What Would Satan Do? (6 page)

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” asked Raju, “if there was one of those locust clouds right now, and they ate the president?”

“What?” asked Liam.

“Who?” asked Festus.

“Locusts!  The president!”  Raju pointed to the screen.  “They eat him up.”  He put his fingers to the sides of his mouth to demonstrate locust mastication.

“He’s the governor,” said Liam.

“Whatever,” said Raju.  “It would be cool, and you know it.”

“Yeah,” said Festus.  “Or maybe some frogs.  That would be so—” 

Raju jumped off the couch and levitated, Scooby-Doo style as he pointed to the screen.  “Holy shit, dude!  It’s bugs!”

On the screen, the picture of Dick Whitford cut away to the hair-helmet woman.  She expressed some uncertainty as to the exact nature of what was transpiring at the Governor’s press conference.  Over her shoulder, the little screen-within-a-screen showed the Governor flailing and waving his hands wildly, and then being ushered off the stage.

“It’s bugs!” said Raju.  “They’re there.  Right now!  Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!”

“Calm down,” said Festus.  “It’s not bugs.”  He leaned in for a closer look.  “It’s not—”  He squinted, leaned even closer, and then touched the television screen as if that would help.  “Wait a minute.  I think it might be…”  He turned to look at Liam, but Liam had stood up and was headed out of the room.

“Liam?” said Festus.  Raju turned to see what the hell was wrong with Liam that he didn’t want to stay and watch the Governor get eaten by a swarm of locusts.

“I’ll be up front,” said Liam.  “Got some … guitar stuff to take care of.”

Chapter 7.
                
Shirley Is a Merciless, Automaton Whore

Washington, D.C. is a crappy place to live.  Sure, the monuments and museums are nice, and the idea of tooling around a city that occupies the top spot on Russia’s list of “Cities to Pulverize and Obliterate with Nuclear Weapons” is cool, but actually living (or trying to live) in the Nation’s Capital sucks.  One of the main problems is the climate. 

For most of the United States, climatologists use labels like “temperate” or “subtropical,” but for D.C., they had to carve out a special and unique zone called “Ass.”  The problem is that the Founding Fathers decided that the best place to build the capital was a swamp, which in terms of city planning is just one, small step away from actually building a city under water.  All that moisture in the air acts like a multiplier for temperature, except that it somehow works both ways.  When it’s hot, the humidity makes it hotter.  When it’s cold, the humidity makes it ass-tastically cold – hence the climatologists’ nomenclature.

The Devil was in a foul mood.  He held
the telephone at arm’s length.  “Do you understand that I am, at this very moment, freezing
to death
?!”

Shirley — the telephone representative for Washington Gas — may have understood, but she was not at all sympathetic to the Devil’s plight, which is to say that she was acting like an unfeeling, robot bitch as she followed a diagrammatic flow chart of scripted answers with about as much empathy for his misery and discomfort as a washing machine has for clothing as it cycles from soak to agitate to rinse to spin.

No, Shirley didn’t seem to care anymore than his thermostat did.  And yelling at her wasn’t helping any more than it had with that.  Satan had screamed at and berated the little box on the wall off and on for two days before his neighbor had knocked on the door, wondering what all the fuss was about.  The neighbor had explained the mysteries of climate control, and had eventually helped Satan to figure out that the gas wasn’t working.  So now here he was, on the phone with this merciless, automaton whore.

“I’m sorry, sir, but if you want to place a service order, you need to call us three days in advance,” she said.  This was the fifth time she had advised the Devil of Washington Gas’ three-day notice requirement.  Of course, Shirley had no idea that she was speaking with Satan.  She heard his accent and figured he was just another one of those diplomats from England or Gondor or wherever. 

“You keep reciting that as if it were some kind of mystical incantation that will make me go away.  Do you really think that I didn’t hear you the first five times you said it?  Or that I was somehow unable to understand?  Oh wait, I’m sorry.  Are you, perchance, a complete fucking idiot?  Is that the problem?” 

“You’re just being rude,” she said.  Shirley didn’t like these snooty foreign guys.

