What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [83]
Satan tightened his grip around the man’s throat to stop him from saying anything untoward. He leaned in, his face side-by-side with the Tank’s, and whispered into the man’s ear. “What you’re doing here, to these old people, it’s wrong. And you know it,” he said. “You insult and sadden the Lord with your wickedness.” There was an abrupt shift in the tone of his voice, from evil and Satanic to Las Vegas showman or circus announcer. “Which is why I’m here!” he said with a grin.
Meanwhile, back in the world inhabited by more normal weirdos, Eli wore an expression of alarm and utter surprise. This might have been because nothing he’d seen that morning had given him any reason to suspect that the gentleman in the ratty suit would suddenly break out a Latin-dance/Jiu-Jitsu move on this random jerk. Of course, it might also have been the fact that his newfound amnesiac friend was glowing slightly.
“Fuck,” the Tank managed to choke the word out. He followed up with a gurgled, “you.” He wriggled and twisted, trying to wrench himself free.
The Devil lifted his head back away from the Tank’s ear to look him in the face. When he spoke, his voice had changed. It had grown, expanded, and multiplied, as if the guy at the sound board had cranked up all the knobs for reverb and echo, and then punched the button labeled “Demonic Backing Vocals.” The fact that he spoke in Latin just made it sound that much more evil and scary. “Mens est suus locus, et verto olympus ut abyssus.” The Tank gaped and shuddered. “Iam proficiscor vos pro somnus.”
There was a popping sound like an oversized champagne bottle being opened, and a flash of brilliant, white light. And where before there had been a corpulent guy with a nasty disposition, there was now just a faint cloud of sparkly gray dust spilling out of the track suit and streaming toward the ground.
Satan stood and tossed the track suit aside. He brushed the dust off his hands and turned to Eli with the pleased expression of someone who has just bowled a strike.
The prophet’s eyes bulged and seemed to want to crawl out of his head to find somewhere safe to hide. “I saw— I saw something like that in a movie once. Robots exploded Los Angeles. It was—” He seemed suddenly to be having some trouble with the ground, like he was in the middle of his very own private earthquake.
Satan, still glowing a bit, stepped toward Eli and held the man’s face in his hands. “It’s all right,” he said. He stared hard into Eli’s eyes, like he was trying to see right through them to look at the man’s amygdala or something. “Relax, my friend.”
Eli seemed to regain his composure. At least, he no longer looked like he was about to have an unpleasant, cranially-damaging encounter with the concrete. Satan stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and grinned.
“How—” the prophet breathed like he’d been running. “How? What?” His hands seemed to be doing an independent run-through of all the gestures they knew. “How did you do that?
“Oh.” Satan laughed casually and gave a dismissive wave. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that was definitely—” He shook his head. “Who are you?”
“I,” said Satan, “am an avenging angel.” He beamed. “I just remembered.”
Eli’s eyes grew wide again. “It really is the end of the world!”
Satan cocked his head and squinted at Eli, unsure if he was really willing to make that kind of inferential leap.
Eli stepped back to look at the Devil. “Where are your wings?”
The Devil attempted peer over his shoulder at where his wings should be, turning around in kind of a tight circle like a dog chasing his tail. He stopped and looked back at Eli. “They’re gone,” he said, his eyes wide.
They stood in contemplative silence for a moment, and then Satan perked up. “I need a sword, preferably a flaming one. I seem to have lost that too.” He patted Eli’s cheek, and strode