As the rain began to fall, Isaac hurried his pace down the block and slipped into his favorite bar. The usual crowd of about twenty people were present. Isaac brushed the water off his shoulders and approached the bar. Joey, the bartender, recognized him right away and had a cool beer waiting before he could even sit down. Isaac took a sip and for an instant, swore he had swallowed the most foul thing he had ever come into contact with, but that instant was gone immediately and Isaac shook his head a couple times, unsure of what had just happened.

He turned on his stool as he continued to nurse his beer. Most of the casual acquaintances he had met while coming to the bar over the past few years were there. In particular, a girl he’d slept with a few times named Gloria was in the corner. Gloria was pretty in a sluttish way and taller than Isaac’s wife. He caught her eye and she smiled wryly at him; maybe they’d hook up again that night, he thought.

It was then that Isaac became aware that a couple of the people he knew were in a somewhat heated discussion with another individual just a few seats down from him at the bar. This individual was a newcomer, someone Isaac had never seen before. Isaac scooted over a seat so he could better hear the discussion.

“I’m just saying,” the new guy started, “what if it had already happened and you missed it?”

“That’s just silly,” replied Bob. Bob was a large guy with a foul mouth and a self-deprecating sense of humor. He was also the drunkest out of anyone at the moment. “If it had happened, we would know that it happened. You don’t just sleep through something like that.”

“But maybe you do,” said the new guy. “I mean it’s not like you have any past experience to base it on. Maybe it just happens while everyone is asleep and only the people who are picked realize it.”

“Wait wait wait just a second,” Jerry interjected. Jerry was a shy stockbroker who probably didn’t have any friends besides the people in the bar. “Now you are implying that if, and I emphasize ‘if,’ that if it did happen then all of us here have been forsaken.”

The new guy paused to think for a second. “Well…yeah.”

Bob barked a laugh before chugging the rest of his beer and signaling for another one.

Isaac piped in. “Excuse me guys, but what’s the topic?”

The new guy turned to him and smirked. “The second coming.” He took a sip of his cocktail, something clear with ice and nothing else in it. “Of Christ, to be specific.”

Isaac put the pieces together. “So, are you saying that it might have already happened and we missed it?”

The new guy raised his glass briefly as though giving a toast to something, then shrugged and took another sip of his cocktail.

“So then,” Isaac continued, “we are all in hell right now because, what, we aren’t Christians?”

“Well,” the new guy started, taking a sip before continuing, “I guess it doesn’t have to be the second coming of Christ. Let’s amend it and just say the reckoning. Whatever your religion, let’s assume there are the sinners and the saved. If God, Allah, Yahweh, et cetera came down and collected the saved, where do the sinners go? Into the underworld. And who rules the underworld? Satan. And maybe, this is all I’m saying, maybe Satan enjoys torturing his fellow inmates of hell by tricking them into forgetting they are there in the first place. Then he can cause them havoc at random and enjoy the special feeling of their realization that they are eternally damned over and over again. Just a thought.”

Isaac took a long chug out of his beer. “It’s an interesting theory, I’ll give you that. Totally conjecture, but interesting none the less.”

The new guy started, as though something minutely shocking had been said. “What do you mean by conjecture?”

Isaac shrugged. “I just mean that I could see you’re theory being totally correct, all other things being equal, but I guess we’ll never know if it’s true. You know, I just mean there’s no way to ever gather hard evidence to back that theory up.” Isaac took another gulp.

“Yeah, what he said,” Bob slurred.

“I’m not so sure that you are correct,” the new guy said. He signaled the bar tender for another drink. “I mean, if I am right, and,” he chuckled here before continuing, “that’s a pretty big ‘if,’ then at some point mister Lucifer is going to make and appearance and put it right in your face.”

“Well, yeah, that’s true, but I think I would remember,” Jerry said with a grin.

“But not if mister Beelzebub didn’t want you to remember,” the new guy said. He smiled with a gleam of triumph as he picked up his refill and took a sip.

Isaac finished his beer and signaled for another. “True. Still, it’s conjecture at this point.”

The new guy started again, clearly agitated. “What, didn’t you hear what I just said? It’s not conjecture. If Satan doesn’t want you to remember, then you won’t. You can have proof all you want, you’ll just forget as soon as Satan makes you forget and then you’ll live the torture all over again. That’s not conjecture. Hell is not based on conjecture.”

Isaac could see that he had the guy flustered. He had always been a good debater. Now he was moving in on the kill. “Whatever, man, lay some kind of solid proof on the bar right now and I’ll concede the point. Otherwise it’s only conjecture. We can go down the street and I’ll buy you a dictionary at the book store and you can look up the definition of conjecture if you want.”

The new guy didn’t start this time. “So, you want me to prove it?”

Isaac replied casually, “yeah.”

