The Afterlife Series Omnibus: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War, Stones

by Mur Lafferty

  “You couldn’t touch them,” I repeated blankly.

  “Not one. It was like there was a force field around them. Then when we had decided to search for you, Jet found us, grabbed a soul, and ran off. I wanted to chase her, but Kazuko wanted us to stay and guard the souls. Since it was Jet, I figured you might be involved, and sure enough, she came back. So after she got them all, we followed her to you.”

  “Weird. I was able to touch them.”

  “I know.”

  I stopped, putting my hand on his arm. “Wait a second. How come you’re not freaking out like the last time we were here?”

  “Huh... I don’t know. I could understand Jet’s emotions, like the last time, but there’s no incredible need to go over to that hill and do something that would make me want to kill myself later.” He looked around and spotted the place that had almost been his undoing last time.

  I sighed. “If we’re supposed to be learning shit that will help us later, I feel pretty damn clueless. Any idea who put the souls in cat hell, of all places?”

  He shook his head. “It’s pretty clear Yama helped us out, though.”

  My heart rate quickened as I remembered what I had given in exchange for his help. “Yeah. That was good of him. Do you think we have to take Jet with us to get the other souls?”

  He looked at me, and I fought to keep from squirming under his gaze. “I don’t think so. I’m guessing you would have been able to get the souls yourself, but you couldn’t walk that far. It was pretty far in.”

  I looked away, back toward Kazuko and Jet. “I’ll ask her and see what she says.”

  Daniel still stared at me. “Kate,” he began, but I interrupted him again.

  “Look, I said it because I had to. It’s not a big deal; nothing has to change between us. Don’t feel obligated to me, and for the love of all the gods we’ve met, please don’t act any different around me.”

  He didn’t reply, so I forced a smile. “Let’s head back. We can’t bask in this rest area forever.”

  Kazuko stood up as we approached her. I said my goodbyes to Jet, who clearly was staying in the sun, and hefted my pack. The addition of numerous souls had increased the weight, but I felt lighter somehow. We didn’t talk as we passed the veil between heaven and hell and entered the forest where the terrified cats hunched in their trees, awaiting the inevitable hunt yet again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Daniel had decided that the best way to move about was to just cut a slice in reality and step through. That seemed like a stupid idea, much like closing our eyes and stepping off a cliff, but he asked me rather pointedly to find the road in the dark woods of cat hell, and I honestly couldn’t do it. So I reluctantly followed them through the rip.

  To my massive relief, we ended up on a road all the same, with a great black city rising before us. Daniel squinted at it. “It’s like an evil Disneyland.”

  He was right. I almost expected a Goth Rapunzel to be weeping in the tower because she had just decided to shave her head. No, Goth was too sexy for Hell. My mind went quickly to Lori, a girl from my class who was not so much unpopular as just ignored. She had a hangdog appearance, drab blonde hair and a wide nose, as if only sixteen years on the Earth had already made her too tired for life; she’d had enough. Putting her in Rapunzel’s black tower fit closer to my idea of Hell.

  “So, do you know where this place is?” Daniel asked Kazuko.

  She stared ahead at the jagged walls and spires. “Dis. The city of the Sixth Circle of Hell. Christian mythology. Dante.”

  Daniel and I stared at her. She looked back at us impassively. “I am better with hell than heaven.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

  In life I’d always wanted to be mysterious and Mona Lisa-like. I never pulled it off. Kazuko was a Japanese Mona Lisa. Maybe it was a cultural thing.

  “Why are we suddenly in the Sixth Circle?” Daniel asked. “Why didn’t we start at the top, at the first circle?”

  “I guess that sword of yours is a shortcut. Sorry I doubted you,” I said, still not terribly confident that it was a good way to travel.

  Daniel grinned at me, and I realized I hadn’t been convincing. “Don’t worry, I won’t use it all the time. So,” he said to Kazuko. “What are we doing here?”

  “We will see when we get inside.”

  “Great,” he muttered.

