Authors: Grady Hendrix
“Of course,” Nero said.
“What’s this number?”
“That’s two hundred million US dollars, sir.”
“Yes, but what’s it doing here?”
“That’s what the plaintiff is asking for. It’s the combined actual and punitive damages.”
“Two hundred million dollars?”
“It’s unlikely she’ll be awarded that much if she wins, sir. It’s far more likely the court will reduce the award by half.”
“Nero,” Satan said, barely controlling himself. “We don’t even have two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank.”
“Sir, I have been trying my best not to think about it,” Nero said. “I am under a lot of pressure. The last thing I need to think about is what happens if we lose.”
“If they win they get more money than we’ve seen in centuries. How are we going to pay this?”
“Sir, if I thought about that then I would be underneath this table sobbing. I would be completely paralyzed.”
“We don’t have this money!”
“Sir, believe me. I have a plan – ”
“Your plan is that we don’t lose! That’s not a plan, that’s a wish.”
“Have I not served you faithfully for hundreds of years?” Nero asked.
“Yes. But – ”
“Sir, I will not lose. Hell was the best thing that ever happened to me. When you released me from my torments you took a chance on this short, paunchy, washed-up Roman emperor. No one liked me. Everyone thought I fiddled while my own city burned, even though fiddles weren’t even invented when that happened and I greatly prefer the cithara. They all just judged without knowing the facts. You took me out of the gutter, you gave me a chance, you gave me redemption: an eternity of service to a cause greater than myself. Now I have a chance to return that favor. And sir,” Nero was all steely resolve. “I will not lose.”
Satan had never heard this kind of conviction in Nero’s voice before.
“All right,” he said. “I trust you.”
Nero smiled.
“You don’t know how much that means to me,” he said.
“Okay,” Furlough said, sticking his head back in the door. “They finally got her to stop crying and she’s in the courtroom. It’s showtime.”
Frita Babbit sat in the witness stand. This was the grand climax of the prosecution’s strategy, which had been beaten out and storyboarded by three Hollywood scriptwriters for maximum emotional impact. First, the days of expert witnesses pounding it into the jury’s brains that Satanic abuse was a fact of life, that cults were everywhere and that cults had ruined Frita Babbit’s life. But that was just a tease, because the prosecution always withheld the lurid details of Frita’s abuse, dangling it in front of the jury as it led them down the hallway of their argument like a coy mistress, staying just out of reach, dropping item after item of clothing behind them, drawing the jury down a passage with no exit but the one the prosecution had chosen for them. The jury was primed, and Frita Babbit was about to strike the match.
“Ms. Babbit,” Eddie Horton said. “I don’t want to badger you with a lot of questions. I know how brave you are to even be here today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to you or to your support team.”
He gestured to the six women wearing “Team TruthTeller” t-shirts who were sitting nearby, ready to spring into action the second Frita showed any signs of distress.
“You are a brave, brave woman and I hope that our friends from the press record your heroism and that it goes on to inspire children around the world to tell their parents about the abuse inflicted upon them by Satanic cults. I hope that they, too, will learn from your courage and speak out. Silence does equal death.”
“Thank you,” Frita said, quietly.
“I want you to know that you are a personal hero of mine,” Horton said, placing his hand over his heart. “And it is a great honor for me to cross examine you here, today, where the healing is going to begin. But rather than peck at you with a lot of legalese I want you, in your own words, to tell the court what happened.”
“First,” Frita Babbit said. “I would like to read a poem I wrote. It’s called
‘
Healing?
’”
Healing?
By Frita Babbit
Now and then
I get a little bit tired
Of listening to the sound of my tears
Now and then
I get a little bit nervous
That the best of all the years have gone by
But I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadows.
If I fail, if I succeed,
At least I’ll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity.
Because I am beautiful, no matter what they say
Words can’t bring me down
I am beautiful in every single way
And I’ll find my strength in the arms of an Angel,
Far away from here
In the arms of an Angel;
May I find some comfort here.
