by Cliff Hicks
His cell phone rang again, a different tone this time, but he chose to ignore it as well. Judas Iscariot himself. Several minutes later, the voicemail again. Ignore. It would be a different voice on the voicemail, but the message would be the same. Didn’t mean it. One-time. She still loves you. Don’t take it out on her. All his fault. The same bullshit, just a different octave. His so-called best friend had a way of making anything sound like it was the only possible course events could have taken. Like there was never a choice when it came to anything. His ex did the same thing. Like destiny made all their decisions for them. No fault, no blame. They deserved each other anyway. And really, did they need to talk so damn long to his voicemail?
His Nova sputtered as it wove through traffic, threatening to die at any moment, which made Jake smack the dashboard from time to time. It was, perhaps, the angriest he’d been all day. He could get past his company throwing away all of their hard work to pinch a few pennies. He could get past his fiancée and best friend having a fling that put porn flicks to shame. He could get past his car radio getting stuck on stupid love songs. He could even get past the guy (at least he thought it might have been a guy) screwing up his order at the fast food joint. But he would be damned if his Nova was going to die on him today. If it even started thinking about dying, he’d beat it to death, just to beat it to the punch.
The sound of honking behind him snapped his attention back to the road. The semi that was roaring up on the tail of his car took him by total surprise. If he’d been able to talk to the semi driver, he’d find that the man’s brakes had gone out and he was fighting to control to the lumbering vehicle. But Jake couldn’t talk to him because he was too busy screaming as the semi plowed into the back of his Nova, sending it flying across the road and into a telephone pole. That wood pillar crushed in a part of Jake’s hood and Jake leaned his head back, blinking, struggling to focus again.
He hurt like hell, his body felt like it’d been through a blender, but he was alive. He had to laugh, his head swimming and fuzzy, at the sheer absurdity of it. After all this, something had finally gone his way.
Then, from near the hood of his car, Jake heard a very big wooden crack, and his head turned, dazedly, just in time to see the telephone pole coming down on top of him. “Well, fu-“ Jake said just as the pole slammed into the roof of the car, the massive weight of it flattening the passenger’s compartment, crushing and killing Jake Altford nearly instantly.
And that was when Jake’s day really began to get bad.
* * * * *
“Oh, get up,” a voice told him. “You’re only dead. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.” These words, although all words Jake had heard before individually, weren’t making any sense to him in that particular order.
“Wait, what?” Jake’s eyes opened and he saw an older man, in his late fifties or early sixties Jake figured, looming over him, scowling down at him. “Who the hell are you? What just happened?”
“You died, you moron,” the short man sighed in a rather annoyed tone. “What did you think was going to happen? A telephone pole flattened you like a buttermilk pancake.” Jake’s eyes combed over the man, considering him for a long moment. He was compact but round, with deep blue eyes the shade of the ocean at nightfall. He was balding on top but had a massive white beard, as if someone had tugged on a few chin hairs and yanked most of his hair from the top of his head down. There was still a scattered collection of black and white hair atop the man’s head that refused to give up the fight, however, and each strand seemed to be trying to guard a particular section of scalp. His eyebrows were massive and flared up like spikes, jutting at least half an inch upwards from his face. “Did you want to take a look at your body?”
“Body?” Jake asked incredulously.
The portly man put his hands on his hips, shaking his head with another sigh. Jake noticed, for the first time, that the man was in a white toga of sorts, with white flipflops on his massive feet. “You know, kid, you’re not the only dead person I have to pick up today, so spare me the ‘oh-what-big-eyes-you-have-Grandmother’ routine, ‘cause I ain’t in the mood today. You died. You’re dead. Kaput. Expired. You’ve snuffed it. Whole nine yards. Tough break, but that’s death for you. Let’s go.”
