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There was nothing to take. I turned and went back down the hall, down the stairs. I was pla
“Mr. Gallatin?” Beeflow’s voice.
I stood and stared at the refrigerator. “What?”
“If it’s of any comfort, he didn’t make this happen. It’s been going on for some time. Upstairs?”
“I know what you mean.”
“You were never supposed to know about it. She was always very careful and discreet. But when you offered it to him, when you gave up her love for you-”
“I know what you’re saying, Beeflow. I’m not that stupid. He shows me the truth, you show me the truth-both of you killing me with all this truth about my life. Was that the plan? Because what good does it do? Seeing the truth just shows you how wrong you were about things and how ugly they really are.”
“Sometimes. And sometimes it brings the genuinely good things into better focus.”
I threw up my hands in disgust. “I don’t want to hear any more. Okay? Don’t say another word.” I left my house for the last time and started walking over to the Brothers, not really knowing if what Beeflow had said made things better or worse.
But I didn’t have any time to think about it. Suddenly from down the street came all these screams and sounds of people ru
When they were gone, a few moments passed and then came the second wave. Maybe a hundred wild-looking, screaming women in leather and animal skins, wearing headdresses made out of crazy-colored bird feathers, carrying spears and swords and all kinds of other ugly weapons, some of their faces covered in war paint, went barreling after those scared gladiators. It was clear they were going to catch up any minute.
After the last ones passed I said, “What the fuck was that?”
Brooks and Zin Zan started ru
“And we’re supposed to do something about it? Us? Just the three of us?”
We were already ru
Mike’s Place by David J. Schwartz
The Devil got a job tending bar at Mike’s Place. You’d think he’d be bitter about his change of fortune, but he just shrugs it off. He says a lot of big corporations have failed, and Hell, Inc. was no different, when you get down to it. As for exchanging seven figures a
For his part, the Devil doesn’t discriminate. Used to be you just had to be sinful; now you just have to be thirsty. He says the only difference is that now the really bad ones get tossed out instead of in.
Not that a lot of people are eighty-sixed from Mike’s. It happens, of course-Mike doesn’t put up with fighting, for example. But he puts up with a lot. Too much, some of the waitresses might say. Like Ashes, who never lets a woman enter or leave the bar without putting his hands on her in some way. Or Little Tony, who sits in the corner talking to himself and never tips for his Diet Cokes. Or Beezle.
Beezle used to work with the Devil. I think we’ve all figured out his real name by now, but nobody cares to say it out loud. The Devil insists they aren’t friends, and talks to him as little as possible. Nobody talks to Beezle if they can avoid it. You see, Beezle takes the form of a giant fly, four feet high not counting the legs. On his barstool he looks like sort of a big hairy throw pillow with wings. He only drinks those blended frou-frou drinks, which the Devil hates making. Strawberry daiquiris, mostly. Beezle doesn’t have any fingers, so he picks up the glass with both of his front legs, takes a long sip from the straw, and sets the glass back down again. Twenty minutes later he’s ready for another.
On the surface, though, the waitresses have no reason to get so upset about Beezle hanging around. He always sits at the bar (at the same stool, in fact, and no one else ever sits there), and he never talks to anyone but the Devil-he doesn’t even come in on Mondays, when the Devil takes off and Mike’s pal Gabe fills in. He doesn’t smell any worse than anyone else in the place, and better than some. He doesn’t grab the girls and he doesn’t try to brush up against them when the place is crowded. He also doesn’t attract a lot of smaller flies, surprisingly.
But Beezle makes everyone nervous. For one thing, he sees everything with those multi-faceted eyes, and for all we know he hears everything too, so you either have to learn to ignore him or resign yourself to quietly getting drunk. Which, to be fair, plenty of the regulars are happy to do. Most of them don’t have anywhere else to be, since the Crisis.
Things were bad even before Heaven went out of business. Most people still refer to it as Heaven, or Heavenly Ventures, even though they changed the name to Heaventure when they spun the angels off into their own corporation. It’s hard to say which was a worse mistake.
Heaventure. What kind of a word is that? The Devil says it sounds like Paradise with a sneeze attached. Heaventure. They claimed to have vetted it up and down, fed it to focus groups all across the mortal realm, but you know how that is. You give people fifty bucks, they tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. And the angels-I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how getting rid of your most visible, most profitable product line is a good idea. The whole time Heaventure was “focusing on the aftercare of exceptional mortal souls,” as they put it, the Seraphim Company was making money hand over wingtip. Angels were big business: porcelain figurines, inspirational posters, bumper stickers, plush toys, recordings of the heavenly chorus, branded school supplies, protection services… that last was a bit controversial. Apparently there was a big shakeup in the boardroom before that went into effect, but that was just a picketer in the path of a juggernaut, if you get my meaning.
Meanwhile by this time the guys upstairs were about to lose their halos. They managed to keep it quiet until Friday came around, but when there were no paychecks every cubicle-dweller in the Eternal City emailed everyone they knew. The Big Guy called a company-wide meeting to ask people to remain calm and not to release confidential company information, but that was like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic. The ship was already sinking.
The twenty-four hour cable cha
Monday morning three things happened. The first thing most people noticed was that the streets, the cafés and the unemployment offices were clogged with all the blessed who had thought their needs would be taken care of for all eternity. They’d been kicked out of Paradise because of the second thing, which was that Heaventure filed for bankruptcy and a