A Bad Idea 40

Anne, in a burst of panic, made a sharp turn to the left, hoping to lose Nomed the demon by entering a church. Since she and Shade were in a car, that meant smashing the car through the church doors.

The car broke a couple pews as it skidded to a stop. The janitor, who had been very focused on mopping the church floor, looked up.

“Hey,” he said, “you shouldn’t do that in a church. That’s… no.”

“Demon!” Anne yelled, getting out of the car with laser saw in hand. “Demon, demon, there’s a demon outside, ohmygod demon.”

“She’s not wrong,” Shade said, stepping out of the car in a slightly calmer manner.

“Hey,” the janitor said, “That part of the floor’s still wet.”

For that response to make sense, there are some things you need to know about the janitor.

One, he was a little surprised that there was an actual demon outside: he’d assumed it was someone blasting Norwegian Death Metal, a genre of music with which he was very familiar.

Two, the reason he was so familiar with Norwegian Death Metal was that he was actually an atheist. That might’ve seemed odd, since he was cleaning a church and all, but a job was a job. And yeah, he was from Haiti, a country which was largely Christian. But he’d left Haiti when he was a baby, and had decided that atheism suited his anti-authoritarian attitude a little bit better. Even if he had been Christian, he would’ve been Roman Catholic, whereas this church was Presbyterian.

Three, he was very, very high. He was so high, in fact, that he didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation.

“Sorry!” Anne yelled, crawling onto one of the non-broken pews, awkwardly climbing from one to the other in an attempt to get to the front of the church, where a wooden cross was hanging.

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