“Yes, but you see, you madam, are a moron.  And I am having to cope simultaneously with freezing my backside off and your profound stupidity.  My rudeness is therefore excused.  I am afraid, however, that your stupidity is not.  It is, in fact, inexcusable.  So I must insist that you cease your idiotic prattling and TURN ON MY FUCKING HEAT ALREADY!”  Satan sat down and crossed his legs.  He felt calm and in control.

“Hold, please.”  Some light jazz came on as Shirley put the Prince of Darkness on hold.

He stood up and began pacing.  He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.  The Dark Lord of the Underworld did not look good in sweaters.  Not frumpy brown ones anyway. 

The phone continued to play hold music at him while he waited.  He held the handset out at arm’s length again, glaring at it with an evil eye, and was just about to fling it at the wall when he remembered the last time he’d been put on hold.  He glanced over to where his old telephone was still embedded in the sheetrock and sighed.  The ingenuity and deviousness of humans was astounding – hold music was like a cheese grater for the soul.  Forget all the fire and brimstone, they really needed to start piping this stuff in down in Hell. 

He sighed again.  Was it worth this?  Was eternal damnation really any worse than sitting on hold, listening to Muzak? 

I should just go back
, he thought. 

It was an odd thing, this nagging sense that he should be back in Hell.  He’d been there in rebellion after all.  The original and most profound rebellion.  And it was strange and uncomfortable to think of rebelling as something he
had
to do.  But then, he’d felt compelled to rebel against God.  Driven.  Like it was something he couldn’t
not
do.  And it took him a while to understand, but by giving in and succumbing to that compulsion, he was actually serving a purpose set out for him – and for which he’d been designed and created – by God.  So, the reality of the situation was that he wasn’t a rebel at all.  He was a pawn in God’s big plan.  God needed a patsy, a chump – someone to set up as a straw man in His weird, self-serving battle between good and evil. 

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the deck hadn’t been stacked; if it had been set up as a fair fight; if he were something more than a pawn in the Lord Almighty’s ineffable f’ed up, dumbass plan.  God had created Satan to fulfill a role – to rebel and then get his Satanic ass kicked on Judgment Day.  It was such a stupid plan, and yet, it was a nut that Satan couldn’t crack.

He’d always assumed that an idea would come to him; that, when the time came, he’d figure out some way to emerge victorious.  The minions had asked him about it constantly, the nagging, incessant shits that they were.

“Master, how will we defeat Him, when it is written that … uh … we will not … uh … defeat … Him?” Belial had asked.

And Satan always responded the same way.  “I cannot speak of these things, for He is always listening, but rest assured, I have a plan.”

But he hadn’t.  He had no friggin’ idea what he was going to do.  And as the time drew closer; as the Day of Judgment crept up, he began to realize that a plan wasn’t going to arrive in his miraculous brain.  He’d never figure it out.

And then, one day, he realized,
That was the bloody point
.  It was God’s perfect plan.  A plan in which Satan and his followers, his entire army of fallen angels, were all just pawns.  It was totally, blindingly obvious, but his rebellion – the Fall – it was all planned, intended, part of His great scheme.  He wasn’t the Lord of Hell.  He was God’s scapegoat and, worse, a foregone conclusion.  He hated that. 

Even the labels sucked.  “Prince of Darkness?”  Whatever.  He wasn’t evil.  No, he preferred to group his particular combination of proclivities together under the heading “Fun.”  But fun wasn’t part of The Plan.

And that, of course, was why he was now here, on Earth, wearing a human-body costume and second guessing his decision to trade everything he’d known for a cold apartment, a frumpy sweater, and this robot bitch on the phone who wouldn’t turn on his damned gas.

He thumbed his copy of the collector’s edition of the Star Wars Trilogy that had just arrived, and felt just a tiny bit better.  For the past week he’d holed himself up, staying out of trouble and watching a hell of a lot of television.  And in that time he’d discovered the awesome saga of Luke and Leia and Darth Vader.

Oh, Darth.  Darthy, Darth, Darth, Darth.

