.
“Jeez, boss!” I said with indignation while picking Bik off the ground. He was unconscious, but seemed otherwise okay, so I stuffed him back in my pocket protector. “You didn’t have to do that. He’s just a kid!”
Beezy drew back his fist threateningly. “You want some too?”
“Ah, no, actually.”
“Then shut up and finish your report so I can get back to my walk.”
This was it, the moment when I needed to question my own boss about his possible culpability. “I … I … ”
“Quick stammering, and spit it out. Is this about the work orders?”
“Yes, yes!” I cried desperately, knowing that I had just chickened out. “I’ve never seen so many come in at once.”
“Not a surprise. It is a cold day in Hell.”
I thought quickly, and an idea came to me. “Yes, but some of these really need to be fixed.”
“Like what?”
“Well, another bulb has burned out on the Sign.”
Beezy cursed in Ugaritic, an ancient Semitic language. While I might not know Scandinavian obscenities, I do know Semitic ones, since my boss’s foul temper gave me an almost daily tutorial. Occasionally Beelzebub could whip up something so obscure that even I couldn’t understand it, but this one he’d used before. It translated roughly as “son of a bitch.”
“And Mussolini’s sewing machine has broken.”
Beezy spat. “Crap. All of Hell’s succubi will soon be without pantyhose. Not that they keep them on any longer than necessary, but they still like the way hose make their legs look. Last thing I need is a bunch of she-demons grouching at me.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought too. Listen, boss, I don’t need Orson right now, so can we let him close off some work orders?”
“Shit, Minion. That again? Just a few months ago, it was, ‘Let Orson rebuild the Stairway to Paradise’ without me. Now it’s, ‘Let Orson do my job.’ What part of his eternal punishment do you not get?”
“Boss, I understand completely, but some of these orders have to be addressed, and I just can’t break away from the mystery of the HVAC system right now. Metaphysical ramifications, right?”
My boss frowned. “Right,” he admitted grudgingly.
I was quiet for a moment, trying to think of something that would make this more palatable to Beelzebub. I brightened as it came to me. “Look, we could still accomplish some good, I mean, some bad here. We could make Edison or Ford his assistant temporarily. One of those two pricks would get Orson’s eternal punishment. And either one is a mechanical genius. He would have to watch Orson fumble around yet be unable to do anything but assist. It would drive him even crazier than it does Orson.”
“Hmm,” Beezy said, scratching his forked beard. “That has promise. Okay, do it, but tell Orson that he has to document each completed work order in a memo to you, with a carbon to me. We don’t want him to think he’s completely in charge.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
Beelzebub conjured up a piece of paper and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a memo to Digger authorizing you to borrow either Edison or Ford, only one, mind you, not both, to help Orson. Now, go away.” Beezy grew back to his gargantuan size and strode off.
In my pocket, Bik was slowly stirring. He was certainly a tough little guy and no doubt soon would be okay. I walked over to BOOH, who had just been sitting quietly, watching with interest as I talked to my boss. He hiked one eyebrow at me. At least, I think it was an eyebrow, though I’m not too sure that bats even have eyebrows. Something was raised, however, and I’m calling it an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I know. I’m a coward. Don’t rub it in. Let’s check out our other two suspects first. Maybe we can prove one of them is guilty and never have to question Beezy at all. And stop rolling your eyes at me!”
I swear, the giant bat was laughing, but he patted me companionably on the back. BOOH doesn’t always know his own strength, though. He knocked me thirty feet.
“Thanks, pal,” I said, getting up. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please take me to the office.”
BOOH was inhaling and exhaling rapidly on the entire flight back up to Five. I didn’t hear any sound, but I was convinced that he was indeed having a chuckle at my expense.
Chapter 10
Orson was sitting at my desk when I returned from the Eighth Circle. His head was resting on his hands as he stared at a six-inch pile of work orders before him. Orson glanced to the door as he hear
d me open it.
I whistled. “That’s a pretty impressive pile of work orders you’ve got there.”
“Yes, and these are only the important ones,” he moaned, as the end of the pneumatic tube that hung above my wire inbox spat out five more jobs. “I’ve set two stacks of low priority work orders on the floor over there.” He indicated the new piles in the corner of our trailer. Each stack was over four feet high. The new piles had joined two dozen other ones nearby. Soon we’d have to toss out a few. It was either that or have the trailer tip over from the weight of the columns of paper.
