Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  Jenna Steele.

  “Oh, fuck,” said the Devil. Please, not her, not right now!

  Jenna cracked her gum and stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

  “Baby,” she cooed at him, head buried against his tie. “Welcome back from jail!”

  He didn’t have the energy, he found, to turn her away. He was still so tired. So he turned and led the march out of the airport, and she came with, popping her gum.

  What if she got on camera—she always got on camera—and Memory saw?

  Shit shit shit, he thought, stalking past the ticket counters, out the revolving doors, into a waiting limo. What could he do about it, with everyone watching? He didn’t want to be filmed with her, but he couldn’t afford to make a scene either.

  Jenna piled in beside him.

  The crew was probably already filming. Those guys were always filming.

  LATER, DURING PRIME TIME, a record-breaking audience watched John Scratch offer a loving couple a million dollars to split up. It was a terrible thing to do. He wasn’t sure if he cared. He wanted to feel better about people, with Memory awake. With Arden back. But did he? Not yet. Maybe.

  The woman took the money and broke her husband’s heart.

  It made people all over the world wonder if their wives and husbands loved them a million dollars’ worth. The show caused a lot of arguments even before the second White Pill commercial was over.

  Memory, watching, sitting up in bed, reached for the remote and turned the TV off.

  “Asshole,” she said.

  HE HOPED THE ZOMBIES out in TV land at least learned a lot of hard, new truths, and he hoped they hurt. He was going to sit in his limo and smoke a bag of weed and think of all the reasons he had to be happy, and that was what the Devil was thinking when he saw Zachary Bull Horse step out of the crowd.

  Zachary sort of bulldozed his way through. He sent a cameraman and an onlooker sprawling, and the Devil saw how strange and pale he looked.

  “Big Zach,” the Devil started to say.

  Something was wrong.

  The Devil saw the gun.

  The gun flashed and banged six times, and he felt every bullet tear through him.

  Good thing the limo was right there. He kind of fell into it.

  He didn’t see Zachary tangle with the bodyguards, but he sensed, as he lost consciousness and felt the limo peel out for the hospital, that the big genius had gotten away. And he was glad. He wanted that fucker for himself.

  He coughed blood.

  He hurt so bad.

  He had never been the same, really, since Gettysburg.

  Everything went dark.

  THEN EVERYTHING GOT LIGHT again, and then dark again.

  They kept having to explain to him that he’d been shot.

  Dark again. Light again. Surgery. Dark again.

  And in the twilight spaces between the light and dark, he knew he was dying. One of those slow, critical-condition deaths, with complications, where doctors said, “He’s a fighter!” But every day you were weaker. You were losing blood, but from where?

  And you weren’t the tough old Devil you used to be, that much was certain. You were tired. When had you started getting tired? Was it just time? All that time? Was it knowing that you’d been wrong about practically everything for all that time?

  Poor judgment became a theme, sleeping and waking. He had an attack of courage one day, and woke up and broke up with Jenna Steele, who shot him.

  Great.

  Dark again. Light again.

  Was he tired because of Love? Loving thousands? Loving lots of women like Jenna Steele, but mostly loving someone who wasn’t there?

  SPEAKING OF LOVING SOMEONE who wasn’t there, where was she?

  Surely Memory had been released from her own hospital by now. Why wasn’t she here?

  He asked the nurses about her.

  “Jenna?” asked the nurses.

  “Not Jenna,” said the Devil. “Memory Jones.”

  The nurses didn’t like it when the Devil asked about Memory.

  “Don’t know,” they said.

  “Well”—he coughed—“could you find out?”

  Grudgingly, they called the hospital in New York.

  “She checked out,” they told him. That was all they knew. She didn’t seem to be on TV, or in the news.

  Then some of the nurses texted their friends and told them Johnny Scratch had been asking about Memory. The All-Celebrity News Channel got wind of it and sent reporters.

  “Call me!” the Devil bellowed at the cameras.

