Satan Loves You (25 page)

It took him a minute before he realized that it was empty. Not the bag. The room.

“Satan?” he called. Then, realizing that this was actually an extremely serious problem, he called louder, “Satan? Sir?”

No answer.

He ran out into the hall. Satan wasn’t to the left of him and he wasn’t to the right. Nero tried to put himself inside Satan’s head. Where would he go if he were the absolute ruler of Hell and had just lost his realm? To throw himself off the roof? To binge eat in the snack room? To drown himself in the bathroom? Or would he go home? Nero tried to figure out the quickest route home, and realized that Satan would have gone right, aiming for the courthouse exit. Nero ran, Fritos forgotten, and he reached the double glass doors just in time to see Satan pushing through them and walking out into the crowded parking lot.

“Sir!” Nero hissed, trying to grab his arm. But Satan was already outside. Nero followed and grabbed him from behind. He wrestled with Satan, trying to pull him back into the courthouse. Fortunately, the enormous mob was turned the other way, watching the victory press conference unfold on the other side of the parking lot. If Nero could just get him back inside quickly they might escape notice and the inevitable public lynching that would follow.

“Sir, please, we can’t be out here,” Nero whispered, but Satan ignored him and just forged ahead, trying to reach the airport and home. In front of them, a CNN News crew were shooting b-roll. To their left was a wall of backs. To their right were sheriff’s deputies. All around them was an ocean of people who hated them with every fiber of their beings.

“Don’t do this to me, sir,” Nero practically whimpered as he tried to pull Satan back by one arm. But his fingers slipped and Satan lurched forward, bumping into the CNN sound guy.

The hefty soundman turned to say something surly and then his face lit up.

“It’s Satan!” he said to his cameraman, and they suddenly had him pinned with their lens as they tried to pry a statement out of him.

Nero made a quick calculation and ran away from Satan and towards the deputies.

“Get a car, quick!” he said. “Get us out of here.”

But the deputies seemed disinclined to do anything for Satan. He was the Lord of Evil, after all, and a loser. Nero raced back to Satan who was trying to push past the CNN crew but was getting tangled up in their cables in the process. It was turning into a shoving match, and that was attracting even more attention, and then the cry went out.

“Satan’s over here! He’s over here!”

Fortunately they were in the press area, which meant that they were instantly surrounded by news crews and reporters who wanted a quote, rather than angry citizens who wanted to rip off their heads.

“Cody Gold hates you! How does that feel?” A reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
shouted.

“What’s it like to be a loser?” someone from Fox News screamed.

“Will you sell Hell?” A Bloomberg wire service vlogger hollered.

“Why are you so stupid?” from a
Huffington Post
correspondent who was, inexplicably, holding out his cell phone.

“Please, no questions!” Nero said, trying to push them back, but he might as well have been trying to push back the tide.

“How’d you get to be so evil?”

“Will you become a hobo?”

“Do you have a problem with prescription drugs?”

“What do you think of ObamaCare?”

“Why do you always ruin everything?”

“Ted Hunter wants to turn Hell into a rehab center. Does that make you angry?”

The shouted questions got louder and louder.

“We’ll be releasing a statement later this afternoon,” Nero hollered as the reporters swarmed over him. He went down, lying on the ground, looking up through a forest of legs. They were all surging forward, trampling him, stepping on his face and then, suddenly, they stopped.

Satan was just standing there. Reporters like to push, because if they get too close they figure their quarry will either recoil (which makes for a great shot), lash out (even better) or spin around helplessly, ping-ponging between the desire to recoil and the desire to lash out (not that great, but still good TV). But Satan was disappointing them. Satan was just standing there. After a moment, the reporters all began to feel stupid shouting over each other. Satan clearly wasn’t going to give good camera. Even with the enormous crowd pressed at their backs, the reporters ground to a halt and just stood there looking at Satan, and Satan just stood there looking back at them.

When it had finally reached the point of maximum awkwardness, Satan suddenly spoke. He looked into the nearest camera (MSNBC) and began to talk.

