Down on the street, the cavalry had come to a stop, wibble-wobbling on their Segways in a ring around the hardcore holdouts surrounding the burning minivan. The protestors took this as a sign of hesitation, of weakness, of cowardice. They were wrong. As they surged forward, the crowd dispersal officers unslung hoses from their backs, and then they turned on their Mace Sprinklers.
Thirty-three seconds later it was all over but the screaming.
Mace mist hung in the air over the now-deserted street, occasionally refracting a rainbow. A few signs blew past. One read, “ Computer is Homo Devil Machine.” Another pleaded, “Let’s stop eveil now ok?” Satan found Nero facedown in the gutter, lightly trampled but otherwise okay. Gently, he turned him over.
“Sir,” Nero said. “Why do I want to claw my eyes out?”
“Mace Sprinklers,” Satan said, in awe. “If we can ever afford it we’ll have to get some of those. They’re awful.”
A cop rolled up to them on his Segway and wobbled to a stop.
“Sheriff says you’d better come in while there’s a –” and then he stopped, staring off into the sky behind them.
Satan turned. They heard the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter approaching. The crowd had retreated to the far end of the street and now they sent up a tattered cheer. Even Nero sat up straighter. The copter, far up in the sky, was a gleaming silver dragonfly. It flew closer and the crowd began to run after it. It was even closer now, aiming its landing skids at the empty street. The crowd was ecstatic.
“What is it?” Satan asked.
“It’s Cody Gold,” Nero said. “Celebrity judge!”
“Who?” Satan asked.
But by then the helicopter was so close Nero couldn’t hear him. The wash from the propeller pushed down on the street, kicking up a cold wind, sending signs cartwheeling away, dispersing the remaining mace mist and making it too loud to hear anything. People were standing on cars and cheering, sending up loud ululating cries. What had been a peaceful, if somewhat crowded, Carson City street half an hour ago was now Fallujah after the Americans went home.
The helicopter sank slowly to the street, touched its skids delicately to the asphalt, and then, after hesitating a moment, settled to the ground. Its door was flung open and an enormous figure in a flapping black robe jumped out and sprinted away from the rotor backwash. The crowd went even wilder, and the helicopter shot up off the ground and into the sky like a magician yanking the cloth off a table set for two. The crowd ran forward, but now it wasn’t the run of an insane lynch mob out to string up Satan and Nero. Now it was the clumsy run of Trekkers racing to meet William Shatner.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” the massive, handsome judge said as he handed out signed glossies of himself, posed for the occasional picture and yet somehow never slowed down. He kept moving towards the courthouse. “Thank you. I know I’m popular. You’re too kind. Thank you. Thank you.”
Babies were thrust into his hands and he laughed and kissed them and then tossed them away like footballs, trusting that someone would catch them. A boy in a wheelchair was shoved in his way. Cody Gold hugged the young man who began to cry and then, as Gold moved away, the little crippled child rose up on his stick legs and stumbled a few steps after him as his mother erupted into sobs of joy and threw herself on her now un-crippled son.
“I take it he’s popular?” Satan asked.
But it was too late – Nero was already diving headfirst into the scrum of fans surrounding the sprinting judge.
“Who is this guy?” Satan wondered out loud.
“You don’t know who Cody Gold, Celebrity Judge is?” the cop asked from high up on his Segway.
“I don’t.”
“You might be the Prince of Darkness but you’re a real dumbass. Guy was in the WWE Hall of Fame. Smacked down Kurt Angle, Mick Foley and the Rock all in one WWE pay-per-view event at Madison Square Garden: Total Threeway Smackdown. Greatest pro wrestler the world has ever seen. He attended online adult extension law classes in his spare time and graduated top of his digital class. Became the youngest judge in the history of the world. He’s got six million Twitter Followers and so many Facebook fans that they got a server farm in Iowa just for all his wall traffic. He’d be in movies if anyone made