BBC/ZC1

For most people, the apocalypse might seem like a bit of a downer. Not exactly the way you wanted to round off your weekend; play golf, go to the pub, witness the end of the world. Still, I guess it gets you out of going back to work on a Monday morning. But I don’t go to work on a Monday morning, I work all the time. Not that I have a problem with that, I enjoy my work. Love it, in fact. That’s why I’d been looking forward to oblivion so much. The guys down here were getting very very excited about it; we’d all been expecting a huge surge in workload. But as it turns out, Judgement Day is just like everything in life; a huge let down.

There we all were, adorned in our best horns and favourite decomposing human entrails with our pitchforks sharpened and whips at the ready, waiting by the Dark Gates for what should’ve been a long hard day in Hell. We anticipated a stampede of evil souls awaiting punishment. All we got is a crippled priest who took a wrong turn at Purgatory. Normal practise dictates that we point him in the right direction and give him a kick up the arse, but we were so let down by the event that we fed him to Cerberus out of sheer despair.

Satan had been going on about it for ages, how humanity was working on something that would tear itself apart, and it would bring catastrophe to the world the likes no-one has seen since God last rolled up his sleeves and got cracking(1). The Dark Lord didn’t know exactly what it was that was they were working on, but he approved. He said how he could sense the evil brewing, and how amazed he was that humanity had got this past him without him dabbling in their affairs, clearly more depraved than he previously imagined.

Then of course, nothing happened. Someone had to go up there and find out why people weren’t dying and coming down to Hell for an eternity of damnation at the hands of yours truly. Well of course I jumped at the chance. It’d been many millennia since Lord Kaga the Grotesquely Gruesome Giant Daemon, High Dark Knight of Hell and Baron of the Wastelands of Insane Tedium had run amok on the surface and I had just got myself a brand spanking new implement of torture and death I was dying to try out, The Bastard Sword of a Thousand Screaming Whores Revenge.

I had the sword crafted from solid diamond. Of course, I told all those under my dominion that it was to be created from the left testicle of every man present, harvested their bollocks and made them watch as I crushed them all into a fine pâté that I said would be hardened into steel using my daemonic power. The ball paste actually had nothing to do with the sword; it was just something that I’d been meaning to do to citizens of the Wastelands of Insane Tedium for a while, but lacked a good enough excuse.

But about this sword, it’s much more important than the simpletons I am in charge of. It has the obvious quality of being a 5 foot long sword made from diamond sharpened on the very fires of Hell itself. It can cleave straight through even the toughest substance known to daemon kind; mutated socks found underneath a student’s bed after a solid week of wearing and a year of festering. However, the best bit is this. For a sword to be taken seriously here, it needs to be able to kill a man in the most horrific way without even having to touch them. Lord Jinko the Mutated Rabid Duck Billed Platypus Daemon, High Dark Chef of Hell and Baroness of the Field of Possessed Novelty Items made a sword that, at her behest, would command a man’s arms to suddenly detach themselves from his body and beat him to death with the soggy end.

Not wanting to be bested by a duck billed platypus chef, I gathered a marketing team (it’s not like they are in short supply in Hell) and we began to work on what the sword would do. I came up with the name a Thousand Screaming Whores Revenge at a brainstorming session, which went down well with the marketing committee, bar one member, who now makes an attractive rug in Jinko’s bathroom. Then they asked me, “But what exactly does a whore want to do in revenge?”

So I sent my team to the Highstreet of Eternal Market Research. They asked whores exactly how they would want their pimps to suddenly be killed horrifically. I’m guessing these girls have had one too many rough sessions without a plentiful supply of lubricant because the answer was pretty much unanimous. It was decided, and I used my Daemonic Power to give the sword its special ability; the power to turn a man inside out by bringing his arse through his body and out through his mouth. I know what you are thinking. That’s not quite horrific enough. And let me tell you, if you keep on thinking that, you’ll find out just horrific having your rectum pulled through your oesophagus is, so just watch yourself.

