What Would Satan Do? (22 page)

The men outside, having apparently come to grips with Jimmy’s ascension to the komodo dragon plane of existence, returned their attention to the car.  Or, rather, the individual inside the car.  Hands reached in again, clawing and pulling.  Satan scooted away from the door, but the men yanked it open.  He reversed course, and started to get up out of the car, just as one of the men grabbed him by the lapels. 
Tight jeans
, thought the Devil,
much too tight
.  He tried to set those pants on fire, but there was only smoke.  He tried again. 

“Oh shit!  Oh shit!  Oh shit!” said the man, whose arms were now burning.  He let go of Satan’s jacket, and toppled backward onto the cement.  The Devil stood, wondering why the whole man hadn’t caught on fire.  But his wondering was cut short by another one of those first-experiences-for-Satan-in-a-human-body moments – that of having a crow bar crash down on his skull. 

The next thing he was aware of was that he was being dragged by the arms, his head lolling this way and that, across the asphalt, and away from his beloved – and now destroyed – automobile.  He struggled to separate the throbbing sensation in his head from the pang he felt at losing another Lamborghini.  He thought that he’d just have to get another one, and he wondered for an instant what color he’d choose this time.  But then he was confused about what kind of car it was or where he’d got it.  And then he couldn’t remember what he was thinking about.  Or where he was.  Or what he was doing there. 

His thoughts shifted to the dull, throbbing sensation in his head, and the sting of something – blood? – running down into his eyes.  That was certainly unpleasant.  But then, there seemed to be a lot of unpleasantness right now.  He seemed to be moving; sliding backwards.  It was all very confusing.
 
Something clicked and he remembered that he was being dragged somewhere by two men. 
Ah, yes
, he thought. 
I’m being attacked by assholes.  Assholes in need of killing, no doubt. 
He put his legs underneath him and twisted upward, trying to tear himself out of the grip of the two men.  But it was no use – his body lacked the strength.  He tried again, and one of the men kicked him. 

“Ow!  Why are you trying to—” he asked, and for the second time in less than a minute, something heavy and hard crashed down on his head.

When he came to a moment later, he was leaning up against a dumpster.  Bolts of pain shot down his neck and back, and he felt as if he were going to split in two lengthwise.  Standing in front of him were two men who looked as if they did all their clothes shopping at truck stops.  They were arguing in urgent half-whispers, but he couldn’t make out any of the words.  One of them had a gun, which he was waving in Satan’s general direction as he argued.  Finally, the other man tore off his hat – a mesh baseball cap advertising some sort of bait and tackle shop – and used it to smack the man who was holding the gun.  He shoved the gunman toward Satan.

“Do it already.”

The man with a gun hesitated, pointed the gun at the Devil, and fired.

Satan felt a searing, burning sensation in his belly that blossomed into a hurt that seemed to cover the entire spectrum of pain all at once.  Layer upon layer of pain radiated outward – down his legs, up his chest.  The muscles in his abdomen clenched up of their own accord, doubling him over onto his side.  His throat tightened, and he let out a raspy groan as he struggled to breathe in.  It was cold – terribly cold.  He needed to get out – out from the body – so that he could get these – destroy these men—

The gun fired again, and Satan collapsed in a heap of spent flesh.

Chapter 26.
          
Rule No. 37: Always Take the Body with You

Whitford’s mid-afternoon snack seemed to want to help out as he answered the phone.  “Brr-r-r-ello?”  His face was impassive as he listened to the tiny voice coming from the handset, but then a smile appeared and spread over the wide expanse of flesh.  “You found him?  Already?  That’s—”  He stopped, reining in his enthusiasm.  “That’s good news.  So, okay.  Where’s the body?”  He paused again, and then sat forward, smacking the desk with his hand.  “What?  They didn’t?  Well, tell them to go back and get it.  Get it.”  The squeaky telephone voice got louder and more urgent.  “No,” said Whitford.  “I don’t care.  Just get it.”  He hung up.

Chapter 27.
          
Satan Wakes Up to Bunny Slippers

It was bright.  The sky was the kind of profound and enticing and cloudless blue that only seems to show up on Mondays, when it’s time to head back to work or school or jail or whatever.  It was also hot.  Unusually hot – unusual, that is, unless you’re from Texas and you’re used to fucked-up, hot days springing up suddenly in the middle of what is supposed to be, but never is, the cool season. 

