A Day In The Afterlife

Understand that while the subject matter of my short story relates closely to religious matters, and focuses largely on the Christian deity and tradition, it is not intended to preach in any way whatsoever. In fact, if someone were to obtain their religious worldview from my story, they would very likely be sent to an asylum quite promptly, where they would be beaten with an ice cream scoop to teach them that they should not be allowed to practice their Monty Python-esque religion in this country of religious tolerance.
To make my point clearer, my tale is not intending to say that there is or is not a God, nor does it reflect my own personal views, nor the personal views of any sane person. It is simply an enjoyable (I hope) story set against a religious backdrop.
In short, my narrative should not be taken as allegory of any kind. The only symbolism here is that possibly, if when we die we continue to live, we won’t be any more competent than we are now.
I hope that you keep absolutely none of this in mind, as none of it was anything more than a rather complicated way of introducing myself, stating that there is no real purpose in my little legend, and providing the illusion that I am intelligent.
Sincerely,
David Aaron Séitheach Huff


A DAY IN THE AFTERLIFE
By David Aaron Seitheach Huff



“I think,” she said hesitantly, “that I am alive.”
In this assumption, she was quite incorrect. She was really the deadest person I have ever met. Of course, she was not aware of her recent demise, or how she had come to meet it.
“No, you’ve been somewhat killed.” I replied.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Was it painful?”
“Quite so, I expect.”
She shook her head confusedly. I took pity on her. The poor girl had just died, after all. She was going to be bewildered; they always are, the newly deceased. I always enjoy greeting atheists, as they are quite surprised that they are dead and aware of that fact.
“My name is Peter. No, not ‘saint,’” I quickly added as her jaw dropped, “just Peter.”
She looked at me oddly. “Who are you?”
I smiled. “I thought I had just made that abundantly clear.”
“No, not your name, who are you? Why are you here?”
The corners of my smile twitched. “Well, I am your third cousin, twice removed, twice married, once divorced. And I am here because I am your only dead relative who did well enough in life to be able to greet you. And it is my job to greet people.”
She gasped. “You mean the rest are in hell?”
“Oh, goodness, no! They’re simply taking their punishment for their… well, I suppose you’d say sins. We prefer to refer to them as ‘mortal indiscretions.’ Of course, the definition of a mistake may vary by culture. Oh dear, I’m just confusing you more, aren’t I? I shouldn’t talk about divine procedure to someone who’s just expired, anyway…”
She did look perplexed, and I’m sure my ramblings about the way we do things in the life after death were giving her a headache, or would be if she had a physical head which could ache.
“Poor girl. You’re all alone in the realm of Nirvana. Oh, don’t worry, we only reincarnate Buddhists and Hindus and those people; we just refer to the afterlife by whatever name we feel like. And I suppose you’re not all alone, really, if you were, I’d have to be somewhere else, which is… oh, never mind.” I checked my clipboard. “Your name is Karen Alverson, correct?”
At that point, she did something which quite surprised me, as I wasn’t even aware that a disembodied spirit could faint. I had thought that was a purely mortal tendency.
This worried me somewhat, because when one dies, one becomes naught but a consciousness. What happens when a consciousness loses consciousness?
Being unacquainted with the answer to this question, I simply picked the girl up (the intangible don’t possess a great deal of weight) and carried her to the placement center.
The placement center is a huge, white hall with an abundance of stairways. One leads off to the Reincarnation Chamber, where those who believed they would be sent back again are re-placed. Another goes up to the Glory Elevator, which leads Christians to the glories of the sun, moon, and stars. If you were a Unitarian or someone who just sort of believed in a happy white place where you get to vacation for the rest of eternity, you can climb the Stairway to Heaven. (Sounds strangely familiar, but I can never quite place it. Probably something I remember from life) A further flight goes to the Oblivion Complex, where atheists can go to ‘cease to exist’ if they’re a trifle uncomfortable with the idea of an infinite existence. The problem with the Oblivion Complex is that you can’t change your mind about it, and it’s very troublesome to get out again if you can’t alter that decision. Also, no one knows for sure what it looks like. On the far left, there is a dark, austere, descending staircase, which leads to the Compensation Room.
There are many staircases to accommodate different opinions of the way the Universe works. But only the Compensation Room is a nearly universal sojourn. It is an unpleasant place indeed, but an ingenious piece of technology. By reading the aura waves of a particular subject, it adapts itself to a physical embodiment of their most feared torment. Whoever their deity, they usually have something to pay for. For some, the discipline is slight, simply a bit of unbearable anguish for their transgressions, and then it’s over. For others, they are sentenced to spend a millennium or two in the room. For the most unforgivable sins, at least five millennia and then they are released… into hell. Not exactly an improvement, in my mind.
