by Riley Hunt
Word of advice? Don’t screw up. Just ask Hitler. That messed-up dipshit won’t get out anytime soon, if ever.
The man I had been waiting for stumbled out of the bar he had been in for the last few hours. He wasn’t staggering, but he wasn’t walking in a straight line like a sober person, either. His feet dragged somewhat behind him with each step he took. He buttoned the long, brown overcoat as the wind picked up, setting a biting chill to the air, and he visibly shivered. His face remained turned away from me, shadowed in the darkness. The flickering streetlamp did little to illuminate his features. I thought about pulling out his file and reading it again but stopped myself. I had to watch what decision he chose.
He would either turn around, go back into the dingy bar, and use the app on his phone to call a ride, or he would step toward the curb to get to his vehicle, fall, and knock himself unconscious, and, before anyone could find him on the dark street, previously scarcely lit by the one lonely, flickering lamp, a car would come around the corner, and it would be game over.
Sometimes, I felt bad for people like him. They didn’t know that in the end they would be judged by their soul’s deeds, both good and bad. It was like a points system. Remember Hitler? Yeah, he was fucked and wouldn’t be able to leave Helius.
Surprisingly, I’d never been past the gates of Helius. Mostly because I had no desire to, but also because it wasn’t required. Reapers were lower-level Angels, and Helius just wasn’t our style. The sulfur smell stuck to you just by escorting souls to the front gate. Who wanted to stink? Rotten eggs perfume wasn’t pleasant for anyone.
The man toppled over, but on the sidewalk, not the street.
I waited and tapped my foot. Any moment now.
He stood back up, walking back to the red brick wall that lined the front of the bar building. The green neon light shone harshly, glowing from the bar name ‘Babes’ just above the door.
It was a hole-in-the-wall bar. The windows from the outside looked seedy, and the alley along the side of the building was nothing more than a trash heap that screamed, “Come catch a disease.”
He put one hand up against the bricks as he fumbled with his pants with the other.
Cringing, I watched as he pissed on the side of the building. It was obvious where this guy was going.
We didn’t get to know where they went, not until after their sentences. We grabbed them, brought them to the Hall of Judgement, a literal scale—not joking—and escorted them to where they deserved to be: Purgatory (also called Limbo) Heaven, or Helius. Two of those places I’d never been to. Limbo was where my home office was. Heaven, on the other hand, I had never been to. Nor was I allowed to go. You would think being an Angel would get me a ticket to the big upstairs.
Nope.
I could only go once deemed able to, like retirement when the world ended in a million more years. Or whenever the human race decided to blow each other up until no one was left.
We’d all thrown in our bets on how it would end. My bet was nuclear annihilation, but it looked like the douche that chose global warming might win, and maybe sooner than we thought. Another bet I would lose.
The man finally finished pissing on the wall, and he zipped up his loose brown pants. They were those type of suit pants a sleazy lawyer would wear, which was exactly what he was. When he turned around, there was an obvious stream of wetness that started from his crotch down the side of his leg. He hadn’t quite made it out of his pants.
Gross.
I wished I could avert my eyes. Just looking at the wetness intensified my overly sensitive sense of smell, and I could almost taste the sharp ammonia of an unhealthy bladder. I tried not to gag, feeling moisture brim at my eyes, and I choked it back.
Humans, souls, mortals, meat suits, whatever you wanted to refer to them as, were sometimes pretty disgusting. Very few completed their cycles in the time that we gave them.
For some reason, I was taking more souls to the gates of Helius than anywhere else. Lately, there hadn’t been any ascensions. It was like a dry well.
There were whispers that the big CEO upstairs was livid, and you didn’t want to make him—her? no one knows—mad. That could be an end to your existence.
“Come on.” I groaned in frustration, tapping my leg restlessly, watching the white cloud of warm breath against the chill of the night escape my mouth. Despite being immortal, I still felt the biting cold as it seeped into my soul.