In the middle of the enormous sky, the midday sun lingered, blinding and oppressive, and beat down like a giant, 2-nonillion kilogram ball of incandescent, boiling gas parked a mere 93 million miles away.  A very slight breeze blew in, offering a tantalizing hint of cool relief, but then decided it was way too hot to spend the day hanging around blowing on things, and flitted off to find some shade.  A nearby fountain burbled.

Satan lay slumped in an awkward heap by the side of a ripe-smelling dumpster, his pinstriped suit dusty and in tatters.  One arm of the jacket had disappeared entirely, and the underlying, blood-stained shirtsleeve looked as if it had had a run in with an automatic-juicer-and-julienne-fry-o-matic from some late-night infomercial.  His fancy shoes were gone, and his socks were nowhere to be found.  Despite the state of his apparel, however, Satan appeared to be whole and completely unscathed.  A little dead looking, maybe, but there was no blood actually on his body – coagulated or otherwise – and nothing really to indicate that he had, in fact, been wearing the clothes when they had been so thoroughly abused.

An odiferous man in a faded blue, floral bathrobe and bunny slippers shuffled up.  In his hand he held an oversized placard that read, “Repent!  The End Is Nigh!”  He noticed the pile of distinguished-yet-disheveled gentleman next to the dumpster and scooted over to have a look. 

“Hey,” he said.

Satan continued to look dead.  The man laid his sign aside and, kneeling down, jiggled Satan’s collar.  Satisfied that Satan was not actually dead, the man rose.  One of the members of the order of rodentia ventured out to investigate, thinking (or smelling) the man to be one of their brethren, but the man cleared his throat, and the rat scurried off.

“Wake up,” said the man, nudging Satan with the cute, bunny-nosed end of his footwear.  Satan stirred, but then was still again.  “You need to wake up,” said the man.  “It’s almost three o’clock.  Naptime is at an end.”  He stepped back, took a deep breath, and reared up to deliver a good, swift kick to Satan’s backside.  But Satan groaned, and the man un-cocked his lethal slipper. 

Satan’s eyes flicked open and darted around, taking in his surroundings, while his body remained motionless, and stuck in its awkward position.  Finally his eyes alighted on the oddly-colored, rodent slippers in front of him, and made their way slowly up to the Rasputinesque countenance of the man in the floral robe.  “Who are you?” he asked.

“I,” the man stepped forward with a dramatic sweep of his arm, “am Eli.”  He stood as erect as his aged and weather-beaten body would allow, and placed his right hand over his breast.  He made his eyes all squinty and pointed what he thought probably looked like a good, steely gaze off into the unknown distance.  After allowing the profundity of the moment to steep adequately, he turned back and beamed at Satan.

Satan eyed Eli suspiciously.  The man had all kinds of odd symbols scrawled on his arms and legs.  They might have been tattoos except for the fact that they looked less like the work of a trained tattoo artist than that of an inebriated weirdo with a predilection for wandering around the city in a bathrobe.  He decided that the man was probably just a harmless idiot, and moved on to more pressing matters.  “Okay, then.  Excellent.  Now, who am I?”

Eli did not hesitate even an instant before answering.  “You sir,” he said, “are the man I found lying beside this dumpster.”  He pointed a grimy, blackened finger at the spot where he’d found the Devil and, in fact, where the Devil still lay.

“Very good,” said Satan, nodding, feeling that this was indeed a good answer.  Progress.  He took a deep breath.  The fickle breeze was back, and for a moment the rank smell of the garbage was gone, replaced by the scent of chlorine from the nearby fountain.  It soothed him, but then he remembered where he was, which was next to a stinky dumpster, apparently behind a building somewhere.  His eyes darted some more.  The rest of his body continued not to move.  He looked up at Eli.  “How did I get here?” he asked.

“That, I am afraid, I do not know.”  Eli looked at the ground and shook his head sadly.

“Hmmm...”

The breeze came back again.  This time it brought a sheet of newspaper advertising some specials at a nearby drugstore.  They watched the paper flap back and forth for a moment, and Eli started to pick at some lint on one of the pastel flowers on his robe.  The Devil thought at first that this might be the man’s way of passing an awkward, silent moment, but then Eli kept at it, and the Devil began to wonder whether the man had forgotten the conversation altogether.  He was just about to say something when Eli looked up from his robe.

