dodged a burning hand that feebly grabbed at the hem of his pants.
“You can’t think about that right now,” Nero said, shifting gears. “Right now you need to go to Heaven for your meeting, and then there’s a food poisoning outbreak in Minneapolis that you need to handle as acting Death. Come on, sir. You should go before anything else goes wrong.”
Suddenly, with a sputter, all the flames went out. The burning tombs stopped burning. Sarcastic applause rang through cavern.
“Nice going!” a heretic shouted.
“Way to run Hell,” another chimed in.
“Let me see you try it!” Satan shouted at them but, to be honest, he agreed.
One hour later, Satan was back on the escalator. In the old days he had used the travel time to work on new torments, but these days there was only one thing he really enjoyed. These days, he liked to stare off into space. No one bothered him when he was staring off into space and if someone asked him what he was thinking about he could just smile and nod as if he were thinking thoughts that were deep and complex when, in reality, he was just staring off into space. More and more, Satan found that he was happiest when he just let his mind go blank.
“Satan,” someone yelled. “Hey, Satan!”
He looked up just in time to see Gabriel passing him on the down escalator.
“In a hurry. Got summoned,” he said.
“I summoned you,” Gabriel said, flapping his enormous wings and lifting himself up off the escalator. He hovered over Satan like a sanctimonious Macy’s Day Parade balloon.
“Oh, right,” Satan said, scrambling to walk down the up escalator, puffing hard as he worked to stay in one place.
“There’s a woman – ” Gabriel said.
“I don’t do that thing with the apples anymore,” Satan said.
“Not that.”
“Come on, my legs are giving out,” Satan said.
“The incident at the Charlotte Airport? Last week?” Gabriel said.
“I already told you, it won’t happen again. I was just looking for a miserable place where I could try to come up with some new torments.”
“You were seen. By this woman.”
Gabriel held up a picture of Mary Renfro. It was an unfortunate photo from her high school yearbook that made it impossible to tell if she was laughing at a joke or howling in pain.
“Didn’t you guys clean up?”
“We did. Apparently, we missed her.”
“Go zap her now.”
“We took a vote upstairs, and you’ve been elected to take care of her. Personally.”
“I’m busy,” Satan said.
“Your sloppiness will no longer be tolerated,” Gabriel said. “If you won’t do it, then you need to come to Heaven right this minute so we can have A Very Serious Talk.”
“All right, I'll deal with it,” Satan grumbled. Anything to avoid yet another sanctimonious lecture upstairs.
“Besides, she’s one of yours. An atheist.”
“Self-proclaimed or de facto?” Satan asked.
“Oh, self-proclaimed. A member of the Council for Constructive Atheism.”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
“See you in the ring,” Gabriel said. “Michael’s going to decimate your devil spawn this year.”
As Gabriel erupted upwards in a flurry of feathers Satan called after him:
“Technically, I didn’t spawn anything.”
The Rainbow Babies and Tiny Childrens Hospital of Minneapolis smelled like an open sewer. Small children gripped their cramping stomachs, exploded liquid out of both ends and died of food poisoning.
“I knew that hamburger looked pink in the middle,” one father cried. “So I just let my baby nibble a little bit around the edges. How’d he get so sick?”
Another father howled, “I knew those discount burger patties were too good to be true. Ninety-nine cents for a dozen?!? But I thought a little ketchup would hide the stink and then I could cook the germs away.”
“I didn’t know you needed to refrigerate that meat ALL the time,” a mother sobbed. “There ought to be warning labels! I’m gonna sue someone!”
Doctors and nurses sprinted from room to room, avoiding the grief-stricken, confrontational parents like obstacles on a confidence-building course. Over the past week they’d gotten used to patients experiencing what they had taken to calling DDS (Delayed Death Syndrome) and they’d been taken by surprise at how quickly these kids were biting the dust. They kept intubating, they kept hydrating, they kept dropping IV lines into miniature veins, but still their tiny patients kept dying.
“I knew it was rotten,” a little boy moaned. “It had blue fur on it. But I love my burgers.”
Satan reached inside the child and shut him down.
“We’ve lost another one,” a nurse shouted, and a crash team blundered through the door to attempt yet another