Satan Loves You (14 page)

“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!”