In their passionate embrace of all that is meaningless, in their insistence on inserting irony into every facet of their lives, in their mindless worship of the cheap and shoddy, hipsters negate all that they touch. Worse than that, they have no souls. When a hipster dies their body is taken back to their hometown where they are stripped of their Eighties retro finery by heartbroken parents, their nineteenth century facial hair is shaved off, their labial piercings are removed and placed in a yellowed envelope with their baby teeth, and their aggressively meaningless tattoos are hidden beneath a thick layer of morticians make-up. Their parents assume that as difficult as its body is to deal with, the hipster’s soul has already moved on to a happier place. Those in the death business know otherwise. Long ago, the constant, sneering contempt hipsters have for those deemed less cool than themselves (read: everybody) microwaved their souls into tiny dried husks that rattle around inside them like old beans. When a hipster dies, he or she simply ceases to exist. In life: they helplessly hump every passing trend. In death: nothing.
For creatures of pure soul, like the dead, or those who stand close to the roots of Creation, like Satan, the hipster is a cosmic finger in the eye, an aberration that makes the Universe want to vomit. A hipster penetrating one of the spiritual realms feels as vile as a neo-Nazi penetrating a Holocaust memorial service. It is wrong, and the reaction is often a sudden, spontaneous spasm of violence.
Nero picked up a folding chair and began to beat the awful thing.
“Not cool!” the hipster squealed. “So not cool!”
“It’s getting away,” Satan said as the hipster covered its head with wristband-encrusted wrists and tried to scurry around Nero. Satan threw his lamp at it, cutting off its escape. Nero summoned all his courage and tackled the scrawny, shapeless thing, and the two of them rolled into the corner, looking like a beach ball wrestling a piece of string.
“Hurting! Me!” the hipster shouted as it struggled.
Satan picked up his phone and dialed.
“Yo!” Enar said.
“Enar,” Satan said. “You sent me a hipster.”
“The kid’s already there? Great! Have you heard his demo yet?”
“I’m very upset, Enar.”
“Yeah,” Enar said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him play you track two. It’s terrible.”
“I’m very upset you sent me a hipster.”
“It’s what all the kids are into these days. You and me, we’re old guys, we don’t understand. This kid, he’s from Bushwick.”
In the background, the hipster was trying to bite Nero.
“Get away, you nasty thing!” Nero said, kicking it.
“I want you to send me someone normal,” Satan said.
“Normal for what?” Enar asked. “Go down to Williamsburg and that’s all you see. Check out Silverlake and this guy is about average. Come on, he’s my sister’s kid. Help me out.”
“You don’t understand,” Satan said. “I can’t send this thing out as a representative of Hell. We’ll be a laughing stock.”
“Laughter is the best medicine,” Enar said.
“No,” Satan said. “It’s the worst medicine. In fact, it’s not even a medicine at all. I want to return your hipster.”
“I can’t really let you do that,” Enar said. “Look, you don’t want the hipster. I understand. There’s not a lot of patience for his brand in my sister’s house, either. But the fact is, he signed the contract. Right now, he’s all you’ve got. I can try to find someone with a more mainstream look but right this minute no one comes to mind, and it’s going to take me a while to sort through the options. And you know what the song says, ‘If you can’t be with the one you love/Love the one you’re with.’ Which, in this case, is my sister’s kid.”
Satan moaned in spiritual pain.
“The second I know something, I’ll be calling you,” Enar said, and hung up.
Satan slammed down the phone.
“I just want to go to the bathroom,” the hipster whined. “Is that OKAY?”
Nero lowered his guard for a second, but that was all it took. The hipster kicked him in the shins and made for the door. Satan tackled him and they went down in a heap. Lying on top of the wriggling sack of pale, jelloid flesh made him feel sick. The hipster had no bones, no muscles, no form or structure, he was just a pale skinbag covered in hair and ironic tattoos.
“I’ve got its feet,” Nero said.
Satan found that he was holding two limp tentacles that must be its arms.
“I’ve got its arms,” he said. “Now what do we do with it?”
“Here,” Nero said, dragging it towards the garbage can. “We’ll put it in a garbage bag and drown it in the Acheron.”
“Right,” Satan said.
“We’ll have to double bag it,” Nero said.
“Let go of me, you gaylords,” the hipster squealed.
The phone rang.
“Ignore it,” Satan said.
In one swift motion Nero grabbed the trashcan liner and pulled it up around the hipster’s legs.
“Now cram him in,” he said.
The phone stopped ringing.
Satan tried to shove the hipster into the trashcan liner.
“Don’t make me go Cobra Kai on your ass,” the hipster blustered.
They kept cramming. The intercom on Satan’s desk buzzed. It buzzed again. It began buzzing in an annoying staccato rhythm, but they ignored it and kept shoving. The bag was up to the hipster’s skinny waist by now, its two noodle-like legs folded up underneath it.
“You dudes suck,” the hipster whined.
The desk phone began to ring again and finally Satan couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed it, and in that moment the hipster squirmed away.
“Sir!” Nero cried.
