by E. A. Copen
“You don’t understand,” he exclaimed pawing at me to get away. “It doesn’t matter how long you stand in this line, you’ll never get to the end of it. It just keeps going and going and going...”
I careened my neck to try and see ahead. From where I was, I couldn’t see the end of the line or where it was leading to. It didn’t look like it curved in any direction either. The line just went on so far that I couldn’t see the end of it.
“Hey, buddy.” I tapped the guy in the suit on the shoulder. “What’s everyone in line for?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “We’re in line because there’s a line.”
“Right, but what’s the line for?”
Suit guy blinked. His jaw fell open and his eyes crossed. Guess he’d never considered the why of his situation.
“Don’t hurt yourself, pal. You just keep on standing here. I’ll be back.” I slid out of line off to the side of the hallway and muscled my way past everyone standing there, dragging Jean along behind me.
“You can’t do that!” someone shouted at me.
I ignored him and kept working my way forward. Yet, no matter how many people I passed, I never saw the beginning of the line. I could’ve sworn I’d seen that lady with the curlers and the pink bathrobe before too. My feet were starting to hurt, and I was sweating from all the work of pushing people aside to get past them. All the dirty looks people were giving had started to take its toll too, and I started shooting them back.
“See?” Jean said, exasperated. “It never ends. It’s just a continuous line.”
“If it went on forever, then why the ‘Now Serving’ sign?” I shoved aside a guy who kept looking at his watch.
“Complacency! They want you to think there’s an end, a purpose to all this, but there isn’t. It’s a conspiracy.”
I sighed. That was Jean, though. Always so melodramatic.
There was a break in the line ahead, a small space where no one was standing. It wasn’t an end, but it was something different, so I fought my way forward to investigate. Once I got closer, I realized it wasn’t really a break in the line. Someone was standing there, she was just too short to see.
The little girl couldn’t have been older than seven. Dressed as a fairy princess, complete with wings, a tiara, and a magic wand, she stood in line, hugging herself tight. Her eyes darted back and forth. When the line moved, she hunched over and crept forward the tiniest bit.
My chest ached at the sight of her, and I thought of my little girl waiting for me back home. A girl that age shouldn’t have had to stand in a line full of dead people all alone.
“Hey,” I said walking up to her.
Her head jerked toward me. Big, blue eyes blinked. She took a step back toward the wall, away from me.
“It’s okay.” I held my hands up so she could see I wasn’t carrying anything except the staff. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I don’t think you can hurt me anymore.” Her voice was so sad, I wanted to scoop her up for a hug. She pulled her hands away from where she’d been cradling her stomach to reveal a big, bloody hole. “I was in the back seat eating my Halloween candy. Mommy and Daddy were arguing. Then there was a loud noise like breaking glass, and there was stuff sticking out of me. It hurt a minute. Real bad. Then, I was here.”
Car accident. Damn, life was cruel.
She inched closer. “Are you an angel?”
I squatted next to her, folding my hands in front of me. “No, I’m not, but I’m sure there’s one around here. Would you like to help me find one?” Some asshole had to be in charge of this shit show, and when I found him, I was going to wring his neck until this little girl got sent upstairs. Someone had made a serious clerical error.
“O-okay. But I’m not supposed to go with strangers. Mama said.”
I forced myself to smile and offered her my hand. “My name is Lazarus Kerrigan. You can call me Laz. This is my friend, Jean.”
Her eyes got big when she looked over my shoulder. “Is he a ghost?”
“He’s a disembodied soul, which is sort of like a ghost. You don’t have to be afraid of him. He’s a good guy. He helped a bunch of kids not much older than you not so very long ago.”
Jean faltered but bent over and took the little girl’s hand. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance Miss...?”
“Andrews,” she answered, shaking Jean’s hand. “Sophie Andrews.”
“There,” I said standing and offering her my hand again. “We’re not strangers anymore. I say it’s time to kick this line and go find out who’s in charge so we can get things moving. What do you say?”
Sophie beamed and grabbed my hand. “Okay.”
A necromancer, a spirit, and a dead little girl fighting their way through a hallway full of near literal zombies in search of an angel in Hell. Now, that’d be a story to tell at dinner parties.
It took forever. For hours, we walked and saw no sign of anyone except for dead people. The hallway stretched on for miles, long enough that I resorted to carrying Sophie after a while.
Eventually, we came to a narrow door with sandstone columns on either side. Standing next to either column was a half-man, half-sphynx cat. They wore white skirts held in place by golden belts. More gold dripped off their cat ears. Sharp blue eyes focused on me. They showed me razor sharp canines and lowered curved, spear-like weapons at my face.
“Back of the line,” one growled.
“Just came from there and there seems to have been some kind of mistake.” I patted Sophie on the head. “This one’s in the wrong line.”
“We don’t care. Back of the line!”
“Maybe we should just go to the back of the line,” Jean whispered. “They look like they have sharp claws.”
“Screw that. Watch her.” I put Sophie down next to Jean and pushed up my sleeves on my march toward the cat shifters. “Listen, ugly. You go find Bastet or Ra or whoever oversees things down here, and you tell him the Pale Horseman is here for an inspection.”
