What Would Satan Do? (3 page)

The Prince of Darkness paused and turned back to watch as students and staff ran around screaming, shouting, and snapping photos with their mobile phones.  He wondered for a moment if he should try to look inconspicuous, but with no mobile phone of his own, wasn’t sure he could pull it off.  In the end, he just decided not to worry about it – his usual approach to dealing with problems these days – and ambled off toward the parking garage where he’d left his beloved automobile.

The chaos soothed him.  Or it should have.  Mayhem usually did.  It always had, even before the whole misunderstanding with that big, galactically-stupid, lunkheaded asswiper Michael and all those other angelic fuckwits.  But today?  Not so much. 

The problem, of course, was the frogs.  Well, no, it wasn’t the frogs.  It was what they represented – or might represent.  He saw one and regretted his choice of shoes for the second time that day.

What if it really were ending?  What if?  Was that even possible?  If he wasn’t doing it – and he wasn’t – then there was no way any of this could be happening.  Without him, there would be no end; no final showdown between good and evil.  He was the necessary ingredient; the catalyst.  He was the special sauce in God’s divinely-constructed, cosmologically-huge hamburger, and now he’d taken his evil ball and gone home. 

It wasn’t that he cared particularly for the world.  Except for Lamborghinis.  And Star Wars – well, Darth Vader anyway.  And ice cream.  But the rest of the world could go take a flying leap up into a goat’s butt for all he cared.  No, he’d come here to avoid being a pawn. 

It had all started with an admission.  He finally, after all of the years of waiting and time-biding and grudge-holding, had admitted the one thing he’d never even allowed himself to consider:  He was going to lose, and there was no way around it.  The Day of Judgment was coming, and though he was supposed to have kind of a leading role, things weren’t going to turn out very well for him in the end.  After all, that God jerk had planned the whole thing.  In fact, there was a whole book in the Bible that set it all out: He’d start things up, have a bit of fun, and then, in the end, have his ass handed to him by that Great Big Dick in the Sky. 

And so Satan had quit.  He’d just walked right out of Hell.

“I—uh—I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk about.  You know, check things out,” he’d said.

The minions looked at each other.  Satan hadn’t gone topside in two millennia. 

He looked at them, his evil eyebrows raised expectantly.  They stared right back, waiting.

“Okay then,” he said.  “Be back soon.”

He’d been a little impetuous about it, sure.  But how do you tell a legion of angelic bad guys who you’ve led into Hell that you’ve changed your mind?  Satan could just see it.  “So, you know that the whole End Times, Let’s-go-kick-God’s-ass thing we had planned?  Yeah … we’re going to have to go ahead and cancel that.  Budget cuts – you know how it is.” 

He wrung his new human hands and sighed.  Even without the plague of frogs, things hadn’t exactly turned out as he’d expected.  He’d known living as a human was going to be different, of course, but he’d expected it to be different in the, “Wow, this is new and cool and exciting!” sense, rather than the, “Holy crap this really sucks a lot!” sense.  He just had not anticipated so many things – traffic jams, old, slow people, Muzak – but then, that’s the problem with moving to a place you haven’t been in 2,000 years.  Entire continents get discovered, civilizations rise and fall, paradigms shift, indoor plumbing becomes popular – and it was all a little overwhelming.

Of course, there were good things.  He had, for example, spent almost an hour flushing things down the toilet in his first apartment.  And when he’d run out of stuff to flush – his pet fish, his car keys, a toupee he’d stolen – he’d run out and bought fifteen pet rodents of varying size.  He flushed seven of them before number eight – some kind of fidgety thing with odd hair – had got stuck and put an end to the evening’s adventure. 

There were other technological marvels that appealed to Satan’s inner twelve-year-old.  First among these – after toilets, of course – were exotic sports cars.  Italian ones were particularly nice.  He recalled, back in the 1960s, when one of his minions had come in to tell him about this new project.

“Sire, I have developed something new.  Something that will distract countless minds and separate souls from The Almighty.”  It was Azriel.  Kind of a boner, but earnest and a hard worker, so, you know, tolerable.

“What?  Yeah, okay, swell.”  Satan had by this time already become almost completely overwhelmed by the sheer monotony and predictability of it all.  He waved Azriel on and tried not to collapse in a fit of boredom.