Things broke in Hell constantly, but not at this rate. I’d never seen so many work orders come in in such a short time.
“I’ve never seen so many work orders arrive in such short order,” Orson said, echoing my thoughts, though with better grammar. “Steve, I know how important the HVAC system is, but some of these can’t wait.”
My assistant started to get out of my chair, but I waved him back down while I perched myself on his stool. “You’re right. In fact, I was just talking to Beezy about this very issue.”
“And?”
“And I’ve gotten his permission for you to handle the work orders while I continue to focus on the HVAC.”
Orson looked startled. “How’d you pull that off? He never lets me do anything on my own.”
“I promised him we’d get you an assistant.”
“I get an assistant?” My friend was even more surprised than before. Then his eyes narrowed. “I get it. This person will suck at maintenance jobs, even worse than you and I do.”
“On the contrary. Both of the possible candidates are extremely handy, far more so than the two of us put together.” I looked up at the ceiling, all innocent. “Of course, whichever one ends up being your assistant, he won’t be able to do anything on his own, which should be frustrating for him, even more frustrating than it is for you.”
Orson’s face lit with understanding. “Now I do get it! This is how you got Beezy to agree to this, right?”
“Right.”
“But you said two candidates?”
“Indeed I did.” I hopped off the stool, got myself some coffee, and rejoined him. “You get to choose who you want.”
“Who are my candidates?”
“Hey, gotta light? I’m hungry.” a tiny voice said from my chest. Bik zipped out of the pocket protector and landed on the desk.
“Glad you’re feeling better.” I threw him a nearly empty pack of matches. “Here, knock yourself out, kid.”
“No thanks,” he replied, lighting a match. “I got enough of that from Beelzebub. My skull is still ringing. Who would have thought that an old fatso like him could be so fast?”
“You should see him with a flyswatter,” I said.
“I'll pass on that too, if it's all the same. One run-in with him is enough for me.” Bik sucked down the flame of the match then lit another.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Orson said. “Who are my choices for assistant?”
I grinned all big and toothy. “Do you have to ask? Why, Big Prick and Little Prick, of course.”
Orson laughed so hard he began to weep, pounding his fist on the desktop and doing other stereotypical actions that indicated extreme amusement. “I should have known you’d find a way to stick it to those two.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, we can only stick it to one of them, though I suppose the unselected will take this as a small blow to his self esteem. So, who is it going to be: BP or LP?”
BP, aka Big Prick, was Thomas Edison. LP, or Little Prick, was Henry Ford. Like I said earlier, they were two of my least favorite people in all Hell. The dislike was mutual. They were envious of my position, because they actually would have liked an eternity of being handymen. Besides being inventive, both of them were good at fixing things.
Orson’s laughter finally diminished to a soft chuckle. “That’s easy. Edison, of course.”
“Well,” I said, slurping down some coffee, “he would have been my choice, but why did you decide on him?”
Orson leaned back in my chair, clasping his hands over his capacious belly. “Back in 1980, about five years before I died, I made a documentary called ‘The Secret of Nikola Tesla.’”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
My friend shrugged. “No reason you should. It was pretty obscure, made in Yugoslavia. This was not the best time in my life, you know. I was peddling Paul Masson wines as a way to make a buck. Same reason I made this movie.”
“Hey, you’re being too hard on yourself. Didn’t you do ‘The Muppet Movie’ at the same time? You had a great cameo in that!”
Orson grinned. “That was a year or two earlier, but yeah, that was fun. Anyway, I played J.P. Morgan in the Tesla movie. A good part of the story was about the AC/DC wars, and Edison didn’t come off very well in the telling.”
“Ah ha! So you’ve been holding out on me. All along, you’ve disliked BP too!”
“Yes, but you’ve done such a good job pulling his chain whenever you’ve had the opportunity that I haven’t seen the need to do anything.”
“Well,” I said in mock exasperation. “I hope that you’ll take up the slack and do your part now.”
Orson grinned mischievously. “Most assuredly.”
I finished my coffee and put down my cup. “Then let’s go collect him.”
“Why don’t we just have BOOH do it?”
