Robert Butler - Hell

And as Hatcher pops out of the crowd and tumbles to the pavement and skids along, it comes to him in a terrible rush: if Satan can’t hear our thoughts, can’t read our deep inner selves, maybe God can’t either. Maybe it takes meat.

He scrambles to his feet. The crowd is surging past him and around the corner. He is standing before the door to the Automat. But it’s a little late, he knows, to go in and effectively not buy a lamb chop. He takes a step toward the corner and his hands are at his sides and suddenly his left palm feels a complicated metal something. He lifts the hand and finds two car keys on a looped key ring with a heavy bronze fob engraved D CK. Nixon is disappearing around the corner up ahead.

Hatcher follows and he turns the corner and the crowd thickens and he keeps his head down and works hard to push through, and then, as with the first crowd, he breaks into a sudden sizable empty space. Another line of whip wielders is trying to keep order, and again they ignore a Modern coming through, and ahead are the chosen, queuing up. Dick Nixon is hustling toward the line, and now Hatcher feels something, a large physical presence, and he stops and turns his face and looks up, and across the street, sitting in the rubble-filled lot at the corner, looming high over everyone, is a vast, primitive rocket ship, an amped-up Wernher-von-Braun-model V-2 with an extra pair of wings mid-body and portholes all along the side and a door at its base, a narrow door — though wider than the eye of a needle — with a metal staircase ascending to it.

At the bottom of the stairs leading to the door of the rocket, his back to Hatcher, is a man in a flowing crimson robe, the man with the liver-brown hair, which hangs down to his shoulders, the man of the loud voice, the Son of God, guiding the line of the chosen, placing a gentle hand in the small of each passing back. Including Dick Nixon, who enters even as Hatcher watches. Nixon made it. Hatcher tries in his mind to put Jesus with this machine, and again he looks up the long, gray body of the rocket. It is streaked in black, as if with reentry scorch marks. And up near the nose of the rocket is a word in Old German typeface, running at right angles to the ground. Hatcher angles his head to the side to read it: Herausforderer. He can’t figure the word out by cognates. But he thinks perhaps this is the hand of Wernher von Braun showing itself. And if von Braun is in Heaven making chariots of fire and if Dick Nixon has made it as well, then maybe Hatcher and Anne have a chance.

Anne. Hatcher snaps his head back toward the crowd, but he can see only bearded male faces. He takes a step in that direction. He is about to call out her name. Then suddenly she’s beside him.

“We can approach our savior together,” she says.

“Anne.” He tries to take her in his arms, but she presses away with her hands stiffly on his chest.

“There’ll be time for that later,” she says.

He pulls back his hands.

“You have to get me out first,” she says.

“You may do better going to Him alone,” he says.

Her brow furrows as she contemplates that.

“I’ll follow,” he says.

They turn toward the Chariot of Fire. Jesus is bouncing along the line now, coming in this direction, his exhortations not quite audible from this distance. He has one hand on his beard as he rushes along. His hair does not flow with his steps. Something seems off.

“It’s all about our minds, man,” a voice says behind Hatcher. “It’s all about the human mind.”

Hatcher turns. It’s Judas.

“What we remember,” Judas says in a rush. “What we forget. We choose those things for ourselves and it all has to do with what we want. And what we fear. You know? What drives us. What we gotta have. What we’re scared shitless to have. And they can always fuck with us, the powers that be. The powers can fuck with us because of our minds.”

“Isn’t He going to take you?” Hatcher says.

Judas ignores the question and he talks ever faster. “See, our minds aren’t really us. They’ve got their own agendas. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds, if only we could pluck out our brains and see only with our eyes.”

And now behind Hatcher he can hear the voice of Jesus, that familiar voice. “Hurry, my lambs. Hurry. It’s time.”

And Judas says with sudden, calm slowness, “I’ve been through this before, man. I remember now.”

Jesus’s voice is very close and Hatcher begins to turn.

“A hundred times,” Judas says.

And Hatcher is facing Jesus, who is very near. And the liver-brown hair is a bad wig. And the beard is fake. Plastic, hooked loosely over the ears. And inside the overlarge robe is a small, dark-skinned man with a smarmy voice that Hatcher remembers from a special exposé they ran on the alleged fakery and fraud of his miracle services. Jesus is a creepy little self-denominated evangelist named Benny Hinn. Hinn looks Hatcher in the eyes and he says, “Come along, my lamb. Come along.” He looks at Anne. “You too, my dear.” And Hinn turns and he starts pushing the people at the back of the line, and the chosen ones stampede forward for the rocket ship.

“It’s a different dude each time,” Judas says softly. He’s standing at Hatcher’s side now. “They always seem to actually believe they’re the Man Himself while it’s going on.”

Hatcher looks toward Anne, who is standing in absolute stillness at his other side, her mouth tight and drawn down.

And so the three remain for a while. Hatcher McCord, Anne Boleyn, and Judas Iscariot watch as the last of Benny Hinn’s chosen lambs enter the door of the rocket, and then Hinn himself steps in, turning at last in the doorway to make the sign of the cross before disappearing into the darkness and closing the door behind him. Faces appear at the portholes. One of them is Dick Nixon. One of them is Carl Crispin, whose fingers appear beside his chin and wiggle farewell to Hatcher. Then the rocket begins to make a deep, thunderous sound, and it begins to tremble, and great plumes of black smoke roll from its exhaust port, and the rocket begins slowly to lift from the ground, and it rises and rises and the three observers tilt their heads far back watching and Judas says, “We need to go inside now. Quickly.”

And Judas leads them along Lucky Street toward the Automat, even as all the other petitioners for Heaven are surging past them toward the place where the rocket took off. But at the corner, Hatcher stops and turns and looks up at the distant Chariot of Fire with flaming exhaust, soaring high into the powder-blue sky of Hell, glinting in the faux sunlight. And suddenly the rocket vanishes in a vast, booming bloom of white smoke.

“Hurry,” Judas says, pulling at Hatcher’s arm, and the two of them and Anne push through the Automat’s doors just in time to avoid the dense, flaming rain of metal shards and body parts falling all over the neighborhood.

Through it all, through the clanking and thwacking and squinching in the street and through the cries of the Old Ones left behind as they stagger in from the carnage outside, Hatcher and Anne and Judas sit at a back table and say nothing. Eventually, after all the pieces of the Herausforderer and its passengers have finished falling from the sky, and after the ones who were not chosen and who escaped maiming and burying under body and rocket parts out there are sobbing and wailing inside the Automat, Anne turns to Hatcher and says, “I have to go now.”