Jake’s face scrunched up. “Wait a minute, if I’m dead why do I have to go anywhere?” He stood up and was suddenly aware he was next to his car, which was nothing more than scrap metal at this point beneath a giant shaft of wood. Somewhere instead that coffin of steel laid his corpse, but if he was dead, which seemed likely at this point, Jake wasn’t really eager to see himself in the horrible shape he imagined he was in. The blood, his blood, leaking out from the mess was more than disturbing enough. As was the truck driver who was staggering around the wreckage of Jake’s car. And of Jake himself, he supposed. Of course the truck driver had emerged from the crash without so much as a scratch. Typical, Jake thought to himself, before turning his attention back to the annoyed being dressed in white. Story of his life. Or what used to be his life.
Fat Guy In Toga shrugged as he glanced over his shoulder at him. “Well, y’know, it’s just Heaven. But if you wanna stay and get dragged up later, that ain’t my problem. I think it’d just be easier if you did it now rather than later. C’mon, let’s go,” he said as he started to walk away. Jake took one look back at the Chevy Nova, mangled beyond recognition, a strange expression on his face. He could hear the sounds of an ambulance in the background. But, more importantly, he could hear the sound of his cell phone inside the car ringing again, his ex-fiancée calling once more. And really, if he had to debate between that damnable ringtone or some fat guy leading him to Heaven, the choice was obvious, wasn’t it? Jake put his hand to his face for a second then turned around and scrambled after the heavy-set guy who was walking down the street.
“Hey, wait up!”
The rotund man turned back to look at him, offering a single sound that might have been part of a laugh. “Decided to come after all, huh? Alright, kid, let’s get rolling. We’ve got three other people to pick up before we’re ready to head upstairs again.”
Jake offered a hand to the man, who looked at it like it was a dead fish that offended his sensibilities. “I’m Jake.” He hoped that maybe the older man would maybe shake his hand, as it might have put him at ease. He didn’t. In fact, he scowled at it a bit more.
Fat Guy In Toga cocked his head a little to the side then looked back to the street. “I know, Jake. It was in your file. You can call me Bob.”
“Bob?”
“What,” Bob said, crossing his arms over his chest as he turned to glare at Jake, “you don’t think Bob is a good name for a Cherub? You were expecting something like Ezekial or Jebediah or something? Too bad. I’m Bob, so shut up about it. I’m sick of every dead schmuck thinking he can make fun of me for my name. I’d kick your ass… if it was still tangible.” (Clearly, Jake had touched a nerve.) Bob turned back and started walking down the street, Jake having to struggle to keep up.
“So, uh, Bob, I’m…”
“Dead?” Bob asked with a big grin on his face. This seemed to be a subject much more to Bob’s liking. “As the dodo.” Jake noticed they were moving through the streets without much commotion. It was at that point that Jake looked down and noticed he was partially transparent. “I know, I know, it’s like a bad special effect from some cheap Hollywood movie, ain’t it? Still, whaddaya gonna do, huh? It’ll be gone as soon as we get you upstairs anyway.”
“Upstairs?”
“What, hearing problem? You know, upstairs. Heaven.” Bob sighed a little bit. “It’s not technically upstairs, but that’s because it’s technically everywhere and nowhere at the same time, but you try telling that to some housewife from Tennessee and see if she understands what you’re talking about. Then again, I can’t imagine you need a lot of quantum theory when your entire life consists of plunking out a unit once a year.”
Jake saw someone walking towards him
on the street and moved to get out of his way and suddenly his vision was full of all sorts of things. His body stood still as a person from behind walked through them, Jake seeing every inside bit of their brain before catching the back of their head, the man’s black ponytail swaying back and forth. “Okay,” Jake wheezed, “awkward.”
“Yeah, you ain’t tangible, so you gotta get used to that kind of thing. It’s a bitch, but it’s got its perks, like peeking into women’s changing rooms any time you want,” he laughed. “I mean, I’m dead, but I’m not dead, if you catch my drift. Makes the trips out to grab you stiffs a bit more fun. Anyhow, we’re here. Just got a wait a minute or so. Here,” Bob said as he grabbed Jake by the shoulders and moved him over a few steps to his left. In front of him, Jake could see a massive office building, a few people from security talking to a few police officers. It looked as though they were checking each person as they tried to leave.
