Chapter One

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny – Wisdom from a Fortune Cookie

Hell, the spiritual dimension, not the small town in Michigan, is not as bad as you think. It’s worse. In fact, the lake of fire, brimstone, weeping, gnashing of teeth and daily whippings could be considered the high points of the entire experience. The rest is unthinkable. Actually, it’s unspeakable – unless you have the right number of jaws.

The Reverend Cyrus Evander Milton, who did not have the correct number of jaws, would gladly confirm this for you if he was not busy trying to defend himself from a particularly large, particularly muscular, and especially ugly demon named, well, it doesn’t matter. Wrong number of jaws. For the time being, we will refer to him as Mr. Happy. He was certainly smiling, and a large muscular demon with several jaws and an disturbing collection of implements destined to meet the Reverend may as well have a cute name.

Standing to one side, evidently cheering the larger demon on, was a much smaller demon. Much smaller. Knee-high, in fact. Actually, he didn’t seem to be cheering so much as lending moral support to Mr. Happy. If you want to be picky about it, he actually looked rather annoyed about the whole thing. Every now and then he would yell something to the larger demon in the unspeakable language of Hell, then sit down again and rest his jaw (the largest, and only externally visible one) on his hand.

The good Reverend – well, let’s be honest, he wasn’t very good at all; hence, Hell – looked around for a rock or a stick or something to hit the larger demon with. Anything to stop his damned smiling. Most people, in Hell, have their spirits broken within seconds of arrival. Reverend Milton had an advantage over them, however. He knew he was going to Hell well before he died.

As Mr. Happy advanced on him with a large, black, rusty, spiky implement the Reverend didn’t really want to consider the use of, Reverend Milton had a small revelation. Perhaps, he thought, the individuals who suggested religion as a solution to his money problems were simply joking.


Cyrus Evander Milton – Cy to his friends – sat at a dirty bar. The bar was dark, smoky, worn and loud. Cy usually preferred quiet bars, but the noise didn’t bother him in this bar. In this bar, if it was quiet, it was deadly quiet. When this bar was quiet, it was time to leave quickly. If it wasn’t quiet, though, it was a good place to get thirty-two ounce glasses of Pabst Blue Ribbon for one dollar and twenty-five cents. Besides, it had a good jukebox and a pinball machine.

Sitting next to Cy at the bar were the two most interesting people he’d ever met in this bar. The first one was a scrawny guy with dirty jeans and the foulest mouth he had ever heard. His t-shirt read, “I fucked your sister, and I want my money back.” The other guy was huge. Cy was pretty sure superheroes would be jealous of this guy’s physique. At least, they would be jealous of his upper body. His legs were tiny and twisted, and he had some trouble walking.

He was also the single most ugly son of a bitch Cy had ever seen.

The two of them were drinking enough to incapacitate a group of elephants. The smaller one – what was his nickname again? Something profane – was ordering beers fast enough to almost need a dedicated bartender. The bigger guy, the one with the Greek name, simply ordered pitchers of beer and drank straight from the pitcher. They had both already been in the bar when Cy arrived at two o’clock that afternoon, and neither of them had slowed down in the four hours he’d been there.

Cy had learned the two of them were unemployed and had been for a long time. The bigger one was a welder, or something like that. The smaller guy never told Cy what his profession was. Cy guessed he was a hustler of some kind, based on what he had seen earlier.

The scrawny guy had walked up to a group of clean cut college kids. The four of them stood out among the bikers, punks and other troublemakers like sheep in a den of wolves. The waitress, heavily tattooed with blue hair pulled back in a ponytail, had just brought them a new round of drinks.

The scrawny guy said to the tallest guy, who had a freshly delivered glass of Johnny Walker in front of him, “I’ll bet you a dollar I can drink your entire drink without touching the fucking glass even once, or using a straw.”

The tall guy, blond and not too bright looking, looked around at his buddies, laughed, and said “You’re crazy.”

The scrawny guy dug a dollar bill out of his pocket, smoothed it out as well as he could, and put it down on the table next to the drink.

“There’s my fucking dollar. You put a dollar down, and if I can drink your entire drink without touching it, I get both dollars. If not, you get two dollars. What do you say?”

The college guy looked around at his buddies again. One of them said, “go on, I want to see him do it. I’ll cover your bet, just to see the trick.”

Blondie pulled out a dollar and put it on top of the scrawny guy’s dollar.

“Ok, you’re on,” he said.

