Infernal Pizza
Suffer, Pathetic Human!
Don't Worry, That's Just the Roof of Your Mouth You Feel Peeling Away
Glade High School had lately discovered the Tony LaVey Pizza kit, a new form of fundraising in which children were set loose in the streets, running door to door to pimp easy-bake junk food. Each kit came with three crusts, three bags of mozzarella, a sleeve of pepperoni slices, and what looked like three medium-size blood bags of bland marinara.
Almost immediately, the kits had become the most popular fundraiser in town. Every group from the Band and Drama Boosters to the football and field hockey teams, the language clubs to Academic Jousting, had begun peddling pizzas to raise money for projects and events. And as a result, nearly every family in Georgeville had a freezer full of white boxes imprinted with the fat red face of Tony LaVey. Even families who already had three or four kits in the freezer seemed unable to resist purchasing a couple more, "just in case," each time a cheerleader or a Physics Is Phun member showed up at the door holding a clipboard. Had there been an emergency in which all the residents of Georgeville direly needed a piping hot pepperoni pizza in under thirty minutes, the town would have survived it unscathed.
The surfeit of Tony LaVey kits, however, meant that every single time their parents went out of an evening, the same young persons who had pursued their sales so relentlessly were forced to eat the very product that had funded their new uniforms or that trip to Lexington Market, the Smithsonian, or the Liberty Bell. Thus, the tedium of Pizza Night had driven Rudy and Daniel to what they had dubbed "infernal experimentation."
They would prepare all of the usual elements of the pizza kit—thaw the sauce, the pepperoni, the cheese, the frozen crust—and then add to it, with creative abandon and a complete disregard for gastrointestinal safety, an ungodly amount of peppers and spices. Over a period of months, they had gone from baking what many might have considered reasonably piquant pizzas to unleashing upon a pie's molten mozzarella surface an unholy hotness that the Scoville scale was not equipped to quantify. The suffering such twisted experiments wrought upon victims—usually just Rudy and Daniel themselves, who would hunker over their slices sweating, tears streaming down their cheeks, while they laughed at their self-inflicted cruelty—made hellfire seem a welcome summer breeze. Even Lord Asmodeus, prince of the Demon Duchies of Goetia, would have burned his scaly hide on a hot slice of their Tony LaVey.Daniel eyed the pizza Rudy had already cooked and thought a moment. "Maybe we should just make a normal one," he said, momentarily sympathetic to his friends' impending eternal pizza damnation.
"Pathetic human," Rudy spat.
"Yes," said Daniel, an evil grin spreading across his face, all Christian charity evaporating in a fiery lick of roasted habeñero. "Let them suffer!"
And the two of them set about preparing to pry open the gates of hell.