Good Omens

It was while leafing through a magazine one day that she learned that, around the country, there was an apparently insatiable demand for commodious buildings in spacious grounds run by people who understood the needs of the business community. The following day she went out and ordered some stationery in the name of the Tadfield Manor Conference and Management Training Center, reasoning that by the time it had been printed she’d know all that was necessary to know about running such places.

The ads went out the following week.

It had turned out to be an overwhelming success, because Mary Hodges realized early in her new career as Herself that management training didn’t have to mean sitting people down in front of unreliable slide projectors. Firms expected far more than that these days.

She provided it.

* * *

Crowley sank down with his back against a statue. Aziraphale had already toppled backward into a rhododendron bush, a dark stain spreading across his coat.

Crowley felt dampness suffusing his own shirt.

This was ridiculous. The last thing he needed now was to be killed. It would require all sorts of explanations. They didn’t hand out new bodies just like that; they always wanted to know what you’d done with the old one. It was like trying to get a new pen from a particularly bloody.. minded stationery department.

He looked at his hand in disbelief.

Demons have to be able to see in the dark. And he could see that his hand was yellow. He was bleeding yellow.

Gingerly, he tasted a finger.

Then he crawled over to Aziraphale and checked the angel’s shirt. If the stain on it was blood, something had gone very wrong with biology.

“Oo, that stung,” moaned the fallen angel. “Got me right under the ribs.”

“Yes, but do you normally bleed blue?” said Crowley.

Aziraphale’s eyes opened. His right hand patted his chest. He sat up. He went through the same crude forensic self.. examination as Crowley.

“Paint?” he said.

Crowley nodded.

“What’re they playing at?” said Aziraphale.

“I don’t know,” said Crowley, “but I think it’s called silly buggers.” His tone suggested that he could play, too. And do it better.

It was a game. It was tremendous fun. Nigel Tompkins, Assistant Head (Purchasing), squirmed through the undergrowth, his mind aflame with some of the more memorable scenes of some of the better Clint Eastwood movies. And to think he’d believed that management training was going to be boring, too …

There had been a lecture, but it had been about the paint guns and all the things you should never do with them, and Tompkins had looked at the fresh young faces of his rival trainees as, to a man, they resolved to do them all if there was half a chance of getting away with it. If people told you business was a jungle and then put a gun in your hand, then it was pretty obvious to Tompkins that they weren’t expecting you to simply aim for the shirt; what it was all about was the corporate head hanging over your fireplace.

Anyway, it was rumored that someone over in United Consolidated had done his promotion prospects a considerable amount of good by the anonymous application of a high.. speed earful of paint to an immediate superior, causing the latter to complain of little ringing noises in important meetings and eventually to be replaced on medical grounds.

And there were his fellow trainees.. fellow sperms, to switch metaphors, all struggling forward in the knowledge that there could only ever be one Chairman of Industrial Holdings (Holdings) PLC, and that the job would probably go to the biggest prick.

Of course, some girl with a clipboard from Personnel had told them that the courses they were going on were just to establish leadership potential, group cooperation, initiative, and so on. The trainees had tried to avoid one another’s faces.

It had worked quite well so far. The white.. water canoeing had taken care of Johnstone (punctured eardrum) and the mountain climbing in Wales had done for Whittaker (groin strain).

Tompkins thumbed another paint pellet into the gun and muttered business mantras to himself. Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You. Kill or Be Killed. Either Shit or Get Out of the Kitchen. Survival of the Fittest. Make My Day.

He crawled a little nearer to the figures by the statue. They didn’t seem to have noticed him.

When the available cover ran out, he took a deep breath and leapt to his feet.

“Okay, douchebags, grab some sk.. ohnoooeeeeee …”

Where one of the figures had been there was something dreadful. He blacked out.

Crowley restored himself to his favorite shape.

“I hate having to do that,” he murmured. “I’m always afraid I’ll forget how to change back. And it can ruin a good suit.”

“I think the maggots were a bit over the top, myself,” said Aziraphale, but without much rancor. Angels had certain moral standards to maintain and so, unlike Crowley, he preferred to buy his clothes rather than wish them into being from raw firmament. And the shirt had been quite expensive.

“I mean, just look at it,” he said. “I’ll never get the stain out.”

“Miracle it away,” said Crowley, scanning the undergrowth for any more management trainees.

“Yes, but I’ll always know the stain was there. You know. Deep down, I mean,” said the angel. He picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands. “I’ve never seen one of these before,” he said.

There was a pinging noise, and the statue beside them lost an ear.

“Let’s not hang around,” said Crowley. “He wasn’t alone.”

“This is a very odd gun, you know. Very strange.”

“I thought your side disapproved of guns,” said Crowley. He took the gun from the angel’s plump hand and sighted along the stubby barrel.

“Current thinking favors them,” said Aziraphale. “They lend weight to moral argument. In the right hands, of course.”

“Yeah?” Crowley snaked a hand over the metal. “That’s all right, then. Come on.”

He dropped the gun onto the recumbent form of Tompkins and marched away across the damp lawn.

The front door of the Manor was unlocked. The pair of them walked through unheeded. Some plump young men in army fatigues spattered with paint were drinking cocoa out of mugs in what had once been the sisters’ refectory, and one or two of them gave them a cheery wave.

Something like a hotel reception desk now occupied one end of the hall. It had a quietly competent look. Aziraphale gazed at the board on an aluminum easel beside it.

In little plastic letters let into the black fabric of the board were the words: August 20.. 21: United Holdings [Holdings] PLC Initiative Combat Course.