Death Sucks

by Andrew Mallen

  Fujibashya offered Bobby a hand and nodded. Bobby got the hint, he knew what his teacher wanted and was happy to oblige. “Let’s do this asshole,” he cried.

  Jones’s smile faded quickly. “You sure boy? You sure the Master would want you to spend valuable time looking for your cock and balls after I cut them off.”

  “Oh lookie here, a cowardly Englishman, shocker,” Bobby said, smirking and shaking his head. “How now old chap? Do you have to pop to the loo to change your knickers? Jolly good show, another gutless limey, right oh, cheerio.”

  “Sword!” Jones shouted as he stormed toward the Reaper.

  Fujibashya handed his sword to Jones and backed away. Bobby readied. Jones hefted the sword and attacked. His first strike came from above meaning to cleave Bobby in two. Bobby didn’t block it, he simply stepped out of the way then swung his own sword in an efficient arc severing Jones’s left leg just below the knee as he stumbled passed. Bobby was so surprised by his own skill he nearly tripped over the freshly liberated limb as he steeped clear of the sprawling English prick.

  “What are you two playing at?” Sin bellowed from his throne where he’d blinked into being.

  Bobby spun, eyes wide and mouth open, like a kid caught watching his dad’s porn.

  “Well?” Sin rose, his muscles balled with tension and his teeth gnashed with wrath.

  “He attacked me Master,” Bobby offered a feeble explanation.

  “No my Master, he lies!” Jones cried as he crawled towards his leg. “The little shit tried to escape! He tried to run!”

  “Run where you stupid fuck?” Bobby snapped.

  “Fuji?” Sin turned to the silent warrior.

  Fujibashya met the devil’s eyes then pointed one steady finger at the one legged Englishman, “This one make challenge.”

  Sin whirled on Jones who had retrieved his leg and sat staring in shock at them. “I told you there would be time for revenge when this was over. I told you to wait. I told you to teach and to watch! You continue to fail me Mr. Jones,” Sin grew with his rage, standing at least twenty feet tall by the time he’d descended from his throne.

  “He…he…insulted me my Master. He…he…I had no choice,” Jones cried, looking like a bad break dancer in a bloody bathrobe as he tried to stand and face him.

  “You risk us all!” Sin raised the Reaper up with unseen power until he floated eye to eye with the monster. “I cannot trust you anymore.”

  “You can my Master! You can!” Jones cried, knowing he had royally screwed the pooch and probably for the last time.

  “Burn,” Sin whispered.

  “Master please…” Jones begged but it was a waste of words.

  Jones floated toward the giant fireplace facing the throne. The flames grew to greet him. Shackles, hidden until then behind the fire, reached out and clamped down on his wrists and remaining ankle.

  “Burn here with me so I can watch you suffer. Burn until you realize what your idiocy threatens, what your foolishness could have cost us. Burn, Mr. Jones, burn.”

  Sin smiled as the shackles drew Jones into the fireplace and through the flames until he hung crucified against the back wall of the massive hearth. The fire eagerly fed on his flesh. His screaming was like music to the ears of all those listening.

  Burn, you rotten piece of shit, burn.

  *

  “Mr. Fujibashya,” Sin called the young ninja by his full name for the first time. “Do you have honor?”

  Fujibashya fixed the demon with his cold eyes and nodded.

  “Are you loyal?” Sin continued the odd line of questioning.

  Is this a job interview because I never got the memo?

  Fujibashya nodded again.

  “Will you take an oath to honor and serve me?” Sin asked but it was not a question, he was playing Fujibashya, strumming the strings of the ancient warrior’s ethical code.

  Fujibashya was no fool, he knew Sin was trying to entice him to pledge his sword and his life to the demon. It was a fool’s game, there was no choice offered and none to be made. Fujibashya could not refuse him, it would only add to the horrors he and his clan already endured. “Yes,” he grunted roughly.

  No way! This is not good.

  “And your warriors? Your clan?” Sin wanted more than a sidekick, he wanted a personal squad of assassins to watch his back.

  Not fucking good at all!

  “I speak for all,” Fujibashya replied and bowed.

