What Would Satan Do? (25 page)

The Tank watched for a few seconds as a circus of expressions played across Satan’s face.  He turned to Eli, his palms out as if to say, “What the hell is this?”  Eli shrugged.  Satan stayed lost in his thoughts, oblivious.

So, he was an angel.  But what on Earth was he doing here?  He glanced at the mean-looking little shit of a man in front of him.  The man needed to go, that much was clear.  He was, after all, intensely irritating, though Satan couldn’t put his finger on exactly why that was.  Sure, the guy was a jerk, although Satan wasn’t entirely certain that that was really what was bothering him.  But whatever the source of his irritation, Satan knew that he’d been put here to take the man out.  He knew it with every fiber of his poorly-dressed being.  He was here as an avenging angel, sent to dispense Divine justice and kick the crap out of bad guys like this.  It was just so clear; so perfect.  But then, if that were right, wouldn’t he have a flaming sword?  Wasn’t that kind of standard equipment?  No matter, he’d figure that one out in a minute.  Right now he had bigger fish to fry – a bigger, fatter fish in a track suit.

Satan stood erect and opened his mouth, baring his teeth.  But he wasn’t going to eat the Tank or anything.  He was just smiling.  It was a broad, infectious smile. 

The Tank tried to keep his angry face on, but then apparently couldn’t help it.  He let a tiny bit of a grin slip. 

“I am the Morning Star; the Son of the Dawn,” said Satan.  He stood tall, with his shoulders back, and breathed expansive, epic breaths.  He turned to the side – just slightly – like a kicker lining up for a field goal.  And he kept smiling a bug-eyed smile that would have made CDC staff members reach for their plastic, air-tight apparel.  “I am the Sun and the Moon and the stars that dot the Firmament.  I am the light of the breaking dawn.”  He took another step toward the Tank – kind of a swooshing (but still very manly and menacing) sashay of a step.  “But to you,” he said, “I think I may just be bad news.” 

The Tank didn’t seem to know what to say in response to all of this.  He managed to wipe the stupid grin off his face, replacing it with kind of nasty, skeptical look.  But then the Lord and Master of the Underworld and All Kinds of Other Bad Shit just stood there, shining the kind of endless, spotlight smile that usually only preachers and politicians can manage.  And so the Tank’s angry expression melted, bit by bit, and was replaced at first by a face that made it look like he was trying to speed things up on the toilet.  He fought, his head shaking a little even, but in the end he couldn’t help it, and smiled again – a real smile this time, big and ebullient.

“Arnie,” said Satan.

The Tank’s happy face dropped at the sound of his name.

“You’re an evil-doer, Arnie.”  Satan took another step toward the man.  “Your heart is wicked, and filled with vile intentions.”  The Devil’s smile was still all lightness and warmth.  He waited and smiled and watched the various emotions fighting for air time on the Tank’s conflicted face. 

The silence between them was just about to get awkward when the Devil took a smooth, impossibly quick step toward the Tank.  He wrapped one hand around the man’s throat, and grabbed a handful of his hair with the other.  At the same time, he stepped a quick, short step around the Tank, thrusting one leg behind the man, and then lunging forward, as if the two were doing some super-sexy and aggressive Latin dance. 

The Tank reeled – which is perfectly normal, well-adjusted behavior that is not at all unusual for someone whose head is being yanked backward by the Prince of Darkness.  He tripped over Satan’s foot and toppled back, his arms doing the double-take, flailing thing that arms do when people fall backwards, and collapsed back against Satan’s forward leg. 

All of this happened in less than a second as part of a single, deft move.  The Tank lay perfectly still for an instant, his eyes wide and darting as he tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.  It took a second, but then his demeanor changed.  His eyes went from wide and dinner-plate-ish to narrow, slitty, and pissed.  “Let go of m—” he said.  He wriggled awkwardly, like a still-live fish, wrapped in butcher’s paper and headed for the block. 

Satan tightened his grip around the man’s throat to stop him from saying anything untoward.  He leaned in, his face side-by-side with the Tank’s, and whispered into the man’s ear.  “What you’re doing here, to these old people, it’s wrong.  And you know it,” he said.  “You insult and sadden the Lord with your wickedness.”  There was an abrupt shift in the tone of his voice, from evil and Satanic to Las Vegas showman or circus announcer.  “Which is why I’m here!” he said with a grin.

