The world was on fire when the Devil came to town. Which might explain why no one noticed. Or cared.
Flames licked the road, dancing through the rivers of blood as they coursed through the stones in the road and jumped, gleefully, from one oily rainbow to the next. Flames with minds of their own hopped happily from road to fence and from fence to fields, where they smoldered and flickered out. The crops had already turned to ash; there was nothing left to ignite. But the fire didn’t care. It blew dust and smoke at him, filling his lungs and scratching at his throat.
Inspiring the most mortifying of reactions: a cough. The Ruler of Hell, choking on a little fire and brimstone.
Luckily, the only witness to the incongruity was the limo driver, who barely counted as anyone anyway.
Staring straight ahead in the front seat and dressed in spotless white, the driver had zero desire to get out of the vehicle and risk a battle with all of the soggy elements that seemed to be winning their war over this town.
The Devil examined his gardening boots, the mud already squishing under them. He lifted his dagger gaze to the unsympathetic driver, who met the Devil’s petulant annoyance with an icy, uncaring glare of his own. Uncaring for the mud splatters that came well past the younger man’s ankles, uncaring for the sweat already pressing his brown hair to perfectly frame his face, uncaring for the soot streaking down his neck.
“Close the door,” the driver finally hissed. “Sir.”
The young Prince of Darkness obeyed, and then jumped back as the vehicle pulled away, spraying thick red mud in its wake. Sometimes mud was red, right? That could be for normal, non sanguineous reasons? Unconvinced, he fought the vomit rising from his stomach. Luckily, he hadn’t eaten, so nothing came up.
Finding himself all alone, the air began to settle around him, thick with ghosts and memories, whispering in his ear.
“You killed me—”
“You took my baby: he was only 6. I never found him.”
He could feel the shadows of the fallen on his arms, curling around his neck, pulling on his clothing, tugging at his hair, slithering their way into his boots, flicking their tongues over his sweat, and ripping the red brown splatters off his legs like wax.
He hoped that walking would shake them loose, but it was like moving through fog. Each step pulled him into a new space, filled with more of the slithering, slinking shadows hissing at him.
“You burned my house.”
“My mother starved to death. You took all the food we had.”
He could not see their faces, he did not know their names. He did not want to know.
Desperate for a distraction, he searched for something he could focus on other than floating shades of memory. But the fields offered no relief: the leaping flickers of fire and soft feathery ashes inspired as much revulsion as the soft voices.
Finally, his attention lit on something small, something dark grey. Something alive. Was it covered in soot or was that its natural color? Either way, it was definitely watching him, sitting back on its haunches at the edge of a field burnt so badly that not even an expert botanist could recognize what had once grown there.
“Are you watching me?”
The rat didn’t respond.
The Devil scowled: of course it wouldn’t answer him. It was a rat. How could it possibly understand him? And what was he expecting in return? A polite little “howdy do?” Perhaps the rodent would tilt an invisible top hat at him. He snickered at the absurdity.
Continuing down the road, the burned fields seemed to go on forever. The flames flickering out, the ashes falling softly around him like a gentle blanket of snow: dissolving into the mud as soon as it hit the ground. He noticed the paint peeling on fences that marked the edges of the fields: none of them were a consistent color and all of them looked like they hadn’t received maintenance in several seasons.
A few weeds had done their best to push themselves up out of the ground, in between the stones. Only to be scorched and trampled back down into the earth. Poor little shoots, doomed before they had gasped their first breath of air.
He shook his head. It was their own fault for risking their pathetic little lives on fighting the inevitable.
Finally, the fields began giving way to houses. These houses made it clear that no one had cared about anything around here in years. Every house as far as the eye could see was in need of some kind of repair, and clearly had been for quite some time.
They were water-damaged from rainstorms. There were signs of fire scars that had faded, the sun having risen and set several times on the burns. Paint was peeling and blemished by nasty graffiti, windows broken, cracks and holes sat, gaping and exposed.
He didn’t even feel bad for these people: maybe the fires had expedited the process, but clearly the inhabitants didn’t care about themselves enough to make their own lives any better. So, why should he care for them?
Besides, he wasn’t convinced there were even people in these rundown shacks to waste his sympathy on. And who has sympathy to spare, here at the end of the world?
Everything looked abandoned. Empty porches. Rocking chairs tilted and frozen at angles such that no grandmother would have been able to sit in them. Knocked this way and that by wind or gunshots. Porch swings broken and sliding onto the ground, filled with leaves and ash blowing out of the fields. Clearly, no one had stayed around to defend what was theirs. Why should he care about any of it when they didn’t?