“Because I’d like to take a quick look at Digger’s operation.” I didn’t tell my assistant that I wanted to decide for myself if the demon running Hell’s main sulfur mine was really incapable of mucking with the HVAC system.
“You’re the boss, though you know BOOH will have to make two trips.”
“He’s a fine, strapping bat. He’ll manage.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” Bik said, finishing his last light. “I want to touch bases with Grandpa. Besides,” he said, looking hopefully at me, “I’m still hungry. That encounter with Beelzebub really took it out of me.”
I tossed him another matchbox. “Bon appetit!”
As BOOH was carrying me and Orson through the Throat of Hell from Level Five to Six, I managed to yell, “Oh! One thing: Beezy says he wants every completed work order accompanied by a memo, explaining what you did. Original to me, carbon to him.”
Orson shrugged, an impressive accomplishment, since he was in the pincer grasp of BOOH’s claws. “That will slow me down,” he yelled back, “but I write fast, and if it’s the price I have to pay to be allowed to accomplish something, so be it!”
That was all the time we had to discuss these details, as BOOH had already reached the mines on Level Six.
On Earth, you get sulfur as a byproduct of removing sulfur-containing impurities from natural gas and oil. You can also get it from a salt dome by pumping a shitload of really hot water into the dome. In Hell, though, sulfur is as valuable as gold, so Satan has decreed that it be mined in similar fashion.
Hell’s primary sulfur mine was an impressive operation. The entrance was huge, a black shadow of football field proportions on the side of a mountain. A train track - a rather poorly maintained one I knew, since it was my responsibility to do the maintaining - ran through the center of the hole. Periodically, a hand cart fully laden with sulfur would be laboriously pushed from the inside of the mine to the outside by five or six of the workers. The track was big enough that a locomotive could have pushed and pulled the weighty cart. Hell, the track was big enough to handle a Super Chief, but that would have made things way too easy for the mineworkers. Scratching the smelly, yellow crap out of the innards of the mine, bringing the sulfur to the surface, and loading it into trucks whose bays were a little bit too high to just dump the cargo in - it had to be shoveled in by hand - was the eternal punishment for the workers here.
Eternal punishment isn’t supposed to be easy.
On either side of the track, hundreds of damned souls in white coveralls flowed in and out of the mine l
ike so many ants entering and leaving their anthill. Digging in a mine was dirty work, and by the end of the seemingly indeterminable work day, the coveralls would be filthy, with streaks of yellow and black all over them; yet Digger, the demon responsible for the mine, required that the workers report every morning in spotless white coveralls. Since each of these poor bastards had but a single set of coveralls, they spent the evening scrubbing the sulfur, dirt and general grime from the fabric. It could take all night to get the coveralls clean, and many of the mineworkers would show up in wet, but white work outfits.
Putting on wet clothes is its own form of Hell, as everyone knows.
At the entrance to the mine was one of the Underworld’s time clocks, an impressive array of timesheets in hundreds of timecard holders, and a shift whistle. Periodically, the whistle would blow, and an officious-looking demon in a hard hat, holding a clipboard, would grab a microphone and yell into it: “Break time! Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.” Three seconds later though, he’d pick up the microphone again and scream, “Break’s over! Back to it, you lollygagging fuckers!” No rest for the weary in Hell’s sulfur mine.
“Minion!” rasped the demon. “What do you want?”
“Hey, Karnaj. We’re looking for Digger, oh, and Tommy Edison.”
Karnaj took a fat cigar out of his mouth and motioned inside. “You’re in luck. Both of them are together, as it happens, just a few hundred feet inside.” He examined us critically. “Good. You brought your own hard hats. Can’t let you in without a hard hat. Union rules, ya know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know the rules. We belong to the same union, after all.”
That would be the SEIU: Satan’s Employees Infernal Union. Every damned one of us is a member. It’s mandatory, of course, though we don’t get any benefits from belonging. Still, rules are rules.
We walked through the entrance, shouldering our way through the workers, who, depending on the severity of their personal damnation, were digging sulfur out of the walls, ceiling and floor of the cavern with picks, screwdrivers, pocketknives or their own fingers. Second shift had started only an hour ago, but already the hands, faces and necks of these workers, that is, the only portion of skin not covered by the coveralls, and of course the coveralls themselves, were coated with sulfur, making the workers look like golden robots. Nervous golden robots.