  “Very good. They will join us shortly.”

  Fujibashya’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing in search of treachery.

  “No bullshit Master Fujibashya. Finish training Mr. Grant and I will take you to them, to your new home,” Sin assured the cynical assassin then turned to Bobby. “Enough bullshit Grant. Understood?”

  Bobby nodded with fervor.

  “Twenty hours!” Sin roared. “Twenty hours until show time!”

  Shit, that was fast.

  Sin took a moment to study his ex-sidekick. Jones was nothing more than a scorched silhouette against the stone, an abstract decoration behind the flames. Sin shrugged and sauntered back up to his throne which had grown to accommodate his new size. “Well? What are you waiting for! Teach! Fight!”

  “Yes Master!” Bobby replied and turned to Fujibashya who winked a secret ‘Atta boy’ at his new student.

  The dude played all of us! Fucked Jones, check. Took his job, check. Got out of the Flame, check. Freed his crew, check. Not just a Master with the blade are you, you crafty little mofo.

  Bobby winked back and smiled, he could use a guy like Fujibashya on his side. The ninja attacked, swordless at first, kicking and punching like an epileptic octopus until he fought his way to Jones’s sword. Once the sword was in his hand every strike became a lethal one. The blade caught Bobby from every conceivable angle but never drew blood. Fujibashya slapped him with the wide, edgeless side of the sword, arresting each thrust a millimeter before impaling him. It was a small mercy but it was not his mercy that astounded Bobby. The ninja was not only demonstrating his humanity but his willingness to disobey and rebel against his self-appointed master.

  This is good, this is very good.

  Bobby danced the dance, taking blows and blocking others, paying for the ninja’s ancient secrets with pain. Watching the little warrior closely, trying his best to mimic his every move, Bobby realized that even if he had twenty years, he’d barely make a dent. Unfortunately, twenty hours was all he had left.

  *

  “Times up!” Sin informed the teacher and his student from where he sat watching them.

  Fujibashya halted immediately, bowed to Bobby, then turned to bow to his master. “Go with him,” Sin nodded toward a Reaper that just entered the throne room. “He will take you to your people.”

  Fujibashya bowed again and followed his guide without a word. Bobby waited as Sin studied him. “Come on boy, let’s eat.”

  “Eat?” Bobby repeated.

  “You can’t fight on an empty stomach,” Sin chirped as he climbed down the steps from his throne.

  “Dude, I’ve been dead for years, I don’t think my stomach is in commission anymore.”

  “Well that won’t do, not for this dinner.”

  With that a hunger so powerful gripped Bobby’s guts that he doubled over in agony.

  “Hungry now?” Sin asked with a wicked grin.

  “Fucking famished!” Bobby unfolded despite the pain.

  Sin chuckled, clapping him hard on the back with a hand as big as a car door, “Come on then, food’s getting cold.”

  *

  The devil’s dining room was as big as an airplane hangar. A narrow table ran its entire length and covered, end to end, with steaming hot platters of deliciousness, filling the grand space with a fog of tantalizing aromas. Like the throne room and the library, a massive fireplace dominated one wall. This one appeared to be made of a deep green, semitransparent coral. Its intricate network of delicate branches overlapping and intertwining
to form an arch of mesmerizing beauty around the flames they housed.

  Trophies hung from every inch of free space on the adjacent walls. Heads of every shape and size, none of which Bobby knew, stared through dead eyes. Some were as big as wagon wheels, others as small as grapefruit, all as bizarre the beast who collected them. The assortment of unusual shapes was outdone only by the variety of their colors, colors Bobby saw but found his mind unable to deciphering.

  “Magnificent isn’t it?” Sin asked, seeing Bobby caught in a trance.

  “Crazy,” Bobby murmured.

  “The apex predator from every world,” Sin explained with pride. “I hunted them all and with only my scythe.”

  “No shit?” Bobby wasn’t impressed, the carnage sickened him.

  “None,” Sin assured him. “That was before my brother banished me.”

  “Oh.”

  “This table is too big for just the two of us, let’s eat by the fire,” Sin said, slowly shrinking back to a still intimidating ten-foot self while perusing the banquet.