Their eyes doubled in size. “Inspection?” The one on the left gulped.
The one on the right lifted his spear. “I don’t believe you. Prove you are who you say you are. Where are your powers, Horseman?”
I made a fist. “Maybe you should ask Anubis. Oh wait, I already killed him.”
He narrowed his cat eyes, flashed his teeth one more time and demanded, “Wait here,” before disappearing through the door.
I went back over to Jean.
“I’m surprised that worked,” said the pirate.
“You and me both.” I hoisted Sophie back into my arms.
She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired.”
“I know. We’ll get you to rest soon. Promise.”
“You!” A deep voice boomed through the hall, sending everyone toward the front of the line to cower against the wall.
I turned around to meet the weirdest looking god I’d ever seen. He was an imposing seven feet tall with green skin showing through bandages that were wrapped all around his person. Aside from the bandages, he wore a long-sleeved robe of pure white with a red sash at his waist. He was bald and had no eyebrows except for the golden ones someone had painstakingly painted on.
His weird gold prosthetic chin twitched as he sneered and pointed at me. “Bring him to me.”
The cat guard still in the hallway marched forward and grabbed my arm, escorting me into a grand hall of sandstone walls. Sheer silk tapestries hung from the columns, shifting in a cool breeze that smelled of incense. Golden light shone behind two massive stone thrones on a dais. Both thrones were empty, but the god I’d just met was working his way toward claiming one.
All around the room, more cat-men and some gods—identifiable by their golden souls—scurried from computers to printouts and back again. Papers fell from overfull filing cabinets while they shouted at each other the same way I imagined day traders did on Wall Street. It was a chaotic, disorganized mess.
“You stand before the Lord
Osiris,” announced the cat guard. “King of the blessed dead, father of the Nile—”
“I’m the most stressed-out god in the multiverse!” He stopped at the top of the dais to kick over a stack of papers. “And it’s all your fault, Lazarus Kerrigan!”
“Whoa, wait a minute.” I put Sophie down. It didn’t look like anyone was going to attack me, but just in case, I needed to have both my arms handy. “What’d I ever do to you? I don’t even know you.”
Osiris sat in his throne and leaned on a fist. “You necromancers are always destroying things around here, breaking the rules. It used to be what was dead was dead. Souls would come, stand in line for their judgment, get their hearts weighed, and go wherever I sent them. It was all very efficient. Wait times hardly ever stretched more than a few hours. Now...Now the current wait to be judged is four years!”
“I still don’t see how that’s my fault.” I stepped forward, planting my staff. On either side of the sandstone walkway, blue-green water blocked any escape. I didn’t want to think about what was probably lurking in those bottomless pools.
Osiris gestured to a bronze apparatus to his left. I stared at it, trying to figure out what it was. After a minute, I realized I was looking at the largest old-fashioned set of scales I’d ever seen.
“How am I to weigh hearts without Anubis?” he moaned and put his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes. “His feather is gone, and the fast and efficient road to the afterlife with it.”
I turned away from the scales, unsure of what to say. I had killed Anubis, but not by choice. Anubis had been one of the few gods I actually liked. While he served as my reaper, he’d never tried to sugar coat things for me and always gave me the benefit of the doubt while being fair. When I almost became a ghoul, he took my magic after we struck a deal. The only way for me to get it back had been to kill him. He fought well, almost won, but like every god, he let his ego get the best of him.
“I guess you want more than an apology, huh?”
“An apology?” Osiris lowered his hand and shot me a look that made my skin crawl. “In addition to destroying a well-oiled bureaucratic process that we used for centuries, you murdered my son. If you were anyone other than the Pale Horseman, I would have you mummified while living.”
I cringed and shrank back. On my list of preferred ways to die, having my organs liquified and pulled out through my side and my brain yanked out through my nose ranked pretty low. “I know it won’t make any difference, but he forced me into it. I didn’t want to. If he was your kid, then you know how he was. Stubborn. Probably a little too honorable for his own good.”
Osiris sighed. “That does sound like him.” He stared into the pool to my right, lost in a memory for a moment before he snapped back to the present. “Anyway, until he matures again, we’ve had to make do without him. It takes longer, it’s messy and disorganized, but what’s a god to do?”
I blinked. “Matures again? What do you mean?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
I shook my head.
He stood and walked down the stairs to stand at the end of the walkway. “Death and torment is not the end, not even for you. All are reborn given enough time, though never in the same way. The souls must be broken down before they’re cast in the Night River. In the end, The Creator forms them anew and instills them in new bodies. Different, but made of the same parts.”
That was news to me. I’d always thought the After was the end, eternal reward or punishment. I supposed it made sense though. Even all the punishment had to have an end goal or else why bother?
A chill ran through me as I suddenly remembered Morningstar’s speech to Emma about breaking down her soul. “How long does that process take?”
Osiris looked to one of his underlings, a fox-faced god carrying around stacks of papers.
“In Earth time?” The fox-faced underling grunted as he placed the stack of papers next to another huge pile. “Seven days. After that, the soul that was is gone forever. All you can ever get back are the pieces.”