  We approached the gates, our feet kicking up ashy dust on the road. The gates stood cracked open with a guy sitting out front on a stool, scratching patterns in the dust with his sword.

  I saw almost at once that this was no “guy,” but rather an angel with dirty gray wings. His dingy hair hung in his face. In fact, everything about him said dingy. He didn’t come off as a tortured fallen angel as much as a really bored angel gone to pot. I glanced at Daniel, who frowned as well.

  He stepped forward. “We are Daniel, Kazuko, and Kate. We are Travelers to the city of Dis.”

  The angel waved us in without looking at us, bored. Kazuko stared at him with open contempt, but kept her mouth closed.

  “Not much security,” I said. “It’s a wonder we didn’t see the damned wandering around the outside gates…” I trailed off. The damned weren’t, in fact, wandering around outside the gates.

  They were wandering around inside the gates, though.

  They had all been branded, men and women - and my stomach turned at seeing the children, their eyes hollow and searching – with their crimes. “Pride,” “Lust,” “Suicide,” and more were burned across foreheads. The children mostly were identified as suicides, but there were plenty of men and women who had killed themselves as well. They were the most pathetic, looking to escape a terrible life only to receive an even worse afterlife.

  In theory, of course. There didn’t look to be much torture going on here, unless you counted boredom, or that French guy who said, “Hell is other people.” People slumped against walls and milled around. Angels wandered with them, in and out of buildings, sometimes jabbing people half-heartedly with swords, but otherwise ignoring them.

  “This is all wrong,” Kazuko said.

  “You think?” Daniel answered her. He approached one shed-like structure that leaned to the left. Inside was a descending stone staircase. We went down, squinting at the sudden dark. We heard chains clinking and – goodness, was that laughter?

  The stairs led to a dungeon, with the requisite chains bolted to dripping stone walls, stone tables with old bloodstains marring their surface, and whips stacked neatly in the corner alongside cases of unidentifiable tools. The only thing missing were the tortured souls.

  Three girls had taken a spiked chain and were swinging it like a jump rope, the girl in the middle trying to avoid it. It was heavy and sometimes came crashing down on her, cutting her skin. She just laughed and took her place at the turning while another girl took the center, and the game continued until someone else got hurt. Although they clearly were having innocent, if masochistic, fun, the word “suicide” branded each girl’s forehead.

  I smiled slightly at the cute and grisly scene, but Daniel lost it. “What the hell is going on here?”

  The girls stopped their game and stared at him impassively.

  “Where are the tortured souls? What is everyone doing just hanging around? This is like the outside of a 7-11 on a Saturday night!”

  The girls glanced at each other. One, a little African girl, stepped forward. “No one has been tortured here in weeks. We thought we were finally allowed to go to heaven, but we can’t leave, either. So we play.”

  “This is bullshit,” Daniel said, and stormed past me on his way up the stairs. Kazuko followed.

  I went down to the girls. “So why are you girls here?”

  They didn’t glance at each other nervously or giggle or shrink back the way I had experienced with girls that age, but instead faced me head-on with hollow eyes. I realized with a small pang in my chest that they had been tortured for years; what did
they have to fear from a single unarmed woman?

  The one who had been wounded when we came in dabbed at the cut on her cheek. “My daddy touched me. No one believed me, so I took some of mommy’s sleeping pills and killed myself.” She spoke plainly, with no sense of shame or regret.

  The other two nodded. “Granny beat me and locked me in the basement,” one said. The other had an incestuous childhood like the first.

  I gritted my teeth. The unbelievable injustice of these girls’ existence in hell was overwhelming to me, and I knelt in front of them, looking at each of their faces, tears brimming.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’d like to help you, but I don’t know what I can do.”

  One of them, the one with the cut cheek, patted my shoulder. “It’s okay, really. The angels stopped torturing us a while ago, and it’s been almost fun since.”

  I searched around in my backpack for a tissue. I pulled two out and handed her one for her cut, which she accepted. As I dabbed at my eyes, I noticed my backpack shifting. Something stuck out of the top, and I grasped it.