“Did you get shot?”  Eli pointed at the front of Satan’s shirt, which had a nasty blood stain down the front.

The Devil fingered the hole, pulling the fabric to the side.  “I don’t know,” he said.  His body ached, and the spot on his skin under the bullet hole felt rough and hot to the touch.  But there was no blood and no wound.  In fact, he seemed to be just fine. 

Eli leaned over, offering Satan a hint of the olfactory bouquet that was the result of a long-standing estrangement from showers and bathing generally.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Looks okay to me.”

Eli stood, looked around here and there, and kicked at the ground with his toe.  It wasn’t clear to Satan whether the man was attempting to extract an irritating pebble from his footwear or responding poorly to something the ground had apparently said to him.

“It’s very bright,” said Satan.  He was starting to sweat and wished that the breeze would quit fucking around with that paper and put itself to good use.

“Yes.  Yes it is,” said Eli, nodding.  He stared off into the middle distance in the manly way of someone who has just received a bit of well-stated wisdom.  “It is indeed.”

“I had a car,” said Satan, remembering out loud.  “I loved my car.”

“I had one too, once,” said Eli, commiserating again.

Satan sat up.  “Do you know what happened to it?”

“Well, no, I can’t remember.  But it was a nice car,” said Eli helpfully.  He looked at Satan’s tailored suit.  Even though it was dirty and torn to pieces, it still was an extraordinary fit and looked damned sharp.  “Where are you from?” he asked.

Satan hesitated, started to speak, and then stopped again.  A look of shock – and maybe just a tiny bit of panic – came over his face.  “I—” he started, but then stopped.  He turned his pale face to look up at Eli.  “I don’t think I know that.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it matters much.  The world is about to end.”  Eli picked up his sign.

“Oh?”

“Yes.  It’s true.”

Satan made a pensive face and looked down at that spot – off to the left, and maybe six inches or so off the ground – where people look when they’re pondering serious things.  “That … is deeply troubling.”  He pondered some more, and shook his head.  “I’m not sure why, though.”  He turned to look at Eli.  “How do you know?  How do you know the world is going to end?”

“Because, my friend, I am a prophet.”  He placed one hand on his hip and, with the other one, made a sort of waving gesture.  “It’s my job to know these things.”

“Ah,” said Satan.  “Okay.”

“You should come with me.”  Eli extended his hand, and pulled the Devil up. 

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  Something tells me you should.”

Satan thought about it for a moment as he stood, swaying very gently in the non-existent breeze.  “Okay,” he said.  And they went.

Chapter 28.
          
Ramón

“It’s such an odd picture,” said Lola.  “None of it makes any sense.”

Liam shifted and swerved around a minivan full of lemmings.  “What doesn’t make sense?” 

“Whitford.  Louisiana.  The virus – or gas or whatever.  Closing the borders.  All that.”

“What borders?” asked Festus.

Lola turned to face the back seat.  “Whitford has checkpoints at the Texas border and Louisiana border.  They’re turning people away.”

Festus leaned forward.  “So we couldn’t leave Texas if we—?”

“I’m not sure.  It’s not like he issued a press release about it.  I guess he’s just trying to keep out official government types while he consolidates power here.”  Lola stopped, realizing that she was sharing privileged information with a weirdo who looked like Jesus – a homeless, vagrant version of Jesus.

“So,” said Liam.  He flung the car around a curve, drifting slightly as he threaded between two slow-moving boring mobiles.  It was an artful maneuver, but went largely unappreciated, as the car’s passenger compliment was mostly devoid of art-driving aficionados.  “What I want to know about is this whole Louisiana thing.  What’s really going on there?”

“That,” she turned to face Liam, “is really screwed up.  And totally mystifying.”

“He’s not just helping out?” asked Festus.

Lola turned back to look at Festus, her eyes suspicious.  But Festus grinned a big, stupid grin, and she relented.

“No, Whitford’s not helping.  I mean, New Orleans is in bad shape, don’t get me wrong.  But there was no need for him to rush in and play the hero.”

“But given the federal government’s track record…” said Festus.

“Well, what you don’t know is that Whitford actually mobilized the Texas State Guard before anyone knew for sure the storm was going to hit New Orleans.”