The Compensation Room was not something Karen would have to bother with. My records showed that she had regularly made right her infractions on Earth.
I took her to Marcus, a nearby supervisor, hoping he’d know what to do. He looked considerably surprised, but then, I believe he spent most of his time practicing how to look considerably surprised.
“Here now, Peter, what happened?”
“Our new arrival just swooned. Is it possible for an anima to lose consciousness?”
He looked uncertain. (But as I said before, this was nothing new) “I suppose it must be. I’ve never seen it before in my death.”
That wasn’t good.
“Should we call on God? Karen was a Christian, you know. God would be the deity to talk to.”
He looked at me like I had just asked him if he would like to return to Earth as a violet baboon.
“Peter, you can’t be serious. We can’t trouble God with something like this. He’s very busy.”
“Well, if this isn’t a pressing matter, I don’t know what is. A spirit fainting? It could be serious.”
He opened his mouth and floundered for a moment, then closed it, seeming to bite back a retort.
“Oh… All right, but we must be quick about it.”
We marched off towards the Glory Elevator. Stepping inside, we pressed the Celestial button.
As the lift rose, I contemplated the idea of speaking personally to God. I’d spoken with him before, of course, but only in court situations, when we were trying to determine the fate of certain Christians.
The elevator finally stopped. We were nearly blinded as we stepped out; even the landscape was glowing slightly. There was a huge, white mansion off to the right, and many more along the pathway, though none so majestic in architecture as the first.
Almost as we rang the doorbell, the door opened, and we were greeted by a handsome young man in a white tuxedo.
“How may I help you, sirs?”
Marcus grimaced uncomfortably.
“We need to speak to God. It’s urgent.”
The butler (I assumed that was what he was; I’d never been in a celestial mansion before) looked shocked.
“Speak to God? Without an appointment, unannounced? Who do you thi-“
At that moment, he saw the girl, dead to the world (forgive the pun), in my arms.
“Oh, dear. Please come in and wait a moment.”
He stepped inside, and we followed. He briskly walked off towards an office.
At this point, I was struck by the sheer beauty of the house. Everything was white, so bright it was almost blinding, which is cliché enough that I shouldn’t bother to mention it here. There was nothing unclean, and yet it had a warm, pleasant feeling as opposed to the sterility present in the Placement Center.
God, a tall man with a young face, white beard and hair, and a business suit even whiter than the butler’s came out. He looked at us.
“Peter. Marcus. It’s good to see you. Now, let’s get straight to the point, as there are some prayers that need answering, and today is a bit of a rush day. I’ve seen this very few times in the past, but Karen is in a state of soul-shock. Her spirit is in no real danger, but we’re lucky that Lucifer and his allies didn’t get hold of her before you brought her here. They’ve been studying how to induce soul-shock themselves, and we can’t afford to let them have that knowledge. I’ll bring her out of it, but just so you know, past victims of soul-shock have faded in and out before they were fully cured of its effects.”
The butler brought out an odd-looking stretcher with various electronics on it. I laid Karen’s soul out on it. God pressed several buttons and then touched her forehead, tracing his fingers down her temples. She woke up, seeming a bit groggy, but fine aside from that.
God grinned.
“Good morning, young one. Sleep well?”
Karen’s eyes widened.
“Are you…”
“God? Yes. I am.”
After a moment, she stood. God put his hand on her shoulder.
“Welcome to Heaven, Karen.”
He hugged her, then pulled away. This was all getting rather too sentimental for me.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to be going. But if you have any other questions, don’t be afraid to drop in anytime.”
He smiled again, then turned and went back to his office.
We left there without further incident.

Lucifer snarled.
Not meaning snarled as a verb, in particular; it was much more a perpetual state than a singular occurrence; Lucifer always snarled.
“How can you be so imbecilic, so incompetent? You had a chance! There she was, in soul-shock, and the only people around her were those two guardian spirits! No seraphim, no archangels! But you had to let them slip right through your fingers and go to God!”
The two malevolent spirits fidgeted nervously.
“Master, it’s very difficult to keep up our disguises, let alone try to convince the two guardians to hand the girl over to us.”
Lucifer continued to scowl.
