The Winner: Epilogue

Everything is dark, then everything is gray, then brighter and brighter still. Suddenly I feel enveloped in light and suddenly I can breathe again. I’m about to yell, but I can’t. I can’t, then suddenly I can and my voice turns into a scream; a bloody, hellish scream.

And then suddenly I’m awake. I don’t know where I am, but wherever it is, it’s hot and humid. My body is drenched in a hot sweat.

I look around to try and get my bearings. It looks like I’m in some sort of cave. Orange light flickers down at the end of it. I’m laying on a dirt floor. The air feels thick and tastes like carbon monoxide. I spit just to get the taste out of my mouth.

The more I’m conscious, the more things come back to me and the more confusing things are. Where am I? The last thing I remember is that I was tied to a bed, bleeding to death while Apple was feeding me my own cock. Oh shit! I quickly reach down between my legs. Wait. Glory hallelujah, my dick is still there. “It was just a dream!” I yell, relieved even though it was a pretty harrowing dream. I start to laugh at that revelation.

A voice from somewhere else in the cave yells, “Shut up.”

“Fuck you,” I yell back. I start to get up only to be yanked back down hard by neck. I hadn’t noticed the metal collar clasped around my throat. I feel around and find it’s attached to a chain that’s embedded into the rock.

“Where the hell am I?”

The orange light at the end of the cave suddenly flares up into a full on fireball and blast of hot air hits me. My skin feels like it’s tightening, like I’m being cooked alive, but not quite. I can now see the entire cave and I’m not just here with one other person. There must be about sixty of us in the cave, men, women, even a few children, all chained by our necks against the wall. We are all naked and covered in dirt and ash.

“Where the hell are you?” a voice booms from the flames. “Hell is where the hell you are, bitch!”

Then I hear cackling and the figure of a gangly black dude limps unscathed out of the inferno with his cane. He’s wearing a big red coat, a red fedora with a black feather poking out of the brim, and has a giant pentagram encrusted with diamonds hanging off his neck by a gold chain. The guy looks like some crazy, demonic seventies pimp.

Someone screams and he yells, “Somebody shut that bitch up!” he yells and the screaming stops. Everyone cowers away from him.

The demon pimp clears his throat. “Okay, so seein’ as you all new intakes here, let me introduce myself. I’m sure y’all heard of me before. I’m motherfuckin’ Satan. I’m da non-white Devil! I’m the Artist Formerly Known as The Prince of motherfuckin’ Darkness! That’s right…I’m the one in charge of this whole motherfucker, and when I talk, j’all shut the FUCK UP!”

Pimp Satan smacks the closet person to him with his cane, hard enough to break his head open and splatter the guy’s brains across the cave. The guy falls dead, and Satan pokes his body with the cane. “Get the fuck back in line, ho!” and the guy slowly gets back to his feet, even though his skull his caved in. Guess you can’t die in the afterlife. Satan starts pacing slowly down the cave.

“Maybe some of j’all be wonderin’ how the fuck you got here! Maybe some of j’all be sayin’ ‘oh, but I was a good person, I don’t deserve to be up in dis place’. Doan come to me wit dat bullshit! I doan wanna hear any of it! All I know is dat j’all led some wicked ass lives and now I got yo ass fo’ all eternity!”

He raises his cane like he’s gonna hit some terrified blonde woman, but he holds back and laughs and pats her on her bare shoulder. “Jus’ fuckin’ wit you. Nice titties by the way. I’ll get ‘atcha later, white bitch…”

Satan continues on, “Lemme clear up another misconception a lot of motherfuckers have when they come down here; that Hell be some ‘spiritual state’ or ‘absence of God’ or some bullshit like dat. Sorry bitches! Hell is straight up fire an’ brimstone and motherfuckin’ crows pickin’ at yo motherfuckin’ guts like they chitlins an’ sardines every motherfuckin’ day. And if you think yo mind is goan git used to it, that at some point all dis sufferin’ will become routine and it won’t suck so bad after awhile, then think again you faggot-ass hoes! I’ll hook you up with a hundred years of bliss and contentment and love just so it feels scary and fucked up again when I throw you back in the rotation! Make no mistake, we some seriously fucked up niggas up in dis place!” he holds up his blinged out pentagram. “See dis? That means I’m the OG of motherfuckin’ evil! Da Godfather of all darkness up in here! Recognize!”