“Really?” The new guy stood up. “You really want me to bring up how you, Isaac, fucked that crackhead bitch last spring and when you found out she was pregnant, you actually punched her in the stomach as hard as you could? I mean, they can’t make that shit up, Isaac, you punching a drunk crackhead bitch in the stomach. That’s out of a fucking rap song, Isaac. Only a sick fuck would come up with that.”

The bar was silent.

Joey simply starred like most of the patrons. Gloria seemed suddenly very interested in the painting off in the corner of the room. Jerry and Bob simply had their jaws on the floor.

“Oh, don’t feel so bad, Isaac,” the new guy said in a patronizing voice. “You want to here about Bob here?”

Bob took a step back.

“Bob seems like a jolly guy, sure. He even plays Santa at the mall every Christmas.” The new guy was now looking squarely at Bob, who had broken out in a cold sweat. “But Bob has a secret. Bob likes to rape little girls, doesn’t he?”

Bob let his beer mug slide from his grasp. It shattered on the floor. “I’ve been trying to stop, honest,” is what he said.

The new guy merely smirked.

“And Jerry,” the new guy said, pausing to sip again before continuing, “Jerry here runs a pretty sweet con job. He goes to nursing homes, gains the trust of otherwise deserted old folks to the point of getting in their wills, and then suffocates them with their own pillows to collect inheritance.”

Tears began to trickle down Jerry’s face.

“And Gloria over her enjoys spreading her syphilis to everyone she sleeps with. That includes you, Isaac.”

Gloria’s face turned beet red as she looked at Isaac in shame.

“Joey here is a charter member of the local KKK, one of my favorite organizations because I get to play with every single one of them.”

The new guy went on, naming every person in the bar by name and listing the various atrocities they had committed.

“So I see your point, Isaac, about it being conjecture, because it is conjecture coming from any being in the universe. Any being…except one.”

And then, the finally reality of the situation sank in for all the patrons of the bar, all the people in the city who were also having their own conversations with the so-called new guy, all the people in the country, all the people in the world who had been forsaken when judgment day had come to pass.

Isaac began to bleed. He bled from his mouth, from his eyes, from his nose and ears, from under his finger and toe nails, from his genitals and rectum. Isaac had always been phobic of blood and now he was covered in it.

Bob, who feared drowning above all else, was sprawled on the ground hemorrhaging water from every orifice.

Jerry, deathly afraid of spiders, found himself absolutely covered in them.

Joey was on fire, running back and forth behind the bar.

Gloria was being beaten by a man that was the spitting image of her father when she was seven.

In what some people might call a twist of irony, Gloria’s father was being beaten by the spitting image of his own father somewhere in the Midwest.

In the skies above the Atlantic Ocean, a plane full of criminals with a great fear of flying was breaking apart and crashing.

In a major Asian metropolis, a crooked politician more afraid of shaming his family than anything else in the world was being arrested for several high profile crimes and being filmed by all the major networks as he was escorted to the police car.

Somewhere in the southern US, a violent racist was witnessing his wife give birth to a beautiful baby with dark black skin.

In the Middle East, a suicide bomber who had just detonated himself found his surprise at still being alive replaced by the horror of the fact that the corpses and body parts of his victims where not those of the faceless religious rivals but instead all his closest friends and family.

In an African country, a warlord cowered in fear as the thousands of people he had had killed were now slowly surrounding him, rotten and decaying as they were.

In Europe, a man who had devoted his life to persecuting non-believers of Christ both verbally and physically found himself on his knees begging the visage of Christ to forgive him as it calmly explained that he had failed in his mission and was a disappointment to Christianity.

And so on.

In the bar, Isaac lay in a puddle of his own blood. Somehow, through the screams and the red sheen over his eyes, he could clearly see and hear the ‘new guy’ as he stood over him. Everywhere on Earth, people found no matter how twisted their fate appeared to be, they too could see and hear him.

He smirked. “And despite everything you did, everything you thought you could get away with, everything you assumed would stay behind closed doors even in the eyes of God, all you had to do was be sorry. All you had to do was repent. Every second of your life was a second chance.” He chuckled. “Failures.”

He snapped his fingers.

What Isaac witnessed was an explosion that sent his body flailing through the window of the bar and onto the street. The pain was indescribably immense. Yet he did not perish. He remained there, smoldering. The ‘new guy’ emerged from the fire undamaged, smiling.

“I really did enjoy this one, Isaac. I think we should do this one again, at least once more. It’s not like we’re short on time, right?” His smile grew wider, and then a deep laugh echoed out of his mouth. And then, everything was a cloud, a dream, a distant memory, a bizarre feeling, and practically nothing.

Isaac stood on the street. Where was he? Had he just left work? This was Main street. Isaac began to regain his senses. The sky was overcast and it was about to storm. Isaac spotted the local watering hole at the end of the block. As the rain began to fall, Isaac hurried his pace down the block and slipped into his favorite bar.