“I see these protesters, and I hear what people are saying about me and I know everyone thinks that I’m evil and the source of all their problems,” he said. “Well, I just wanted to say that I am evil, but I’m not the source of all your problems. I’m just a guy with a job.”

Somewhere in Atlanta, CNN went live. In the NBC Universal Network Origination Center in New Jersey a producer, buzzing on Adderall, cut into
Hardball with Chris Matthews
. On Sixth Avenue, Fox News picked up the feed. The BBC jumped in with both feet. Al Jazeera cut away from
Al Jazeera This Morning
and went live to Satan. The whole world was watching.

“I didn’t ask to run Hell,” Satan said. “I just sort of fell into it. I used to love it. I used to get to be creative and every soul was a challenge. Now I dread every minute of it. So many of you are coming to Hell that it’s all I can do to keep the place running. We barely make any money, things are always falling apart, everyone always needs something and more souls have to be processed every day and it never ends. I’m always playing catch up, I’m always running behind. I’m always trying to find the least worst solution.

“I know you’re thinking,
‘
Why don’t you just quit?’ I say, why don’t you? You don’t like your jobs either. But one day you look up and suddenly you’ve been doing something for so long that you don’t know how to do anything else.

“I’ve done my best. I’ve given this job everything I had. But it didn’t matter, because now the beings in charge are taking it all away. Maybe some of you know what that feels like. Maybe some of you know what it’s like to give everything to a job and one day someone tells you,
‘
We don’t need you anymore.’ I did the best I could, and it wasn’t enough. I guess at the end of the day I was born to lose. Now excuse me. I have to go pack up my office.”

There is nothing louder than a mob of two hundred thousand people being completely silent. So silent you could hear the tiny servo motors in a million camera lenses whirring as they zoomed in for a better shot of Satan’s red-rimmed eyes. So silent that you could hear a plane passing high overhead. So silent that when a CNN cameraman coughed, everyone could hear it. Satan began to push through the crowd and they parted like the Red Sea. Satan wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, but he knew that he needed to get away, to get to the airport and to get back to Hell. Nero followed in his wake. The crowd was silent. It was like being in church.

The first thing to hit Satan was a dirty diaper. A puffy plastic folded square that smacked him right in the shoulder, stuck for a moment and then fell to the ground. Then someone threw an empty Poland Springs bottle. A banana peel arced through the air and landed on Nero’s face. He flung it away in disgust.

Suddenly, the air was full of garbage, like rice at a wedding reception, showering down on Satan and Nero. Then came the jeers and the shouts and the catcalls and the insults. The noise was back and it was louder than before, more dangerous. And as Nero and Satan made for the highway, the sky darkened with the garbage of a thousand, thousand packed lunches, and diaper bags, and stroller pouches, and recycling bins all raining down on their heads.

In Utah, Harry Harlib lay on the floor of the TV room. His mom had let him stay home from school today so that he could see how awful Satan was so that he would do his homework and be good so he wouldn’t go to aich ee double hockey sticks. His dad was in the easy chair and his mom was on the love seat and their usual running commentary – a mixture of prayers and outrage and sarcasm – had died out when Satan started talking.

Harry’s dad was older than his mom. He’d been a cement mason specializing in concrete finishing since his first summer job at sixteen. He’d made so much money that he’d dropped out of high school and focused solely on getting rich. For years, he didn’t even have a bank account, just an empty fifty-pound Quikrete bag in his garage stuffed with cash. When he’d finally dragged it into the bank and dumped it out on the counter it turned out to contain fifty thousand, four hundred and sixteen dollars and eighty-two cents. That was enough to start a new life. Buy a house. Have a kid.

Things had been good until ten years ago when construction started slowing down. Harry’s dad would do anything for work. He’d go anywhere. But the simple fact was that there were too many cement masons and not enough cement mason jobs. He started taking extra work on the side. Odd jobs, handyman work, whatever he could pick up from day to day. Whatever would pay the bills.

Three months ago he woke up one morning and realized that he hadn’t touched a mixer in over a year. What he was now was the guy who cleaned the kennels at the local pound and thought he was still a cement mason. He was stealing twenty-five pound bags of dog chow and selling them cheap on Craigslist for extra cash. He’d tried so hard, but now they had nothing. For Harry’s dad, Satan was speaking to him.