“Why am I standing here?” Jake said, turning to look at Bob, who had taken a few steps back and was smiling broadly. “Uh, Bob?”
From above Jake, he could hear a distant sound and he looked up just in time to identify it. It was screaming, and the screaming was coming from a businessman who was plummeting at Jake at an alarming rate. So alarming, in fact, that he passed right through Jake before he could move out of the way. There was a very sickening splat sound at Jake’s feet and he wanted to throw up. “Oh god… that was disgusting,” Jake said, trying desperately not to look down.
Off to the side, Bob laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Uh, excuse me?” a new voice asked. A lean man stood up next to Jake, dressed in the same business suit he’d seen plummeting towards him seconds ago. There was a crowd of people gathering around them now, but they were all looking at their feet, the morbid sight gruesome but apparently just too interesting to look away from. “What just happened?”
“You died,” offered Jake, helpfully. He hadn’t the foggiest what was going on, truthfully, but he figured it was better to be useful about it. Jake kept his chin up and his eyes level, trying to avoid looking below him as he stepped away from the mess with the man. “How do you feel?”
“Not dead,” the man replied, a bit bewildered and slightly depressed, as if he was afraid he might have survived. Then he looked behind them, and saw the mess that was his corpse, the sight of which caused him to turn and he tried to throw up. The sound was there, but there was nothing for him to throw up, so all it sounded like was a very severe cough. “Is… is that me?”
“That was you, bub,” Bob said. “This is you now. You’re on your way to Heaven, so come on, we gotta get going. No time to waste. Quota to make. Let’s go.”
“Heaven?” the man asked, incredulously. “Me? Really? Wow.”
Bob started to walk and that meant that Jake followed. The new man also followed, simply because he didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. Jake glanced at the new man as they walked, ruffling his brow. “You seem surprised by that,” Jake said, trying to size the man up as they walked side by side.
“Well, yeah! I was just about to be arrested for embezzling thirty million dollars or so, and so I smashed my window and jumped out of it. Long fall, too! Not every day a Chicago native flings himself out a window with thirty million in cash squirreled away,” the man said with a toothy grin. “Yeah, they’re gonna remember Martin Stevens.”
Something about what the man had just said didn’t quite sit well with Jake and after half a second passed before he realized what it was. “Wait, did you say Chicago?”
Martin cocked an eyebrow curiously at him. “Yeah, why?”
Jake looked around them as they walked, keeping stride with Bob and making Martin halfway sprint to stay in pace with them. “I knew this didn’t look like Omaha! And we walked here!”
They rounded a corner and suddenly the urban environment was gone and they were standing on a street corner in a very rural looking town, if you could call it that. Jake could count maybe a couple dozen buildings arranged in a long strip, none of them over a story high. In the background he could see snow-capped mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. “This,” Martin said a bit breathlessly, “this is not Chicago.”
Jake rolled his eyes back into his head. Dying, it seemed, made you state the obvious for a bit. He could understand why Bob found it annoying. “You don’t say. Hey Bob, how the hell did we get here?” he asked the Cherub, placing a hand on the fat man’s shoulder.
“Zen teleportation,” Bob replied, lifting Jake’s hand from his shoulder with one of his own. “If you ask the way, you aren’t ready to go there on your own yet.”
“You’re some big help,” Jake snorted, looking around as he tried to get his bearings.
The short man shrugged at them. “I’m a taxi service, not a tour guide. Not my job to play twenty questions because you feel the need to know everything before its time. We’re just here to make our last couple of stops, then we’re outta here and back home. They should be here any minute,” he said, leaning up against a wall. Martin tried to lean against the wall with one arm, palm first, and started to fall through before Jake grabbed him and pulled him back. Bob chuckled a bit at the sight of it. “Watch that; it takes some practice, the whole being dead and solid thing. Not that it’ll matter much to you in a bit.”
Martin’s head tilted up, gazing at up at Bob. “Why wouldn’t it matter?”