Anyway, less about this sword and more about this whole where-the-fuck-are-my-souls business. Satan called me up and asked me to go sort all this mess out, and I tell you, he was pissed. He’d already personally tortured Hitler 5 times, told Einstein the secret to existence and then cut off his hands and tongue so he couldn’t tell anyone about it, and made Jack the Ripper listen to the Steps album on repeat, and that was just for breakfast.

He’d gone into great depth about how there were grand plans laid out for those souls, invested a lot of time and effort into thinking up the most excruciating of agonies for them, especially those involved in accountancy (2), and went into intricate detail about his extreme disappointment in humanity’s incredibly rude no show.

He instructed me to go to the mortal realm, find out what happened, and cause some major havoc. And if there was already major havoc, he told me that I was to exasperate the situation. He wanted colossal chaos, mammoth mayhem, immense immorality and, in general, complete and utter anarchy on a gargantuan scale not witnessed since the Vikings decided that rape and pillaging was a great way to throw an international party (3).

More than anything, he wanted those “Bloody souls down in the bloody pit right this bloody incident, or things will get bloody messy round here, and this is bloody Hell. Bloody slacking human bastards.”

I took on board the blood references and, with The Bastard Sword of a Thousand Screaming Whores in hand, I summoned myself to the most foul, deplorable, twisted and distinctly vile place on the face of the planet. A place constructed purely through the sheer force of evil; Milton Keynes.

After taking a piss on a tramp, I immediately set about identifying the problem. I wondered about town, trying to find some evidence of what happened here. It seemed eerily quiet. The soulless drab underpasses and redways that make up the pedestrian paths in Milton Keynes were completely devoid of their normal depressed and despondent occupants.

Then I saw them. I knew something was up straight away, because no-one sees a 10 foot Daemon with horns, wings and goats feet wondering around walks towards them in slowly and groaning, even if they have thousands of people with them. It’s just one of these things that you simply don’t do. I went over to the horde, and attempted to command them to do my biding, but onwards they still came. It was then it hit me, these humans were undead!

Well I can’t be having that, if they aren’t dead, who am I going to torture? I need fresh souls to torment, there’s only so many times you can joke with Steve Irwin about the irony of his death before it gets old, I need new material.

So I set about the mammoth task of slaughtering these ghouls and sending to them to hell where they should rightly be. Heads were severed, bodies were burnt, rectums were pulled through oesophagi, thousands of undead fell against my brutal infernal retribution.

It was simply not enough though. As I swept through Milton Keynes butchering anything that groaned, it occurred to me just how long this would take. If this was a world wide epidemic, I’d have to personally travel from town to town, city to city, hunting down every one of these pesky zombies. They can’t be tortured, they don’t feel fear, they aren’t even slightly impressed by my eternally intimidating appearance and, worst yet, when I use my sword on them, a sword that I put so much effort into designing every little flawless aspect of, they still don’t die!

Well sod that. Bloody humans, they can’t even get Armageddon right. So what do I do? I can’t rightly leave them to it, but I’ll be God’s personal bitch-slave before I go round doing each one of these zombies in myself. I decided I had to take a different course of action. I would take on ethereal form, enter the spirit plane, travel back in time (4), and covertly interfere with human lives during the initial outbreak and get them to do all the hard work. It’s alright, I already know I’m a genius, you don’t have to tell me, I did absorb Leonardo Da Vinci’s intellect after all.

The following highly detailed accounts are from the lives of the humans I observed and are my attempts to change history so the entire world does not become ghouls. Just to be clear, I’m not trying to save them you understand, I just want them to die and stay dead. Is that too much to ask?

(1) I always thought that was a let down. Omnipotent power and infinite imagination, so what does he do? He sends a flood. Oooh, a flood. Well fucking done. Mother Theresa has had more evil and punishing excretions.
(2) For that, he was planning to get them to solve the NHS’ budget problem, a fate worse than having your scrotum enlarged to several thousand times its original size, painted as a jumbo packet of salted peanuts, and placed in front of a stampede of elephants.
(3) The Vikings were Satan’s favourite race to every set foot on the planet. Who else thought humanity was sweated out the armpit of a frost giant and attacked a monastery 5 times in one month just for kicks?
(4) Being able to screw with time and space is just one of many, many perks to being a Daemon.

--The Reporter 13:13, 30 November 2007 (UTC)