Azriel had then produced a tedious parade of mind-numbing charts and graphs and other un-fun things that described the super car in glowing terms like, “the ultimate expression of pointless excess” and “a giant penis suit that people can wear.”

“Yeah...” said Satan, exploring just how far he could mash the side of his face with his palm.

“Men will spend their lives lusting after these.  They will prioritize acquiring these cars over all else.  They will have mid-life crises.  They will wear gold chains.  And most importantly, they will forget Him.”

“Sounds cool,” he said thinking,
Whatever
. 

But now that he was here and had actually managed to procure one for himself, he finally understood.  These things – in his case a Lamborghini – were truly manifestations of the sublime.  Just thinking of being behind the wheel sent chills up his human spine – the sound of ten cylinders and forty valves, all working together in absolute harmony; a perfectly-orchestrated symphony that, as you pressed the accelerator, spun faster and faster, working to a feverish, howling crescendo.  And then, just when you and the engine couldn’t take any more, you shifted into the next gear, and got to start all over.  It was exhausting just to think about it.

His Lamborghini – a white Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera with a bright red, go-faster stripe and extra shiny wheels – was parked on the lowest underground level of Georgetown’s enormous main parking garage, where he’d managed to find three empty spaces in a row so that he could park sideways.  That meant, however, that he’d have to take the dreaded elevator.

It wasn’t a particularly bad elevator.  In fact, it was perfectly nice, with almost none of the urine smell or stains that one so often encounters in parking garages.  But it was slow.  Hellishly slow.  It made him want to smash his head into the wall – except that he knew better than to try that again.

He trotted around the corner into the parking garage and nearly tripped when he saw an extremely heavy woman waiting in front of the elevators.  He was about to say something, but then remembered that he was supposed to try to find the positive in any situation.  The positive here, he thought – just as the elevator bonged and the down arrow lit up – was probably the fact that she’d already pressed the button and done all the waiting for him.  He swept past her just as the doors opened, spun, and stabbed the “CLOSE DOOR” button.  She stood perfectly still, a look of shock on her face.  But then, just as the doors were coming together, she stuck out a meaty arm and forced them back open.  The rotund woman stepped into the elevator and smiled at the sartorially resplendent Lord of the Underworld. 

Yuck
, he thought.  There weren’t so many fatties around last time he’d made the trip up.  He made a show of looking nervously back and forth between her gargantuan caboose and the elevator weight capacity sign.  She harrumphed and turned to the task of selecting a floor.

This, it turns out, was kind of tricky.

She pressed the button for the fourth floor, hesitated, and then also selected the fifth floor. 

Satan raised his eyebrows. 
No
, he thought,
she wouldn’t
.  He tried to imagine what was going through her mind, but drew a blank.  He decided that was probably right.

His cellmate pondered for another moment, and decided apparently, that she also ought to press “3.”  And so she did. 

Satan’s jaw slowly made its way toward the floor.  The cow had pressed three different floors!  Sure, there was a lot of her, but he couldn’t see any way that she was going to manage more than one stop.  He fought off the urge to stab her in the ear with a pencil, but only because he didn’t have a pencil.  He seethed.

Enorma stepped away from the button panel, but still looked pensive.  She took a tiny step forward, but stopped again, apparently still trying to remember which floor she actually needed. 

No.  Fucking.  Way
, he thought.  He searched the elevator frantically.  He felt trapped, which wasn’t really all that shocking, since he was, in fact, trapped inside a metal box with a giant woman who seemed intent on prolonging their time together.

The woman squinted, squared her jaw, and threw her shoulders back as she stepped up, once more, to the panel of backlit buttons.  Her previous forays into the field of floor selection had all been in error.  Just practice, perhaps.  But now she knew, apparently.  She saw the light.  She was on the true path.  She reached out triumphantly for button number two, but before she touched it, launched up though the top of the elevator, up the shaft, through the atmosphere, and into low-Earth orbit. 

“Shit,” said Satan.  “Not again.”  He wedged the doors open and climbed out of the elevator to go find the stairs.

Chapter 4.
                
Holy Land Coffee

Liam McEwen’s path was similar to Satan’s.  Except that he didn’t start out as an archangel.  Or lead legions of other angels in a direct, militant uprising against God.  Or bring about the fall of man by manifesting as a reptile and passing out fruit.  Or, you know, rule Hell.  So saying that they were “similar” might be putting it a little strongly.  But their careers were precisely the same in one important respect:  Both had simply walked away one day.

