Authors: Grady Hendrix
“You know what,” Sheriff Tommy Furlough said, looking down from the roof of the courthouse where he’d set up his command post. “Those fellas don’t get paid enough to get crushed protecting Satan. Tell
‘
em to fall back and hang loose. Their only job right now is to keep these yahoos away from the courthouse doors.”
Orders went out on the walkie-talkies and deputies all over the street crawled out of the crushing crowd to safety and re-formed by the double glass doors of the courthouse. Out on the street, the minivan came to a complete stop. The crowd started to rock it on its shock absorbers. Inside, Nero and Satan and their driver were trapped.
“Sir,” Nero said. “This is really getting out of hand.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Satan snapped.
“I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job,” the driver moaned.
Protestors pressed their screaming faces to the tinted windows, spat on the glass, shouted “Satan is New World Order UN Pawn!” and punched the windows of the minivan. In the front seat, the driver, who wasn’t a professional driver anyways but was actually studying right now for his accountancy license and was just driving this van to pay off his student loans, covered his face and began to cry.
“Oh my god,” he sobbed. “They hate me. They hate me!”
The crowd kept rocking the van and its left two tires came up off the asphalt completely. It hovered in mid-air for one vertiginous instant and then slammed back down. A cheer erupted from the crowd.
“I think they’re going to do that again,” Nero said.
“Please,” the driver sobbed. “I have a prepaid test next week. I don’t want to die.”
“Would both of you just calm down?” Satan said.
The minivan lifted off again. This time they could feel gravity snatching at it as it reached the peak of its arc, but it escaped and then slammed back down again, cracking Nero’s head against the window.
“They won’t be happy until we tip over,” Nero observed.
The driver was on his cell phone.
“Tell Titi and Haha that I love them, baby,” he cried. “And I love you, too. Oh, baby, I love you so much.”
The crowd was beating on the windows with American flags, and all Satan, Nero and the driver could see was an angry swirl of red, white and blue. The van went up for the third time. It hovered at the top of its arc and then hands began slapping the metal panels, urging it over, tipping it like a cow, and their hearts lurched as it finally succumbed to gravity, teetered past its balance point and then crashed to the asphalt. On impact, all its windows blew out in a shower of safety glass.
A roar went up from the crowd and then hands were reaching in through the windows, trying to haul the three of them out.
“I’m not Satan!” the driver howled. “I’m a Methodist!”
He was dragged away into the sea of grasping, tearing hands. Hands grabbed Nero’s ankles and hauled him out on his belly. He grabbed the cup holders as he passed but they snapped off in his hands.
“My Lord!” was the last thing he screamed to Satan as he was pulled out of the van and swallowed up by the mob.
Satan was alone. Hands were snatching at him, but they couldn’t get a grip. He crawled through the drifts of broken glass until he reached the rear doors and kicked them open, emerging into the crowd. He was bruised and scratched, cut and shaken.
“Nero?” he shouted.
The crowd was on him. They grabbed him, violating him with their fingers, pulling him in every direction, lifting him up, pushing him down, hitting him, shrieking and screeching, waving their signs in his face, showering him with spittle, screaming their chants and personal beliefs into his face. Behind him, the battered minivan caught on fire. Up on the roof, Sheriff Furlough had had enough. He lowered his binoculars.
“Alright, boys, it’s all fun and games until someone sets a fire. Send in the cavalry.”
An acne-spotted deputy stepped to the far edge of the roof and scissored his arms frantically back and forth over his head. After a moment, he turned back to the sheriff.
“They’re comin’!” he shouted.
Down on the ground, the cavalry came rolling around the corner of the courthouse from the parking lot on the other side of Harbin Avenue where Furlough had been holding them in reserve. The noise of the crowd changed from an angry roar to a panicked gabbling as people sensed that the cavalry was on its way. Protestors ran before them, fear blossoming across their faces, backing away at first, then jogging away, and then just turning and flat out running like Hell. Panic swept through the crowd.
The cavalry were two hundred strong, volunteers from all the different state sheriff’s departments wearing riot helmets and facemasks, bandoliers of tasers strapped across their bulletproof vests. They looked like stormtroopers. They looked like they meant business. But that’s not what struck fear into the hearts of the protestors. What broke the will of the crowd was that they were all riding Segways. Black Segways. And on every Segway, across the matte black cattle catchers welded to their fronts, was the motto: “Tase
‘
em all, let God sort
‘
em out.”