The college guys were too inexperienced to realize the bar had quieted down quiet a bit, but Cyrus had certainly noticed. Other patrons, rough types who were drinking on a Tuesday afternoon, had turned to watch the scrawny guy’s trick. They knew bar bets in this bar did not normally end without hard feelings. Hard, brass-knuckled, steel-toed feelings.

The scrawny guy straightened his t-shirt, stretched his neck a little bit and took a few deep breaths.

“Gentlemen, watch this,” he said.

The bar was entirely silent now.

The scrawny guy snatched the drink and swallowed it in one gulp, then slammed the glass back down on the table. The college guys started laughing and the taller one grabbed the two dollars off the table.

“You touched the glass. You lost the bet,” the tall blond one said. “How dumb are you?”

“Yep, I lost the bet,” the scrawny guy said, and walked back over to the bar while the table of college kids hooted with laughter and slapped their pal on the back. The rest of the bar resumed their conversations, and the bar settled back into a comforting noisiness.

“The funny part about that,” the scrawny guy said to Cy and the greek guy after wiping his mouth, “is that I just got a five dollar drink for a buck, and that fucker thinks he came out ahead.”

“Jesus, you are likely to get your ass kicked in this place with that kind of trick,” Cy said.

“Well, no, that’s not very likely at all,” the scrawny guys said, “although I guess we do cause a bit of shit now and then.”

“Now and then,” the Greek guy said.

They ordered a few more drinks, and settled back into conversation. Earlier, Cy had asked them how they were able to afford going out to drink, even if the beer was only a buck or two, if they’d been out of work for so long.

“We don’t worry about it,” the Greek guy said. “For us, money issues take care of themselves. We’ve got pretty much all we need, anyhow. More than we need, really.”

“Are you guys crooks or something?” Cy asked.

The scrawny guy with the profane nickname and the ugly Greek guy laughed long and hard at Cy’s question. The Greek guy wiped his eyes and took another drink from his pitcher of beer.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “Well, maybe some parts are like that. The organized bits. But no, we’re not criminals.” He took another drink and continued.
“I guess the best way to explain it is to say that the universe is looking out for us. We’ve been out of work for a long time, but it’s never been a problem, money-wise. The last several years have been a little boring maybe, but that’s what motorcycles are for.”

The scrawny guy chimed in with a “Fuck yeah!”

“We’ve been around the country once or twice,” the Greek guy said. “It helps pass the time. Now and then we help out a friend in trouble.” He laughed.

“You’d might want to watch out, by the way,” he said to Cy, “Our friends get into trouble a lot. Nasty trouble.”

“What kind of trouble do you mean?” Cy asked.

“Nasty fucking trouble,” the scrawny guy said. “Shit, you’ve got to clean your ears out or something, you deaf shithead.”

“Huh,” Cy grunted. “I don’t know, not having to worry about money? The universe taking care of me? I wish I had that kind of trouble.”

The Greek guy turned and looked at Cy, hard.

“Well, friend, have you considered the religion business?” he asked, then laughed and turned back to his drink. “Buddy, that’s where it’s at,” he said.

“Religion, huh?” Cy asked. “Doesn’t that come with a vow of poverty or something like that?” Cy was pretty skeptical about religion as a cure to his money woes. The last time he’d been to church was when he was sixteen. It had been a bunch of unpleasant people eager to tell him how every thing he did, thought about, wore or said was wrong before excluding him from the group because he made the rest of them uncomfortable.

“Not necessarily,” the Greek guy said. “What do you think they used to pay for the great cathedrals and temples of the world? It wasn’t blessings and charitable deeds, I can tell you.”

“The religion business,” Cy mused, then ordered another drink.


Mr. Happy advanced on the Reverend Cyrus Evander Milton. Mr. Happy smiled all the wider, making it possible for the Reverend to see a couple more of Mr. Happy’s jaws. The Reverend hadn’t been able to find anything to strike Mr. Happy with. There wasn’t even a handful of sand to throw at him.

Hell was remarkably inconvenient in that way.

The Reverend heard a voice inside his head. It was cold, deep and malicious. It said, “I am going to break you again and again.”

The smaller demon stood up, reluctantly, and shouted something brief to Mr. Happy. Mr. Happy stopped smiling. His expression was, if anything, worse than the smile.

“I am going to break you, later,” said the voice in the Reverend’s head.

Mr. Happy and the smaller demon disappeared, leaving the Reverend alone in a pitch dark pit, cold, naked and shivering.

The Reverend decided to make the best of the situation by weeping and gnashing his teeth.