What Would Satan Do? Read online

  Bill Cadmon was the pastor of Austin’s Driftwood Fellowship, a non-denominational, evangelical Christian megachurch. It was the biggest house of worship in the world, if you didn’t count those Korean jerks and their Yoshi-yosho-buttrado-Kung-Pao thing. Cadmon sure didn’t. After all, he ran a live, closed-circuit feed to a whole other campus every Sunday. Plus, his television ministry reached out to over twenty million people in more than one hundred countries every week. And anyway, they were friggin’ Koreans. They could just go suck it.

  He stepped down off the stage and walked the aisles, pausing here and there to thumb through stacks of promotional materials piled on the seats – like he did every week. These days it was just a spot check, but when he’d started, he’d taken a sort of pride in making sure that everything was in order; that each and every person who came in had a copy of the week’s program. But the church had grown – exploded really – so he’d long since had to delegate that task. And nowadays, folks got way more than just a program. They got glossy, full-color brochures advertising all kinds of interesting, faith-based services that the church now offered. But he still liked to walk the aisles.

  As he worked his way up the lower bowl of the arena, Cadmon thought about what an insane ride it had been over the last few years. He’d begun expanding his business empire – “fellowship,” he reminded himself – with a line of books, taking the catchy phrase, “What would Jesus do?” and turning it into faith-based guidance for daily living. His most recent book – How Would Jesus Lose Weight? – was at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List, and had been there for six weeks already.

  More recently, the fellowship had begun offering a variety of End Times-related services, the most successful of which was a planning business designed to help folks get their worldly affairs in order before Judgment Day hit. A last will and testament is great if you actually die, but what is the legal effect of being among the Chosen – those the Lord takes up to Heaven during the Rapture, before all the really bad, fiery, end-of-the-world stuff happens? Cadmon had experts standing by 24-7, ready to help figure that out. Of course, that kind of service would really only work if you could convince people that the end of the world was near. But he wasn’t worried about that. He had inside information.

  He stopped and sat down at the end of a row, leaning back and propping his boots up on the seat in front of him. Things were good. Real good. And now he needed to do some thinking; to figure out his next step.

  There is a strange kind of quiet that comes with being in a big, empty enclosed space like that. It hits you in the pit of your stomach, almost like a touch of vertigo. Cadmon took a deep breath. What the Hell would Jesus do now? Would he get the convertible? Or would He just say, “Fuck it,” and go for the Turbo?

  He’d just closed his eyes to ponder this weighty inquiry when the giant speakers that hung from the ceiling erupted with a furious sound – a robotic buzz saw that tore through the cavernous arena. At the same time, every light ramped up to full brightness, flooding the building with brilliant light. One exploded in a shower of sparks.

  The metallic racket worked its way down from a high-pitched static to a low rumble that shook the floor. Cadmon jumped, startled by the blast of sound, and tried to stand, but his elephant-skin cowboy boot slid, and he fell awkwardly over the top of the chair, sprawling across the seats in the next row. The noise was overwhelming, and he could barely think, but he had to get up and do something. For a second Cadmon thought about Ray, the audio tech, wondering if the idiot was blasting his damned 80’s music again. But then he realized that he recognized the sound. Shit, he thought, disentangling himself. It’s the middle of the day!

  Then it was gone. The light and noise had quit just as quickly as they had started, leaving the arena in total darkness. The change caught Cadmon by surprise, but he grabbed a handrail and managed to avoid falling on his face. He crept slowly down the steps toward the main floor, his eyes locked on the scene before him.

  Down on the stage, a glowing, white-orange light appeared, bobbing and hovering three feet off the floor. In the center of the orb, Cadmon could see shapes and shadows moving as if through a window. The light grew brighter and taller, and as the preacher arrived at the foot of the stage, the shadows resolved themselves into the shape of a very tall man. The man stepped forward, and the light seemed to shrink and close behind him.