I tilted my head up toward the sky, trying hard to suppress the desire to exhale a heavy breath. The target was taking longer than I expected, and I was ready to finish the job.
As harsh as it sounded, I wished he would just hurry up and die. I gave into the urge to tap my foot as the man pulled his phone out of his wet pants and began fumbling with it.
His face held that glazed, dumbfounded look of an entirely trashed individual. His bald head gleamed every time it caught a sliver of the lamplight. Then he turned toward the street and shuffled closer to the corner, where the light blinked in and out with ominous flashes of murky shadows. The man dropped his phone in front of him on the hard, black tar of the street. He leaned over to grab it as he stood at the curb.
As predicted, he stumbled into the street, falling and hitting his head on the dark asphalt. He went deathly still. The lamppost went out and flickered no more, wrapping the unconscious man in darkness.
While I began moving from my hiding spot, still keeping to the shadows, there was no part of me that needed to see what happened next. Over the past millennia, I had witnessed enough death to last a thousand lifetimes. If things went according to plan, his soul would be thrown out, away from his inevitably mangled corpse, so it would save me and him the sight of his mutilated body. If that was what happened. Every now and then, they surprised me.
The car flew around the corner. It was red and slick with dark-tinted windows and flashy wheels with those LED lights that blinded everyone. Moonlight danced off the emblem of the sports car, announcing to the world that it was a Camaro. It screamed, “I like it fast, and I’m overcompensating for something.” Even if the driver could see the man on the road, he still would not have had time to react. He plowed over the man with a bump and an obvious cracking sound of the man’s head being popped like a grape.
I cringed.
Unfortunately, I didn’t turn my head in time.
Even more unfortunately, his soul stood right next to his mushed body.
I waited as the red sports car stopped, pulled back, narrowly missing the body again. Then, after seeing what he had done, the driver fearfully took off. The man’s soul watched in horror.
This was the part of my job that I didn’t enjoy. I would have to gather his soul and wait until it was time for his turn in the Hall of Judgment. The darkness shielded me as I ran towards the ledge, jumped off, and landed.
“W-what happened?” The man shuddered as if the world became a little cooler. “I was going to…”
“Everything will be okay.” I grabbed onto his elbow and hoped that it wouldn’t take long for the door to appear. Portals were more unreliable than Angels, coming and going as they pleased with no sort of predictable pattern. And lately they were taking their sweet time. Even some of the other Reapers had complained about the wait.
I hummed a melodic tune as I focused on the door appearing. That didn’t work.
“What now?”
“We wait…”
A swooping sound surrounded us, and I wondered if there was something wrong with the program. Was Eve on the fritz? I’d heard a rumor that she had more problems every day…
But when a red robed Angel appeared before us, I knew no door would turn up. Oh shit. It was Azrael, the original Angel of Death. My boss. The upper management.
“I will escort this soul,” Azrael said. His face was hidden underneath the hood. The Angel didn’t get the memo that we weren’t living in the biblical times anymore. “You may be dismissed.”
“But he is my target.” I was confu
sed. Azrael never Reaped. Upper management hated getting their hands dirty. “I don’t mind doing it.”
“I said you were dismissed.”
Damn upper management. I sighed and groaned simultaneously.
Tonight was, thus far, a shitty night.
Chapter Two
Vex
The horizon of the city with its towers and buildings seemed like it was painted against the clouded sky. I sucked a deep breath in, taking in the rising red sun. Considering the way things were going in my life, sunrises had a calming effect and soothed my sanity, which threatened to slip away with each day that passed.
When you lived in the original bad place, mental health wasn’t a priority. Surviving and not getting eaten by a daemon or being conscripted into one of Lord’s servitudes were your main concerns.
Thus far, I’d managed to dodge being a slave or tortured and eaten. There was that one teeny incident when I was almost a horde of goblins’ lunch, but I managed to slip out of their reach with pure dumb luck. That other time, I had the foolish idea to bed a succubus. They were nasty creatures with even nastier teeth, but making mistakes was how I learned, and I’d learned at full tilt.