  “Who?” asked the reporters, never looking away from their viewfinders. “Memory Jones or Jenna Steele?”

  The Devil made a cruel face and said, “Jenna who?”

  Wow! The meaner the better! They couldn’t get that streaming fast enough.

  “Jenna who?” flashed out on Web, cable, and satellite within the minute. Flashed all the way down the hall, where Jenna Steele lay lightly sedated in chemical restraints.

  “Baby,” she whispered, crying softly. “Oh, Johnny.”

  Jenna Steele was both smarter and sicker than a lot of people gave her credit for. That night, focusing through a blue-edged drug haze, she leaned out of her bed and reached, straining for her IV. With every ounce of strength and will available to her, she turned up the drip on her chemical restraint, and collapsed back into bed.

  Black sleep came at her with an open throttle. She barely had time to arrange herself and make herself look good before it softly ran her down.

  Bells rang and alarms buzzed, and nurses came. Doctors followed.

  They poked and prodded and shined lights, and announced that Jenna Steele was alive, but would probably never wake up again.

  The announcement flashed out. Millions mourned.

  The Coma Channel staff, recently unemployed, found themselves employed again. They rushed across Manhattan to the hospital, charging batteries and dusting off hidden cameras.

  Jenna Steele was way deep asleep, but by God she’d still be on-screen 24/7. Millions sighed with relief.

  And was it just their imagination, or did they detect, in the on-screen stillness of their sleeping beauty, the dreamy hint of a smile?

  THE DEVIL THOUGHT about Zachary, too.

  Why? Why had he done it? Was he just protecting himself? Old-fashioned fear? A newfound sense of right and wrong? Didn’t matter. You don’t shoot the Devil, man. Why didn’t people know that?

  The Devil imagined eating Zachary, bones and all.

  It made him feel better. At the same time, it brought the dark closer.

  THE REAL DARK, when it finally came for him, wasn’t dark at all.

  It was light.

  A tunnel of light, just like in the movies.

  You’ve got to be shitting me, thought the Devil.

  He felt himself racing up. Racing forward.

  And there was a Light in the middle of the light, the brightest light of all, and it was holding out its bright hands, beaming at him with its eternal, smug-ass face.

  NO WORDS WERE NECESSARY here. Never had been.

  The Light reached inside him, and healed him. Took all his tiredness and uncertainty and petulance, and drained them like used oil.

  Peace flooded him like an April breeze.

  The Devil wept openly.

  Was he forgiven? Could he come back?

  He was forgiven. He could come back.

  Oh God, he thought.

  Behind him, all that horror and pettiness and savagery. So human, so animal.

  Fun while it lasted.

  The Great Light reached for him.

  WHEN THE DEVIL’S MONITOR FLATLINED, the data went out to the nurses’ station, and to each nurse’s beeper. It went to the beepers and cell phones of at least four separate doctors, two life insurance heavies, and a stringer for the All-Celebrity News Channel.

  Even before anyone got the news, the world was a little different. It happened the way subconscious things happen, down deep,
showing up later in the way things look or the way things happen.

  The world without its rebel angel would be a world where rebellion had run out of juice. It was a better world in some ways, and in some ways not.

  It was a world that felt less connected to the things that make rebels in the first place, like appreciating things of quiet value. Like seeing the aurora borealis, flying over mountains, or remembering what it was like to be three. It took self-belief to be a rebel. From now on, that belief would be hard to find.

  It was a world where people felt hollow. Where they watched TV more, then slept more in front of the TV. Where they worried less, which sounds nice until you consider that the dead don’t worry. The dead don’t blush or embarrass themselves. They don’t eat things they shouldn’t or refuse to go to bed on time. They don’t call in sick when they’re not. They aren’t fascinated by firecrackers. They don’t celebrate, because they don’t accomplish anything.

