Free The Devil Stood Up by Christine Dougherty

crash.
    “Guess I’ll see you in Hell, huh?” Amon said, and glanced to the back of the truck.
    The Devil followed his glance and saw the body Amon had occupied, torn almost in two, innards strewn across the road. He looked back at Amon.
    “Yeah, sure, Amon,” the Devil said and now he, too, sat, resting his back against the side of the pickup, facing the specter on the shoulder. “Want me to wait with you?” the Devil said, knowing the shift could be a lonely business. Even a demon felt lost during the Transition between two states.
    Amon shook his head, black feathers glimmering, but faintly, faintly.
    “I’ll see you down there soon enough,” he said.
    The Devil shook his head. “Not if I see you first, asshole.”
    Amon laughed, fading more, his laugh barely audible. His lips moved again, but the Devil couldn’t hear what he said. He shook his head at Amon and a look of discomfort–almost fear–washed over Amon’s borrowed features. He waved his arm in a ‘go on, get out of here’ gesture and turned away, huddling closer over himself.
    The Devil gazed at Amon’s transparent back for a moment more and then pushed this body to stand. He bent and fished into the cab, drawing forth his now battered backpack. Grimacing, he slipped it over his shoulders and let it come to rest on his back.
    His mission was not well-begun.
    As he walked away, his feet kicked up the black feathers that had fluttered to the road. They floated up and as they did, they, too, began to disappear. The Devil snapped his fingers at the puddle of gas seeping from the pickup and it burst into flames that ran hungrily toward the ruined truck. The cartoonish, painted flames on the hood and sides meshed and became one with the real flames until everything began to blacken indistinguishably. Then the truck, too, began to fade away into nothing.
    The Devil was aware that Amon had turned to stare at the blackening truck, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at Amon again.
    He didn’t want to see the despair on that demon’s face.
     
    * * *
     
    He walked. He fished in his front pant pocket and pulled out a battered flip phone–it had been Mark’s, the junkie. The Devil considered the phone in his hand and Kelly passed through his mind, her head bent over her folded hands, her mind a swirl of grief and a deep, soul-shaking unease. Unease that he had caused. He put the phone away.
    This body ached with each step and blood had dried on his chin like a reddish-brown haze of beard stubble. Not much chance of getting a ride when he looked as though he’d quite possibly just eaten someone. He considered his feet, which ached, and wished he wasn’t bound so much by the confines of this human form. He couldn’t even relocate himself–say, to Philadelphia–without the possibility of dropping straight back to Hell if there wasn’t a dying sinner available in the precise time and place he’d need it to be there. Without access to The Litany, it was a crapshoot.
    He thought more about the trial that had taken place four years ago.
    The prosecution had hammered the jury with expert testimony relating to what the last hour of Brian’s life must have been like. The sickness he’d had from being poisoned, the terrible pain and stomach cramps. The nausea a dislocated shoulder could cause, taxing his already overtaxed stomach.  The blinding, grinding pain of a dislocated shoulder. The brutality of a car bumper first hitting his shoulder and head and then bending his body back against the big-wheel seat, crushing and smothering. Then breaking his back and the car’s tires rolling over first his left leg then his left arm. She must have checked then, the defendant, to see if he was dead but he wasn’t, not yet. She must have then turned his body, jerking it into place under the tire, callously disregarding the blood, his shattered spine and flattened limbs, because then the car had gone forward, crushing his little mid-body, ruining everything