  “Yeah,” Bobby struggled to wrench his eyes from the gruesome but captivating decorations.

  “A buffet, you Americans love them I understand?” Sin grabbed a large, silver plate and matching fork.

  “Yeah, sure. What’s not to love about an endless supply of poor quality, extremely unhealthy, room temperature food?”

  Sin frowned but said nothing.

  Over your ugly fucking head big guy.

  Most of the platters Bobby didn’t recognize. Oddly colored mounds of veiny balls, slabs of peculiar meats, squirming wormlike creatures in a pools of bubbling goo and a hundred more offerings of similar curiosity. Bobby found a plate of what looked like bacon and a basket of freshly baked bread and almost cried at the sight. After loading his plate he found Sin gorging himself by the fire at a small round table set for two. Bobby sat as Sin finished devouring a bowl of the eels in goo with all the manners such a slippery undertaking required. Bobby tried to savor his food but couldn’t and forced himself to swallow every bite. Sin’s appetite for food was as insatiable as his appetite for chaos. He made a half dozen trips to the big table within the space it took Bobby to choke down two dinner rolls and a few strips of bacon. Each of Sin’s choices was more repugnant than the last until he finally topped it all off with a mug of, what appeared to Bobby, frothy pus.

  If I ever get out of here I’m going vegan.

  “Are you ready?” Sin asked after a long loud belch of satisfaction.

  Don’t puke. Don’t you fucking puke Bobby.

  “Yes Master.”

  “Do you love her?” Sin asked plainly.

  Bobby almost choked, he hadn’t expected Sin to go there. “I did,” he managed after clearing his throat while deciding that there was no point in lying.

  “And now?”

  Bobby closed his eyes and summoned his inner Casey Affleck.

  Dude can act.

  “She played me. She fucked with my head, ya’know? She fucking hurt me dude. All I want now is to kill that bitch and piss on her face when she’s dead.”

  “Yesssssss,” Sin purred. “She betrayed you, she played you for a fool.”

  “Fucking bitch.”

  “She used you,” Sin stoked Bobby’s rage. “You were a task to be completed and nothing more.”

  “Cunt!”

  “She is, the worst kind. A whore, pimped out by my brother to tame you, to heel you like a dog.”

  “I’m going to hack her to fucking pieces!” Bobby roared and swiped his plate from the table in a fit of feigned temper that would have made Casey proud.

  “Feel it boy! Feel the hate. Let it in. Embrace it! Harness it!”

  Bobby pushed away from the table and attacked the banquet. Tapping into his hate for everything and everyone that had led him to where he stood. He threw platters, tossed plates and pounded the table with his fists until he’d destroyed it all.

  “Good,” Sin stood and clapped, the collisions of his enormous hands filled the room. “Remember that hate and that pain. Kill with it. Show no mercy. Do not hesitate boy for she will not. She comes to finish her task, to kill you for her master. You are nothing to her boy, nothing!”

  “I won’t hesitate Master,” Bobby swore.

  “Good,” Sin hissed, satisfied. “There is ale from your world, sit and have a glass. I have one more detail to see to before we go.”

  “Thank you my Master,” Bobby bowed.

  Sin turned to him, a puzzled look on his gruesome face. “For what?”

  “For believing in me, for giving me this chance.” Bobby explained, hoping he wasn’t spreading it on too thick.

  Sin eyed the Reaper warily for a few short moments before revealing a gratified smile. “You are welcome my son,” he hissed. “I think, once this business is done, you and I will become friends.”

  Bobby bowed deeply once more. “I would be honored my Master. Can I ask you something?”

  Sin nodded.

  “Why me?”

  Sin frowned.

  “I mean why was I chosen to become a Reaper? Jones never told me and Delroy said I was kind of a big deal but if what Gordon told me is true then I didn’t really do anything to justify earning it. I was just trying to save them, the girl and the gangster. I know I was driving the limo or whatever but I didn’t hit that tree on purpose or nothing like that.”

  Sin smiled. “You were the first.”

  Bobby shrugged.

