I’ve decided that from now on, every Saturday is Short Story Saturday. Mostly because I have a bunch of short stories that aren’t good enough for magazines, and I want to do something with them. So, Short Story Saturday. Here’s the first one:

Extreme Makeover: Hell Edition

Patrolling the border of Heaven is a hell of a job, but someone’s got to do it.

Yes, that’s my Hell is for heathens bumper sticker. I believe everyone else should come here the right way—a lifetime of sin and debauchery, just like I did.

What, you thought I was trying to keep people out of heaven? I get that a lot. Yeah, no. Our neighbors to the north are flooding us with refugees fleeing the place they thought would be so great, like we want them here?

Take this couple I picked up in my patrol car, the Richardsons. There they sat, wrinkling their noses and fanning themselves, like they thought Hell would be air-conditioned. They were welcome to stay in heaven, but what did they do? Like so many others, they headed south with fake documents, as if the great trickster had never seen a forgery before.

I pulled up to the courthouse, parked my vehicle, and stepped outside. Then I opened the back door, ushering more of that nice sauna-like air into the backseat. “Get out.”

Bill Richardson was closest to the door so he got out first with a lot of groaning and grunting. This being the afterlife, he didn’t actually have any aches or pains, but old people get into the habit of acting like they do, and they continue it here. Sweat dripped from Bill’s balding pate as his wife climbed out, tugging down her Atlantic Boardwalk t-shirt with its sparkly sequins. I gestured them to the door.

Inside the courtroom, I seated them at a table, then sat my ass down behind them, making it harder for them to escape.

The judge cleared his throat and shuffled the paperwork in front of him. “Bill and Miriam Richardson. I see you’ve been charged with illegally crossing the border from heaven into hell, despite mounds of evidence showing you worked very hard to get into heaven in the first place. If you don’t have an attorney, one will be appointed for you. We have no shortage of them.”

An attorney-client convo happened over the next few minutes as the prosecutor sat at her table and filed her nails, unconcerned. Finally the defendants’ lawyer declared them ready to proceed.

“Very well.” The judge leaned back in his chair, licking his lips with his forked tongue.

What, you thought Satan wasn’t a lawyer? He gets his kicks as a judge now, not unlike his counterpart up north.

“Your honor, Bill and Miriam Richardson were caught climbing over the golden wall and escaping from heaven.” The prosecutor waved her hand and a VR presentation played in the middle of the empty floor. It showed Bill and Miriam, grunting and groaning like they were doing an arthritis cream commercial for the meatsacks as they laboriously swung their legs over the solid gold wall, then fell through the clouds, ultimately landing in the heat-scorched desert where I found them.

“Didn’t like heaven, huh?” The judge scratched behind one of his horns.

“Your honor, my clients are placing a claim for asylum based on heaven’s false advertising,” their lawyer announced.

The prosecutor raises an eyebrow. An unconventional approach.

“Evidence?” she asked.

“My clients would like to address the court to explain,” their attorney said.

Beezlebub grinned around his forked tongue. “I’ll allow it.”

He was going to enjoy this.

“Your honor, we were told our whole lives how wonderful heaven would be.” Miriam stood and smoothed her pleated pants.

“You didn’t find that to be true?” The prosecutor inquired.

“Well…” She scratched her head and stared at the floor. This being hell it is, literally, lava, but that wasn’t what had her attention.

“Well, what was the problem?” Satan spread his tomato-red hands. “Were the pearly gates too sophisticated for you? Were the gold sidewalks not shiny enough? What could you possibly have found wrong with heaven?”

“It’s just that we didn’t know who else would be there,” Bill blurted out. He got up and stood awkwardly next to his wife. “You see, we went to church every week, your honor.”

“I do see.” Beezlebub waved some papers at him. “This is just your last six months as meatsacks. Perfect weekly attendance. And this—” He grabbed another sheaf of papers, probably started the Amazon rainforest burning again back in meatsack land. “—these are your nightly prayers, not just for your own souls to be saved, but those of your friends.”

“It’s not our friends we have a problem with,” Miriam said. “Your honor, we haven’t seen any of our friends up there.”

“It was all those people from the church, the ones we didn’t like.” Bill swiped at the sweat on his bald head. “The backbiting ones, always judging everyone else while cheating on their spouses and taxes. We never thought they would get in.”

“In short, you believed heaven was a special place where you and all the people you liked would be together again?” The prosecutor’s voice dripped with cynicism. “And the people you didn’t like would magically be here?”

Both Richardsons sort of shrugged and nodded in agreement.

“Heaven is full of the worst sort of people,” Miriam said finally. “That Edith Miller once told me I was destined to end up, well, here, because I wore a sleeveless dress to church in July. Called me scandalous, but she spent a lot of time on her knees with the preacher, and she wasn’t praying if you get my drift. And the Smiths were so dedicated to personifying sloth and greed, they wanted to pay their nanny in all-you-can-eat cereal. Hypocrites, all of them. I don’t understand how they got in.”

