Flesh and the Devil- Nobody's Perfect

  Flesh and the Devil:

  Nobody’s Perfect

  By Brad Eases

  Copyright 2016 by Brad Eases

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter 1

  Talk about a bad day at work! Asmodeus, the handsome thirteen-foot-tall Demon of Lust, had just spent an hour, Hell time, in the ninth circle, getting reamed out by Lucifer himself. Ok, so the last gig hadn’t turned out as planned, and Asmo had let a couple of live ones get away, but that was at most a temporary setback. He really hadn’t deserved the tongue lashing that the King of the Bottomless Pit had given him. And, as everyone who had ever spent face time with Lucifer would verity, the worst part of it all had been that breath. Woo—eee! ‘Cleave me from top to bottom, sew my eyes shut, sink me in a river of boiling blood and fire, but would a breath mint be too much to ask?’ Asmodeus thought as he walked down the hall.

  The upshot of it was this: he was getting another chance, but he had to work with a team. He still got to call the shots, but Lucifer had made his fellow team member Larry, a.k.a. Pimple, a.k.a. Zit, his “lieutenant.” Pimple was a good guy, but he was a demon, so of course he was going to try to screw Asmodeus over. And he was certainly going to rat on him at every opportunity. This operation had to be absolutely flawless. Lucifer had made perfectly clear what the consequences of another screw-up would be. If Asmo didn’t get some human flesh down here pretty damned quick, the Evil One had dangled the prospect of detailing him to heaven. As a janitor. Those people may have been saints, but that whole “I can do no wrong” attitude really wasn’t much of an inducement to proper lavatory hygiene. Add that to the eternal all-you-can-eat buffet, and you kind of got the scope of what was waiting if things went south again.

  He smoothed his hair, straightened up his clothes, and snapped his fingers. “Larry, Belial, Moloch, Leviathan, Lilith! Let’s hit it!” he said. The demons gathered around him.

  Apparently, Larry was feeling his oats. Face like a wart, but he suddenly thought he was a big man, or rather, demon. “Not so fast,” he said, “What’s the plan? I’d hate to think that we’re going at this willy-nilly. Genius favors the well-prepared, you know.”

  God (if you will), he was going to be a pain in the ass. Asmodeus shut his eyes for a second, and then spoke in a level tone.

  “I haven’t had time to assemble the Power Point presentation yet,” he said. “But the general outline goes something like this: we each assume a human form, and it becomes more or less permanent until the end of the campaign. There’s going to be no jumping around between mortal bodies on this operation. That’s what got me into trouble last time. I’m going to look like myself, only normal sized, and my code name is ‘Morris.’ Belial, Leviathan, you’re going to be women. Leviathan, you’re going to be a blonde, and we’re going to call you umm… Goldie! Belial, you’re going to be an older woman, hints of grey and all that kind of thing, and your name will be Jessica. Moloch, you’re a banker/financials type, and your name will be Mr. Cash. Try to keep that whole love of child sacrifice thing under wraps, at least at the beginning. Lilith, you’re pretty much going at it as you are. Lose the bird feet, though.”

  “But the bird feet are my trademark!”

  “Lose them!”

  “What if I get stuck like that?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll just have to take that chance.”

  “What about me?” Larry asked. Asmodeus narrowed his eyes and looked at him. “What would you like?” he asked tiredly, pinching the bridge of his handsome nose and looking at the ground. “I wanna be a rock star,” Larry said. “Tall, dark, long hair, a bad boy.”

  “Ok, fine.” Asmodeus said. “Rock star it is. Code name Basil, Basil Cell.”

  “There’s this group, the GottaTans,” he continued. “They’re a nudist club. There are two women in it, Diane and Eve. Diane is the one who sent me back to Hell last time around. She’s number one with a bullet. Eve is her best friend. Guess I don’t have to tell you why we want her. So we infiltrate this group, figure out which of the Seven Deadly Sins work with these women, and get them to start sinning their asses off. Gluttony, envy, greed, lust—they’re all good, people! And I don’t even have to mention how nice it would be to get a signature on a long-term contract. Anyone else we bag along the way is icing on the cake. And there’s this guy Matt who might just be low-hanging fruit. We can have a formal kick-off meeting later if you want, Larry, but I suggest we get through that door and onto earth right now and start working on our personas. Do I get a buy-in here, team?”

  Amid the general nods and assents, Larry had one observation.

  “I don’t trust the big guy on this one. I’ve got a funny feeling he’s going to stick his beak in somewhere.”

  ‘And you’re going to do everything in your power to help him screw me over,’ Asmodeus thought. ‘Zit.’

  Chapter 2

  Diane was distinctly uncomfortable. She didn’t know why she felt it, but she had the uneasy impression that she was being ogled. Strange. There was no one in sight, and she was, after all, a nudist, so she couldn’t exactly lay claim to modesty. It was just that she had that sort of edgy, self-conscious feeling you get when someone is looking at you with the wrong intentions.

