Lucifer's Lottery

the money on crack; then he maxes out the card and leaves town! Fucker leaves me with two kids and no food, and even if I had food, I can’t cook it ’cos I got no power, so I gotta buy Pop-Tarts and canned spaghetti, but I can’t even buy that ’cos my fuckin’ piece of shit husband MAXED OUT MY CARD!”

The woman looked close to a psychotic break. Meanwhile, her two children looked up at Hudson, stared a moment, then looked away.

The woman’s eyes were red now. “Mister, could you give me five or ten bucks? Please? This shit’s fuckin’ killin’ me.”

“I—” Hudson began but didn’t finish.

“My fuckin’ food card doesn’t renew till the sixth—that’s over a week from now. I’ll have to feed my kids garbage till then.”

“I—” But Hudson thought, I could give her twenty bucks and still have plenty for the whores . . .

“Aw, fuck it!” she wailed. “You guys are all the same! Don’t wanna help anybody. Ya think I’m gonna buy drugs with the money. Shit! Does it look like I’m tryin’ to buy drugs!”

“I—”

The woman shoved both of the kids. “Come on, we’re going home . . .”

“Wait,” Hudson said. She turned and glared at him. Hudson took everything out of his wallet and gave it to her. “This should help,” he said.

She looked cockeyed at the $160. “Aw, fuck, man! Thanks! You saved our asses!” She yelled at the kids. “Come on, you little crumb-snatchers! In the store! They close in ten minutes!”

Hudson watched blankly as she pushed her kids back into the store. The woman fully entered, but then stuck her shabby head back out.

“Hey, man.” She smiled. “God bless you.”

I hope so, Hudson thought. “Good night.”

He turned and headed down the sidewalk. Behind him, from the bar, DO ME and GAG screamed at him.

“What did you do?”

“You ASSHOLE!”

“Scumbag motherfucker!”

Hudson looked at them in the doorway and shrugged. He cut across the sodium-lit bank parking lot, then headed through the alley toward his cheap cinder block efficiency. I guess this is hopscotch of the new age, he thought, taking awkward steps around the used condoms and discarded hypodermics that littered the asphalt. Behind him, in the distance, he would still hear GAG and DO ME cursing. Then he laughed when it fully sunk in:

I almost picked up two prostitutes a week before I enter the seminary and take initial vows of celibacy . . .

A minute later he was home, not really knowing if he felt good or awful.

(II)

Smoke the color of spoiled milk gusted from the intermittent censers as far as the eye—be it demonic or Human—could see. What an interesting color, Favius mused, mystified. He stood on the southernmost ramparts, proud to know that a large part of this security sector was under his command: sixty-six meters of a multiple-square-mile construction reservation recently dubbed the Vandermast Reservoir.

Its depth? Sixty-six feet.

The reason that Favius marveled at the hue of the censer smoke was simply because of the contrast: out here, in the black-sand expanse of Hell’s Great Emptiness Quarter, everything, like the sand, was black. The walls of the Reservoir itself were black, as were the sub-inlets and enormous inflow pipes. The causewalks, too, were black—constructed of basalt bricks—and even the barracks were black. Very little of the scarlet sky could be viewed just then, due to the blankets of black clouds. Favius noted only a single rift in said cloud cover, which revealed a sickle moon.

A sickle moon, yes, that was black.

Hence the sickish-white smoke rising from the curtilage of untold censers amazed this steadfast servitor of Satan. The churning wisps of contrast broke the endless visual monotony of what he’d been looking at for longer than he could remember.

Bronze-helmed and breast-plated, Favius had long ago earned the rank of Conscript First Class. This rank he’d earned faster than most due to his predilection for logic, efficiency, and unhesitant brutality. In life he’d served the in the Third Augustan Legion, circa AD 200, slaughtering women and children in a village called Anchester during Rome’s occupation of Angle-Land. Now, in death and damnation, he was a loyal member of Grand Duke Cyamal’s Exalted Security Brigade. Since time was not measurable in Hell, Favius had no way of calculating how long he’d actually been serving this post, but it had to have been the Living World equivalent to hundreds of years.

The notorious Exalted Security Brigade were sworn on their damned lives to guard by all means necessary the six-billion-gallon facility. Directly under his command were a hundred foot soldiers and countless Golems, all who coalesced to form a living and not-so-living security shield. This far out in the Quarter, infiltration and/or vandalism against the Reservoir was unlikely, but no chances could be taken.

If this project were not very important, Favius knew, my expertise would not be needed here, and nor would the Brigade’s . . .

Sword always in hand, Favius turned and gazed out at the bleak and awesome sight: the Reservoir’s empty pit. He remembered when the Emaciation Squads had first broken ground with mere shovels, digging out and carting away the sinking black sand and corrupt soil. Surely millions of these workers had toiled themselves, literally, to nothingness, and when their labors had reduced them to sunken-faced twigs, they were buried alive beneath the unholy Reservoir’s soil, where they would twitch and mutter and think— forever.

All in the service of their detestable Lord.

I am so honored, the Conscript’s voice creaked through his mind. Only the most loyal, the most trusted, and the most heinous of Lucifer’s soldiers were granted such esteemed duty.

A noxious breeze trailed across the Conscript’s helmed face, and at once he smiled. The breeze carried the rich, organic stench of the Mephistopolis, the place he dreamed of returning to once his duties here were done. He longed to rape, to maim, to slaughter: his natural instincts. And just then he dared to wonder, How much longer?

Such thoughts, he knew, could be deemed treasonous in the event any Archlocks were about—Archlocks, Bio-Wizards, or other servitors skilled in the reading of minds. Favius indulged himself, raising from about his muscled neck the pair of Abyss-Glasses—Hell’s version of binoculars. Instead of lenses, the powerful viewing device was fitted with a pair of eyeballs plucked from the sockets of a Dentata-Vulture, an infernal creature possessed of superlative vision. Favius’s tar black heart fluttered when he scanned the farthest fringe of the Reservoir, admiring the fencelike barrier of Golems forever watching outward for signs of assault or trespass. Within this impenetrable wall of manufactured monsters patrolled Conscripts of Favius’s class who were overseen only by one of sixty-six Grand Sergeants. Favius hoped that one day he might rise to such a hallowed rank . . .

He snapped to attention at the sudden, encroaching sound: footsteps and the clatter of plate-mail. He held his legionnaire sword in the present-arms position. Grand Sergeant Buyoux, he realized.

“Stand at ease, friend Favius,” came his superior’s voice. The Grand Sergeant wore a full smock of plate-mail armor, from knees to the top of his head. Only his poxed face showed through an oval in the hood. He carried a flintlock sulphur pistol, and emblazoned on his chest was the seal of Grand Duke Cyamal—a trine of sixes fashioned via intricately engraved skulls.

“State the status of your post, Conscript.”

“All clear, Grand Sergeant!” Favius barked.

“As always, a good thing.” The corrupt face in the oval smiled thinly. “And now? State the status of your disposition.”