“No one doubts it, Bets,” Cathie said. She’d pushed the minutes aside, thank God, and had been giving Markus a thoughtful look. Now she turned her attention to me. “Y’know, we touched on this last time, too. You were going to think about a twenty-first-century version of the Ten Commandments. Maybe nothing will get changed at all,” she added when Markus opened his mouth. And then, to me, “Did you? Think about it?”
“As a matter of fact.” I whipped out my cell phone in triumph, called up the document I’d e-mailed myself. (Yeah, cell phones work in Hell. No, I don’t know why. Take it up with AT&T.) “I went through the whole list. You guys should prepare to be impressed.”
“No one is prepared,” the Ant said. “At all.”
“Shut up,” I suggested sweetly, and began.
CHAPTER
FOUR
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS REMIX
Because It’s the Twenty-first Century Already, Come On
Big Number One: Thou shalt have no other gods before God. Whether that’s God, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh, Elohim, Hu, Ishvara, Nirankar, Shiva . . . whatever spiritual being in your life you pray to.
That means your cellulite-free thighs aren’t your god. Network ratings aren’t your god, a fixed mortgage rate isn’t your god. Your stock portfolio isn’t your god, or your stylist, or your brand-new phone. None of those stupid material things are your god. Clear? Great. Moving on.
* * *
Number Two: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
See number one: no other gods before the God. So don’t make a statue of whatever you’re worshipping instead of your god. The earth is cluttered enough.
* * *
Number Three: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Don’t throw around the big guy’s name like it’s meaningless. It’s the opposite of meaningless. It’s full of meaning! Look, I get it: we live(d) in a world where third graders drop f-bombs. I know you’re gonna do it. You know you’re gonna do it. I blasphemed eight times before lunch. Just . . . try not to. Or at least cut back. It’s not unreasonable to show a little respect to your creator.
(I dunno, I get that God says these sins are all equally awful, but I’m having trouble punishing the guy who lived a good life but shrieked “Jesus Christ!” when his daughter came home with four piercings, with the same intensity as the serial killer who slashed his way through an Atlantic City Laundromat.)
* * *
Number Four: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
God rested on the seventh day, and so should you. What, resting’s good enough for God but you’re above it? Your compost won’t mulch itself? (That’s what you do with compost, right? Mulch it?) There will never be a better time to micromanage your children as they clean their rooms? Ah . . . no. This commandment is like your mom’s nap-time rules: you might not feel tired, but you are. So just rest already and when you get up you can have cookies.
* * *
Number Five: Honor thy father and thy mother.
Hey, they made you! And most of the time, after making you they took care of you: they put a roof over your helpless, diaper-soiling head and fed you and basically gave up a huge chunk of their lives for you (what, you thought they loved The Lego Movie as much as you did? they didn’t; that movie sucked), and the least you can do is not be a shit about it. (All right, the least you can do is nothing.) Yes, they’re annoying. Yes, they can’t quite get the hang of seeing you as an adult even if you’re wearing bifocals. But come on. They made you.
And some parents are utter shits. They just are. My friend Jessica’s, for example; her dad molested her and her mom knew and didn’t care. So “honor thy father and thy mother” is getting a somewhat looser interpretation in cases like that: don’t kill ’em. No matter how much you dream about it. No matter how much you’re sure they’ve got it coming. You think it’ll fix things? It’ll make your life better? It won’t. So. Come on. They made you.
* * *
Number Six: Thou shalt not kill.
Really a no-brainer on this one. There are aggravating people in the world. (Me, for example.) There are terrible asshats in the world. (Sometimes also me.) That has always been true. There are people so depraved and violent and dangerous that the world is actually better once they’re dead. But don’t kill them. Not your call.
(Murder disclaimers: Self-defense is fine. War is sometimes fine. Protecting loved ones is fine. A situation that encompasses all three is fine. In this case, “fine” means, okay, it was wrong, but let’s take a look at the extenuating circumstances and see if we can cut you a break. Welcome to a kinder, gentler Hell!)
* * *
Number Seven: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
C’mon, it’s not asking too much to expect you to keep it in your pants. You’re married; that means you’ve acknowledged that you caught your limit. You promised each other and the priest or minister or judge or aunt who was ordained by the Internet that you wouldn’t bang anyone else. So: don’t bang anyone else. Easy. (Rather: don’t be easy.) If you need it? If your life will be over if you don’t fuck that particular person? Get a divorce. Then bang away, baby.
* * *
Number Eight: Thou shalt not steal.
Another no-brainer. That shit doesn’t belong to you. Leave it alone. There’s really no explaining to be done here, no loopholes. Murdering a serial killer is one thing, but stealing your neighbor’s newspaper is something else. Plus, what were you thinking? You can read it on the Internet for free!
* * *
Number Nine: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Don’t lie about him or her. Don’t make up crap to get them in trouble. Yeah, they only mow their giant lawn about once a month. And their dog is constantly escaping just long enough to leave a major dump on your lawn. They call the cops every time you have a party, not because of the noise, but because they’re pissed you didn’t invite them. All those dead cars parked on the lawn they never mow are bringing down the value of your home. And you know they’re the ones who fill up your recycling bins with their old newspapers.
