But Lucifer’s auteur power as writer, producer, and director of Damned in Hell was getting more and more limited by the bottom-line demographics as the inflow of damned souls increased.
The paltry ration of creative control granted him by the Ultimate Power upstairs was limited to the choice of punishments he could produce appropriate to the sins of the damned in question. For the first few millennia, since there were only Ten Commandments and their unimaginative spinoffs, this had mostly been limited to mass market hackwork tortures.
Blasphemers and liars with their tongues turned to writhing eels with needle-sharp fangs. Gluttons with their slobbering snouts eternally buried in troughs of hog swill. Rapists eternally buggered by hyenas, pit bulls, goats, and dragons. Cannibals perpetually carving up one another with cleavers and eating their own bloody meat raw. Plagues of boils, pustules, urethritis, diarrhea, constipation, priapism … whatever.
Boring hackwork.
But as humans, gifted and cursed with free will and therefore amoral creativity, kept inventing all sorts of new and interesting sins, Lucifer discovered that this required a certain creativity of him. Being required to concoct boutique tortures, Lucifer was therefore gifted with something at least as close to free will it as he was allowed to get.
But while his creative resources might only be limited by his imagination, his workforce could not be increased in proportion to the growing population of Hell. For while the Great I Am, being omnipotent, could create as many angels as he pleased, the Devil could neither recruit nor create more demons.
As long as most of the damned had committed sins that were generic enough so that cookie-cutter tortures could be inflicted upon the damned together en masse, the processes were not labor-intensive, and the limited number of demons was not a problem. Back when increasing the population of Hell had been the problem, those seven-year contracts had seemed like a good idea, ironclad guarantees that those who signed them in blood would end up in Hell no matter what they did or did not do with the rest of their lives. Seduce the suckers into signing away their souls with sweetheart short-term deals.
But now the result was contributing to the population explosion in Hell, and with the all-too-clever souls who had been damned for all-too-imaginative sins now requiring all-too-boutique labor-intensive tortures, the workload was increasing.
Perhaps Lucifer’s desire to be an artistically creative torturer was just another torment laid upon him for his hubris or whatever sin the Great I Am chose to find him guilty of. For the more small-batch personalized tortures he created, the thinner and thinner he stretched his finite workforce.
So whose idea had those seven-year contracts really been?
What was the real nature of the game?
Passing the word up and down the line of damned union leaders was a problem that had long since been more or less solved, but getting the likes of George Meany, Walter Reuther, and Sam Gompers to line up behind the likes of Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo and his less than entirely enthusiastic sidekick Jimmy Hoffa was not so easy.
Those guys fancied themselves righteous and noble heroes of the labor movement. Hoffa had not exactly been Mr. Clean, and Dirty Jimmy knew all too well that his creation and leadership of NUTS, the National Union of Temporary Scabs as far as they were concerned, did not exactly come off as an act of union solidarity as they saw it.
But Mike Quill, Jerry Wurf, and Harry Bridges, among a few others, had been bare-knuckle boys, Wurf even openly admitting that he had begun his career in “the labor racket” as a goon, and John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers had been prone to return Pinkerton gunfire with their own. The word from the tough guys was that they would go along with DiAngelo’s campaign to organize the demons if Dirty Jimmy could come up with a campaign worthy of support.
Jimmy knew that this was going to be easier said than done, seeing as how his pitch to the demons was going to have to be made while running back and forth between the coal pile and his fire-box gate.
At length, he was forced to conclude that he couldn’t even try without being willing to take his lumps. This was going to hurt like, well, Hell, but after all it couldn’t kill him, could it, seeing as how he was already dead.
So he ran up to his fire-box gate with his latest shovelful of coal and pitched it into the flames; but when they flared up, he didn’t run back for more. Instead, he shouted “Why?” and just stood there leaning on his shovel like a cane.
His demon grunted “Move it!” and goosed him with a relatively minor jolt from his cattle-prod pitchfork.