The hipster was almost at the door, one foot dragging the trashcan liner, when Satan hurled the office phone, striking it in the head. The boneless thing went down, bonelessly. All business, Satan and Nero stuffed it back into the garbage bag.
“I think it broke my skin,” Nero said, examining his arm where the hipster had bit him.
Suddenly, the door burst open and a flock of fat, giggling cherubim fluttered through. They knocked into one another, they plowed into the ceiling and they bumped into the walls. Nero tried to swat them away from his face. One of them landed on Satan’s desk and stood up on its fat little legs, pulled out a horn and tootled on it.
They began to sing in their lisping, eerie voices.
“You’re wanted...you’re wanted...you’re waaanted...” they warbled, “In...Heeeaveeeennnnn!”
It was the big finish. They began to fly around lazily on their backs, pulling lyres out of their sagging diapers and strumming them, blowing meaningless little pootles of noise on their tiny trumpets, shaking golden tambourines to different rhythms. The one on the desk threw up.
“I suppose we should have answered the phone,” Nero said, as they fled the office.
Normally, when you get a Cherubim Summoning you drop what you’re doing and get yourself to Heaven, ASAP, but all the management books Nero had ever read emphasized staying focused on your goals and avoiding distractions.
“Sir, if there’s no Death, then no one is dying. We need to address this problem before it gets bigger.”
“I have to go to Heaven,” Satan said, trying to give Nero the slip, but Nero had a grip on his arm and wouldn’t let go.
“This is important, sir,” he said.
“It’s just Death.”
“It’s death,” Nero said.
“So?” Satan shrugged.
Nero wasn’t shocked. He had once been mortal and Satan had existed since before the dawn of time. Their takes on death were of a necessity very different. Death had certain rules it had to follow, and while most deaths could be handled by Death’s Minions, Death itself had to be present for situations where fifty or more humans lost their lives at once. And, like Broadway ticket sales, Hell depended on bulk busin
ess.
Right now, deaths were still occurring, but they were occurring on a delay. Gangbangers were fleeing in terror from punks they’d busted full of caps who were now chasing them down the street. ICUs and ERs were overflowing with patients who just wouldn’t die no matter how bad the doctors were at their jobs. A suicide bombing in Indonesia had resulted in two dozen very angry train passengers ganging up on the extremely startled and very much alive bomber and dragging him to the nearest police station. People were dying, but they were dying in ones and twos, in tens and twenties, and they were dying slowly. Slowly enough for the victims of a bus crash in the Andes to haul their shattered bodies back to their home villages and freak their hysterical families right out. Slowly enough for anti-insurgency actions in Afghanistan to turn into dusty remakes of Night of the Living Dead. The situation was causing a lot of problems on Earth. But the repercussions were going to be worse in Hell.
Satan’s realm existed in a state of delicate equilibrium. The main event in Hell was demons tormenting the souls of the damned. But the demons worked for so little pay that they were basically interns, doing it because it kept them entertained while they frittered away eternity. Without Death ushering in big blocks of newly dead souls the demons would get bored, they’d get distracted, they’d wander away from their stations. Then souls would start jamming up and the lines for processing would back up, and the longer the lines got the more demoralized the demons processing them would become and the slower they’d work and the more jammed things would get and eventually it would all grind to a halt.
It had happened once, after Atlantis sank, and it had taken hundreds of years before things got back on track. Nero didn’t want to see that happen again.
“We have no choice, sir,” he said. “We’ll have to unleash that hipster unless we can find an alternate Death today.”
“I will not have a Death who has a tattoo on his chest that says, ‘Strength & Respect’.”
“I don’t know if we have a choice, sir. Look around you. People are trickling in, but without any big disasters we’re going to fall behind. Death is an ever-unfolding mystery. It can’t just stop unfolding.”
“Can you do it?” Satan asked. “Just until we find someone permanent?”
“I was going to suggest you,” Nero said. “I can’t leave Hell.”
“I’ll get you a waiver.”
“But you’re the boss.”
“I have a strong belief in delegating.”
“You are the Lord of All Evil, Father of Lies, Bel, Behemoth, The Fallen One, the Prince of Darkness. Leviathan.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. Way to pass the buck. I’ll do it just like I do everything else around here.”
“Personally, I thought Nic Cage would have made for a compelling Death.”
“Who told you that?”
“I saw it on his Twitter feed. He thought it was a new Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Unfortunately, we’ve only just touched on the tip of the Problem Iceberg.”
“Do we have to touch on the rest? You do realize that was a Cherubim Summoning, right?”
“It’s about the Ultimate Death Match, sir. Without Death, we only have War and he won’t be wrestling for us this year. He’s decided to go on a biking tour of Iran. They’ve got some human rights violations that he’s really excited about.”
“What about Famine and Pestilence? They’ve got moves.”
“Famine is doing a walking tour of Somalia to work on her book about Central African cuisine and Pestilence has three months of vacation time due and she’s using it to go on a package tour of some of the most infectious cities in Canada. That’s all four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, sir. Our entire first string.”
“But...” Satan wasn’t quite putting it together yet. “But who’s going to wrestle for Hell?”
“We should talk to the Minotaur.”
“There has to be someone else.”