“Do you realize that she would have been the last link in the chain? We could bring about soul-shock at will. We could simply knock out a human and steal his body. It would take a very long time for an archangel with the ability to wake them up to find their anima and get there, by which time, we could easily do it again! We’d have a fighting chance!”
The demons’ greediness became even more intense, which is rather difficult to describe, as demons already look quite avaricious.
Pacing, Lucifer sustained his frown.
“Do not, I will repeat that so as to drive my point home through your asinine souls, do not, fail again.”
As his minions left, a black, wraith-like figure seemed to float into the chamber. Lucifer grinned on seeing it.
“Ah, Revenant. Just the phantom I wanted to see. We have almost completed our research on soul-shock induction. We just need one more spirit, and she’s bound to fall into shock again. Those two that just left here are completely inept. Would you care to retrieve the girl’s essence?”
The apparition twisted its features slightly.
“With pleasure.”

Karen was still slightly light-headed, and I feared that she would fade into her coma again. Marcus wasn’t so worried. He expected that since God had revived her, she would stay awake. I disagreed simply because even God had said that sometimes spirits fell back into soul-shock. I’m certain that he could have cured her entirely, but he had his reasons not to.
Marcus was happy that she was awake, but his duties (and desire for a promotion) called him.
“Well, Karen, what say we take you on down to the Placement Center?”
“All right, I guess so.”
So we returned. When we arrived, an archangel greeted us. He was tall, with black hair to his elbows.
“Hello, Karen. And you would be Peter and Marcus, guardian angels, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right. But I’m afraid you have us at a disadvantage. I thought I knew all the archangels. In fact, I thought there were only seven of you.”
“Well, God hired an eighth recently. I’m… Lionel.”
It was glaringly obvious that he was lying; God doesn’t change His mind on issues like the number of archangels, etc., not to mention Lionel’s ridiculous choice of an archangel name.
Marcus became suspicious. As did I, but Marcus was a fool who didn’t bother to hide it, which I suspect was part of the reason he had died.
“Who are you?
Lionel’s smile twitched.
“I’m the archangel Lionel.”
“No. There is no eighth archangel, and even if there were, he wouldn’t call himself Lionel.”
Lionel’s lips became a thin white line.
“Are you questioning my identity?”
Marcus laughed.
“Now it’s unmistakable. No archangels are stupid enough to hold out a disguise this bad after they’ve been discovered. Besides, what kind of thing to say is ‘Are you questioning my identity?’ Of course I am! Why, I-”
Marcus’ lecture trailed off as Lionel’s eyes suddenly glowed red, which I have determined in my experiences to be a bad sign, usually. A red line, glowing in the same manner as his eyes, began to run down the center of his forehead and on down his form. The lines and eyes turned a flat black, and then he imploded.
As the illusion collapsed, the black dust that had made up the faux archangel resolved into two demons.
“We’ve come to get the girl.”
Marcus looked at the pair of short devil-spawn distastefully.
“Get thee hence. Now. Leave. Go.”
The demons growled and leaped at him. This was rather ineffective for their purpose, because he grabbed them both and thrust them, quite literally, down to hell.
Karen stuttered.
“I… You… Demons!?”
Marcus nodded.
Karen fainted.
I groaned.
At that moment, an archangel I recognized approached.
“Gabriel, thank heavens.”
He surveyed the damaged floor.
“What’s this?”
“Marcus here just had a slight altercation with a couple of demons.”
“Ah. I see. What happened to the girl?”
“She fell into soul-shock.”
He frowned.
“Not good. She just came out of it, correct?”
I nodded.
“I’d best take her to God. She may require some healing that is beyond my power.”
He tried to take her, but Marcus didn’t let go.
“Marcus, give me the girl.”
He looked at Gabriel suspiciously.
“There’s something a bit off about all this.”
Gabriel looked at him solemnly.
“Marcus, do you have so little faith as to doubt me?”
Marcus looked stricken. He handed Karen’s frail spirit to Gabriel. Marcus was right, though, something was wrong. I could sense something…
Gabriel smiled slightly.
Then his outline faded to a black mist.
I smiled.
“Ah, so that’s it. I knew something was-oh dear.“
“No!”
Marcus leaped at the wraith, but it caught him in much the same manner that he had caught the demons.
“Fool. You should have trusted your intuition. Now you will meet the consequences. You may remember aurablades. You may recall that they were used in the Great War.”