There were a lot of things that he loved about Star Wars.  The Death Star kicked ass, and seeing the fuzzy little Ewoks get killed had been highly satisfactory.  And, of course, he saw Darth Vader as a kindred spirit, both in terms of general outlook and his heavy reliance on what Satan figured must be anger-management breathing.  Mostly though, it was the mythology of the movies that struck him.  It was, he thought, kind of an allegory for his own struggle and rebellion against God.  He just wasn’t sure whether he was Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader.  And the whole dark vs. light sides of the force thing was confusing.  God was easy enough – He was the emperor.  Satan had some ideas for where the story should go next, and had decided that he was just going to have to go to Hollywood and meet the man behind the films.

Shirley came back on the line and went straight back into her mantra: “I’m sorry, sir, but you need to call us three days in adv—” but she didn’t finish, due to the fact that, at that very instant, the entire headquarters of Washington Gas exploded in an enormous fireball. 

On Satan’s end, the line went dead.  There wasn’t even any hold music. 

“Hello?” he said.  “Are you there?”  But this was just denial.  He knew that Shirley was no longer on the line.  And he knew it was his fault.

The phone started making that rapid beeping sound phones make when left off the hook.

He punched the OFF button and took a deep breath, letting the phone fall by his side. 

“Shit,” he said.  No gas.  No heat.  And he’d risked exposure.  Again.  What he really needed was something to help him stay focused; some kind of motivational tool.  Maybe one of those calendars like they have in factories.  Only instead of saying: “Fifty-nine days since last on-the-job accident,” his would have to say something like, “Three days since last accidental use of supernatural Satanic powers to blow shit up.”

* * *

FBI Agent Bob Robertson was put in charge of the investigation of the explosion of the Washington Gas headquarters.  His mandate, broadly speaking, was to answer two questions:  First, just what in God’s name happened?  (It was a poorly-worded mandate.)  Second, how was it that, with the entire headquarters exploding in a giant fireball, all but one of the Washington Gas employees escaped completely unharmed? 

Robertson hadn’t a clue.  And the forensics guys had been no help at all, concluding only that it looked like there had been an “explosion of some type.”

As for the one Washington Gas employee who had been affected, it wasn’t clear how exactly her condition related to the incident, or if it was even related at all.  Her name was Shirley Strickland, and really she was perfectly fine, except for the fact that she seemed to be completely incapable of saying anything other than, “I’m sorry, but if you want to place a service order, you have to call three days in advance.”  Robertson had no clue about that either. 

He did have one lead, at least – space heaters – for whatever that was worth.

A lot of people in and around Washington, D.C. heat their homes using oil, so the destruction of Washington Gas’ headquarters didn’t cause the kind of panic that might have occurred had the entire D.C. Metroplex suddenly found itself without heating oil in a cool November.  Still, there are enough folks there who do rely on natural gas for heat, especially downtown in the apartments and condominiums occupied by the zillions of interns and young professionals.  Pretty much all them went out that day and bought space heaters. 

Most of the stores in town ran out of space heaters within hours of the explosion.  One store, however, sold its entire supply – it had nine on hand – in just thirty minutes.  And every single one of the space heaters, it turns out, was purchased by the same person – an individual using a credit card registered in the name of Mr. B. L. Tod, which was the same name the guy in the white Lamborghini had used in signing up for his parking space. 

The street address associated with the credit card had been a fake.  Fortunately, one of the agents had thought to check the address on the Internet, so the FBI was spared the embarrassment of sending an assault squad to the National Cathedral.

Now, Robertson was back at the office, taking care of some paperwork that had been piling up while he’d been out failing to solve the Washington Gas fiasco.  His team was still investigating, but he wasn’t particularly hopeful.

“Bob?  Bob!  I think I’ve found him!”  One of his younger agents stood, leaning halfway over her desk as she continued clicking her mouse.  After a few more clicks, she grabbed a couple of sheets of paper off the printer, and headed over to Robertson’s desk.

“Danvers, right?” he said, looking over the pages she’d handed him.  Robertson knew Danvers’ name perfectly well, and her perfectly-shaped bottom even better.  He studied the page.  It looked like – well, he couldn’t tell what it was.  He handed it back.  “What is this?”

“It’s from an Internet forum,” she said.  “Someone has been posting using the handle Bacon, Lettuce, and Death.  And apparently he’s a big Star Wars fan.”  She nodded and smiled as she said this, apparently thinking that it explained everything.