“Well, what with so many new people flooding into heaven all the time, standards change,” the judge said. “People work their way into the bureacracy and change things.”

“God…doesn’t run things anymore?” Miriam asked.

“Technically, yeah, but he outsourced a lot of the boring administrative stuff to his most ardent followers. Now the big guy has time to make our golf game every Sunday afternoon.”

“You play golf together?” Bill’s eyes widened. “I thought you two were enemies?”

“We were, but we’re getting too old for that shit, so now we’re more like frenemies. That reminds me, I have to post a mean tweet about him.” Beezlebub grabbed his phone and pecked at it with sharp red nails.

My phone made the familiar tweeting noise and I checked my feed.

@Satan666 Hell is HAWT right now. We’re getting so full of ex-Heaveners I might have to stop punishing people and start forgiving them like someone else is always going on about….

“Well, the people are just too insufferable up there in heaven,” Miriam continued her plea. “So we request asylum on the grounds of false advertising. We were told heaven was a nice place, and, well, it just isn’t.”

“I see.” Beezlebub tossed the papers in the air and they floated down onto the lava floor, the bubbles ultimately swallowing them. “The thing is, if we grant you asylum, we’d have to do the same for everyone who wanted it.”

The Richardsons were silent.

“Which is, in fact, what we already did for your friends, Edith Miller and the Smiths.” The devil broke into a grin. “I guess they didn’t like being up there with you and your bare arms, huh? And since we have a housing crisis here in Hell, you’ll have to room with them for some time. You know what my friend Sartre said about hell, right?”

“Uh, your honor.” I stood, suddenly unsure where this was going. “I, ah, thought your policy was to deport undocumented immigrants?”

“It was.” He shrugged. “But some of the escapees really make the place much nicer. The more of them we take in, the more property values increase.”

“Your honor, are you saying you want to gentrify Hell?” The prosecutor stared in shock.

Beezlebub spread his hands. “Heaven is the only place where you can’t take it with you.”

Bill and Miriam’s foreheads wrinkled into frowns.

“You mean to tell us we could’ve transferred our investment portfolio here if we came here directly?” Bill asked.

Satan shrugged. “We’re always open to afterlife beautification projects, and those take money.”

This entire turn of events made me pretty uncomfortable. Back in meatsack world, my friends and I used to talk about our place here in Hell. Argue about who would drive the bus here. Talk about all the sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll we were going to enjoy. Now the place was getting overrun, not just by people like the Richardsons, but also their enemies, those holier-than-thou types I always counted on getting away from down here.

As the Richardsons negotiated with Beezelbub about the percentage of his fee to embezzle back some of the money they left their grandkids and funnel it to Hell through an account in the Caymans, I slipped quietly out the back door, got in my car, and headed for the border.

No one noticed or cared as I climbed over the wall, still in my border patrol uniform. Clearly I was just looking for escapees.

But I didn’t stay at the border. I wandered the mostly empty gold-paved streets, trying to guage how many insufferable people were still around. From the look of things, not many.

“Can I help you?” A voice said from behind me, and I turned around.

“Hey there.” I had no idea what to say. “Ah, I just brought some escapees to our court. They mentioned you were having a hard time filling vacancies here.”

The old man nodded and stroked his long white beard. “And you were thinking of defecting?”

I sighed. “It’s just… Hell ain’t what it used to be. The fun people are drowned out by the killjoys who escaped from here, or the dullards who escaped to get away from them. And Beezlebub doesn’t care, he wants to gentrify the place.”

“So you want to downgrade, huh?”

I stared at my shoes, or tried to. The glare off that gold pavement is really something else. “All my life, I’ve been a hellraiser. I feel like such a traitor for leaving… but all those uber-devoted types I wanted to avoid are down there now instead of up here. It’s a real mess. I suppose this is the part where you send me back down in a hail of fire and brimstone, huh?”

The big guy waved a dismissive hand. “Nah, haven’t done that in years. The optics were bad. Stay if you want. Rent’s low, and most of the dedicated churchgoers have run off to Hell. It’s actually kind of nice here now. Want a toke?”

“Yeah, that’d be nice. Sure you don’t want to cast me out?”

“Not at all. I’m trying to gentrify this place, too.” God pulled out a doobie and a lighter. “Think any of those rich people down in Hell might bring their money up here?”

“I might know a few. But… if you and Beezlebub just keep trading residents you don’t like, aren’t you just taking turns dealing with them?”

“What else are we going to do? There are a lot of people neither of us want bouncing around the afterlife.”

An idea occurred to me. “Wouldn’t it be better if there was some other way to deal with them?”

“Like what?”

“Like a return to sender label.”

The big guy raised an eyebrow. “I’d need someone with experience rounding people up and returning them to where they came from.”

I spread my arms. “I’m perfect for the job.”

And that’s how I started the zombie uprising on Earth…