  She was walking down one of the paths to meet her friend Eve for three o’clock coffee, and she was bare—that is, bare unless you counted the gold gladiator sandals or the cat eye sunglasses she wore. That degree of coverage was pretty much the norm for her. Her breasts were medium sized and firm, and her nipples were brownish-pink, although in the winter when they weren’t out in the sun all the time, they tended more to pink. She shaved her pubic area ever morning. “Nothing worse than having stubble down there,” she’d tell anyone who cared to discuss grooming, though in truth, she also liked to show. Her ass was tight as a drum. She was an extreme athlete—the harder the sport, the more she liked it, and she kept herself in tip-top shape. She was proud of her body, and saw no reason not to flaunt it in all its glory. Diane was a coppery red-head. She lived at “The Stills,” a clothing-free community run by a naturist group, the GottaTans, and she worked remotely from the small cottage that she owned on the grounds. The place was named after some of the equipment used by an earlier tenant in one of his sidelines.

  She could distinctly remember the last time she had bothered to get dressed—it was a wine and grocery run—but she couldn’t remember which day it was—four, five days ago, maybe? She usually didn’t think about her nudity at all, didn’t even notice it, but at the moment, she felt quite exposed, and a little vulnerable. Strange.

  Not that “The Stills” didn’t have a certain creep factor in and of itself. Before it became a nude resort, it had been the stomping grounds for Nathan Bedford Forest Anderson, a notorious moonshiner and would be Pentecostal preacher. A preacher who practiced the handling of venomous serpents. There had been at least one documented murder on the grounds, still unsolved, and although it couldn’t be proven, at least one and probably several more cases of demonic possession. The grounds included a graveyard and, separately, the grave of Emily Anderson, the young woman who had been murdered. And, oh yes, there was one recently reported sighting of a ghost. To put it mildly, “The Stills” had a profound paranormal dimension lurking beneath it.

  She probably was being watched, Diane decided, but whoever was watching her most likely couldn’t do anything much worse than producing green slime, or filling a room with flies, or wailing and clanking chains in the middle of the night. None of those had actually happened here, and the concept of a roomful of flies was gross, but Diane and all the other residents and club members had come to accept a certain degree of standard horror film
type schlock. In truth, they even exploited it—they played it up and booked the hell out of the place from August right up through Halloween. If the place were to get slimed, they could jack up their fees, Diane thought and chuckled.

  Besides, she was damned if she was going to let some non-corporeal entity intimidate her. She stopped, turned around, thrust out her breasts, and shook them vigorously.

  “Take that, you leering blob of formless ectoplasm!” she said to herself, and then turned, bent slightly and shook her butt.

  “And that too!” she said. “And I don’t want any of that kind of touching where I turn around and find that no one’s there!”

  Pleased with herself, she resumed her walking.

  Satan, perched on a fir bough in the form of a raven, was pleased with her too. The idea that a sassy shake of her cute, bare ass made her immune to danger was just the kind of shallow naivety that his people could work with. A cheeky attitude—great! It usually correlated with a kind of fundamental bad judgment, he mused, and smiled to himself as he watched the cheeks under consideration disappear down the path.

  Satan was there on the QT. Asmodeus was putting his team in place, and Satan wanted to keep an eye on his boy Asmo. It was performance evaluation time (it was always performance evaluation time in Hell). If Asmo blew this one, Satan would kick his ass from one end of the fiery place to the other. And if Asmo didn’t mess up, seeing his team bag the lass would be tasty.

  — — —

  Richard, the president of the GottaTans, was in his office going over some paperwork. He had known that this was going to be expensive and a lot of work, but it turned out that setting up a mini-distillery was almost as much trouble as taking a case to the Supreme Court. First, one quarter of the agricultural material used for distilling had to come from the premises, and no more than fifty percent of it could come from out of state. That had necessitated buying a nearby farm and hiring someone to work it. There had been a silver lining, though: the farm included a tumble-down orchard, and those apple trees were producers. So, in addition to the corn whiskey they would make and market as a “craft” liquor, they could make hard cider and freeze distill it into brandy.

  The fact that the raw materials weren’t on the club grounds was a huge plus. State laws prohibited selling liquor at the place of manufacture, so “The Stills” could get a liquor license and set up a little bar and bottle store. Of course, that was after the distillery had sold the booze to the state and the state had resold it back to the club, but those were just the laws. And then there were the whole federal permit requirements. The paperwork, filings, and fees seemed endless, but if everything could be squared away, the potential was enormous. Eventually. They could only produce three thousand gallons the first few years, and never exceed twenty thousand without graduating out of their mini-distillery status. But still, three thousand gallons of liquor a year came out to well over fifteen thousand 750 milliliter bottles. Price it at, say, $30 a bottle and do the multiplication.