Meanwhile, back in the world inhabited by more normal weirdos, Eli wore an expression of alarm and utter surprise.  This might have been because nothing he’d seen that morning had given him any reason to suspect that the gentleman in the ratty suit would suddenly break out a Latin-dance/Jiu-Jitsu move on this random jerk.  Of course, it might also have been the fact that his newfound amnesiac friend was glowing slightly.

“Fuck,” the Tank managed to choke the word out.  He followed up with a gurgled, “you.”  He wriggled and twisted, trying to wrench himself free.

The Devil lifted his head back away from the Tank’s ear to look him in the face.  When he spoke, his voice had changed.  It had grown, expanded, and multiplied, as if the guy at the sound board had cranked up all the knobs for reverb and echo, and then punched the button labeled “Demonic Backing Vocals.”  The fact that he spoke in Latin just made it sound that much more evil and scary.  “
Mens est suus locus, et verto olympus ut abyssus
.”  The Tank gaped and shuddered.  “
Iam proficiscor vos pro somnus
.” 

There was a popping sound like an oversized champagne bottle being opened, and a flash of brilliant, white light.  And where before there had been a corpulent guy with a nasty disposition, there was now just a faint cloud of sparkly gray dust spilling out of the track suit and streaming toward the ground. 

Satan stood and tossed the track suit aside.  He brushed the dust off his hands and turned to Eli with the pleased expression of someone who has just bowled a strike. 

The prophet’s eyes bulged and seemed to want to crawl out of his head to find somewhere safe to hide.  “I saw— I saw something like that in a movie once.  Robots exploded Los Angeles.  It was—”  He seemed suddenly to be having some trouble with the ground, like he was in the middle of his very own private earthquake.

Satan, still glowing a bit, stepped toward Eli and held the man’s face in his hands.  “It’s all right,” he said.  He stared hard into Eli’s eyes, like he was trying to see right through them to look at the man’s amygdala or something.  “Relax, my friend.”

Eli seemed to regain his composure.  At least, he no longer looked like he was about to have an unpleasant, cranially-damaging encounter with the concrete.  Satan stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and grinned.

“How—” the prophet breathed like he’d been running.  “How?  What?”  His hands seemed to be doing an independent run-through of all the gestures they knew.  “How did you do that?

“Oh.”  Satan laughed casually and gave a dismissive wave.  “I don’t know.” 

“Well, that was definitely—”  He shook his head.  “Who are you?”

“I,” said Satan, “am an avenging angel.”  He beamed.  “I just remembered.”

Eli’s eyes grew wide again.  “It really
is
the end of the world!” 

Satan cocked his head and squinted at Eli, unsure if he was really willing to make that kind of inferential leap. 

Eli stepped back to look at the Devil.  “Where are your wings?”

The Devil attempted peer over his shoulder at where his wings should be, turning around in kind of a tight circle like a dog chasing his tail.  He stopped and looked back at Eli.  “They’re gone,” he said, his eyes wide. 

They stood in contemplative silence for a moment, and then Satan perked up.  “I need a sword, preferably a flaming one.  I seem to have lost that too.”  He patted Eli’s cheek, and strode off past him toward the old man who’d so recently been moving furniture. 

Eli seemed to deflate.  “What?”

But Satan’s attention was now focused entirely on the old man, who sat on the little porch of the apartment building, next to his wife.  Satan squatted down and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.  The old man shuddered a little at the touch, but looked up into the Devil’s eyes, unafraid.

“It’s okay,” said Satan.  “Everything will be just fine.”  But the old man looked confused, and maybe even a little bit angry.  It wasn’t okay.  Everything, apparently, would not be fine. 

“I appreciate...”  He waved his hand in the general direction of the pile of now-empty track suit.  “But the landlord is going to be really upset that you … you ...
evaporated
his man.  He’s going to be pissed off.”  He shook his head, simmering.  “And what about our rent?  What are you going to do about that?”

Satan leaned over and picked up a length of pipe that was lying on the ground.

The old man continued.  “This is a fine mess.  A real fine mess.”  He pointed an accusing finger at the Devil.  “You tell those boys at the KW that this isn’t what we agreed to.”

“What?”

“You’re with the KW, aren’t you?”

“What?  What on Earth are you talking about?”

