Hellfire Jones and the Angel Invasion

Chapter 4 ½

CHARLIE:

How easily the mighty fall. Titanus Augustus, ironclad emperor of Rome. thought himself invincible. He ruled mercilessly through fear and terror. His one fatal flaw? He was a dick.

Absolutely no one liked the guy. An emperor should at least have an inner circle he can count on. That's how a lowly servant girl was able to sneak in and poison his honey glazed wildebeest. No one else was looking out for him.

I mention this not just because I have a Masters degree in Ancient History and I love babbling about this stuff when I'm drunk. No, it's to explain how easy it was for me to get into the Oval Office and fool the president into thinking I was the devil. No one liked him, so no one stopped me.

Hello, by the way. My name's Charlie Huber, Presidential Intern. I know this story's other narrators just babbled away without even introducing themselves.I hate when people in books do that. How hard is it just to say hello?

Anywho, a bunch of us had planned to freak out the president. I dressed as a satanist for Halloween a couple years ago so I was the obvious choice. Some red body paint and some horns, and I was promoted from cultist to devil. The whole thing went great until it went to hell. Literally.

The yellow contact lenses were really starting to hurt. I couldn't wait to squeeze them out and put on my comfortable nerdy glasses again. I was more than a little tipsy, though, and pulling plastic out of my eyes didn't seem like a good idea.

A better idea was to get some coffee in my system to counteract all that Scotch I inhaled. I stumbled into the break room where my fellow intern, Lilly, was sipping her tea and looking at some spreadsheets.

"Did he buy it?" she asked without looking up.

"I think so," I said.

"I'm sure he did. He's such a puppet," she said. We all thought that, but Lilly was the only one who was brave enough to say these kinds of things out loud. She got away with a lot of stuff. I was about to find out how.

"Yeah, you should have seen his face but..." I reached for one of the coffee mugs with the presidential seal on it. The red stage paint from my devil costume smeared the pure white mug, which might have been kind of symbolic. I'd have to remember that image if I ever became president myself and was writing my memoirs.

"There's nothing else to say, is there?" she asked. Lilly didn't look up. She just tousled her long black hair; her red highlights rose and fell like waves of fire. I was entranced.

"I mean it was a good joke, but encouraging him to arrest someone?" I asked. "I just think we took it a little too far."

She finally looked up. ""We? The devil's in the details and you were the devil. So if anything was taken too far, it's on you."

"N-no. It's us," I stammered. "Everyone. It was your idea to begin with."

"So what if he gets arrested? That Mitchell Murphy guy spams us 50 times a day about how we have to investigate Roswell because the "truth is out there." Or how we need to ban whaling because they could accidentally kill the Loch Ness Monster. And his annoying tagline; April Showers Smashing the Powers. That sounds like a threat."

"Maybe someone named April hacked into his computer?" I suggested. "We can't just arrest this guy."

"Our geek squad checked this. No doubt, the offending computer belongs to some moron named Mitchell Murphy. The FBI ran a profile. No job. Few friends. That's classic terrorist profile."

I wondered if that made me a terrorist suspect too. 'Intern' isn't a real job.

"Ok. this stops right now," I said. "I'm not going to let some innocent guy get hurt. I'm going to..."

"You're going to sit," she said, finally looking up from her laptop. "Now."

I did as she said. I don't know why. It wasn't just that I had no other choice. It was more like knowing that my life was under her control from now on.

"Sitting," I said.

"Good boy. Now, I have one question. Do you think cats are evil?"

"Huh?" I asked. "No. I've got two at home."

"Cats have no conception of the future or how their actions will impact that future," she said. "They also eviscerate mice, but let's ignore that. Cats do whatever they want when they want, regardless of the consequences. So does that make them evil?"

"No, of course not." I wondered where she was going with this. I almost got my Masters in Philosophy but I decided Ancient History would be more practical. "It's simple. If the cat has no conception of the future or good and evil, then obviously..."

"Blah, blah, blah, boring," she said. "What if all you know is evil? Nothing else. You're born into evil. Surrounded by evil. Have evil imprinted in your brain every day. No choice. The cat is just ignorant. Knows nothing of right and wrong. I, on the other hand, know nothing but wrong. That makes me innocent. Unlike you who knew dressing up like Satan was bad."

Lilly's serene blue eyes were now gleaming jade with dark pupils that reflected the light like those psycho kitty memes. On top of her head were two pointy cat ears. Or were they horns?

"Our side needed to get Murphy first," Lilly explained, if that could be considered an explanation.

"Huh?" was my deep philosophical response.

"Do you know what a succubus is?" she whispered.

I nodded.

"I'm not a succubus," she growled. Lilly opened her mouth and suddenly that was my entire universe. I felt myself being sucked in. Her teeth bit down and I felt my bones crack over and over until they were pestle. I then slid down her throat like grains of salt to a fiery pit below. In retrospect, I should have called in sick today..

I suppose the moral of all this is not to dress up like Satan to play tricks on the president. I hope you've all learned a valuable lesson from this.

Now...HELP!

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