Bob laughed a bit, his hands on his hips. “’Cause you’ll be in Heaven, Nimrod, duh.” A gunshot rung out through the air. “Oh! Time for the show!” It sounded like Bob actually had a touch of glee in his voice.
One man came running out of a bar, waving his hands in the air. His name was Ted. “Look Dennis, you got it all wrong!” Ted looked he might be barely twenty if he was lucky. Scrawny but in that kind of way that women found attractive, he had something of a charming quality to him when he wasn’t, like he was now, running for his life. Ted tripped and started crawling forward, moving behind a car. “It’s not how it looks!”
A few steps after Ted came Dennis, gun a’blazin’. “Oh yeah, then how does it look you sack of shit? You knocked up my daughter!” Ted had to be in his fifties or sixties but he was grizzled and rugged in a mountain man sort of way, his scraggly white beard parting to let that booming voice out. “Tell me how it is, Ted!”
“I love’er, Dennis! You gotta believe me!” Ted was struggling to keep as much of his body behind the car as possible. An older gentleman came out of the barbershop a few shops down and stood next to Bob, Martin and Jake, none of whom he could see.
Martin turned to Bob, a confused look on his face. “Why doesn’t the barber call the sheriff or something?”
Bob offered up a dismissive laugh, pointing at Dennis with a chubby finger. “That’s your sheriff right there.” Bob squinted his eyes, scowling as he seemed to be staring past the two men in the heated argument, then he broke out into a big tooth grin. “Lenny!”
Martin and Jake both turned to glance over at the empty space behind Ted, who was walking over towards the car slowly but surely. First all they could see was a slight haze, like an outline in heat distortion, but eventually they could start to make out a figure and then the details all became clear.
It was another short, pudgy guy, although this one had bright red hair, straight and partially hanging over one eye, as opposed to Bob’s salt’n’pepper bird’s nest mess of rapidly dwindling hair. Lenny looked a little younger than Bob did, but seemed to have the same general demeanor. “Hey Bob, how they hangin’?”
“You know how it is. Same story, different day. Out of the office, so, y’know, can’t complain too much. What’re you doing here?” Bob said, as the two men began to exchange one of those elaborate friendship handshakes incredibly old friends often have. Jake tried to follow it, but around the time they were on the third fist pound with a twist, it was lost on him.
“See you in hell, Ted!” Dennis came around the corner and opened first, unloading shot after
shot into Ted’s chest, while Ted, who had pulled out a .22 from somewhere, shot once at Dennis, clipping across his neck, severing his major artery. As both men slumped to the ground, Martin and Jake looked away from them and back to the two Cherubim.
“These two aren’t yours, Bob,” Lenny said as he jerked a finger behind him at the corpses of Ted and Dennis. Ted’s ghost was already beginning to stand up, but apparently it was taking a little longer for Dennis to bleed to death.
“What?!” Bob howled. He slammed his fat hands onto his hips and scowled angrily. “What are you babbling about, Lenny?”
“Excuse me?” Ted’s ghost said, trying to interject.
“You!” Bob shouted, pointing a stubby finger at him, not even looking his direction. “You’re dead, so shaddap. Someone’ll be with you in a minute!”
“I’m… I’m what?” Ted asked, staring at him.
“What do you mean these two aren’t mine? Whose are they, then? Yours?” Bob had taken a few more steps towards Lenny. “Why would you take’em?”
“I’m dead?” Ted said to himself.
“So are we, if it’s any consolation,” Martin told him helpfully.
“Oh shut up,” Jake sighed at Martin.
“It’s… it’s not any consolation at all, really,” Ted whispered.
Behind Lenny, the ghost of Dennis stood up. ”Uh, what’s going…”
“HEY!” Bob bellowed as he turned and looked at Dennis. “If you do not be quiet, I will devote the rest of my existence to finding some way to bring you back to life just so I can kill you myself all over again! SHUT IT!” He whipped his head back to Lenny. “DID YOU…”