I can’t help it anymore. I start cracking up.

“WHO THE FUCK BE LAUGHIN’?” Satan screams. “WHO THE FUCK THINK IT’S FUNNY WHEN I’M DEEP IN MY FLOW?”

Ever had one of those moments where you just can stop laughing no matter how much you want to? Well, I’m in the middle of one of those moments. Satan shuffles down the cave to where I am at and yells in my face, “WHAT’S SO MOTHERFUCKIN’ FUNNY, YOU BITCH ASS CRACKER?”

“Nothin’,” I say through a stupid grin I just can’t get rid of.

He raises his cane, “Spit that shit, else you goan be spittin’ up yo teeth!”

“It’s really nothing,” I say, still giggling. “I just never thought Satan would look like Flavor Flav…”

Satan’s face lightens up and he lowers his cane. “You pretty funny for a white boy,” he says. “Sheeeit, you goddamn hilarious. You wanna see somethin’ else that’s funny?”

Suddenly, it feels like I’ve been kicked in the balls with a steel toed-boot. I fall over on my side as cold pain shudders through my body. I look down and my cock is split open down the center, like someone stuck an M-80 in my pisshole and lit it. The motherfucker made my penis explode!

“Fuck, not again…” I moan.

“Naw, naw. That ain’t the funny part. Check dis out,” Satan says. Suddenly the pain is gone. I look down and the splattered gore that was my genitals is shifting together, like my dick is reconstituting itself. After just a few seconds, the skin has healed together and my schlong looks good as new and the pain is gone.

Then just as I’m feeling relieved that I’ve been completely healed, it fucking explodes again. The intense pain is making me retch, even though there is absolutely nothing in my stomach to vomit up.

Satan cackles. “That’s da shit right there! What, you doan think dat’s funny? I cuz I think it be fuckin’ hilarious! Goddamn, losin’ yo dick is how you got here in da first place, ain’t it?,” he pokes me with his cane, “By the way, glad to have you here you Poopy motherfucker, cuz of everybody in here today, you deserve to be in here the most!” Ghetto Satan shuffles on down the cave.

“I could fuck with that white boy’s pencil dick all day, but we got shit to do today. All y’all bitches get up!”

The chains attaching us to the stone suddenly break off, freeing us from the stone. One guy at the end tries to run away, but Satan points his cane at him and his head explodes. “Ain’t no escapin’ here! Get the fuck back in line!” The headless body stumbles around before someone pulls him into an empty spot.

“Now let’s get goin’! That way motherfuckers! Step!”

I groan and wonder how I’m gonna be able to walk, but it looks like my dick has healed up and is whole again. My balls still give off a dull ache though. Wearily, I stand up as the two rows of naked people start to walk nervously out of the cave.

Outside is nothing but another huge, subterranean cave. There’s the requisite lava and machinery that is probably only there to add to our misery. We get marched by a pit where some woman and a child are being buried alive by some things that look like zombies. There are people hanging from the walls crucified upside down. On the far end of the cave, there’s something that looks like a hill, but on closer inspection, it’s actually a pile of dead bodies. Mean looking billy goats with three horns munch tear chunks off the corpses.

“Don’t be dawdlin’ to look at da sites, motherfuckers,” Satan says behind us. “You gonna gave all eternity to dwell on dis shit.”

I shuffle on with the rest of the people. I’m sore and depressed, not only that I’m in Hell (personally, I hadn’t believed there actually was afterlife which is probably why I’m here) but that besides Satan being some crackhead pimp type, it’s as cliché as a heavy metal album cover.

We walk over some burning rocks which singe the soles of our feet, when Satan yells at us, “Hold on. Y’all motherfuckers stop up there!”

I really wished he hadn’t told us to stop while we were walking on hot coals, but I guess that’s the point of Hell. I look behind us and Satan is talking to some guy wearing white robes. They’re talking heatedly to each other, then they start walking down the rows of people. The man in white stops and points right at me, “This one…”

Satan slams his cane down on the coals, sending cinders up in the air. “This motherfucker? Naw, naw, there’s gotta be a mistake…”

“Yeah, Lucifer, this is the one,” the man in white says. “What can I say? We fucked up. You know what happens when someone forgets to refresh the database…”

“Refresh the motherfuckin’ database? You work for Heaven motherfucka! Can’t you afford some goddamn software that works?”