And I will survive
As long as I know how to love
I know I will stay alive.
I’ve got all my life to live,
I’ve got all my love to give
And I’ll survive.
I will survive.
“I will survive!” she shouted, rising to her feet.
There was silence for a moment, and then, in the back of the courtroom, a female reporter began slow, strong clapping. And then a man, tears running into his beard, stood up and began to clap as well. It was just the two of them for a moment, but then another reporter put down his notebook and stood, clapping slowly, proudly, powerfully. And then more people stood, and more, and Judge Gold was clapping, and Eddie Horton, and the whole courtroom was an echoing chamber of empowerment and applause as people cried and embraced one another.
Nero wasn’t clapping. Neither was Satan. They wanted this to pass, but it didn’t seem like it would anytime soon. Finally, the applause died down and, except for a few sniffles, it was quiet again.
“I don’t remember anything about my childhood,” Frita Babbit began in the fragile voice of a true survivor. “We lived in a safe neighborhood. There weren’t many black people and the ones who were there were clean and well-spoken. I thought that the world was a good place. But then came...that night.
“The first time the Satanists came for me, I remember it like it was yesterday. October 25, 1988. I remember it was a Tuesday because I checked Google calendars a few days ago with Ms. Standing and that’s what she told me. My parents and I had just finished watching Geraldo’s two-hour special, “ Exploring Satan’s Underground,” and it was my bedtime. I went up to my room and I remember feeling heavy and tired, like I was sleepy. The next thing I knew my mother was holding me over the toilet and then she flushed me down it. There was a secret tunnel inside the toilet leading from our upstairs hall bathroom to an underground chamber.
“I was so scared. I came out of the toilet pipe and three tall men in black robes with horned helmets grabbed me and one of them washed me so I didn’t smell like toilet. And then they took a turkey baster and put a baby inside of me. They told me that when the baby was born they were going to eat it and make me drink its blood so that my soul would belong to Satan. One of them was Joe Biden.”
“The Vice President?” Eddie Horton asked. This was obviously new to him.
“Yes,” Frita said. “He has a double who fills in for him in the Senate when he’s performing Satanic ritual abuse. That’s why he’s such a big advocate for stem cell research: he wants to clone himself. After that I developed a fear of toilets and of Joe Biden. Somehow they returned me to my bed, almost as if it had all been a bad dream. But if it was a bad dream it was one that never ended because night after night my parents helped the Satanists abduct me.
“Their Devil church was ruled by the Dungeon Master, and it had underground tunnels that ran all over the city. Tunnels led to the hospital where they stole amputated feet and removed appendixes for their buffet tables, to the local record store where they would play Black Sabbath albums backwards. The name of the cult was Knights in Satan’s Service. They would make me inject drugs in my eyeballs, like heroin and crack, and when I was a teenager they kept me from telling anyone what was going on by giving me lots of mind control drugs like LSD and NutraSweet.”
“Did you have a baby during this time?” Eddie Horton asked.
“I had lots of babies,” she said. “ They ate them all. They cooked them in a big baby loaf, like a meatloaf, and put barbecue sauce on them made out of the spit of Jews.”
“I’m sorry, the what?” Eddie Horton asked.
“Jew spit. It’s their favorite thing to eat in the world after babies,” Frita said. “For Satanists, Jews are like prize cows who make delicious spit for them to eat.”
“Let’s move on from the, um, Jew spit,” Eddie said.
“Sure,” Frita Babbit said. But it was clear that she was just getting warmed up. “All of the Satanists were homosexuals, too. I knew most of them. There was Joe Biden, of course, he was a big homosexual. And then my mom, my dad, our minister, all the teachers at my school, the entire town council, our neighbors, my family doctor, the entire cardiology department of our local hospital, and most of the English department from the community college. They used to bury me in a coffin after they made me pregnant and then they’d dig me up to take the baby and eat it. Once they cut off my head to show me what would happen if I told anyone, and then they sewed it back on before I could die. It really hurt. They would make me have babies with anything: turkeys, seagulls, pelicans. Almost any kind of bird. Once they made me have a baby with a bald eagle, and then they wrapped it in an American flag and burned it.”