“The KW.”  The old man turned his liver-spotted, jowly face to Satan.  “Aren’t you with the KW?”

Satan struck a pensive pose and scratched his chin.  “I don’t think so.”  With that settled, he moved on to bigger, brighter, and less boring things.  “Regard this,” he said, wielding the pipe, “this simple pipe.”  He waved his hand with a flourish and the pipe ignited.  “Now, regard this flaming pipe of divine justice!”  He wafted the fiery implement back and forth a couple of times.

The old man glared at Satan, evidently not impressed, and still very pissed.

The Devil let the hand holding the pipe drop by his side.  “You shouldn’t be ungrateful,” he said.  “The Almighty gets very upset when people are ungrateful.  Very upset.  You could even say, I suppose, that it irks Him.”  Satan held up the fiery pipe again, and was just about to administer some fiery, Divine retribution when he was interrupted by the sound of squeaky brakes.

Satan turned to see an enormous Town Car roll to a stop.  Almost every part of it – even the windows – was black.  And the bits that weren’t black were brilliantly-polished chrome.  It was immaculate, and – to Satan – beautiful.

He turned to Eli.  “Ooh,” he said, pointing his fire pipe back at the car.  Behind him, the old man and his wife stood, removing caps, patting down skirts, fixing mussed hair, and otherwise making themselves presentable for their overlords.

Eli shuffled over to Satan’s side in a hurry, apparently anxious about something.  “Put that thing out,” he said, waving his hands.  “Put it out.”

“What?”

Eli pointed at the car.  “It’s the KW!” 

“What’s that?”

“Kind of like the ... the mob.  Or what’s that Japanese thing?  The Yakuza.  Bad news.  Very bad news.”

“Oh,” said Satan lightly.  He extinguished the flaming pipe of Almighty Vengeance and tossed it aside.  “Should we run away?”

Eli stopped, turned, and straightened up as best he could.  “No,” he said.  “It’s too late for that.”

Chapter 31.
          
Hells Bells

Bill Cadmon entered his office to find that the ratio of hot, young assistants to old, fat guys had got completely out of whack.  The usual compliment of buxom, college-age blondes was present, of course, but there were far too many corpulent, middle-aged men – which is to say that there was one old, fat guy sitting in Bill Cadmon’s $3,000 chair, which was parked behind the preacher’s 125-year-old, $25,000 desk.

“What are you doing here?” asked Cadmon.

Dick Whitford ignored the question.  Dick Whitford did not answer questions that did not serve his purposes.  “You didn’t get him, did you?”

“What?”

“The body,” said Whitford.

“Oh, I—”

“You didn’t.”

“—don’t know.  I haven’t had a chance to ask.”

Whitford raised his eyebrows in the way that Big Deals sometimes do when they want to signal that all questioning, gainsaying, or other forms of uncooperative conversational behavior should cease immediately.  “You didn’t get the body.”  Having made his point, Whitford returned his attention to a folder of papers he’d spread out on the desk.

“Okay,” said Cadmon, flummoxed.  He tried a different tack.  “How do you—?”

Whitford did not look up.  “He burned down the Mansion.” 

“He?”

“The one you were supposed to take care of.”

“How do you know it was him?”

Whitford tore off his reading glasses and stared up at Cadmon from underneath heavy lids.  “Who the hell else could it be?”

“Hell, I don’t know.  Anybody.  There are a lot of maniacs running around town right now…”

“Those are
your
maniacs,” said Whitford, with a nod toward the door, presumably to indicate the various militia men on the church grounds, and not the nice old lady who was mopping the floor just outside the office.  “Or are you trying to tell me that you think your men burned down my mansion?  Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, no.  Of course not, but—”

“I didn’t think so,” said Whitford.  “Besides, we have video from the security cameras.  Apparently the video shows the whole thing – every surface of the building – bursting into flames simultaneously.  Hard to imagine the morons you’ve hired managing that.”

“Did the video show—?”

“No,” said Whitford.

“You didn’t know what I was going to ask.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.  I was going to ask about llamas.  You had no idea that I was going to ask about llamas.  Did the video show any llamas?”

Whitford lowered his eyelids to half mast.  He sat like that for a moment, and then returned his attention to the papers.

“So you think it was supernatural…”  Cadmon spoke the conclusion to himself, and then stuck out his chin as he contemplated the implications.  “You think it might be our guy?”