The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Pretty little devil and Stephen King

Genre: Alternate history

Setting: A boxing ring

Trope: Devil in my ear

POV/tense: Third/present

And the result:

Underground

“You know you want to do this, don’t you, Stevie boy?” she says as she strolls among the tubes and flasks in the workshop.

He wipes the sweat from his eyes. He’s burning up like never before. It must be some kind of fever, he tells himself. “Come on, Carrie, don’t be like this.”

She reaches him and she dances her fingers along the back of his neck. “Like what?”

“Like trying to get me to do something that, I don’t know, maybe I’m not totally sure I want to do.”

Carrie stretches her long legs out and Stephen stares at them, wondering how someone could be so damned beautiful. She catches him looking and she smiles, red ruby lips, black hair parted in the middle that falls past her shoulder. “Yes you do. Now say it after me.” She arches her back. “Say it, Stevie. Yes. I. Do.”

He feels the flush of heat all around him and he says, “If hell was like this I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.”

Her eyes flash. “Then say it.”

“It wasn’t enough that I left my wife and kid for you? It wasn’t enough that I left my career for you.”

She laughs. “What career? A schoolteacher?”

He sputters. “No. I was gonna be a writer. A good one, too.”

She gets on the floor and crawls toward him. She stops at his feet and looks up. “You know you want this. You know this is what you were really called to do, don’t you, Stephen?”

He swallows hard. He wants to look away but he can’t. He’s never felt passion like he does with her. He knows he can’t give that up. He knows he’ll never surrender. He knows it’s worth whatever price he has to pay. “Yeah, I do. I know it all too well, baby.”

Carrie climbs onto his lap. She straddles him and wraps her arms around him. She smells like sweat and sugar. She smells wrong and dirty and amazing and inescapable. “Promise me you will,” she whispers in his ear.

“Yes,” he tells her. “Anything you want me to do, I’ll do it.”

After an hour of heaven on the floor of the workshop, Stephen King, the Weather Underground’s latest recruit, goes to the Las Vegas Convention center where Muhammad Ali fights Ron Lyle and he plants a bomb beside the ring. Thirty four people are killed in the blast. Including Ali. Including King.