Satan Loves You - By Grady Hendrix Page 0,104

Mexithans,” Mary said. “They do alla construction everywhere, anyways.”

“What are you so happy about?” Nero grumbled.

“Imma ex-nun who was impregnated by Satan, committed suicide, got beaten up by the Archangel Michael and I can still drink pina coladas,” Mary said. “The glass is startin’ to look half full to me.”

“Childish,” Nero grumbled.

“Hello, cutie pies,” a voice sang out.

They all looked up.

Crawling out of the Archeron river, burned and oil-covered, drenched and wounded, disheveled and looking like twenty miles of bad country road, was the unmistakable figure of Charo.

“I am back from the bottom of the big bad river,” she said. “And boy are my arms tired! Ha ha!”

“They killed ya,” Minos said.

“It take more than that to kill pretty Charo,” Charo said. “I work county fairs in the Midwest for long time in the Eighties. After that, this is kid stuff.”

She noticed Nero.

“What is problem with little fat Roman emperor? Why he make the sad poopy face?”

“Satan embezzled all our money and took off,” Nero said. “Hell is in ruins. We’ve replaced Death’s minions with an army of hipsters and we’ve got two million backlogged souls that we have to process.”

“You know what that sounds like?” Charo said.

“What?” he asked.

“It sounds like time for a songing!”

She put her fingers to her mouth and let out a loud whistle. There was a yipping from far away and the ranks of drunk demons parted to let through Delilah, her Chihuahua, who came charging across the rocky plains carrying a guitar in her mouth.

“Hello, little puppy,” Charo cooed, taking up her guitar. “Who wants some ‘Hava Nagila’?”

And she began to play. It didn’t take long for all the demons to join in, and by the time they were singing it the second time around they had Nero up over their heads in a lawn chair and were carrying him around the smoldering, burnt ruins of the Reeducation Camp and things didn’t look quite so bad, after all.

Satan leaned back in his first class chair and smiled. He’d never been in first class before and it was absolutely, wonderfully horrible. It wasn’t so much the pina coladas they brought him before take off, and it wasn’t the fact that he got to eat off of real plates with real silverware. What really elevated the experience was that all the economy passengers had to troop past him on the way to their seats with envy churning in their guts.

A sudden idea for a new torment seized him and he called for a pen and paper. For the envious, he could restructure their tortures so that they were split into two groups. Having their tongues crushed by sharp rocks would feel so much worse if other, randomly chosen, envious were getting Swedish massages nearby. The envious getting Swedish massage would become all stressed out from watching the tongue crushing, and the ones getting their tongues crushed would be envious of the ones who were getting Swedish massage. It was too horrible for words, and it was the first new torment he’d come up with in centuries. Just like that, his brain relaxed and unclenched like it had just been lowered into a warm bath.

The Captain announced that they were ready for take-off and the enormous 747 taxied down the runway as the sun set all pink and gold. In the overhead compartment were two bags containing a hundred million dollars, and in Satan’s head new ideas for torments were gushing like a slot machine payout. And somewhere, if he strained, he could hear an angel crying. He’d spanked their butts and won, mostly by cheating. It made him smile.

Satan leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and let the feeling of satisfaction ooze down his spine and out into Creation. It was broadcast across the planet like radio waves, penetrating all the dark, forgotten, miserable places, reaching all the dark, forgotten, miserable people. It went out to all the blasphemers, from the Roman Catholic schoolboys in Ireland putting on their first condoms, to the Muslim girls wearing bathing suits in Saudi Arabia; from the unhappy Sudanese women illegally selling millet beer to send their children to school, to the Orthodox Jews sneaking a piece of bacon; from the Southern Baptists cruising gay bars to the Pentecostal lesbians holding hands with their secret girlfriends, they all felt it.

In the hearts of all these sinners, and in the hearts of all the heretics, and the blasphemers, and the con men, and the strippers, and the furries, and the freaks, and the Goths, and the leather daddies and the sugar mommies, and the divorced and the damned and the difficult and the stupid and the surly and the losers and the unforgiven and the unforgivable and the felons and the vandals and the tortured and their torturers and the abortionists and the pot smokers and the licentious and the envious and the slothful and the gluttonous and the angry and the vain.

In all of their hearts a tiny sun blossomed for one brief moment, just a split second of succor in their cursed lives, and all of these heathens heard a message whispered in their ears. A tiny message that let them know that no matter how hopeless things seemed, they had not been forgotten, they were not alone. No matter how often they had failed, they had not been abandoned. It was a simple message, and it was only four words long.

“Smile,” it said. “Satan loves you.”