  “You were the first soul whose death was forecast and whose soul was taken before being offered absolution. You, my dear child, were the experiment. Until you, my dream was just that, a dream. You made it a reality. There was nothing special about your life, nothing at all. We used you because you died along with two others who were clear candidates for the Flame and sent a third Reaper along with them to claim you. It was no more than a convenience but it turned out to be so much more. Making you a Reaper was never part of the plan but since stealing your soul was so easy I wanted to see how far I could push the limits of the pact without being discovered.”

  Bobby’s mind back flipped, landed awkwardly and crashed hard. Everything that happened to him, all the pain and madness, had all been because of nothing more than bad luck and worse timing. He’d been the guinea pig in Satan’s fucked up experiment, the rat in his warped maze. It was so absolutely inconceivable, so inexplicably unthinkable and yet there he sat in Satan’s dining room preparing to overthrow God.

  “I must say that when you managed to actually earn your scythe I was quite impressed. Jones, as you know, can be a real pain in the ass when he wants to be. He assured me he would offer you no special treatment which was what I wanted. I needed you to fight for the right to serve me, to kill for it.”

  “So…so I…what if I failed?”

  “You would have gone to the Flames.”

  “And …”

  “There is no and boy. Had you failed you’re eternity would be spent suffering and thinking of nothing else. I would have found another way to destroy my brother, of that be sure. There is no point in considering what could have been. This is what is. You are here, on the precipice of a new era. You are the catalyst for a new beginning. You, Robert Grant, are the keystone in my plan to restore this and every world to order.”

  No fucking way. This is all because of me?

  “Yes and no,” Satan replied. “The path you walk was chosen for you but we have traveled so far and so fast along it because of your dogged persistence.”

  Bobby shook his head as if jumbling the words would make them any less intolerable. It didn’t. Sin smiled again then turned and left without another word.

  *

  Bobby hunted down the beer among the remnants of the devastated tablescape. He found a huge jug of the golden-yellow brew and a single, intact glass, poured and chugged the first without even tasting it. He savored the second and was pleasantly surprised to discover the beer was a nice, cold and crisp German-style lager.

&nbs
p; Oh man do I miss beer.

  As the all too familiar buzz settled over his brain, the very feeling he had chased aimlessly through life, Bobby realized that if he downed a few more glasses he’d tap into the liquid courage he needed and forget the thinks he didn’t. He swallowed the last few gulps in the glass and grabbed the pitcher. Holding it above the froth ringed glass, the sudsy contents lapping the pitcher’s sides, he struggled, as he always did, to do the right thing.

  Don’t do it bro, you gotta stay straight.

  Fuck that shit! I earned this!

  Nothing good ever came from being wasted.

  Nothing good happens when I’m not! Look a-fucking-round dude!

  People are depending on you. You can’t fuck this up.

  One for the road then. Just one.

  Nothing’s so bad that a drink can’t make it worse.

  Fuuuuuuuuuck!

  Bobby tossed the pitcher into the fire, followed closely by the glass. He wasn’t ready for what was waiting for him, he never would be. They don’t teach you that kind of thing in High School, there’s no ‘Save the Universe 101’or ‘Defeating Gods for Dummies’. School was such a waste of time, he’d have to write a letter, a real doozy that would melt his old principal’s glasses when she read it. That would teach them to send him to the afterlife unprepared.

  *

  “Still festering?” Sin asked as he strode toward Bobby.

  Startled by his appearance, both in the room and by his new look, Bobby said nothing. Comic book Satan was gone, along with the horns, claws and red scales he favored. Dressed in a plain red toga, cinched at his waist by a rough, black rope, Sin stood on three hooved feet, watching Bobby through a single round, purple, pupilless eye. “This is how I awoke for the first time,” he explained.

  Bobby frowned. “Awoke?”

  “I was not born, I simply came to be. I awoke.”

  “Gordon too?” Bobby asked, needing to know if God woke up looking like something Seth McFarland dreamed up while tripping hard on some seriously potent LSD as well.

  “I don’t know,” Sin confessed. “He was first.”

  It was a weird time for a history lesson but Bobby was intrigued. “So He changed by the time you showed up?”