  I pulled out a sword with a white hilt. It was not like Daniels scary-ass katana, but rather a straight Chinese sword like Kazuko’s. The blade glowed white and the heat that radiated off it stung my hand.

  The girls gasped and drew closer, eyes wide. “Careful!” I said.

  They didn’t listen. They each reached forward and grabbed the blade. I winced, imagining their little hands burning, but couldn’t pull back for fear of cutting them.

  I didn’t have to worry. The girls each began to glow and burn: bright, pure light with no sound or odor. They looked at me and smiled, the hollowness leaving their eyes. Then the white fire consumed them and they were gone. I choked back another sob and stared at the white blade. It ceased glowing and became just a regular sword. I stared at it a moment longer and then tried to put it back into the bizarre portal that was my backpack, but it wouldn’t fit. I did find a scabbard, though, so I sheathed it and strapped it across my back the way I’d seen Kazuko do.

  I left the empty dungeon and went back up the stairs.

  Upstairs was pandemonium. Souls and the fallen angels alike screamed and ran in terror from the force that was Kazuko. She had forced a fallen angel to his knees and held her sword to his wings.

  Daniel watched her, his arms crossed.

  “What the fuck?” I asked Daniel, watching her hiss in the angel’s ear.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “She mentioned something about how underworlds were not run this way, it offended the principles of Izanami, and then she started punishing the angels.”

  Kazuko kicked the angel between his wings and he went sprawling at our feet. She put his sword to his throat. “Tell him. Tell him why you aren’t doing your job.”

  Daniel and I looked at each other, realizing she wanted the angel to answer to him.

  The angel winced as Kazuko’s blade nicked him. Black ichor dribbled into the dust. “We no longer feel the Morningstar’s influence. We tried to keep up our jobs, but it was His will more than anything that ran this place. It slowly began to unravel. We don’t know why it’s happening and we can’t find help; we’re as trapped here as the souls are.”

  “Why would Satan leave?” Daniel asked.

  “I don’t know,” the angel said. “I have been here since the Fall and served him faithfully. His influence has always been strong.”

  “It could be whatever is making God lose souls is making Satan lose influence over hell. Think that’s possible?” I asked in a low voice.

  Daniel shrugged. “No idea. Sounds reasonable, though.”

  He nudged the angel with his shoe. “Uh, do you think you can get back to work?”

  The angel looked up at Kazuko, frowning. “I think we have new inspiration.”

  I looked around at the terrified souls. The angels had begun to perk up and started herding the souls into the buildings. I looked back at Kazuko, standing glorious and terrible above the angel. The first anguished scream came out of an open window and I made up my mind.

  “They’re back at it, Daniel. Tell her to let him go.”

  Daniel paused and stepped back. Kazuko dropped her hold on the angel, who sprawled in the dust. “Back to your post,” she hissed, and he ran.

  Daniel looked at me, frustrated. “I have no idea what’s going on. Are there any lost souls here? Can you sense them?”

  I paused and shook my head. “I don’t think so, at least not in the sense that you mean. But I want you to do something for me. Get them to gather the children.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Just gather the children who killed themselves. There’s something I want to test.”

  He shrugged and nodded to Kazuko, who approached the angel at the front gate. The angel looked at her with undisguised loathing, but at her command, he left and began patrolling the castle, bringing children to us. They didn’t look at Daniel at all, but all of them stared at me. When the angel was done, I pulled the sword from my scabbard and held it in front of them, blade down. It glowed again, the heat making me wince.

  “Where did you get—” Daniel began, but stopped when the kids ran forward to grab the blade.

  Like the girls in the dungeon, they each burst into a white hot flame, all the while smiling peacefully. Nearly every child came forward and immediately disappeared – the ones left over didn’t make a move to the blade. Instead, they eyed it warily.

  “Why are you here?” I asked one.