Irrelevant. For whatever reason, that’s your home. You have to take the good (the ice cream truck always starts on your block!) with the bad (the ice cream truck runs late because it has to avoid hitting the neighbor’s dog). Suck it up, buttercup.
* * *
Number Ten: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.
C’mon, this isn’t the seventies and you’re not throwing a key party. Don’t be coveting: not his/her spouse, ox, or butt. Sometimes it’s hard not to be jealous, especially when your neighbors have the bad taste to flaunt their good fortune: “Gosh, don’t you think everyone should be driving electric cars? If people really cared about the environment, they’d find the money somehow.” Yeah, yeah, go plug yourself, you smug jerk.
Just . . . try to cut them a little slack. Remember, fifty thousand years ago if you didn’t play nicely with your neighbors, death came a lot quicker. These days it’s not death you have to worry about so much as intense annoyance. But you never know when you’ll need them. So be nice. Or at least don’t be terrible.
* * *
Addendum:
“And on the eighth day the Lord said, ‘Ye have done well in mine eyes; go ye forth to all the malls of the land and shoe you well with the shoes of designers. And avoid ye knockoffs, for if ye adorn thyself with such thou shalt know naught but blisters.’”
Yeah, I know: uproar. Can’t blame a gal for trying.
CHAPTER
FIVE
“Okay . . . that’s not . . . completely te
rrible.” Whoa. From the Ant, that was high praise. “Except for the shoe addendum. That’s just stupid.”
“It is not! Okay, it’s a little dumb. But give me a break, it took me hours to come up with all that.” Well. An hour. Except it was more like thirty minutes. I had time to kill while waiting for Sinclair to get ready to go another round. For a dead guy, his refractory period was pretty impressive. But not, y’know, instant. Besides, he was getting steadily more sulky about being left at the mansion every time I went to Hell. But that was an argument for another day. Another year, hopefully. “But it’s like Father Markus said: the basics are pretty much always the same. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t be a dick. The big diff is, it’s not a hard-and-fast set of rules for Christians. Don’t kill and don’t steal apply across religions, or lack of religion.”
“I can’t decide if that’s brilliant or deepest blasphemy. I’ll pray on it and get back to you.” He would, too. He was always tracking me down to let me know he’d prayed on something, and how the power of prayer revealed to him my general incompetence. Blech. “It’s true, you’ve covered the basics,” Markus admitted. “Though I’m not one hundred percent behind the ‘murder is okay in wartime’ clause.”
“When else would murder be okay?”
“Meet the new boss,” Tina murmured, “same as the old boss.” At the stares, she replied, “Why are you looking at me like that? I enjoy the Who as much as the next woman.”
“Except that’d be me,” Cathie pointed out, “and I hate that shit. The Simpsons described the sixties perfectly: ‘What a shrill, pointless decade.’ In fact, as more and more boomers end up in Hell, I’d like to move we forbid all bands who were in the top one hundred between 1960 and 1979. For their own safety.”
“I’m not the same as the old boss,” I said, stung. “I’m giving Hell a much-needed and long-overdue makeover, for free, I might add, which is something the old boss either never thought of or never cared about.”
“I’ll guess it’s the latter,” Markus replied. “So then. How to get this information to the masses?”
“I dunno. Put up flyers?”
“Isn’t that a little late, though?” Marc asked. He was definitely more engaged in the meeting, which was really, really, really, really good. You know that whole “zombies need braaaaains” thing? It was true. But the movies got it wrong: zombies needed stimulation, not Dr. Hannibal frying up brains in butter. Marc needed to keep busy, to keep learning, to stay focused, to be alive. He was a zombie, but one who had been dead maybe a minute. Still (mostly) warm, still (for most intents and purposes) alive. He doesn’t need to eat or drink; he’ll enjoy his Caesar haircut forever; he’ll never have to worry about cancer or Alzheimer’s or arthritis. But if he went too long without stimulation and got bored, or was away from me for too long, he’d start to rot.
Nobody wanted him to rot. Especially after all he’d done for us from the moment I talked him out of jumping from the rooftop, BBC Sherlock–style: embracing our vampire natures, backing us up regardless of the Big Bad du jour, risking his life, being turned into a vampire in the future and a zombie in the present . . . endless. Endless sacrifices.
So we put up with him dissecting mice on our kitchen counters and reading and writing at all hours of the night and doing Sudoku (when will that puzzle trend die?), cleaning out the attic by dumping all the old stuff into the basement, then reversing the process to clean the basement, and roaming the mansion at all hours, always looking for something to keep himself occupied. Not that I had anything against roaming; Sinclair, Tina, and I did it all the time. (We’ve tried to keep the lurking to a minimum.) But it was less creepy when vampires did it, which makes no sense but is true regardless.
“Right? Betsy?” I blinked and realized Marc had been waiting for an answer.