  The world without the Devil was a world without certain kinds of fun. The kind you keep to yourself, like if women’s shoes excite you or you like to eat dirt. It would be a world where the urges were shallow and sleepy, where you wanted to go to Mars less, wanted to get in shape less, wanted to do it doggie-style less.

  Left behind were the Devil’s mistakes and the mess he’d made of things, here and there. Things like always being in a hurry. Things like living with a broken heart until the broken heart felt normal. His absence spread over them like a plague, everywhere over the whole Earth.

  It would be a world with less shouting, less pushing back. Less pushing all the elevator buttons just because you could. It would be the kind of world where people didn’t build pyramids or Empire State Buildings or cars that ran on old french fries.

  It would be like a stagnant pond. The big fish would work themselves to death eating the little fish. It would be a world where the best you could hope was that maybe, just maybe, being eaten wouldn’t hurt very much. It was a shitty kind of hope, the kind that made hope feel like a joke. But in a world without rebels, it would suffice, just because no one had the balls to imagine anything better.

  HEAVEN, FOR THE DEVIL, was like walking into an old photo album.

  Above, the exploding stars.

  (Let there be light!)

  Below, ankle-deep, the waters.

  All around, circling, choir upon choir of divine music.

  And he turned to the brightest of lights, walking beside him.

  And he spoke with more peace and kindness in his voice than ever before.

  He said, “No.”

  HIS HEART CRACKED like a hot rock when he said it, but he meant it.

  Leave his Earth behind?

  Even if it was stupid and hopeless and doomed to rut in its own blood, it was ten times better than this.

  Heaven was the only conceivable thing worse than doom and stupidity.

  It was peaceful, but it was the kind of peace that came with nothing ever changing.

  The Light pulsed. It looked sort of disgusted, and turned away with its nose in the air.

  The tunnel came and sucked the Devil up like a vacuum cleaner, sent him burning like a meteor back to Earth, back to his hospital bed in Ohio.

  Beep, said the machine by his bed. Beep. Beep.

  “Memory?” he rasped.

  Silence.

  45.

  The Colony

  Ohio, and then someplace deep in the woods, 2005

  WHEN HE FELT STRONG ENOUGH, they let him go.

  They wanted him to ride out in a wheelchair. He refused.

  Two insurance thugs materialized, and explained that he could either ride in the chair like a good dog or they could strap him in with duct tape.

  He wasn’t feeling that strong, so he rode.

  When he got to the door, he sniffed the air.

  Hunting.

  What he was hunting was a long way away. It took a while to catch the scent. Longer than it should have. He felt supernaturally limited. He also drew stares.

  The Devil didn’t usually like quick fixes, but he was in a hurry, and frustrated, so he waved his hand and made his limo appear at the curb before him.

  Except it didn’t.

  He tried again. It was like turning the ignition on a dead battery.

  What had happened to the strange, dark powers that came with being the Devil? They weren’t gone, exactly, but they were faded. Was this the price of God’s healing touch? Of falling back to Earth again? Was it like the electricity going out, and would it come back on?

  He caught a bus north, out of town. North and east, until the concrete gave way to grass and fields, and then woods on either side.

  From time to time he sniffed the air, making sure he still had the trail.

  Either the trail was growing fainter, as trails do, or his sniffer was dying.

  Maybe both.

  IN A SMALL TOWN not far from the Massachusetts coast, he followed his nose off the bus. He sniffed the autumn air, which bit, the way New England autumn air does. The cold bothered him more than it should have, so he bought a toboggan cap at a thrift store before letting the trail take him out of town and into the woods.

  It was Memory’s trail, he realized. A smell like burning light and eternity. If he could find her, he would sleep in her arms until he was himself again, and they would live here together until the Earth itself was swallowed by the sun.

  It was Zachary’s trail, too.

  Both trails made him tremble with anticipation. But why were they together?

  Zachary’s trail made sense. It went into hiding, into the woods.

  Why did Memory have a trail at all? Why wasn’t she with him now?

  It felt better to concentrate on Zachary.

  HE DID NOT hurry.

