Authors: Grady Hendrix
It took Satan an hour to get to his office and the entire time it was nonstop questions, questions, questions. By the time he dragged himself through his office door, he felt like he was full of lead. He left the lights off, felt his way around his desk and sunk down into his chair. It was peaceful in the dark. It was quiet. It was calm. He thought about massaging his forehead again.
“Yo,” someone said. “What does it take to get some Bronson up in here?”
Satan squealed and fell over backwards. Grabbing at his desk he managed to switch on the lamp and saw something horrible sitting Indian style in the interview chair across from him. It was vaguely human but what human would claim this thing as its child? Its jeans were tight, and clung to its stick-like legs. Around its concave chest was draped a baggy, waist-length cardigan and a v-necked t-shirt with its own face airbrushed onto it. And that face! Hideous beyond measure! Its hair hung in dry, frizzy sheets to its shoulders, and out of it crawled two bushy sideburns that dragged themselves down across its cheeks until they met over this thing’s upper lip. There were piercings in its chin and tongue and from its entire body radiated a sense of unsettling emptiness. It was all style and no substance, a human broadcast antenna for the latest fads, a toxic hole in Creation. It was unclean. It was unreal. It was unholy. Ironically, it threw a gang sign.
Satan screamed.
“Sir, what is - ?” Nero burst in and saw what was in the chair and he froze in horror. “A hipster,” he gasped.
There are some who say that hipsters are young, recently-settled urban middle class adults or older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture. There are others who say they are scum-sucking crybabies from the bowels of Hell. Those who have been to the bowels of Hell know a harder truth: hipsters are the pollution of eternity.
Every particle in Creation has an associated antiparticle with the same mass, but an opposite electrical charge. There are neutrons and antineutrons, protons and antiprotons, matter and antimatter, gravity and antigravity. There are sentient beings and then there are hipsters. Just as matter and antimatter brought into contact will annihilate each other, so too will conscious, rational life and the hipster destroy each other if they are forced to share the same space. Hipsters hate work, passion, duty, honor, loyalty and anything that requires time, dedication or commitment. They embrace crappy beers like Pabst Blue Ribbon, they love crappy bands like Vampire Weekend, crappy sports like kickball and crappy furniture. They tell themselves that their love of these things is ironic, but love is love and how long can you pretend to love something before you debase the very notion of love?
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 business.
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.”