I gasped. (I had become quite skilled at that in the last twenty minutes) The Great War had taken place directly after the creation of Earth. Lucifer’s plan rejected, he had declared war on God. Foolish thing to do, that, but he had claimed the loyalties of a good third of the population of heaven at the time. Archangels instructed groups of us on the use of our aurablades.
An aurablade is projected from the soul depending on the strength of one’s aura for good or evil, and it is actually capable of rending a soul. A torn soul is essentially dead, but is eternally conscious of its pain. Although I can’t be certain, I would assume that this a rather unpleasant sensation.
I watched in horror as the phantom’s blade appeared in his other hand, a black sword that seemed to draw in all light and destroy it.
He brought it down, but I covered my eyes, unable to watch.
I heard a metallic clang.
I looked up to see the real Gabriel, holding back the fell blade with his own white sword. He looked calmly at the fiend.
“So, Revenant. You dare to challenge Heaven again?”
The answer to this question seemed rather obvious. Wraiths are generally not the ‘tourist’ type.
Revenant bared his teeth.
“Archangel.”
Gabriel smiled.
“Hell-spawn.”
Revenant growled and dropped Karen and Marcus, twisting his sword to unlock it. He moved with inhuman speed, arcing the sword around his head. Gabriel’s blade met it, but Revenant slid his sword down the length of it, attempting to slash Gabriel’s leg.
Gabriel moved with speed and grace, looking as though he were performing a complex dance. He blocked every blow that Revenant brought down on him. Finally, he lowered his blade, ducked a swing, and brought his sword up through Revenant’s wrist, severing the hand holding the black sword.
Revenant looked at the dismembered appendage in horror. (At least I think he was looking at it. I couldn’t really tell; as his shape seemed to shift.)
“I have failed.”
Gabriel nodded, and then sliced Revenant in half. His black, misty spirit dissolved into the air.

Lucifer screamed in frustration and rage. But then, that was a common enough thing.

Gabriel looked at us.
“How did that apparition get in here?”
Marcus looked guilty.
“Well, it came disguised as you and tried to steal the girl.”
Gabriel looked at him sharply.
“And you let him have her? You know what Lucifer and his armies have been planning. They’ve almost completed their device to induce soul-shock. Karen was the last thing they needed to activate it.”
If he had been alive, Marcus’s eyes would have flown across the room, and he may have accidentally stepped on his jaw. His mouth opened and closed for well over a minute without mustering any sound, making him look remarkably like a trout.
Gabriel explained the various problems that this device could have caused, including the possibility of another war.
Marcus looked so upset I was afraid he would fall into soul-shock.
Gabriel looked around.
“We need to get Karen to God, and quickly.”
“Not so fast, archangel.”
I groaned. It never ends. To my surprise, the figure I saw when I turned was the devil himself. Really.
Lucifer snarled still, but added a liberal dose of sneer.
“I don’t need Revenant to complete my machine. I should have known that if something needs to be done right, I have to do it myself.”
He rushed at Gabriel, who sidestepped and slashed with his aurablade. Lucifer jumped over the sword, drawing his own to attempt to cleave Gabriel. Gabriel threw himself back, then leaped forward, slicing his blade straight through Lucifer’s torso. Lucifer looked like he was experiencing excruciating pain, but then the mist that had been his torso wafted about him for a moment, and his spirit reconstructed itself.
He continued to snarl and sneer, but added a smirk to it.
“You can’t rend my soul, Gabriel! Don’t you remember? God cast me down to hell, where I was to reside forever.”
Gabriel’s frown deepened, and the battle resumed. I saw a white-cloaked figure leap from a balcony, sword glinting in the light of… well, everything.
“So you’ve returned, Son of the Morning!”
I recognized Michael’s voice.
Lucifer continued to snarl with a touch of smirking and sneering, but mixed in some grimace.
“Michael! Old… friend. Will you join the fracas too?”
Michael’s sword clashing against Lucifer’s was sufficient answer.
“You know it’s hopeless, boys. You can’t defeat me.”
Lucifer sliced the air where Michael’s abdomen had been just a moment before. Gabriel answered this by slicing through Lucifer’s neck, causing a fine black cloud to float where his jugular area had resided an instant before, but again Lucifer repaired himself.
Lucifer sustained his slightly smirkish snarl with a hint of grimacing sneer, and supplemented it with a derisive leer.
“Getting frustrated?”
Michael and Gabriel both ran him through simultaneously, but with the same effect: nothing whatsoever.
“You know, this has been a lovely exercise in pain, but it’s time you met the instructor.”