The only visible signs of life were the stray animals, dirty and mangy: cats, rodents, birds, the occasional dog. None of the dogs were small or yappy, but none were regal or wolflike either. All of the animals, small or medium sized, looked hungry. Yet they all took a break from their critical search for food to watch him with uncanny intensity. Even the animals knew he didn’t belong there.
Once, he thought he saw a young set of eyes peering out of a window, only to be immediately snatched back. But it still didn’t seem likely that people could actually live in any of these houses, so he just assumed they didn’t. Without the dramatic abruptness of the fires, the earth, rain and wind seemed just as effective in their determination to reclaim this town.
Hopefully that meant everyone would be concentrated in a centralized location. That would make his mission a lot easier. He imagined himself standing in whatever passed for a town square and announcing his arrival, everyone cheering. Fools.
Houses gave way to houses of worship and he found himself standing in the middle of a downtown as empty and abandoned as the outskirts had been.
The Devil had heard about the explosion of churches planting themselves all over the rural towns, offering salvation from the inevitable, but he’d never actually seen the resulting sprouts of spirituality. Nor had he expected to find them like this: paint peeling, unpatched, windows broken, tagged and padlocked. Did the all-knowing owner know what was going on with his houses? Couldn’t the all-powerful handle a few repairs and renovations? Just a little basic upkeep, maybe?
For a second, he thought he heard his sister’s derisive scoff in his ear. Before he could react, a voice, gentle and smooth, dripping in the sweetest of sweet red wines, broke through the fog that was the Devil’s brain: “Son, are you lost?”
The man was older, dressed all in grey with a flash of white at his throat.
“In more ways than one.” The Devil tried to hide a snort.
“Aren’t we all,” the man answered without a hint of irony. “Perhaps I can be of service.”
The slickness made the Devil want to retch.
“I’m new in town,” he smiled slickly. “I’m supposed to be renting a room above the church.”
“The church?” the man echoed.
The stranger looked around, a little chagrined. Weren’t they all the same?
They all looked the same to him. Two were painted black: the Devil didn’t know a whole lot about churches, but he didn’t think he’d seen any painted black before. The other four were all white. At least, they had been painted white, once upon a time. They were clearly losing the same battle against the elements: grime, soot, water damage, and wind were turning them an uneven patchwork of dark smokey grey, rotten tooth yellow, and light grey with black stripes and spots.
Some of the windows had been broken so long ago spiders were spinning their webs between broken shards, their hapless victims finding the same redemption as the humans who had preceded them.
Across the door of the red church, in black letters, someone had scrawled the inscription: “It’s too late now.”
The Devil chuckled.
The same sickly sweet voice beside him: “Oh, does that amuse you?”
The Devil raised muddied green eyes to meet the innocently widened blue ones of the church man. “Yeah,” he said, without a drop of apology in the thickened smoke of his voice. “It does.”
A thick moment of silence. The good man did not know how to respond. “I’m glad,” he finally lied. “That you are able to enjoy a moment of levity here at the end of the world.”
Well, at least the men of god would be the same liars here that they were everywhere else.
“Hopefully,” he said, leading the way towards one of the churches, “the joke doesn’t get old.”
With the smile of a snake contemplating a prepared meal: “It won’t.”
The Devil walked into a church. He was highly disappointed when neither he, nor the building, nor the pastor who had led him there, spontaneously combusted.
His host showed him to a loft overlooking the main room.
He hated it immediately. It was small. Cramped. Dusty. There was one single bed with nothing but white sheets and a single pillow. And worst of all, the one tiny window in the room above the church was completely papered over.
Dropping his leather traveling bag on a table, he pulled out a wilted potted plant, Euphorbia tithymaloides. The leaves that had survived the dark journey were curling in on themselves, yellowing at the edges. He snapped the dead leaves off, curling his lip at the uneven spacing along the spiny stem, and grazed a thumb absently over the thick, shiny parallel leaves that had survived. They opened back up into waxy green leaves, brightening under his touch. He placed it carefully in the window ledge, hoping it would catch whatever rays of light broke through the covered window.
He cast a disgusted look around the unlit, darkened cave of a room.
“Get the job done,” he told himself. “And get out of here.”
Devil in, Devil out. Welcome to Hell.
If you liked this , don’t forget to subscribe to have future chapters delivered directly to your inbox.
If you loved this, leave a comment and join our chat.
If you know someone else who would love this book as much as you do, feel free to share this with them!
Awesome! I can't wait to keep reading! Captivating intro!