  There had been a lot of controversy about the name of the liquor. Some had thought that it would be good to exploit the name of the preceding owner, infamous for his moonshining business, and call it something like “Nathan Bedford Forest Anderson.” But the man’s history had been so vile that the idea was nixed almost immediately by a majority of the people who got a vote. In the end, they decided to call the corn “Old Luke,” after a notorious blacksnake that had formerly resided thereabouts. Its residence had been abruptly terminated by Diane, who escorted it off the premises, in fact off of this mortal coil, by the swift application of a machete to its neck.

  The brandy had been named with much less ado. It was to be named after the young woman buried in the rose garden, and simply called “Emily Anderson.” The label was to bear her image and that of a single apple blossom.

  The next big problem was finding a master distiller. That was going to be interesting. Many of the local good old boys had lobbied for the job, and Richard had a fine collection of mason jars full of white lightening going as a result. Some of it wasn’t bad, but the rest of it should have been used to remove paint or power a farm vehicle. He certainly wanted to keep relations with the locals good, and was willing to employ some of them as help, but for the Chief of Distillations, he wanted someone with more traditional credentials. Fortunately, he had a small pool of resumes that looked promising, and a couple of interviews lined up in the next few days. He wondered if he should hold them here at the Stills or over at the site of the distillery. At the distillery, he decided. That way the interviewees wouldn’t be distracted by the sight of women walking around nude.

  ———

  Diane had shrugged off her discomfort and met Eve. Eve was a raven-haired, blue eyed beauty, and just as dedicated a nudist as Eve. Her breasts were large but firm, and her butt was what some people describe as a “bubble.” She kept her bush nicely groomed. At present, it was a just barely there landing strip.

  They were frantically making last minute arrangements for the upcoming Open House.

  “So what still needs to be done?” Diane asked.

  “So much! We’ve got to cut the grass, clean the Clubhouse, rake the beach, set up the volleyball nets, get the stuff for the wine and cheese party…”

  “And finish our fight for the heart and soul of the club,” Diane added.

  “It’s not a fight, and it’s certainly not for the heart and soul of the club!” Eve retorted. “It’s a tired, old worn-out discussion, and it doesn’t matter which way it ends up. You think the club should remain clothing-free and I think it should turn clothing optional. You’re puritanical, and I’m pragmatic.”

  “You know, since I’m all for requiring total nudity everywhere on the premises, I find it a little odd that you’re calling me a ‘Puritan!’” Diane said. “If I had to lump myself in with some religious sect, I think I’d go with the Bacchante, or something like that. I do share their fashion sense, and those wine-soaked festivals to Dionysus sound pretty good to me.”

  “I think you’d have a hard time finding a congregation,” Eve said dryly. “And it’s just that I think that we should let people do what they’re comfortable with. It might make people with some misgivings more inclined to try it.”

  “Look, you’re ok with requiring nudity in the pool area, right?” Diane asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Same thing, only the pool area comprises the entire grounds.”

  Eve sighed. “Let’s get back to the Open House. Do you have any time to chip in on one of those tasks?”

  “I can run the lawnmower as well as anyone, I guess,” Diane said.

  “Matt’s supposed to do that. When and if he ever gets done fucking around in that sinkhole,” Eve said.

  Matt was Eve’s ex-almost-fiancée. She still had a diamond he had given her, but, technically speaking, that was a make-up gift, not an engagement ring, although at the time, Matt had proposed, and she had been very close to accepting. The relationship had been bumpy, both before and after the making up, and when Eve began to suspect that his judgment, at times, was questionable at best, she had gently put any wedding plans on ice. She still liked him and still wore the diamond (and usually only that and flip-flops), but there was no burning desire to rush into any ‘till death do us part’ stuff. Matt seemed ok with the arrangement.

  “Ok, I’ll string the volleyball net. Can’t have a nudist Open House without volleyball—it’s practically the national pastime! If the beach doesn’t get raked, well, it’s still a beach,” Diane said. “And I’ll help you with the club house after that.”

  “It sure needs some spiffing up. Holy moley, what a job!”

  They were rising to tackle their tasks when Matt appeared. He was wearing coveralls and had a light strapped to his forehead. “I’ve got something to show you, it’s really interesting,” he said. “Down in the sinkhole.”

  “More buttons?” Diane asked.

  “Another old light bulb?” Eve smirked. r />
  “Could it possibly be an old hand-blown bottle or some busted-up crockery?” Diane sniggered.

  “None of those,” Matt said. “It’s geological.”

  “Do we need coveralls and a headlamp?” Eve asked, “‘Cause if we do, you can just tell me about it.”

  “We need a candle and some matches,” Matt said. “You’ll see.”

  They found some birthday cake candles and matches in the Clubhouse. Matt led them to the sinkhole and helped each of the bare women gingerly enter the depression. Once in, he switched on his headlamp.

  “I’m not taking one more step into this dump, not without a HAZMAT suit,” Eve said. “And that would be even worse than wearing regular clothes!”

  “Come over here,” he gestured.

  “My sandals are going to be so ruined!” Diane complained, “and I just got them!”

  “Bend over and look under that rock,” he said, gesturing.

  “Only if you bend over and look with us,” Diane sneered. “No standing behind us this time, Matthew!”