“Okay, I see what you mean. If we put up flyers—”
“We’re not putting up flyers, for crying out loud,” Cathie muttered, staring down at the minutes. “What year do you think it is? Why not just round up all the town criers, have them disseminate the info?”
“—what good does it do? The people who ‘earned’ Hell, for lack of a better word”—There were kids down here, for God’s sake. No kid on the planet fucking deserved an eternity in a lake of fire and that was the fucking end of it. Although if a kid spent a century in a lake of fire, were they a kid still?—“they’re stuck here now. Knowing the rules won’t help them avoid Hell. It’s too late. Isn’t it?”
“It’s still a starting point. As I said, most of them know what they did to deserve eternal damnation.” Father Markus looked around the table at all of us. “But if I understand Betsy’s plan correctly, they can learn what to do to earn their—I don’t know how you’d say it—heavenly parole?”
“I can’t decide if they go to Heaven,” I said, shocked. “It’s absurd enough that I’ve got any say at all in what goes on in Hell! That’s . . . you know.” I pointed at the Lego ceiling. “Up to the big guy. So to speak. Once they’re paroled, they can leave here and go wherever.” Which reminded me: we needed some parole officers of the damned. I might not be as hard-core as the devil was, but I’m not about to release random spirits back into the wild without a way to keep an eye on them for a while. “Tina, while I’m thinking of it, could you make a note for us to talk to some actual parole officers, pick their brains?”
“Of course.” She tap-tap-tapped on her phone, which would have been impressive except I knew how much time she spent playing Cupcake Crash on the thing.
No one else had said anything, so I added, “Even if we could get the word to the living: ‘Hey, here are the new and improved Ten Commandments, even though that’s not for me to say—oh, who am I? Just a vampire who runs Hell on the side—anyway, I’ve got no authority on earth over regular people and God is probably generally disgusted with me, but just abide by the new (except not really) commandments as best you can and maybe you won’t end up with an eternal season pass to the Mall of America of the damned.’”
“That . . . probably won’t work,” Tina said, ever the tactician. (That’s what you call someone who’s super tactful, right?)
“Betsy has a point about not choosing who goes to Hell,” Markus said. “That’s completely out of her—your—purview.” He shifted his full attention to me. “All you can do is decide what to do with the souls who show up in your territory.”
I shivered. My territory used to be designer shoe stores and Orange Julius drive-thrus. Then it was the whole of the vampire nation. Now it was the endless dimension that was Hell, with all its billions of inhabitants. If I kept getting these unasked-for promotions, I’d end up running the universe if I wasn’t careful. And who needed that headache? I now perfectly understand why God created the universe and then basically went on vacation. I could almost picture the mind-set: “Here it is, you’ve got free will. Enjoy and good luck.” God: the first slack-ass.
“I guess it’s God’s purview,” I said at last. “And He’s welcome to it! My end’s hard enough. I wonder—d’you think He knows? About Satan being dead and me being undead but nominally in charge? Of course He does,” I answered myself. “He’s omnipotent. Or Satan went up there to tattle on me.”
“Doubtful,” the Ant said. “She wouldn’t set foot in Heaven for anything. They haven’t spoken since the Fall.”
“A long time to sulk,” Cathie commented, and that made Father Markus bristle.
“It’s a bit more complicated than a father-son spat over who put the ding in the bumper,” he said. “Lucifer upended the world order. Even if there could be forgiveness for such an act—and of course our Father can forgive all who genuinely repent—who’s to say the Morningstar would want it?”
“Clearly she didn’t want it,” Cathie replied. “Or at least, not in all the time she was running the show down here.”
(Clarification: Lucifer, also known as Satan 1.0, was a fall
en angel and thus, apparently, genderless. But she’d always appeared to us in the guise of Lena Olin in terrific designer suits and killer footgear, so most of us were in the habit of referring to the devil as “she.” “It” was probably correct, but it sounded weird and mean. Though why I worried about sounding mean to the devil, of all creatures, was a mystery. You can take the Miss Congeniality out of the Miss Burnsville pageant, but you can’t take the Miss Burnsville pageant out of the Miss Congeniality. Or something.)
And all of this raised the question: where did the devil go when you killed her? Not Hell. Not Heaven. Where? Walmart? Where?
I shook my head. “I can’t worry about that now. Too much other stuff on my plate.”
“Majesty, if we cannot stay focused, bringing change will be that much more difficult.” Tina always managed to say “focus, idiot!” without actually saying it, which I appreciated.
“Yes, focus, idiot,” Cathie said. I mentioned I appreciated Tina’s tact, right? Tina’s lips went thin and she opened her mouth, so I jumped in. (Figuratively. Not literally.)
“I am, but there’s so much stuff to worry about! For one thing, I’m still figuring out how my kind-of onomatopoeia works.”
“Omniscience,” Tina corrected gently. “Onomatopoeia is when the name of a sound is its sound, my queen.”
“You lost me,” Marc said, and thank goodness, because I was trying to limit my stupid questions to under a dozen an hour. So far, no good.