were instantly surrounded by news crews and reporters who wanted a quote, rather than angry citizens who wanted to rip off their heads.
“Cody Gold hates you! How does that feel?” A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor shouted.
“What’s it like to be a loser?” someone from Fox News screamed.
“Will you sell Hell?” A Bloomberg wire service vlogger hollered.
“Why are you so stupid?” from a Huffington Post correspondent who was, inexplicably, holding out his cell phone.
“Please, no questions!” Nero said, trying to push them back, but he might as well have been trying to push back the tide.
“How’d you get to be so evil?”
“Will you become a hobo?”
“Do you have a problem with prescription drugs?”
“What do you think of ObamaCare?”
“Why do you always ruin everything?”
“Ted Hunter wants to turn Hell into a rehab center. Does that make you angry?”
The shouted questions got louder and louder.
“We’ll be releasing a statement later this afternoon,” Nero hollered as the reporters swarmed over him. He went down, lying on the ground, looking up through a forest of legs. They were all surging forward, trampling him, stepping on his face and then, suddenly, they stopped.
Satan was just standing there. Reporters like to push, because if they get too close they figure their quarry will either recoil (which makes for a great shot), lash out (even better) or spin around helplessly, ping-ponging between the desire to recoil and the desire to lash out (not that great, but still good TV). But Satan was disappointing them. Satan was just standing there. After a moment, the reporters all began to feel stupid shouting over each other. Satan clearly wasn’t going to give good camera. Even with the enormous crowd pressed at their backs, the reporters ground to a halt and just stood there looking at Satan, and Satan just stood there looking back at them.
When it had finally reached the point of maximum awkwardness, Satan suddenly spoke. He looked into the nearest camera (MSNBC) and began to talk.
“I see these protesters, and I hear what people are saying about me and I know everyone thinks that I’m evil and the source of all their problems,” he said. “Well, I just wanted to say that I am evil, but I’m not the source of all your problems. I’m just a guy with a job.”
Somewhere in Atlanta, CNN went live. In the NBC Universal Network Origination Center in New Jersey a producer, buzzing on Adderall, cut into Hardball with Chris Matthews. On Sixth Avenue, Fox News picked up the feed. The BBC jumped in with both feet. Al Jazeera cut away from Al Jazeera This Morning and went live to Satan. The whole world was watching.
“I didn’t ask to run Hell,” Satan said. “I just sort of fell into it. I used to love it. I used to get to be creative and every soul was a challenge. Now I dread every minute of it. So many of you are coming to Hell that it’s all I can do to keep the place running. We barely make any money, things are always falling apart, everyone always needs something and more souls have to be processed every day and it never ends. I’m always playing catch up, I’m always running behind. I’m always trying to find the least worst solution.
“I know you’re thinking, ‘Why don’t you just quit?’ I say, why don’t you? You don’t like your jobs either. But one day you look up and suddenly you’ve been doing something for so long that you don’t know how to do anything else.
“I’ve done my best. I’ve given this job everything I had. But it didn’t matter, because now the beings in charge are taking it all away. Maybe some of you know what that feels like. Maybe some of you know what it’s like to give everything to a job and one day someone tells you, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’ I did the best I could, and it wasn’t enough. I guess at the end of the day I was born to lose. Now excuse me. I have to go pack up my office.”
There is nothing louder than a mob of two hundred thousand people being completely silent. So silent you could hear the tiny servo motors in a million camera lenses whirring as they zoomed in for a better shot of Satan’s red-rimmed eyes. So silent that you could hear a plane passing high overhead. So silent that when a CNN cameraman coughed, everyone could hear it. Satan began