Satan is dead.
I’ve yet to see Nietschze’s reaction; I’m sure Herr Übermensch himself is shitting his britches, looking for an ersatz overlord to pummel him into submission. For all the mindless, batrachian little madmen hopping the streets with their hair on fire, hang in there — I am the authority you crave.
I am El Corrupto.
To be fair to my sourpuss comrade, Hell doesn’t feel the same for anybody since the Dark Lord’s passing. His Darkness elicited that feeling of oh fuck, it’s him! whenever he walked into a joint. He cast a long shadow. Satan oozed a miasma of pure evil that could only have been augmented by a LORD OF EVIL sign around his neck in flashing neon lights.
To quote a famous marketing firm: Satan didn’t make Hell, he made it more Hellish. And without him, the place isn’t the same.
Hell wasn’t such a bad place to be. It felt more like Heck. I was remarkably nonplussed when I first arrived, although I have to give Satan credit for at least approximating an atmosphere of eternal punishment for the new arrivals. They use piss-your-pants scare tactics before you enter — it’s like an entrance to a theme park for the damned. The Gates of Hell is a behemothian maw filled with hideous teeth and a tongue that looks like a mucous-covered pink carpet that leads directly down into the warrens of Hell.
After sliding down the tongue and my ass landed on the scalding cobblestones of Rue D’Enfer, I was underwhelmed by the efforts to ensure my eternal damnation. No boiling cauldrons of oil and nary a pit of lava in sight.
Ok, Hell wasn’t a picnic. It was a creepy place, as though the light of the sun passed through a monochromatic filter and cast a greenish-gray pall across the columns and facades and gargoyles that hovered above the streets. It rained newts and frogs. The beer was bad, the music was worse and the literature was non-existant. The air was filled with attar and sulphur, making one feel as though they were suffocating in a fart-filled funeral parlor. It was unpleasant, but I could conjure a dozen different places in my mind that could be much, much worse.
Satan’s death made things worse. The damned are like geeks that were once beat up for their lunch money and are now begging Satan’s toadies for discipline. It’s as though the authority vacuum has delt a mortal wound to the fundamental order of things. Instead of spilling into the streets singing ding-dong the Wicked Dude is dead, the damned are marching in bizarre parades of self-flagellation.
This just won’t do.
I squandered my life as a pitiful, powerless little man in Steubenville, Ohio. Those that escaped across the river, through the West Virginian panhandle and into the maternal sanctuary of Pennsylvania refer to my home town as Stupidville. No one ever — ever — escaped from Stupidville, except the city’s famous son, Dean Martin. Dino drank martinis and trashed Vegas hotel rooms while we cleaned the shit from our boot cleats and drank cheap beer.
When I transform into El Corrupto and go forth to gather my posse, the first man I’m enlisting is Dean. I’m making a local Stupidville boy my Lieutenant. He needs a title though. I like Spanish because it sounds so damn sinister. Maybe El Guapo. Or I’ll christen him Der Schlechte Mann because German sounds so kickass as it rumbles from the tongue. French would never work because people will laugh if I introduce Dean Martin as my l'homme mauvais. Titles are meaningless at this point, however; first, I must nail the look.
I must look the part. If I’m to have any hope of leading these insufferable little shits into a new era, I must look the part. My voice is high and thin, I have an underbite and not an ounce of muscle tone. I must look the part.
Consider the great evil men of history — they looked bad. Genghis Khan was born clutching a bloody clot from his mother’s womb. That is tough as nails. Hitler, despite being an innocous squirt of a man, knew what it meant to look bad. He had stormtroopers with kickass helmets and henchmen like teutonic statues chiseled from granite. Hitler did not let girl scouts and weaklings into his inner circle. When the Hitler Boys rode into town at high noon, nobody dared messing with ‘em.
The pandemonium out there is unacceptable. I will give them the authority they crave and the order they deserve. I will give them El Corrupto.
But first, my costume.
this is just an excerpt of the entire story