“Except in the case of lost souls, such as your friend.” Osiris gestured to Jean. “He still needs to be processed.”
Jean gulped.
I moved back to stand between Osiris and Jean. “He’s not getting processed today. I need his help.”
Osiris rolled his eyes. “Fine. It’s one less thing for me to do. Which brings me back to why my once-glorious throne room is now awash in dead trees instead of dead souls. All the gods you kill perform a function, Horseman. Their absence creates an imbalance, one the multiverse will always seek to rectify. Thus, they will be reborn in time. Until that time, however, we will have to learn to do without. That means sifting through everything manually for each soul. The good, the bad, the indifferent...”
I looked around the room. What Osiris needed was a decent filing system or a better understanding of how to use those computers to create a searchable database, all things I wasn’t particularly good at. There was probably a computer geek in line somewhere that could help him though, if he thought to look.
“Why are you here, Horseman?” Osiris asked crossing his arms over a powerful chest. “To my knowledge, none of my people has violated any laws, and we weren’t even at the tournament. We have no quarrel with you.”
He’s afraid of me, I realized. Though he was putting up a good front for everyone around him, his wary gaze told a different story. As much as he disliked me, Osiris was trying to appease me because he feared I’d do to him what I’d done to Anubis. That wasn’t the reputation I wanted preceding me everywhere I went, the reputation of a bully. I’d be much more likely to get the help I needed if gods liked me instead of fearing me, but I didn’t know how to change his mind.
He raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to answer.
I cleared my throat. “Lucifer Morningstar took a soul to his Hell that doesn’t belong there. I’m trying to get it back.”
“What soul?” He snapped his fingers at one of the nearby underlings who went frantically to peck at the keyboard.
“Her name is Emma Knight.”
“Emma Knight.” Osiris glanced at the underling on the computer.
The underling slammed a thumb down on the keys, and a nearby printer whirred to life, spitting out half a dozen pages faster than I’d ever seen any printer work. Two cat-faced gods rushed to gather the papers from the air and went to present the file to Osiris.
The Egyptian king of the dead made a non-committal grunt as he leafed through the pages. “I see. She had a binding contract with him. Only fools would cut a deal with the Devil, but it seems there are more and more of that kind of fool around these days. Humans. Always thinking about life without paying the least bit of attention to the afterlife.”
He lowered the pages. “Afraid there’s nothing I can do. The contract is ironclad.”
“I’m not asking you to help me,” I said as I went back to the narrow walkway. “Not in so many words. All I want is the key to the second gate. Tell me what you want for it.”
Osiris stroked his prosthetic chin. “There is one thing...” He shook his head and threw his hands up. “No, it would be impossible, even for a Horseman. Anubis is the only one who could do it. You couldn’t possibly.”
“Yes, he can,” Jean boasted, gesturing to me. “This man has survived the ghoul virus, singlehandedly beaten back the Shadow Army, and slain more gods than anyone. Just yesterday, I watched him grip the chains that bound Fenrir to Hell and make the beast bow in submission!”
“Please shut up,” I growled at Jean under my breath. He’s going to get me killed, exaggerating like that.
“Is this true?” Osiris cocked his head to the side, waiting.
While it was all only sort of true, I knew better than to shoot down the story that Jean had worked so hard to build up. I’d seen how that played out in Ghostbusters. When someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
Osiris lowered h
is hand and dropped Emma’s papers. “Then perhaps you are worthy. And if you’re not, I’ll feel no remorse. It is a fitting punishment for one who murders gods.”
I exchanged glances with Jean. Thanks, asshole.
Sophie shivered and grabbed her stomach.
“There’s just one thing,” I said turning back to Osiris. “This little girl, Sophie Andrews, doesn’t belong in Hell. She goes upstairs. Then I do your job for you.”
The underling at the computer began furiously typing in Sophie’s name.
Osiris held up a hand, bringing the typing to an abrupt stop. “Done. One of you scribes find me an angel and get me one express ticket for an unaccompanied minor.”
“Sir,” said one of the scribes, cowering, “there’s an additional fee for unaccompanied minors and for rush processing.”
Twin gold flames sparked in Osiris’ eyes as he glared at the scribe. “Don’t complain at me about fees. Call Bob in accounting! Give the girl a piggyback ride there if you must! I don’t care. Just make it happen!”
The scribe bowed low. “Yes, my king.” He scurried off, hunched low.
I waited for him to go before walking back to kneel in front of Sophie. “They’re going to take care of you,” I promised, putting my hands on her shoulders.
Sophie blinked and frowned. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t be. Where you’re going, there’s no more pain. No lines. No sadness. It’s the happiest place you’ve ever been. Not like this place.”
“Will there be My Pretty Zombie Fairy Princess dolls there? I always wanted one.”
I smiled. “More than you can count.”
Sophie’s eyes sparkled. “When do I leave?”
The girl seen to, I stood with a pat on her head, dusted myself off and gave Osiris my full attention. “Okay, Osiris. What exactly is it you want me to do for you?”
The god grinned, showing perfect white teeth, drawing his painted eyebrows into a point. Somehow, I just knew I wasn’t going to like his little quest.
