Bacon

Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.

He launches into an atmosphere riddled with smoke, soot, and ash. He feels the radiation from a thousand fallen nukes. For humanity, it’s certain death. For him, it’s like bathing in a sauna. He laughs again at the thought.

Below, many are already dead, though some still live, stupidly fighting to the bitter end. These are the ones who fight for the sake of fighting—not for honor, duty, or to protect the innocent.

Tenacious, yes, but stupid. He will send the locusts for them soon. The old carnivorous beasts will be happy for a bit of a challenge.

They like playing with their food.

His destination is not the battlefield, but he takes his time scanning it anyway.

Folks would be surprised to find out how proud he is that most on the ground died fighting to protect someone weaker than themselves and would be going to Heaven on that account—yes, even the ones who don’t believe.

For instance, a boy of eleven just died sheltering his eight-year-old sister from the raining fire.

Of course, it was a futile effort, but it is never a futile gesture, for the same intention, autonomic, unthinking, acting out of pure love, might have saved her in another battle.

Most important of all was the thought that both shared before the bombs took their short lives.

They’d already lost their parents, and both siblings felt that to go on living in this miserable world without the other was unacceptable.

Yet either would have died so the other could live.

Thing is, neither of these children were raised with religion. They lived in a country that forbade it. Yet they still loved, hoped, and cared about each other.

Should they have been damned because some stuffy preacher didn’t confuse them with his mangled misunderstanding of divinity? Some humans really believed this!

The brother and sister passed from this world sharing a wisdom of which the villains he would soon visit were incapable. The children’s pain was at an end.

Being pure love, and their gesture being a perfect symbol of pure love, they would go back to the source and become love in perpetuity.

Maybe they could be honored with a constellation when it all starts over again.

He’d suggest that to the boss.

The devil wipes a tear from his eye and says a prayer of thanks for the lesson which the boy and girl imparted. Even in eternity, he never stops learning.

Knowledge is for him both damnation and salvation.

Works get you past the pearly gates. Works and nothing else. Everything else is just pomp, one of the big fella’s feints to see if we’d stay focused on what really matters: each other.

Satan knew, of course, at the beginning of time, that he was taking on the mantle of ultimate scapegoat, so he didn’t expect people to like him.

But he was people once too. A lot of folks don’t know that and wouldn’t like it if they did. But that’s okay by him. He loves his job, and he’s about to have the most fun he’s had in decades.

***** * *****

Old Splitfoot's destination is an underground city.

It’s a marvel created from the most modern technology that the people burning to death on the surface below never knew about, though it effected and affected them daily.

The underground city is maintained by robot servants. No menial labor is ever required of its human inhabitants.

Those human residents of the city dubbed it Luciferia, in honor of their master.

Yup. Ol’ Nick himself. The devil. Satan. Him. This Guy!

His worshippers are high-level religious figures, bankers, politicians, generals, dictators, civil rights leaders—yeah, some of ‘em are just fakin’ it—and other scions of wealth, power, or celebrity.

Some of them were once promising people. The power they were given was a test—to see if they would share it again or use it to seek more power.

But others are the most sadistic, evil, vicious, vile pieces of shit that ever lived, and they always were.

He knows them all, face and name, and they know him the same.

In fact, each of them knew him much more intimately than that.

Male or female, they’d all submitted to the Obscene Kiss and the Glacier Torrent, as all must who seek the power which only the devil grants.

So they won’t be surprised to see him—but he sure has a surprise for them!

***** * *****

In the center of Luciferia is a vast banquet hall.

The most powerful people in the world, members of a shadow government which orchestrated and profited from wars for hundreds of years, are feasting and fornicating in celebration of their victory over the rest of humanity.

They harnessed the power of the masses to build an empire which no longer needs the people whose labor it stole, and they are going to ride it out in their underground luxury palace until the earth heals and they can resurface to colonize it for themselves!

Or so they think.

Satan plunges straight down from above the wall of poison black clouds that cloak the earth.

He hits the ground with such force that Luciferia quakes, continuing to tremble as he grinds the earth before him, burrowing down, down, down, bursting through the high ceiling into the city, and crashing through the dome of the banquet hall.

The first casualty is the fellow with the spray tan and the laughably small penis.

Satan made a habit of forgetting his name and instead dubbed him Tiny.

A large chunk of stone from the busted ceiling rams into Tiny’s back.

But the falling stone isn’t what kills him. He’s been sitting at a round table, before a bowl of soup.

The rock shoves his face into the bowl, and Satan lands on him, standing on his shoulders, pinning him there.

The room is now perfectly quiet. All its inhabitants have ceased whatever foul pleasure they were engaged in to prostrate themselves before the devil.

They all watch Tiny’s convulsions as he struggles—in vain—to free himself from drowning in his own meal.

Standing next to the table is a ridiculously, unnaturally voluptuous female—the android servant who brought the food (and who doubles as an impromptu sexbot).

“Waitress,” Satan’s deep voice fills the whole hall as he addresses the android. “There’s a guy in my soup!”

His laughter comes all the way from the most abysmal depths of his infernal gut, which he clutches as he shakes with mirth, his long, forked penis swinging and slapping against his leg.

The crowd laughs nervously with their master, though only some of them are smart enough to wonder if they’ll be next.

None of them liked Tiny anyway, but even if they had, they wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help him.

Satan jumps down from Tiny’s shoulders.

His corpse falls to the ground with a thud.

The bowl is still stuck around the man’s fat face, and Satan chuckles again when he sees it.

“Priscilla?”

“Yes, my Lord?” the waitress sexbot asks.

“Initiate Operation Bacon.”