Lucifer’s eyes bugged out. His mouth lengthened into a scaly snout. His temples grew out to a point and sharpened into curved horns. He grew much taller and larger as claws burst from the tips of his fingers and toes, and bat-like wings sprouted from his spine. His skin turned bright red and erupted into a barrier of scales. A spine-ridged tail grew from the base of his backbone.
He spoke, but his voice had dropped twenty octaves and become rather grating.
“Can you defeat a dragon again, all alone?”
Michael shook his head solemnly.
“No.”
Lucifer the dragon laughed. I noticed that despite his metamorphosis, he had retained his leering snarl with a sneering grimace and a bit of smirk, and now added a triumphant smile with a flourish.
“You admit your inferiority?”
Michael again shook his head.
“No. I admit that I cannot defeat you all alone. But Gabriel and I are not alone.”
Raphael and the four other archangels made their entrances concurrently. The corners of Raphael’s mouth turned up slightly.
“En guarde, lizard!”
Lucifer roared, spitting fire at the archangels in a broad circle that should have nicely roasted each one. But when he let up, none of them were so much as singed around the edges of their cloaks.
Michael smiled now.
“Lucifer, my former brother, you forget that we are archangels. Our souls are no more capable of rending than your own. But there is something we can do to you.”
Lucifer persisted in his smirking, snarling, etc.
“Oh? What’s that?”
The seven guardians thrust their swords into the belly of the beast. Lucifer bellowed in pain. Michael smiled politely.
“Go to hell.”
Lucifer’s huge form began to sink through the floor. His eyes were narrow with anger.
“Fine. That’s where I belong. It’s entirely too clean up here. But if I must go now… I will claim my victory.”
Faster than the eye could see, he snatched up the prostrate form of Karen, then sunk down out of sight. Marcus yelled and dived after him, but struck the floor so hard that his body may have winced in its coffin.
“No! Why? How?”
While Marcus continued this string of pointless rhetorical questions, the archangels looked dismayed. Raphael rubbed his eyes as though he had a headache and sighed.
“Well, Peter, you and Marcus have succeeded in showing your competence. Three invasions in the course of thirty minutes! Perhaps you ought to be secretaries or something rather than guardians.”
We contemplated just how unlikely it was for us to see two demons, a phantom, and the devil in half an hour.
By this time, Marcus had moved on from questioning to sobbing uncontrollably.
“I’ll never get promoted. Never. I’ll be lucky if God doesn’t have me reincarnated as a Democrat.”
Michael looked at him.
“Marcus, you still have a chance. I’m sure God doesn’t blame you.”
“But I still won’t progress at all.”
Michael smiled.
“Of course you will. Especially if you and Peter succeed in your mission to get Karen back.
I choked.
“Get Karen back?”
“Of course. We can’t let Lucifer take over the world.”
“Yes, that would be bad, but… Us? Why can’t you go? You’re the archangels, anyhow.”
Michael looked calm, as usual.
“We can’t enter into hell. You can. Besides that, we have things to take care of here and on Earth.”
I sighed. Never argue with an archangel.
Marcus and I were going to hell. Not that way, of course.


Hell is not my idea of a good vacation spot. It’s rather warm. Well, maybe blisteringly hot is a better way to describe it. Not to mention that the deeper you go, the more unpleasant the things happening to the poor souls get.
Marcus and I descended on and on, beset by trials and sights of extremely unpleasant forms of dismemberment, maiming, etc., at every turn.
When finally we reached Lucifer’s chambers, it was so dark that we could hardly see anything. We opened doors very carefully and quietly, so as not to alert Lucifer to our presence.
We found Karen’s sleeping anima in a tiny room in the back of Lucifer’s dwelling. (I dearly wished that Lucifer had not left the heat on)
There was just one tiny problem with rescuing Karen.
She was trapped behind four fields of energy.
Marcus looked at Karen’s electric prison.
“Well. That’s just wonderful.”
I tried to be the voice of reason, but hysteria is contagious, and I’d caught Marcus’ on the way down, so it was very difficult to be reasonable.
“There must be switches that turn these off somewhere.”
“Well, obviously. But where?”
“Excellent question. Let’s go look for them.”
So we did. The first was easy enough; as we were leaving the room, we spotted what looked like an ordinary light switch. Marcus flipped it, and lo and behold, one of the force fields disappeared behind us. Marcus looked considerably surprised.
“Huh. I wouldn’t have thought that that would work.”
