What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [8]
His Lamborghini – a white Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera with a bright red, go-faster stripe and extra shiny wheels – was parked on the lowest underground level of Georgetown’s enormous main parking garage, where he’d managed to find three empty spaces in a row so that he could park sideways. That meant, however, that he’d have to take the dreaded elevator.
It wasn’t a particularly bad elevator. In fact, it was perfectly nice, with almost none of the urine smell or stains that one so often encounters in parking garages. But it was slow. Hellishly slow. It made him want to smash his head into the wall – except that he knew better than to try that again.
He trotted around the corner into the parking garage and nearly tripped when he saw an extremely heavy woman waiting in front of the elevators. He was about to say something, but then remembered that he was supposed to try to find the positive in any situation. The positive here, he thought – just as the elevator bonged and the down arrow lit up – was probably the fact that she’d already pressed the button and done all the waiting for him. He swept past her just as the doors opened, spun, and stabbed the “CLOSE DOOR” button. She stood perfectly still, a look of shock on her face. But then, just as the doors were coming together, she stuck out a meaty arm and forced them back open. The rotund woman stepped into the elevator and smiled at the sartorially resplendent Lord of the Underworld.
Yuck, he thought. There weren’t so many fatties around last time he’d made the trip up. He made a show of looking nervously back and forth between her gargantuan caboose and the elevator weight capacity sign. She harrumphed and turned to the task of selecting a floor.
This, it turns out, was kind of tricky.
She pressed the button for the fourth floor, hesitated, and then also selected the fifth floor.
Satan raised his eyebrows. No, he thought, she wouldn’t. He tried to imagine what was going through her mind, but drew a blank. He decided that was probably right.
His cellmate pondered for another moment, and decided apparently, that she also ought to press “3.” And so she did.
Satan’s jaw slowly made its way toward the floor. The cow had pressed three different floors! Sure, there was a lot of her, but he couldn’t see any way that she was going to manage more than one stop. He fought off the urge to stab her in the ear with a pencil, but only because he didn’t have a pencil. He seethed.
Enorma stepped away from the button panel, but still looked pensive. She took a tiny step forward, but stopped again, apparently still trying to remember which floor she actually needed.
No. Fucking. Way, he thought. He searched the elevator frantically. He felt trapped, which wasn’t really all that shocking, since he was, in fact, trapped inside a metal box with a giant woman who seemed intent on prolonging their time together.
The woman squinted, squared her jaw, and threw her shoulders back as she stepped up, once more, to the panel of backlit buttons. Her previous forays into the field of floor selection had all been in error. Just practice, perhaps. But now she knew, apparently. She saw the light. She was on the true path. She reached out triumphantly for button number two, but before she touched it, launched up though the top of the elevator, up the shaft, through the atmosphere, and into low-Earth orbit.
“Shit,” said Satan. “Not again.” He wedged the doors open and climbed out of the elevator to go find the stairs.
Chapter 4. Holy Land Coffee
Liam McEwen’s path was similar to Satan’s. Except that he didn’t start out as an archangel. Or lead legions of other angels in a direct, militant uprising against God. Or bring about the fall of man by manifesting as a reptile and passing out fruit. Or, you know, rule Hell. So saying that they were “similar” might be