is difficult to find an impartial jury to try Satan who is, after all, widely considered to be the source of all evil.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Judge Gold snapped. “Get some aliens from another planet? A bunch of atheists? Atheists aren’t even American. The only way we’re going to get a jury on this case is if we send out to San Francisco for a bunch of Montessori kids with liberal parents who listen to This American Life instead of going to church on Sundays and who have no idea that organized religion even exists.”
And, ultimately, that’s what they did.
It was hot in the event room. It had always been hot. Michael couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been hot. He couldn't remember a time before the heat cooked his brains. A time before the carpet burned his feet and the air smelled like singed wool. His wings were sacks full of lead strapped to his back. His feathers drooped. His body streamed with sweat. His legs were made of stone. His shoulders and scalp were burned raw and red by the relentless heat pressing down on him from above.
Angels hate the heat. They prefer the cool reaches of Heaven, and even our Earth is a few degrees warmer than they find comfortable. When the angels who sided with Satan were cast out of Heaven they fell from its chill comfort into Hell’s lake of fire and it seared them, cooked them, broiled them alive. The shock drove them mad. They screamed for decades as their skin roasted and their wings fried and burned. The fallen angels burned in Hell for hundreds of years. After the first year they were no longer begging for water to cool their blistered tongues. After the first decade their flesh had baked off, peeled away and regenerated so many times that they were nothing more than masses of scar tissue. And still they burned.
After the first century, most of them had been driven insane from the pain. Another century passed and Satan began his project to organize Hell. He started to search for the angels amongst the lava flows and in the caverns where the air boiled. He found them where they cowered in the burning darkness, he coaxed them out from molten caves and pitch-black crevasses and he saw what had been done to them. They had fallen as angels but Hell’s fires were a crucible that had warped them until they were twisted, deformed and unrecognizable. Their minds had burned away along with their bodies and what remained were demons – deformed, monstrous reflections of the beautiful creatures they had once been.
Michael knew of this and he was scared that it was happening to him now. He was scared that he was burning to death, that the heat was making him insane. It pressed him down. It cooked him. The nylon wall-to-wall carpet smoldered and was sticky, on the verge of bursting into flame. Michael’s body felt like it would catch on fire at any moment. But still he kept walking. Lifting one leaden foot after the other. He was getting closer to the exit door all the time. Now he was almost two-thirds of the way there. He wondered if he’d be able to make it all the way before he lost his mind.
Sheriff Furlough had assigned Satan and Nero an empty conference room as a staging area. The conference table was so big that it left them almost no room to walk around, and so Nero was trying to pace back and forth as best he could but he kept bumping into chairs.
“What happens now?” Satan asked.
It was the day the trial was set to open and Nero was terrified. But he knew that as lost as he was, at least he had once been human. He understood the way laws and trials worked. Satan was totally in the dark.
“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders,” he said.
“But I thought this was a civil trial?” Satan asked.
“It is,” Nero said, quickly. “I was just trying to banter.”
“Banter?”
“To put you at ease.”
“It didn’t work,” Satan said.
Nero was petrified. He knew that he was the only one who could defend Satan, but the law he felt most comfortable with was Classical Roman law, which hadn’t really been practiced in one thousand eight hundred years. He had watched