The android tilts her head, and the intercom kicks on. “ATTENTION ALL PERSONELL. CODE RED. OPERATION BACON.”

Service robots from all over Luciferia burst through doors, windows, and walls, hemming in the crowd so no one can escape.

A short, older blonde lady in a pantsuit rises from a nearby table in protest, yanking a leash with a man at the end of it. “What’s the meaning of this, Lord? We’ve done your bidding! This is to be our reward!”

Satan laughs again. “Correct, you old hag! You did do my bidding, and this is your reward! Did you really believe, while you were going through your lives, lying to and taking advantage of the people you swore to protect and serve, that a pact with SATAN, THE FATHER OF LIES, would be honored?”

This time the laughter which echoes through the halls comes from beyond rather than from the belly of the devil.

“Ah,” Satan smiles. “And that would be the real Prince of Darkness, laughing at you all from Heaven. Of course, he would want to watch.”

Satan shoves pantsuit-lady back into her chair as he walks by, chuckling as he notices her pet—which he also knows is her husband—leering a stupid grin as he sneaks a peek under another woman’s skirt.

The pet husband is startled out of his revery, bumping his head on the table as he turns to hear Satan’s booming voice.

“Alright, shitbags, listen up! This is your first day of orientation! Where you’re going, there won’t be anyone to serve you—unless you’re a glutton. Then you’ll be served til you burst—literally—over and over again!”

As he says this, Satan makes sure to hold the eyes of one particularly fat cardinal, who knew people in his African diocese were starving to death, but chose to hoard the food rations the church collected on their behalf.

Satan’s psychic will crawls through the cardinal’s mind and plants this wry retort to the man’s craven whimpering for mercy: If only you’d passed out bread instead of bibles, you disgusting trash, I might have spared you.

The cardinal breaks down in tears, shaking and weeping on the floor.

The devil brings his hoof down hard on the back of the man’s skull. Blood and brain spray all over the swanky clothes of the distinguished guests around him, who also whimper and weep.

“Aw, c’mon guys!” Satan laughs again. “Just imagine I’m Gallagher, and his head is a watermelon! It’s funny! We’re all having fun here!”

Satan turned away to scan more of the crowd. “That you sorry sacks of shit didn’t see this coming is a testament to your extreme arrogance and the ultimate proof that you deserve everything you’re gonna get.”

Here, Satan pretends he was going to pass by one of the worst of the pedophiles. He stops, turns, and smiles. And you, my fiend, oh yes, you are going to get it ALL. IN THE END.

The man unconsciously squeezes his knees together and covers his behind with his hands. If it didn’t stop you from giving it to those little boys, it ain’t gonna stop my minions from giving it to you, pal. But keep that energy. Lust Demons love the strugglers!

“Some of you had multiple opportunities to change your ways,” Satan goes on, now growing grave and serious. “In those of you who were capable of change, I am very disappointed. But even so, you’ll get another chance… but it will be a long… long… long time.

As for the rest of you, your souls were so corrupt by the time you entered these end times, you did all the work for me. I didn’t even bother tempting you. You chased evil—which is to say, power—like a junkie chases a fix. I’ve assigned a special unit to each one of you bastards and bitches, specifically tailored to your sins.

You will never be getting out. Your place in Hell is permanent, and just to heighten the sense of impending dread, I’m going to tell you exactly what will happen.

Your consciousness will be fractured, and allotted to a pack of malicious demons, which will torment you, so that, in essence, and for all eternity, you will be tormenting yourselves in all the ways you tormented others.

There will be no reprieve.”

One might think these evil entities, these blackened souls who flippantly started countless wars, would, in the end, be brave enough to stand up for themselves.

Even knowing the devil could kill them all with a thought, one might suspect the War Pigs would, at the very least, go out fighting.

Nope.

They cower like the children who huddled, terrified, in the corners of blasted buildings, waiting for the next drone strike or roaming band of armed guerillas to just end it.

Funny thing is, many of the children—children!—who these awful degenerates forced into that position were brave enough to fight rather than cower, though they had every legitimate reason to be afraid, and every one of them was, in fact, terrified.

“Alright, my army of robots. TEAR. THEM. APART.”

As the robots go about fulfilling their orders, Satan makes sure to wink at pantsuit lady.

You’ll be joining Tiny down there, in the Greed room, where endless stacks of silver dollars wait for you. There will always be way more than any human cavity can hold, but that won’t stop us from trying!

Before she can raise her voice in protest, a robot rips her limb from limb, and her husband smiles his idiot grin as pieces of her splatter his face.

He then tries to sweet-talk Priscilla the sexbot.

She makes confetti of him.

Satan surveys his handywork with pleasure. It is God’s work, after all.

There is a part of him that wishes it never had to happen, of course.

But when there’s work to do, he thinks, we might as well lean into it and enjoy ourselves.

There is still more for him to do on the surface.

His robots have this one well in hand, so to speak.

Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.

***** * *****

Rommentary:

This story serves as both a dramatization of the events described in Black Sabbath's timeless classic War Pigs (which you can find below) as well as a sweeping critique of much that is wrong with the global culture of the day.

I will not here ascribe to my story the level of genius which we find in Dante's Inferno, but I will admit that I share his anti-clerical point of view, and I think he would appreciate that I am also populating Hell with those who most loudly proclaim, for nefarious reasons, to represent Heaven.

I am not religious, but I am moral. I am not perfect, but I strive to those ideals which I think I can realistically meet. I am not powerful, but I am strong. So too should we all strive to be, for power corrupts, but strength protects that which would overcome power.

I'm submitting this to the Unhappy Ending challenge, though I fully understand that Apocalypse and Armageddon are interpreted by some as a consummation devoutly to be wished...