“Tell us about Satan,” Horton said, trying to control the unstoppable torrent of crazy that was gushing out of Frita’s mouth. “Tell us about how Satan abused you.”
“Satan abused me three times,” Frita said. “They summoned him by playing a Slayer album backwards six hundred and sixty-six times. While they were doing that they spanked me with a Bible. After I had been spanked for six hundred and sixty-six seconds all the people in robes suddenly fell to their knees and began to have Satanic sexual intercourse and then a bat flew into the room and made me pregnant. That was Satan.”
“The bat impregnated you?” Eddie Horton asked, to clarify for the court.
“It flew right up my butt. I had a half-man, half-bat baby and its first words were,
‘
Hail, Satan.’ Then the Dungeon Master took it from me and later he told me that the bat baby had become the head of a small internet start-up company delivering dog food to people who lived in Manhattan during the dot com boom in the late 90’s.”
“And the next time Satan manifested, what form did he take?”
“The next time I was in my backyard thinking about all the Satanic ritual abuse I was suffering and listening to the radio, and Satan appeared to me as a snake. He said that I was really hot and that he couldn’t stop thinking about me and then he made me pregnant by biting my ankle. That baby got flushed down the toilet by the Dungeon Master.”
“And the next time you were ritually and Satanically abused by Satan?”
“That time I was in the Devil church and they were making me kill my best friend with a George Foreman Grill. It was horrible. She was screaming at me to stop and I was pressing down, and pressing down, and pressing down. It was such a traumatic memory that I completely blocked it out until a few weeks ago. But after she was dead and Joe Biden and Steven Seagal were eating her body, a huge poodle came into the room. Somehow I knew this was Satan, too, and that he wanted me to have his baby. And so he made me pregnant by licking my hand a lot until it tickled and then there was a warm feeling in my tummy and a baby grew there. He used Dungeons and Dragons to make the baby grow really fast and then I had the baby and that was really terrible because I had just squashed my best friend to death with a George Foreman Grill and I had the baby and I was screaming and Satan ran away and forgot to turn off his spell and so my baby grew up, and went through puberty, and became middle aged and then died as an old man all in ten minutes.”
“How did you know that it was Satan all three times if he came to you in three different forms?” Horton asked.
“Because his thingie is shaped like a pitchfork.”
The entire courtroom turned to look at Satan.
“Keep doodling, sir,” Nero said, under his breath.
Satan doodled harder.
“Are they still looking at me?” he asked.
“Keep
...
doodling
...”
Nero said.
“That was the three times the Devil abused me,” Frita Babbit said. “Satan’s pitchfork wiener ruined my life. Later, I wanted to get married but every time I told one of my fiancés about the abuse they always ran away. Also, I can’t use toilets. I’m too traumatized. I use plastic bags from the grocery store. I wanted to go to college and study Comparative Literature and then go to graduate school and get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and really give something back to the world, you know? But I can’t. All that abuse gave me ADD and ADHD and so I can’t study. And that’s how Satan ruined my life. But I want everyone here to know that while I was victimized, I am not a victim. I am a strong woman. They can’t hold me down. I am proud, and beautiful and empowered and no one can stop me but myself. And I won’t stop me because the only limits I choose to acknowledge are no limits. I reach high, for there are stars lying hidden within my soul.”
There was a quiet moment, punctuated only by the sound of muffled sobs from the visibly moved spectators.
“No further questions, your honor,” Eddie Horton said, and sat down.
“Your witness,” Judge Gold said to Nero.
Nero stood and straightened his toga. He had been stress-eating Cheetos, and there were little orange smudges all over his wrinkled toga, which had turned from white to a sort of off-white grayish gray.
Nero walked to the front of the courtroom and paused dramatically. Then he turned to Frita Babbit.
“Would you state your name and spell your last name for the record, please?”
Frita Babbit looked confused.