“Don’t make me go Cobra Kai on your ass,” the hipster blustered.
They kept cramming. The intercom on Satan’s desk buzzed. It buzzed again. It began buzzing in an annoying staccato rhythm, but they ignored it and kept shoving. The bag was up to the hipster’s skinny waist by now, its two noodle-like legs folded up underneath it.
“You dudes suck,” the hipster whined.
The desk phone began to ring again and finally Satan couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed it, and in that moment the hipster squirmed away.
“Sir!” Nero cried.
The hipster was almost at the door, one foot dragging the trashcan liner, when Satan hurled the office phone, striking it in the head. The boneless thing went down, bonelessly. All business, Satan and Nero stuffed it back into the garbage bag.
“I think it broke my skin,” Nero said, examining his arm where the hipster had bit him.
Suddenly, the door burst open and a flock of fat, giggling cherubim fluttered through. They knocked into one another, they plowed into the ceiling and they bumped into the walls. Nero tried to swat them away from his face. One of them landed on Satan’s desk and stood up on its fat little legs, pulled out a horn and tootled on it.
They began to sing in their lisping, eerie voices.
“You’re wanted...you’re wanted...you’re waaanted...” they warbled, “In...Heeeaveeeennnnn!”
It was the big finish. They began to fly around lazily on their backs, pulling lyres out of their sagging diapers and strumming them, blowing meaningless little pootles of noise on their tiny trumpets, shaking golden tambourines to different rhythms. The one on the desk threw up.
“I suppose we should have answered the phone,” Nero said, as they fled the office.
Normally, when you get a Cherubim Summoning you drop what you’re doing and get yourself to Heaven, ASAP, but all the management books Nero had ever read emphasized staying focused on your goals and avoiding distractions.
“Sir, if there’s no Death, then no one is dying. We need to address this problem before it gets bigger.”
“I have to go to Heaven,” Satan said, trying to give Nero the slip, but Nero had a grip on his arm and wouldn’t let go.
“This is important, sir,” he said.
“It’s just Death.”
“It’s death,” Nero said.
“So?” Satan shrugged.
Nero wasn’t shocked. He had once been mortal and Satan had existed since before the dawn of time. Their takes on death were of a necessity very different. Death had certain rules it had to follow, and while most deaths could be handled by Death’s Minions, Death itself had to be present for situations where fifty or more humans lost their lives at once. And, like Broadway ticket sales, Hell depended on bulk business.
Right now, deaths were still occurring, but they were occurring on a delay. Gangbangers were fleeing in terror from punks they’d busted full of caps who were now chasing them down the street. ICUs and ERs were overflowing with patients who just wouldn’t die no matter how bad the doctors were at their jobs. A suicide bombing in Indonesia had resulted in two dozen very angry train passengers ganging up on the extremely startled and very much alive bomber and dragging him to the nearest police station. People were dying, but they were dying in ones and twos, in tens and twenties, and they were dying slowly. Slowly enough for the victims of a bus crash in the Andes to haul their shattered bodies back to their home villages and freak their hysterical families right out. Slowly enough for anti-insurgency actions in Afghanistan to turn into dusty remakes of Night of the Living Dead. The situation was causing a lot of problems on Earth. But the repercussions were going to be worse in Hell.
Satan’s realm existed in a state of delicate equilibrium. The main event in Hell was demons tormenting the souls of the damned. But the demons worked for so little pay that they were basically interns, doing it because it kept them entertained while they frittered away eternity. Without Death ushering in big blocks of newly dead souls the demons would get bored, they’d get distracted, they’d wander away from their stations. Then souls would start jamming up and the lines for processing would back up, and the longer the lines got the more demoralized the demons processing them would become and the slower they’d work and the more jammed things would get and eventually it would all grind to a halt.