  At sundown, he made a fire amid the roots of an old dead hickory, and watched an open spot between the branches, watched stars pass by.

  Let there be light.

  Lying there with his shirt open, scratching at his chest, he encountered bullet scars. Smooth and bowl-shaped, like moon craters.

  He would cook Zachary Cajun-style, the Devil decided.

  IN THE MORNING, he awoke to find an old woman standing over him. She had long gray hair and bright eyes, and leaned on a tall wooden cane.

  “Morning, Devil,” said the old woman.

  He knew her, he realized.

  It was Zachary’s mother.

  “Mrs. Bull Horse?” he said, clearing his throat, removing his hat. Something in her bearing commanded respect. Something about her was new, since she’d lived in Arizona with her crippled husband, her son, and a garage full of frozen dead people.

  “Don’t you ‘Mrs. Bull Horse’ me,” she snapped. “I know why you’re here, and you and I are going to make a deal before you walk another step. Or I can crack your head with this big goddamn stick, if you prefer.”

  The Devil might have been tired, and his Devil-batteries might have been dead, sometimes, but he still had his pride. He stood, and tried to tower.

  “I’ve come for your son,” he said, “And Memory Jones, too.”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Bull Horse. “So you’ve come for them. It didn’t take a genius to know you’d come for them.”

  “Are they with you? Take me to them.”

  Mrs. Bull Horse raised the mighty cane.

  “Manners,” she warned.

  The Devil almost tore his hat in two.

  “Please,” he said. “Please take me to them.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said. “It’s not like you don’t have reason to see them; it’s not my place to say. We mind our own business here. They’ve agreed to see you, but you have to do something for us, first.”

  The hat came apart. “Who is ‘we’?” asked the Devil. “And what do you mean, ‘do something’?”

  “‘We’ is the people I live with. ‘Do something’ is like singing for your supper. If you want something from us, you give something. It’s an exchange. It’s how things wor
k.”

  The Devil tried to mash his hat back together, to grow it back into a hat, but it refused.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Dig a grave,” said Mrs. Bull Horse, and for the first time he observed that her walking stick was not a walking stick at all, as such, but a sturdy shovel of hand-turned wood and hammered steel.

  She tossed it to him.

  He caught it, and followed her through the woods a ways, into a village right out of a fairy tale.

  A WIDE, GRASSY ROAD passed between rows of stone houses. The village seemed to be built over the ruins of an older village, the Devil saw. Here and there, ruins broke through the earth like stone milk teeth.

  The Devil, even at the worst of times, had a big mouth, and he talked about what he saw.

  “Sure is quiet,” he said. “Everyone must be at work.”

  “They are where they are,” said Mrs. Bull Horse. “About their business, I suppose.”

  They passed the ancient remains of a church, with a cherry tree rooted amid the walls. They passed over a creek, where at last the Devil saw more people. Two men and two women with hand tools were rebuilding a fallen stone bridge.

  “Devil,” they said, and nodded.

  “You don’t have electricity,” observed the Devil.

  “We have it where it’s needed.”

  They passed through trees again, and when the woods thinned out, they stood atop a hill. Weathered gravestones surfaced here and there, overgrown with tall grass and clinging weeds. The Devil saw the sea itself, cold and gray beyond the edge of a rocky cliff. He smelled the rankness of dead things washed up on stone and sand, the familiar funk which the land-bound say is the smell of the sea, but which sailors know is the smell of the shore.

  And Mrs. Bull Horse, pulling her shawl tight with one hand, pointed at the ground with the other, and said, “Here.”

  The Devil let the shovel fall. The hand-forged blade bit weeds and dirt.

  “Who is the grave for?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to know. You just need to dig.”

  And off she went, back downhill, among the trees.

  THE DEVIL DUG.

  Started to, anyhow.

  It took exactly four times driving the shovel into the ground, driving it down with his boot heel, lifting it up and throwing the earth aside, for him to get awfully tired.