“I don’t think there is, sir.”
“But everyone says he’s gone funny in the head,” Satan said. “I don’t know if I can handle that right now.”
“Sir, do you really think that avoiding your problems is a way to solve them?”
“Yes?”
“Sir, you have to confront this problem head on.”
“Fine,” Satan said. “Let’s go see the Minotaur.”
The Minotaur roared. It was a blood-chilling sound, as big as the Appalachian Mountains and as inhuman as a shark. The roar was one word, loud enough to burst your eardrums, powerful enough to vibrate your blood. And that word was:
“Uno!”
The centaurs threw down their cards in disgust as the Minotaur played his last card (a Wild Draw Four) and snuffled in delight.
“Me out!” the Minotaur crowed, and the centaurs drifted off, grumbling.
Satan and Nero approached.
“Hail, Minotaur,” Nero said.
“Hail, Minotaur,” Satan said.
“Hi,” the Minotaur said.
When Hell first opened for business the demons were already there, but some creatures came of their own volition, attracted by its dark energies. The Minotaur was one of them. By the time the deformed, bull-headed giant arrived in Hell he was already an object of so much fear and veneration that a black aura surrounded him. He was a nexus of power, made strong by the swirling force of the prayers of his uncountable victims. The Minotaur had stopped being a monster long ago and was now something like a demi-god, and demi-gods were not to be taken lightly. Unlike Death or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Minotaur was not an employee. The Minotaur merely Was.
“We need to talk,” Satan said. “About the Ultimate Death Match.”
“Is wrestling,” the Minotaur said.
“It is wrestling,” Satan agreed. This was delicate. He’d never tried to compel one of Hell’s freeloading residents into action. His attitude had always been very Latin American in regard to inhabitants like the Minotaur: expect nothing, and you won’t be disappointed. But now he needed the Minotaur. This required diplomacy, and Satan was a terrible diplomat. That was more Nero’s realm.
“Did you know that you’ve never volunteered?” Nero asked. “Thousands of years you’ve been here, but you’ve never gone into the ring to fight against Heaven. War’s done it, Pestilence’s done it, Death’s done it for years. But you, the most terrifying and savage denizen of Hell, the Custodian of the Seventh Circle, have never entered the ring.”
“Hate violence,” the Minotaur said.
“But you’re in charge of the violent,” Satan pointed out.
“Minotaur different now,” the Minotaur said. “Finally think violence no good. Violence no solve anything.”
“What are you babbling about?” Satan snapped. “Earlier today I was just thinking that violence solves a lot of things.”
“Excuse us,” Nero said, pulling Satan aside.
“He’s being a jerk,” Satan said.
“Sir,” Nero said. “When was the last time you were down in the Seventh Circle? A few hundred years ago? Let me handle this.”
“You finish whispering about Minotaur?” the Minotaur asked.
“We’re just surprised – and impressed – by your changes,” Nero said. “You have to admit, renouncing violence is the last thing we’d expect from you.”
“Was crushing skull of Emperor Charles the Fat and think to self, ‘What me hope achieve? Why me so violent?’ After that, no more violence. Only games!”
“Games?” Nero asked.
“Uno! Risk! Monopoly! All very exciting! No violence, but still me always win!”
“You know,” Nero said. “The Ultimate Death Match is a game. It’s wrestling. That’s a game.”
“Is fake!” the Minotaur said. “Minotaur see many wrestlers here. All tell Minotaur wrestling fake.”
“Excuse me,” a voice called. They turned and saw Alexander the Great, soaked in blood up to his chin, stumbling across the rocky ground. “Mr. Minotaur, I was wondering – ”
> “Shut up!” the Minotaur roared. “Is you stupid, fat dummy? You no see me talk to King of Hell and Roman Emperor.”
“I’m sorry,” Alexander the Great’s lower lip trembled.
“You sorry? Who cares? You stupid idiot with dumb brain and jiggle thighs. Go sit in River of Blood.”
“I’ve been sitting in the River of Blood for eighty years and you promised – ”
“Me never promise anything! Get back in River of Blood, dum-dum!”
Cowed, Alexander the Great hobbled back to sit in the River of Blood.
“Are you sure that’s the best solution?” Nero asked.
“After hundred years souls no feel physical abuse any more,” the Minotaur explained. “Emotional abuse only way to hurt them now.”
“Don’t you miss the physical abuse?” Nero asked.
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“How do you know if you haven’t tried it? Just in the ring? Just wrestling in the Ultimate Death Match? You may find that you miss it more than you think.”
“Minotaur no miss physical violence.”
“You would really be helping us out,” Nero said. “Death is gone and we – ”
“What happen Death?”
“He was...let go,” Nero said.
“You fire Death?!?” the Minotaur said, suddenly looming over them both, steam shooting out of his flapping nostrils, eyes red and blazing.
“Kind of,” Satan said.
“Then maybe you fire Minotaur if Minotaur no good in Death Match. Maybe you fire Minotaur if you no like Minotaur attitude. Minotaur cannot work in conditions like this!”
The Minotaur turned his enormous back on them, sat down and began to brood.
Satan Loves You Page 5