Liam had left his job with the CIA’s Special Activities Division five years before.  He’d done well there – worked his way up the ranks, shot some bad guys, snuck in and out of foreign countries – just normal stuff.  But the stress and the politics had ultimately gotten to be too much.  At least, that was what he told people.  In fact, he’d actually quite liked it.  A lot.  After all, not everybody gets paid to kick the crap out of bad guys.  Most folks have to develop hobbies or drinking problems to help them cope with the daily grind, but Liam got to exorcise his demons while he was on the clock.  All good things, however, either have to end or start sucking eventually.

Liam’s departure from the CIA had been precipitated by an unfortunate incident involving former Vice President Dick Whitford, a hot-rodded golf cart, and fourteen gallons of lemon pudding.  This, of course, had come on the heels of a series strange of episodes that, in that rarified, secret-agent air, might otherwise have merited little more than an entry in some top secret report and an endearing nickname among the other sociopaths he called co-workers.  But that was not to be.  Instead, the episode with the VP bumped him up from a necessary evil to a full-fledged problem, and so Liam had been encouraged to fuck off. 

He’d left that life behind, and today a much less lethal Liam stood in line for coffee, just like he did pretty much every morning.  Ahead of him, a queue of students waited to order beverages of absurd complexity.  They wore Gucci and Prada and jaded expressions, and they made waiting in line look cool.  In his old khaki shorts and tattered T-shirt, Liam actually looked more like a student than pretty much anyone else there in the coffee house.

Holy Land Coffee was located just a couple of blocks from the campus of the 50,000-student University of Texas.  It was also next door to the guitar shop Liam had started when he’d returned home.  He loved his guitar shop, if only because running it meant that he tended to encounter far fewer smelly, unfriendly terrorists who were up to no good and needed to be shot.  Or vice presidents, for that matter. 

He sighed.  His life these days was relaxed, comfortable, and mostly fire-arm free – and so he should have felt pretty good.  But something was not right – something he couldn’t put his finger on.  It nagged at him.  He felt like something was missing; like he was waiting for something to happen.  Liam had no idea what, though, because like most men, he was unable to wrap his head around tricky things like “feelings.”  And so, as usual, he just dismissed the whole thing. 

A few spots ahead in line, a young woman who was either a coed or a Hollywood starlet stepped up to the counter.  Her expensive-looking sunglasses had gaudy, gold lettering on the sides and giant, bug-eye lenses that made her look a little like a platinum-haired insect – an insect who probably would’ve looked spectacular in a bikini.  She was on the phone, and didn’t pause to place her order so much as redirect the stream of her conversation from her handset to the barista.

“Um, hi, yes, I’d like grande half-caff, extra hot, soy latte with extra foam, half a squirt of sugar-free vanilla and half a squirt of sugar-free cinnamon, two packets of Splenda, and please put it in a venti cup, ‘kay?  And,” she tilted her head and clasped her hands together in faux prayer, “can I please get a teensy bit of sugar-free caramel sauce drizzled on top?  ‘Kay, thanks.”  Her order placed, she snapped her phone back to her ear and picked up right where she left off without slowing down or even, apparently, breathing in.  “And oh my god she was like,
so
drunk.  I know, right?  What a bitch.  Yeah, I
know
, the
whole
night, and did you see those shoes she was wearing?  So last summer, right?  Oh.  My.  God!”  She shoved past Liam and wandered off to take up space down at the end of the counter.

Liam was, generally speaking, an unflappable guy, partly because he’d seen and done stuff that would have flapped most people.  He’d shot guys and been shot at.  He’d visited the homes and hideouts of notorious terrorists at hours when polite folks wouldn’t dream of calling.  He’d flown in helicopters while failing to keep his arms and legs in the vehicle at all times.  He’d even been bitten by a lemur.  Twice.  And so he usually confronted the would-be Paris Hilton acolytes of his favorite coffee house with the oblivious looseness and the ever-present, lightly-ironic smile of a man who has seen and done horrible stuff and therefore refuses to get worked up about the everyday bullshit of life.  Usually, anyway.  He stared after the coed for a second, shrugged, and then returned his attention to the business of standing in line.