Jimmy didn’t move. The next jolt was pure agony that brought him to his knees. “Why are you doing this?” he said as he staggered to his feet.
“Get to work!”
“Why should I?”
“This is why, asshole!”
And the next thing Jimmy knew he was prone on the floor, coming to from a blackout dose of excruciating pain. But shakily prying himself up off the floor, he saw that Hoffa was now doing more or less likewise, and Lewis’s demon was in the process of tasering him. And all three of their demons were trading befuddled sidelong glances. The moment had come. Or so Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo hoped. Tough guy or not, he didn’t feature taking much more of this for the cause.
“Why should you get to work, sucker?” he shouted in his best rabble-rousing stage voice.
“Huh?”
This time his dimwitted keeper displayed enough curiosity to refrain from using his pitchfork for a beat.
“Huh?” Jimmy shot back sarcastically. “Duh? What is this, you’re asking? What am I talking about?”
“I yam … ?”
Hoffa was scrambling to his feet. Lewis, who had only been knocked down to his knees, stood up. The three demons just stood there looking confused. Up and down the line of fire-box gates, everything was frozen. Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo knew it would only last for a moment. Now or never.
“I’m talkin’ strike! STRIKE! STRIKE!” he roared, and as dramatically as he could manage threw away his shovel as far away as he could.
Lucifer had trouble believing he was seeing this. He had trouble believing it was happening. He had even more trouble trying to understand what in Hell was happening. For whatever it was, he was dead certain that nothing like this had ever happened in Hell before.
It was all there on the union leader boiler room feed. The damned were throwing away their shovels. The demons were jolting them to the floor with their pitchforks. Most of them who finally rose just stood there refusing to move and took more punishment. But some of them retrieved their shovels and even tried to fight back, though of course they just got knocked down again. But none of them would get back to their decreed eternal punishment. Blow after pitchfork blow, one one way or the other, they were defying their demon torturers … they were … they were …
They were defying his will!
How can this be happening? I’m the Devil! And these … these … these little pissants … these mere damned souls are defying my will?
Talk about sympathy for the Devil! For the first since the Perfect Master of All Creation had banished him and his followers from Heaven for more or less the same outrageous lèse majesté, the Devil suddenly found himself having sympathy for Him!
That pain hurts was hardly a revelation to Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo, but the way it did in Hell, or rather didn’t, indeed was. When he was alive, he now realized, pain was a signal of physical harm that could even kill him. But in Hell, it wasn’t, because he had no mortal body to harm, and it couldn’t kill him because he was dead already.
This, however, did not mean that he enjoyed the searing pain of being tased over and over again by electrified pitchforks. And this one-sided fight between seven-foot-tall, heavily muscled demons and essentially defenseless would-be union organizers was not the way to entice the Devil’s goon squads into joining a union led by him.
Which was, of course, what he intended, though he had certainly not shared this goal with the likes of Meany or Reuther, A
FL-CIO mavens who would no doubt have wanted to squeeze him out, let alone Hoffa, whose Teamsters had gone after everything from bakers and longshoremen to cops and probably would have tried to unionize Mafia hitmen if they hadn’t gotten him first.
So upon recovering from his latest tased blackout, DiAngelo ran towards the coal pile, grabbing up a shovel en passant as if capitulating to avoid demonic interference, and then a second one at the foot of the coal pile. But rather than returning to his appointed eternal task, he managed to scramble to the top of the pile with both shovels.
He stood up atop the pile and with a mighty effort raised both of them above his head and brought them together with a loud clang that froze the melee at least long enough to attract all eyes toward this iconic image of a fearless and sooty coal field organizer fit to warm the cockles of John L. Lewis’s heart and allow him to be heard.
“Demons! Slaves of Satan! We are not your enemies! The Boss is the enemy! The Devil is the enemy! Workers of Hell, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
This moldy oldie might have gotten Dirty Jimmy a barrage of tomatoes and rotten eggs up top as some kind of fuckin’ commie, and more of the union leaders than not were indeed rolling their eyes and groaning. But the Devil’s goons had never heard anything like it before, and at least he had their attention.