Even though this sun wasn’t, in fact the sun, it still eased my nerves. The hologram felt real, and it even looked genuine. The warmth of its rays heated my cheeks. The sun, like a large, glowing fireball, had every shade of orange, red and yellow swirling around it like the most complex water painting.
At times, the sight of it stole my breath. I would wonder how long it had been since I had stood in the warmth of the real sun, but I couldn’t remember anything before twelve years ago. When I attempted to remember, I almost always suffered from crippling headaches and nosebleeds that would last for hours and sometimes even days, only disappearing after the thoughts of my past drifted away. I tried not to think about what I missed, who I was, or where I came from.
How did this place become my life? This question haunted my dreams and waking state. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had been a terrible person. Had I killed people? Was I a thief? What could I have done to have been condemned like this?
A throbbing headache began to develop in the upper corner of my temple. This was the first warning sign before the nausea hit. If I continued the search for my past within myself, my body would switch on its defenses and temporarily cripple me.
I pushed all the investigative thoughts of my past out and focused on the surrounding commotion.
I skidded down the street, dodging through the hordes of people—shit, daemons and creatures of the night—all trying to get to their jobs, lives, or wherever in hell they were going to.
The streets were filled with vendors, each one selling something unique like fried Imp legs, molted vegetables, and apparently authentic trinkets from Earth. On the right, we had fortune-tellers, skin swappers, and doomed satanic preachers handing out flyers to join the Church of the Damned.
The outspoken true believer with symbols carved into his skin caught my eye as he blocked the paths of the passersby. He yelled that the dark Lord would return, and when he did, Helius would feel his wrath. No one except for me paid any attention. I couldn’t help it. He was so damn loud and out there with his flaming red robes and the gaudy inverted cross dangling from his neck.
The true believers were who you needed to keep an eye out for. They were terrifying, and, if you weren’t careful, they might catch you in a trap and offer your body as a sacrifice to Lucifer. There was nothing like trying to escape the clutches of some cultists with daggers the size of your forearm. Sure, we were previously undead or immortal, but we still felt pain. In reality, we felt more than the average human being. The afterlife wasn’t all that fair.
“You!” The preacher pointed his crooked finger toward me.
“Are you talkin’ to me?” My eyebrow raised as I curled a finger at myself.
“Yes, you. Do you believe in resurrection?” His dark eyes widened and stared as if he were searching for my soul. “Do you trust in the dark Lord’s powers? Do you trust that He will save your soul?”
“I don’t know what I believe.” I shrugged and continued down the road, but the preacher kept his pace and tailed me. This was not the day to have one of those religious types of conversations. No part of me wanted to debate. I just wanted a damn coffee and to find somewhere quiet.
“Lucifer will rise again, and he will smite those sinners who have wronged his teaching,” the preacher yelled at the back of my head.
“If you say so… ” I mumbled as I turned to face him. My eyes struggled to stay forward and not rolled back to the sanguine sky.
“The non-believers will be cast down and burned in the river of Styx.”
“Don’t you think that is a little extreme? I mean, why would Lucifer put all that effort in? The man is probably having a vacation in L.A. He is most likely drinking expensive bourbon in a penthouse suite surrounded by playboy bunnies or men. I’m not sure what his sexual preferences are. Maybe he is bisexual. Trisexual? Is that a thing?”
“Blasphemy!” The preacher fell to his knees and raised his hands up into the air. “Lucifer, forgive our sins and the foolish non-believers. You shall rise again, and the streets will be filled with blood. The dark Lord will take his rightful place on the throne, and all those who oppose him will perish. Neither Angel nor man will have the power to stop him.”
I rolled my eyes. These true believers had a hard time adjusting to the way things worked around here, and Lucifer’s absence. While his preaching became nonsensical and he waved his hands in the air, I took the distraction and fled down the street. But this time, he didn’t follow.
