what it had looked like on TV, twenty years ago: the great silver reflectors unfolding in solar orbit, the jubilant politicians, the graphs showing a 20% fall in sunlight reaching the Earth… the savage April blizzards that didn’t stop for a month, the endless twilight and the sun dim enough to look at. And now the Devil wanted to give him a wish, in payment for fucking things up for a few thousand bastards who had it coming? Davy felt his lips drawing back from his teeth, a feral smile forcing itself to the surface. “Ah want ye to fuck up the sunshade, awright? Get ontae it. Ah want tae be wairm…”
The Devil shook his head. “That’s a new one on me,” he admitted. “But—” He frowned. “You’re sure? No second thoughts? You want to waive your mandatory fourteen-day right of cancellation?”
“Aye. Dae it the noo.” Davy nodded vigorously.
“It’s done.” The Devil smiled faintly.
“Whit?” Davy stared.
“There’s not much to it. A rock about the size of this pub, traveling on a cometary orbit—it’ll take an hour or so to fold, but I already took care of that.” The Devil’s smile widened. “You used your wish.”
“Ah dinnae believe ye,” said Davy, hopping down from his bar stool. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Tam dodging through the blackout curtain and the doorway, tipping him the wink. This had gone on long enough. “Ye’ll have tae prove it. Show me.”
“What?” The Devil looked puzzled. “But I told you, it’ll take about an hour.”
“So ye say. An’ whit then?”
“Well, the parasol collapses, so the amount of sunlight goes up. It gets brighter. The snow melts.”
“Is that right?” Davy grinned. “So how many wishes dae Ah get this time?”
“How many—” The Devil froze. “What makes you think you get any more?” He snarled, his face contorting.
“Like ye said, Ah gave ye a loan, didn’t Ah?” Davy’s grin widened. He gestured toward the door. “After ye?”
“You—” The Devil paused. “You don’t mean…” He swallowed, then continued, quietly. “That wasn’t deliberate, was it?”
“Oh. Aye.” Davy could see it in his mind’s eye: the wilting crops and blazing forests, droughts and heatstroke and mass extinction, the despairing millions across America and Africa, exotic places he’d never seen, never been allowed to go—roasting like pieces of a turkey on a spit, roasting in revenge for twenty years frozen in outer darkness. Hell on Earth. “Four billion fuckers, isnae that enough for another?”
“Son of a bitch!” The Devil reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an antique calculator, began punching buttons. “Forty-eight—no, forty-nine. Shit, this has never happened before! You bastard, don’t you have a conscience?”
Davy thought for a second. “Naw.”
“Fuck!”
It was now or never. “Ah’ll take a note.”
“A credit—shit, okay then. Here.” The Devil handed over his mobile. It was small and very black and shiny, and it buzzed like a swarm of flies. “Listen, I’ve got to go right now, I need to escalate this to senior management. Call head office tomorrow, if I’m not there, one of my staff will talk you through the state of your claim.”
“Haw! Ah’ll be sure tae dae that.”
The Devil stalked towards the curtain and stepped through into the darkness beyond, and was gone. Davy pulled out his moby and speed-dialed a number. “He’s a’ yours noo,” he muttered into the handset, then hung up and turned back to his beer. A couple of minutes later, someone came in and sat down next to him. Davy raised a hand and waved vaguely at Katie: “A Deuchars for Tam here.”
Katie nodded nonchalantly—she seemed to have cheered up since the Devil had stepped out—and picked up a glass.
Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly. “Neat,” he admitted. “Get anythin’ else aff him?”
“Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby. Just these.” Tam looked disgusted for a moment. “Ah pulled ma chib an’ waved it aroon’ an’ he totally legged it. Think anybody’ll come lookin’ for us?”
“Nae chance.” Davy raised his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil’s mobile phone in it smugly. “Nae a snowball’s chance in hell…”
Non-Disclosure
Agreement
by Scott Westerfeld
I went to Los Angeles to burn down a house.
It was a low-stress conflagration. Just a run-of-the-mill house-burning sequence for a television miniseries. It was working-titled Tribulation Alley—set in a post-Rapture world populated by a lot of recently reformed agnostics and the odd Anti-Christ.
Because it was television,