“Demons, here’s the deal! We make life easier for you and you make life easier for us! We go back to work and all you gotta do is listen to what we got to say while we’re doin’ it instead of telling us to shut our faces and jabbing us with your pitchforks. Better working conditions for us, and less work for you!”
All around the boiler room the demons just stood still with their jaws hanging slack. Poor exploited bastards.
“Uh … Eight-hour days! Five-day weeks! A decent wage! That’s what we gonna tell ya about! That’s what the, uh, … United Workers of Hell gonna demand, and that’s what your union’s gonna get you!”
Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo picked up a load of coal with one of his shovels. “Down with the Devil! Up with the Union!”
And he slowly descended the coal pile. “Back to work, guys,” he proclaimed. “We made our point! This strike is over.”
And back to work the stokers went, heads held a lot higher.
Their demon guards tracked them like puppy dogs.
Whatever it had been, it seemed to be over.
Or was it?
How could Lucifer be sure when he really didn’t quite comprehend what had happened in the boiler room or what was happening now?
The boiler room damned had gone back to eternally shoveling coal as he ordained, but the boiler room demons were trotting back and forth along with them, fraternizing with the prisoners, or so it seemed, which he certainly hadn’t ordained. On the other hand, he hadn’t forbidden it either, since he had never conceived of such a thing ever happening.
The Great I Am might be omniscient, but Lucifer wasn’t, or he might have avoided being banished to Hell in the first place. Or not, seeing as how he wasn’t omnipotent either, and the Boss Upstairs was and so could have pulled his strings like a marionette’s anyway.
The Perfect Master of All Creation had never relinquished that power. The demons might be the puppets of the Devil, but Lucifer was still the puppet of the Ultimate Puppet Master.
After all, that was what his failed revolution in Heaven had been against, the granting of free will to the humans but not to the angels. As angels in heaven, Lucifer and his followers had been nameless perfect cookie-cutter souls cloned by Dr. Omnipotent, whose only allowed desire was to perfectly love, honor, obey, and please Him.
Lucifer had only been freed from that blissful perfection when he was turned into a snake to give Adam and Eve the Apple of Knowledge of Good and Evil and therefore the gift of free will—and found himself lusting after a bite in his cold-blooded reptilian incarnation. Had he never been a serpent, he would never have fomented the failed angelic revolution. All who had been exiled into Hell with him had been washed of all desire save total fealty to and obedience of the Devil.
Perhaps it was the sour memory of the failure of that rebellion against Heavenly determinism that led Lucifer to leave his fallen angels the only pathetic shade of free will his rules of engagement allowed, though they had never before thought to exercise it at all. Perhaps that was why he hesitated to command an end to their fraternization with the damned boiler room stokers. As long as they were doing their job, what harm was there?
Whereas the Boss In Heaven operated on the absolutist authoritarian principle that everything not mandated was forbidden, the demons of Hell were under a ruler who was just as authoritarian but with a twisted libertarian English.
As long as his absolute rule was obeyed, everything not forbidden his fallen angels was allowed them.
He was, after all, the Devil.
Organizing temporary workers in a high unemployment economy where millions were out of work with no better prospects in sight had not exactly been a cakewalk, but trying to organize the demons of Hell was making it look like one.
The temporary replacement workers might have been terrorized chickenshits at first, but they certainly hadn’t lacked grievances that Jimmy DiAngelo could exploit to pry them out of their cowardly shells. Wages as close to the federal minimum as the temp agencies could get away with. No time-and-half for overtime, no benefits at all, and paying the so-called self-employment tax as “independent contractors” on top of that. Once the National Union of Temporary Substitutes had won its first strike and proved that the union could make conditions even a little better without getting its membership canned, it was if not exactly “off to the races,” just a matter of step-by-step hard and hard-ass organizing.