The room was quiet. Linda didn’t read from the Bible or pray, she just put her hand on her broken husband’s back and let him have a moment. He couldn’t stop crying. He wrapped his hands around his graying head and pulled it down onto his knees as silent sobs convulsed his shoulders. Harry sat and watched. Then he looked at the TV and back at his dad. He went into the kitchen and made a big pitcher of lemonade. He took it outside with a bunch of paper cups from the kitchen. He sat on the grass in front of his house with a sign that he wrote himself:

LEMONADE – .50 cents

MONEY FOR SATAN TO BUY BACK HELL

When his parents saw what he was doing they didn’t say a word, but his dad set up a card table and a patio umbrella for him. It was going to be a hot day. They let Harry sell lemonade for Satan all afternoon. He raised sixteen dollars.

In Heaven, the Host were gathered in a presentation room. Theater-style seating. Big screen up front for the video projector. A deconstructed podium in blonde wood. Michael had come back from his journey into the Empyrean and now that he was re-hydrated he was ready to reveal God’s message.

“The Creator is affronted by Satan’s hubris,” Michael said. “The Prince of Hell has overreached. In trying to have and then destroy his own son, in making a mockery of God’s sacrifice with the Nazarene, he has overstepped his bounds.”

“That’s all nice,” Barachiel said. “But what does it actually mean?”

“The meaning is clear,” Michael said. “It is time to depose Satan and annex Hell.”

Phanuel spun with excitement. Bits of liquid fire dropped off him and singed the carpet.

“I’ve been saying this for months,” Raphael said. “It’s nice that people are finally listening to me. Haven’t I been saying this for months?”

“We’re just going to take the whole thing?” Jegudiel asked.

“We will engage in a pre-emptive invasion,” Michael said. “They pose a threat to our way of life. So we will take Hell by force.”

“Um, is that allowed?” Raphael asked.

“Who would dare tell us no?” Michael replied.

Barachiel high-fived Raphael. Metatron stroked his goatee. Jegudiel just rested his chin on his templed fingers and gave a sly smile.

“I have my doubts that this is wise,” Jegudiel said.

“Listen,” Gabriel said, picking up the speech for Michael. “I’ve been going over the plan and it’s fool-proof. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Do you think anyone actually wants to be in Hell? Once they find out that Heaven is taking over they’re going to pour into the streets and hang flowers around our necks. And with all the new souls we’ll be getting, it’ll practically pay for itself.”

“Yeah,” Raphael said. “Why are you being such a baby, Jegudiel?”

“Brother Jegudiel merely speaks from his heart as he always does,” Metatron droned. “He feels sympathy in his heart for the status quo. He revels in the lack of change in the Heavenly sphere. Little does he realize that to annex Hell is the Will of God. It IS the Will of God, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Michael said.

“What more do you need?” Gabriel asked.

“But it will not be legal,” Jegudiel said.

“Oh, piss on that!” Barachiel cried, standing up.“We’re going to war with the minions of Satan, who cares if it’s legal? It is right.”

“But we cannot officially take control of Hell until after the Ultimate Death Match,” Jegudiel said. “That is the only time that the ownership of Hell is in balance. Even if our Host occupies every cavern, every charnel pit, every torture grove, Hell’s ownership will not devolve to us.”

“Who brought the lawyer?” Barachiel sneered.

“Technically you have a point but there has been precedence established many times before,” Metatron droned. “And what is the concept of ownership? It is a multifaceted theory of – “

“You are correct,” Michael said, shutting Metatron up as quickly as possible. “We cannot legally annex Hell and liberate her tortured masses yearning to be free until
after
we defeat Satan in the Ultimate Death Match. But we will occupy Hell NOW. The Ultimate Death Match is in seven days. After our victory we will already be in place to effect a smooth transition.”

Fist pumps, “Yeahs!” Jumping up and down. Jegudiel decided that silence was the better part of valor, and he kept any further counsel to himself.

“Let us take arms, brothers,” Michael said. “For tonight we storm the gates of Hell!”