The man in the white shrugs, “You’d think. But it’s part of the indulgence deal we made with Bill Gates that we have to use Microsoft products.”

“But I had some fucked up shit in store for this smart ass whiteboy!”

“What can I say? It comes from the top. I gotta get him upstairs, pronto.”

Satan growls, then he looks at me and casts a sinister grin. “Yeah, well I bet yo dumb ass will reincarnate or some shit, then I’ll get another swipe at you. Take it easy, white bitch!”

My penis explodes again and I fall on the hot coals and I don’t know what hurts more, my crotch or my skin frying against the rocks.

“Fuck Satan, was that really necessary?” he snaps his finger and my dick reconstitutes itself again. I hope that Ghetto Satan doesn’t take the opportunity to explode it again. The man in white holds his hand out to me, “Here Poopy, get up. Let’s get outta here.”

Even though my dick is whole again, I still have the burns from where my skin touched the coals. I stumble blindly in pain as he leads me to a place where the rocks aren’t so hot. He pulls a second white robe out of his white robe, “Put this on and come with me.”

He leads me into another cave, this one lit with torches that look like they’re made of human skulls. At the end of it is something that looks like an escalator, flanked by two enormous hellhounds who are fighting over what looks like a severed human leg. As we approach, they drop the leg and start growling at us. The man in white raises his hand, “Relax guys, he’s with me. It was cleared upstairs.”

The hellhounds give us a single, blood curdling bark before returning to their leg. We get on the escalator, which looks like it goes up forever. I don’t feel completely safe until the bottom of escalator is completely out of sight.

“Jesus Christ, thank you for getting me the fuck out of that place!”

“You’re welcome, but I’m not JC,” he puts his hand out. “I’m Cassius; a minor martyr from the late Roman Empire. You can call me Caz. By the way, sorry about the mix up there, but like I was saying to Lucifer, there was a fuck up with the database so you got stuck in the wrong spot in the initial placement. It usually only happens to deathbed converts, or people who convert just prior to being executed, and we figure a day or two in Hell while it gets sorted out is fine for those people. However, you came to the Lord over a year before your death, so this is really inexcusable.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “It’s cool. Shit, I didn’t even realize I was born again Christian.”

“Yeah, you were,” Caz says. “Our records indicate that you gave your life to the Lord in the presence of your mother in a room at a disreputable motel when your life was at its darkest. It was almost a textbook conversion. We were thinking of adding it to our archives.”

I’m trying to think of when I’d ever believed it Jesus besides a for a little bit when I was a dumb little kid. Then I remember. “Wait, you mean that shit where I was mocking my mother counted as giving my life to Christ?”

He shrugs. “You said the words didn’t you?”

“I did, but it’s not exactly like I was sincerely giving my life to Christ or anything. And it’s not like I stopped sinning. I mean, I cheated on Apple with tons of streetwalkers when I was in Florida.”

“That’s okay, after you convert you could stomp on puppies and you get instantly forgiven.” Caz says.

“What if I stomped on puppies before I converted?”

“That gets forgiven after you become converted. It’s a good deal, and besides, if we only let people who were sincerely in their beliefs and pure in morality into Heaven, the place would be fucking empty.”

“Oh, don’t get wrong here. I’m not trying to talk you out of letting me into Heaven. I just thought it would be more complicated.”

“You’d be right not to, because just like Hell is a literal eternity of pain, Heaven is a literal paradise of unlimited pleasure and love.”

“Well damn, if I’d know the afterlife was going to be so ‘literal’ I would have converted to Islam. That way I’d get a literal seventy-two virgins.”

Caz leans over in says in a shushed voice, “Well, you actually do get some virgins when you go to Heaven. Just twenty though; that’s why we don’t advertise since we really can’t compete with Islam on that level.”

My eyes brighten up, “Twenty is fine by me. I can totally deal with twenty.”

“I’m also afraid that not all of them are really virgins. Some of them have been around the block quite a number of times. I actually think that’s better than just having all virgins. I mean, at least you get some variety. And besides, fucking virgins is overrated. You have to show them everything, where when you ball the slutty ones, they show a few things.”

“I totally agree,” I say. “Well damn then Caz, bring on the bitches.”

And I ride that escalator all the way up into celestial light until it envelops my entire body and being.