“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 in
to 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?”
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