  His eyes were shut and his hands clasped in front of him. At last he looked up, letting his hands fall by his sides. “William Cadmon,” the angel said, “I am Ezekiel.”

  Cadmon stopped, frozen – he couldn’t help it. He shook the feeling off, and stormed up the steps to the stage, ready to tear the angel a new one.

  “Yes, hello again, Ezekiel.” The angel always introduced himself as if it were the first time. What an idiot, thought the preacher. The novelty of meeting someone who’d spent time face-to-face with God had worn off. “Can’t you just come in the door or something?” He threw his arms up in exasperation. “Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost me to fix all those lights and speakers again?”

  The angel turned his head slowly, looking down at the little human. He glowed with a light that pulsed and ebbed, making him look like he’d just spent some quality time inside a nuclear reactor. His eyes narrowed and seemed to Cadmon just a little bit fiery. “You have made a lot of money since I started visiting,” he said. “You can afford it.”

  “Yeah, okay. So that’s true,” Cadmon admitted. And it was. The angel had told him that if he wrote the books, they would sell, and they’d sold. The angel had told him to start up the automated, computer-based prayer service, and now that was raking in millions. Perhaps the most important information that the angel had shared, however, was a warning about a series of natural disasters that had struck over the last eighteen months – earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and plagues of gross things. And that, more than anything else, was what had allowed Cadmon to grow his empire.

  The preacher had started by sprinkling a few relatively benign statements about the coming Day of Judgment into his sermons. After the first earthquake had struck Paris, he’d started a two-month series on Judgment Day and the Book of Revelation. He was two weeks into that when the first swarm of locusts had showed up. A week later, two tornadoes ripped through Manhattan and central London almost simultaneously. He’d got a call that night from a producer on CNN, asking if he was available for some on air commentary. And so he’d begun his rise to national prominence.

  The angel cleared his throat and Cadmon snapped out of his daydream. The slight smile faded from the preacher’s face, replaced by an expression that was either pain or constipation. He gritted his teeth and glanced around to see if any of the staff was watching.

  “You shouldn’t be here now,” he said. “It’s the middle of the goddamned day! Someone is going to see you!” Cadmon ran his eyes up and down the angel. He was, thought Cadmon, searching for the right word, crusty. Apart from the whole glowing thing, he hardly appeared angelic or heavenly at all. And the glow really only made him look like a Chernobyl victim. His clothing looked like a rough bed sheet or maybe a curtain. At least he’s got wings, thought Cadmon.

  “There is a storm coming,” said Ezekiel.

  “Yeah, yeah, end of the world. We’ve been over this. I’m doing what I can. I already told you—”

  “No, I speak of an actual storm,” Ezekiel said, staring off into the unknown void. “A very large storm. One that will breach the shores of this state and those of your neighbor. Many will perish.”

  “Oh,” said Cadmon, surprised. The angel had never before warned him about anything like that. At least, not in Texas. Usually, the things that happened here were relatively benign. Fucking annoying, sure, but nobody was getting hurt by a bunch of stupid bugs or toads. The really bad stuff struck far away, and earthquakes or floods wiping out brown people in some far-off country somewhere didn’t bother him. In fact, he found it helpful. A frightened flock was a good
thing. A dead flock, on the other hand, wasn’t going to keep the lights on. A scary thought occurred to him. “I’m not going to perish, am I?”

  The angel whipped his head around. “No,” he said.

  Cadmon rubbed his chin. “So,” he said, trying to remember the weather report he’d seen, “you’re talking about that storm in the Caribbean.” He tilted his head and regarded Ezekiel through squinty, skeptical eyes. “The tropical storm? You know where it’s going to hit?”

  “Yes,” said Ezekiel, “and now it is time for us to begin.”

  Chapter 3. Enorma Was Round, Like Sputnik

  Explosions always just seem to make people go crazy. It’s weird. And the students at Georgetown University were not the unique and individual snowflakes they’d have you believe. No, when Gaston Hall blew up, they went nuts and started freaking out just like people always do.

  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.