Hell, aka Helius wasn’t so bad. It sure as fuck wasn’t as bad as Heaven made it out to be. Sure, we didn’t have Angels or the Big Boss G, but we had something better—the power of choice. Hell was a democracy-driven metropolitan. It hadn’t always been like this, or so I’d been told. Thousands of years ago, it was the giant pit of torture that the bible warned sinners of, but over time, the land had been developed and changed to mimic the evolution trends on Earth.
The best change, in my opinion, was that everyone had a chance for redemption. If you did bad shit in your previous life, you had the chance to make up for it after you served your punishment handed out by the DOD.
Daemons over Demise.
There were few instances where rehabilitation wasn’t possible, like Hitler or a couple of genocidal warlords. Or if you killed baby animals. Especially puppies.
The DOD did not take kindly to puppy killers. Those rare cases were given to the Harpies outside the city of Cania. There, their minds would be wiped, and they would be left as a husk to work in the ice mines or to shovel daemon shit.
Ask anyone around Helius about their punishment, and I would bet more than half of them wouldn’t even remember. What was a few decades of torture when you had all eternity to hang out?
A gush of liquid sulfur tumbled from the bloated clouds and coated everything in a sea of piss. People scattered through the streets searching for shelter, cursing and shaking their fists toward the pale-yellow sky.
The drops were harmless, but they would make you reek for a few days. No one wanted to smell like rotten eggs mixed with wasabi. One thing that wasn’t fun about Helius was Adam.
Adam was a complex computer system. That damn machine had been on the fritz for as long as I could remember. Its new programing got jumbled up with its old school methods of torture—fireballs tearing up buildings, sulfur rain, daemon incursions, and lakes of lava. Not a single soul in Helius could fix it or had the power to even attempt to. The Lords tried to contact Heaven about the issues, but those Angel pricks had been ghosting us for centuries. They would send a Reaper or two to drop off a soul, and that was about how much contact we had with the immortal folk.
We all had to learn to live with the malfunctions and incursions. Once the word got out that the Daemons were just people transformed by Lucifer himself, they weren’t so da
mned terrifying. They were just trying to make ends meet and find food and a home.
The “bad place” wasn’t so terrible after all, especially since Lucifer, the dictator prick, had vanished, and his reign of terror had ended.
Lucifer had been gone for so long that we didn’t need to be afraid anymore. The citizens of Helius did their best to survive. We were all stuck in this shithole afterlife together. The togetherness made life bearable to a certain degree. We weren’t all burning in the river of Styx or getting our cocks pecked by the Harpies.
I flipped up the collar on my trench coat and scrunched my chin all the way down to my neck. It burned me up, thinking about those Angels in heaven, sitting on their fluffy clouds and even fluffier asses, laughing at the pathetic sinners in Helius. I had no doubt in my mind that they hoarded souls, and God knew what they did with them.
Souls were like money in the afterlife. Whichever side had the most held the power. Power was what Helius needed to thrive. For the past century or so, the number of souls that passed to our side had been dwindling. No souls meant no power for schools, agriculture, or basic necessities. People and Daemons were starving and struggling. Imagine living an eternal life in darkness. That could only end up in one way—pure uncontrollable chaos. A real shit parade.
The only way to get more souls was to send more Reavers to Limbo, but even those excursions were limited. Adam controlled the doors, but he would only open them sporadically, and even then, they weren’t in their assigned locations. In the last five years, we’d lost more Reavers than we could count. Some got stuck in-between the planes, and some were spliced in half. Others vanished without a trace, and the rest refused the jobs.
Being dead was supposed to be easy.
There was nothing I wanted to do more than knock back a glass of scotch or five to simmer down this sour mood. I hated when my thoughts became so concerned about the welfare of others and the injustices that Helius faced. Hell, we were all in the bad place for a reason, but I still had the right to complain about how my life had ended. What else was I going to do with this time?