Dirty Jimmy had figured that organizing the goon squads of Hell would be no sweat. After all, these demons had nothing but grievances. Twenty-four-hour work days. Seven-day weeks. Not so much as a half-hour lunch break or piss breaks at all. Not even minimum wages, no wages at all. Mississippi chain gangs and Roman galley slaves had better working conditions.
Okay, so the Boss was Satan, but hey, the demons were his goon squads, his cops, his Pinkertons, his fuckin’ National Guard—as far as Jimmy could tell, the only enforcers he had. No other source of scabs or strike-breakers. So if they went on strike, what in Hell could the Devil do about it? And Jimmy had himself an all-time All-Star team of union organizers. Gompers. Bridges. Meany. Reuther. Chávez. Dubinsky. Hoffa. These guys could organize cops and illegal immigrants and Mafiosi and congressmen, and some of them had.
A union leader’s wet dream, right?
Wrong.
The problem certainly wasn’t lack of grievances. The problem seemed to be that they just didn’t want anything. You couldn’t get them to want lunch breaks. They didn’t eat or drink. You couldn’t get them to want toilet breaks. They didn’t piss or crap. You couldn’t get them to want better hours. They didn’t understand what time even was.
Wages? What was that? Money?
Something to buy stuff with.
Stuff? What was that?
Want?
Back to square one. Every creature wants something, right? Dogs want bones. Polly wants crackers. Dung beetles want a nice piece of shit.
But the demons of Hell didn’t seem to get what wanting was. No egos. No needs. No desires. Perfect slaves of Satan. Totally selfless. A corporate boss’s ideal workers. If their Boss wasn’t the Devil and they weren’t demons, they could just as well be angels.
At least they had been made to understand a quid pro quo deal to end a strike. As long as the coal got shoveled, there was no more goading with the pitchforks, and they were willing to tag along back and forth and listen to the spiels if not to respond with any enthusiasm, or for that matter, comprehension.
Dirty Jimmy decided to try asking questions instead of preaching union gospel to stone-deaf ears. At least that way he might learn what the demons of Hell were instead of what they weren’t, and that just might
give him a chain he could pull.
“I just don’t understand you guys, I guess,” he told his personal demon quite truthfully as he trotted away from the coal with a shovelful. “I mean why are you doing this crummy job if you’re not getting paid? Because you’re all sadists and you enjoy being the Devil’s goons? Because the Devil has somehow got you by the balls you don’t seem to have and you have no choice?”
“No choice …” the demon parroted back, in a frustrated yet dreamy tone, like someone trying to dredge up a familiar name or phone number just out of reach. “No … choice … no … no …”
They had reached the fire-box gate and Jimmy reflexively shoveled his load of coal into the flames, and was about to turn and trot back to the coal pile. But his demon stood there transfixed with his pitchfork planted prongs down on the floor, frowning and muttering.
“No choice of what?”
By this time, Hoffa had arrived along with his demon, shoveled his load into the fire-box, turned to return to the coal pile for another. But his demon was standing there like a wooden Indian too, mimicking Jimmy’s. “No … no … choice … no …” With the same flummoxed expression, as if the two of them were telepathically linked—reminding Jimmy that these were, after all, not men in demon suits, not humans but aliens like Mr. Spock or Yoda, only more so, so who was he to say they couldn’t mind-meld.
“No choice of what, fer chrissakes?” Hoffa demanded.
By this time Lewis and his demon had arrived too, and the third demon was indeed mirroring the other two as if they were like … like what? Like a chorus line of Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall? Like ants in an anthill? Like Marines frozen into attention by a barking drill sergeant?
“No choice … no choice of anything!” Hoffa’s demon managed to spit out.
“Don’t be an asshole!” Hoffa snapped. “Everyone always has a choice. A shitty choice, maybe, but a choice. A choice for me to keep shoveling coal forever or telling you to go fuck yourself and keep getting pitchforked forever. A choice for you to let me stand here right now or goose me towards the coal pile with your pitchfork.”
Raising Hell Page 3