  “I killed my best friend’s mother and then him, and then myself,” he said. Other tales of violence, and the use of suicide as an escape hatch, followed his. In other words, these were kids who fully deserved their torment. I shook my head in disgust and the angel returned them to their respective chambers.

  I sheathed my sword and caught Kazuko’s eye. She nodded slowly to me as if I had confirmed her hunch. Daniel’s face, however, showed complete confusion.

  “What the hell was that about?” he asked.

  “They didn’t deserve to be here,” I said simply.

  “And you just…”

  “Well, you just sent the emperors to purgatory.”

  “I guess I did.”

  The tortured screams of the prideful and murderous filled our ears, and Daniel looked around him. “I think we’re done here.”

  We left, and the two angels at the gate slammed it shut behind us.

  “So how did you release the souls?” Daniel asked me.

  “How did you get the whole city running again?” I countered.

  “And why is everyone so afraid of you?” I asked Kazuko.

  She looked at me in her calm, inscrutable way. “So many questions. And no answers.”

  Daniel sighed and raised his hands in the air. “Whatever. We need to find the lost souls. Figure out what’s going on. And, I guess, add finding the devil to our list of things to do.”

  “This wasn’t in our job description,” I said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That night we slept on the road, blankets over us to protect us from the bitter wind. I huddled under mine, unable to sleep. I wasn’t afraid, not with Kazuko and Daniel near me.

  Kazuko sat up, keeping watch. She kept her back to me, ramrod straight, but she knew I watched her.

  Daniel slept hard, breathing deeply once he had covered himself. Troubling thoughts muscled out the tender ones when I looked at him. He was changing, looking at the world around him with more studious intensity. He looked at me differently, too. I didn’t know what he had gone through for me. Maybe if I did know, I’d understand him better, but he seemed alien to me.

  And yet I still worried about him. Stupid love.

  But if I pointed fingers at Daniel for changing, I suppose I had better point them at myself or be called a hypocrite. I had looked into the face of the Divine and come out changed. It was something that I couldn’t remember experiencing with my senses, but I remembered the incident as an emotion: complete
and total serenity. Bliss. Love.

  I still felt like myself, full of cynicism and fear, but I also felt centered and grounded. Every step I took was purposeful; even if I wasn’t sure where I was going, I knew I needed to go there. Memories of our adventures trickled back in - my dog Jet, Hermes, Ragnarök, Susanoo and Izanami…

  I wasn’t sure when my thoughts turned to dreams, but it was a seamless transition, and I woke up rested.

  Daniel was eating a hot dog. I grimaced at him. “Don’t you know what’s in that?”

  “That’s what makes it so good!” he said.

  “Grandma Nancy said they were made of lips and assholes,” I said.

  “Your grandma was a woman of refined beauty.”

  “Yeah, well, your grandma…” my words died away when Daniel stiffened. I’d forgotten that the topic of his family was not a good thing to venture upon.

  I hadn’t thought much about his sister, even though that was one of our main goals. When you’re wandering around hell, goals kind of go by the wayside as you struggle to comprehend and survive. But his sister was still at the center of this whole thing.

  And his mother, the wretched woman. I’ve heard that you’re not supposed to judge people with mental illnesses any more than you judge someone with cancer, but you don’t see a lot of cancer patients killing little girls.

  Daniel packed up his blanket and got to his feet. “Any idea where we’re going today? Anyone? Anyone?”

  I busied myself with my own blanket, and Kazuko rose smoothly to her feet. No one answered him.

  When I finally stood, I said, “I guess keep going down the road.”

  The wind became hotter as we walked, and we pulled our robe hoods over our heads to protect ourselves. Daniel and I huddled together as we went against the wind.

  #

  I know it sounds ridiculous, but I honestly was relieved to next see a hell I could understand, a hell I knew. This was the hell of Looney Tunes, the Far Side, all sorts of comical views, only without the fire.

  A pit the size of a football field was rimmed by listless souls. The pit’s inside was black as if once holding a great fire. Near the center, a small pile of embers still glowed.