The cavalry advanced, firing tasers into the crowd like bon voyage streamers during the opening credits of
The Love Boat
, rolling forward in a flying wedge. Tased protestors dropped to the ground, jittering uncontrollably and wetting their pants. A seven-year-old child was urged by her parents to run up and put a flower on the lead Segway but she got tased in the face instead and went down like a seven-year-old sack of bad parenting. The Segways plowed up the middle of East Musser Street, slicing through the center of the crowd. On camera correspondents ran, their cameramen staying behind to get that one perfect shot and getting tased for their trouble. Their soundmen dragged them to safety. The cluster of protestors packed tight around the burning minivan held their signs up like shields, or weapons, or weapon-shields.
“I don’t think they’re gonna move,” a heavyset deputy said to Sheriff Furlough up on the roof. “They’re gonna topple them Segway things.”
“Just you watch,” Sheriff Furlough smiled. “I may have majored in non-violent crowd control back in college but I minored in ultra-violent crowd control, so that tends to balance things out. Ah, there they go.”
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 movies big enough. Shoot, he’s already up for a place on the Supreme Court.”
“And he’s a judge?”
“Greatest jurist ever to wear a robe. You know that decision in Nevada that if someone’s a real dumbass you can smack them? That’s his ruling. The Supreme Court wanted to overturn it. Couldn’t. It’s airtight.”
And then he smacked Satan.
“Dumbass,” he said, and rolled away.
“Ow,” Satan said.
Over his shoulder the cop yelled, “That’s legal in this state!”
By now, Judge Cody Gold had reached the doors of the courthouse. He shoved his arms up in a big victory “V” and then ducked inside. His fans were left gasping in his wake, on their hands and knees, throwing up from over-stimulation and having private emotional meltdowns. They all seemed to have lost interest in Satan now that they were in the presence of their biggest hero and Satan used the opportunity to find Nero, who was lying on his back in a chewed up bit of dirt that had had grass on it earlier that morning, before the crowd descended.
“We should go inside before anyone notices us again,” Satan said, pulling Nero up.
“He stepped on me...” Nero said in a dazed voice.
Satan smacked him sharply across the face.
“Ow,” Nero said, recovering himself. “What was that for?”
“Get a hold of yourself,” Satan said. “We’ve got a trial to attend.”
“But you hit me,” Nero said.
“It’s legal in this state.”
At the best of times, Nero did not like the physical plane. His centuries of torment had forced him to face the reality that he had been an evil despot and so coming back to the scene of the crime, the mortal realm, always made him self-conscious. What if someone recognized him and he’d had their great, great, great, etc. grandfather crucified? It would be so awkward. Add to this the fact that he had just had an intense fangasm and now Satan, his Lord and Master to whom he owed everything, and because of whom his existence had recently become incredibly stressful, had slapped him. Nero was already a volatile cocktail of neurochemical reactions. He was already a ticking emotional time bomb. And now he did the only thing he knew how to do in the face of this slap.
He ran away crying.
Satan gaped after him as Nero lumbered around the corner of the building.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Wait! Nero? Come back!”
Getting into the courtroom was like boarding a plane in Tel Aviv on September 12, 2001. That is to say: security was tight. Even pieces of paper were being x-rayed. Paperclips were going through mass spectrometers to make sure that they were actually what they claimed to be - wire in a looped shape that used the principles of torsion and friction to hold together multiple pieces of paper - and not nefarious, James Bond-ian assassination devices from the Q Division. No one could walk more than ten feet without some steely-eyed sheriff’s deputy asking for their ID, looking at their face, looking back down at their ID, looking back up at their face, back at their ID and then, finally, giving a grudging nod. Half the press in the courtroom were arrested after background checks discovered their outstanding warrants and unpaid parking tickets and the wheels of justice ground to a halt while alternate journalists were selected and screened.
Finally, Satan was seated in the freezing cold courtroom, waiting for jury selection to begin. The cold, hard-backed wooden chair behind the defendant’s table was designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, but it was nothing compared to the psychological discomfort Satan felt sitting there all alone. He felt conspicuous, sitting at this enormous wooden table with no papers, no files, no law books, no lawyer. It was just him. The plaintiff’s table to his right was packed with things. There were two lawyers, their assistants, Frita Babbit, her PTSD and Recovered Memories Counselor, and they had brought an impressive assortment of papers, files, law books and anatomically correct dolls. Satan felt like a chump.