We came to a room that seemed to be a power generator. The problem was that there were two switches on the wall. Marcus shrugged and flipped one. The sound died out from the generator and the lights went out.
“I don’t think that was the right switch.”
“Yeah, I picked up that vibe.”
I looked back hopefully to the small room, but the shields were still up around Karen. They must have been on an independent circuit. Marcus flipped the switch back on and hit the other one. Another field flickered and vanished. Marcus looked pleased.
“Well, two more to go.”
I looked around, half expecting to be jumped by a demon, or worse, Lucifer the dragon.
“We’d best hurry.”
Marcus looked confused. (I say that like it was an uncommon occurrence, however, I think he had spent most of his life looking confused and was just continuing that trend after his death)
“Why?”
“Because you just caused a power outage in hell. That should get some attention. Lucifer will doubtless come check the generator any time now.”
Marcus jumped, and looked over his shoulder. We moved much faster now.
We found a bedroom, decorated with various portraits of Lucifer, most depicting him committing some atrocity beyond description. Lucifer was the father of all lies and extremely vain, as well.
Marcus looked at one painting distastefully.
“That is revolting, disgusting, abominable, obscene, abhorrent, and so 1970’s.”
In the closet (which contained several hundred olive-green and turquoise candy-striped blazers with matching pants and a plum-colored leisure suit) we found another switch. I flipped it gingerly, but nothing seemed to happen. I hoped that meant that it had dropped another lock.
We walked back out into the halls. As we passed a tiny linen closet, we heard the grating sound of the voice of the devil. Marcus panicked.
“What do we- where-“
I grabbed him.
“Get into the linen closet!”
We dived in, shutting the door just as I saw a clawed foot step past the corner.
“-and we just need about two more hours before the machine will be prepped and ready to load Karen’s soul into it. Then we’ll have free rein of the world. But first we need to figure out what’s wrong with the generator, it might be- what was that?”
Marcus was whimpering slightly. I clapped my hand over his mouth, forgetting that since we were spirits, it would just go through his face. However, he seemed to pick up the message and shut up.
After a long moment, the footsteps began again and faded away. Marcus let out his breath.
“That was more than a close shave.”
“Indeed. If we had been shaving, we’d be scraping the skin off, and possibly the muscle and some vital organs, etc.”
I happened to look to my right and spotted another switch.
“Well, that’s as unlikely a coincidence as I’ve ever seen.”
I flipped it.
We returned to the small room where Karen still laid unconscious, and sure enough, no longer surrounded by shells of electricity. I picked her up and we began the trek back to heaven.
“Stop!”
Oh, not again.
“You, stop!”
I turned around and was not at all surprised to see Lucifer.
“Drop the girl!”
“What, you think we’ll drop her here just because you said so?”
“Well… no, but it’s worth a try.”
“And you know we’re going to run now, right?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“All right. Just so that’s clear.”
We ran.
Lucifer tackled us and that was the end of the chase.
Marcus activated his aurablade. It shone forth like a bright white toothpick. He stared at it.
“That’s it?”
Lucifer started laughing. He threw back his head, and in his distraction allowed Marcus to stab him in the throat. He was still so weakened by his fight with the archangels that he doubled over in pain. Marcus picked Karen up and we ran again.
Marcus and I constantly checked back over our shoulders, expecting to be followed and possibly blitzkrieged by a psychotic devil-dragon.
Marcus held out Karen’s limp spirit.
“Here, take the girl.”
“All right, but why?”
“So I can run faster.”
“Marcus! You coward! He’s not even following us!”
As I spoke these words, Lucifer glided down in front of us, snarling, but no longer smirking, leering, triumphantly smiling, sneering, or grimacing.
“I may not be able to destroy the archangels, but you… you have been quite the annoyance. I’m not going to burn you, and I’m not going to stab you. I’m going to eat you!”
With that, he began to charge towards us.
Marcus shrieked.
Lucifer tripped over some poor tortured soul and rolled down the sides of hell with great alacrity, increasing in velocity until he burst through the wall of his vile abode.
Marcus was hyperventilating despite the fact that he didn’t even have to breathe. I stared down as a dazed devil started to stand up.
“Uh, Marcus? Perhaps we should be going now.”
Surprisingly, we made it back to heaven, where the archangels took Karen to God to wake her up.
I was startled when absolutely nothing happened.
“Well, Marcus, this has been quite a day. And that was extremely anticlimactic.”
Marcus smiled neurotically.
“Well, all in a day’s work!”
And then he fainted.