Undead and Unforgiven (2 page)

Jesus
lived
with us for like a week, what else do you need?

FAMILY GUY
ON ATHEISM

Son of Perdition. Little Horn. Most unclean!

I do miss the old names.

GABRIEL AND SATAN,
CONSTANTINE

I am so smart! I am so smart! S-m-r-t! I mean s-m-a-r-t!

HOMER,
THE SIMPSONS

Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight. I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?

Not good.

You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?

I'd say more like one out of a million.

So you're telling me there's a chance. Yeah!

LLOYD AND MARY,
DUMB AND DUMBER

Get you gone from here. Leave Delain behind, now and forever. You are cast out.
Get you gone
.

PETER, HIGH KING OF DELAIN,
THE EYES OF THE DRAGON
, BY STEPHEN KING

PROLOGUE

Dying is taking forever.

This shouldn't have surprised him, but it did. Everything in Tim Andersson's life had taken forever. He'd been born three weeks late. Went through the fourth grade twice, needed six years to get his fine arts degree. Took the driver's license exam four times. Had to ask the DMV three times to change his name from Anderson to Andersson. Ditto his social security card and passport, the latter proving a waste of time as the trip to Scotland fell through at the last minute because of his shingles flare-up.

The diagnosis—lung cancer at age forty-nine—had been met with dull, hurt surprise. “I don't smoke.”

“Yes, that happens sometimes.”

“I've never smoked.”

“Yes, I understand. It would seem from your family history you're genetically predisposed to the condition. That
and your exposure to asbestos for several years, as well as secondhand smoke—”

“Yeah, I watched my parents and my grandpa die of lung cancer.” In an asbestos-ridden house, apparently. Shouldn't have put off moving out of his folks' place for so long. “Which is why
I've never smoked
.” His only addiction was to Ritz crackers, and always had been. Never saltines. Ritz, with spray cheese (cheddar and bacon flavored), chased with sweet iced tea. God, he could use some now. He'd gobble a whole sleeve of crackers right now and shoot the cheese straight into his mouth.

“I'm very sorry.”

Tim took a deep breath

(better enjoy doing that while you can)

and asked, “My options?”

“Few,” the doctor replied with calm, kind sympathy. “But that's not to say there's no hope. Unfortunately, it's metastasized into your—”

Tim cut him off. He had nothing against the oncologist, who was only doing his job. Tim had gone to the ER two years before with a nagging cough and shortness of breath. He wouldn't have gone at all, but a coworker saw what he coughed up into the bathroom sink and that was that. The ER doc, a nice young fellow with bright green eyes named

(odd that you remember him so clearly)

Dr. Spangler, told him what he suspected and had gotten him a referral on the spot. “There's any one of a number of things it could be. Best to get a diagnosis and be sure, right? And sooner rather than later. Right?”

“Right,” Tim had lied, and then had promptly put it off for years. Right around then the offending cough had cleared up, the coworker had been soothed by Tim's lie

(“Saw a doctor, he said I'm fine.”)

and that had been that.

Until now.

“Story of my life,” he muttered to the empty room. As if it knew its cover had been blown, the cancer had picked up speed the day he'd gotten the diagnosis. So now here he was, twenty-two months later, coughing out his last breaths at Fairview Ridges in Burnsville. Burnsville! (Nothing against the pleasant Minnesota suburb; it was just, for some reason he always thought he'd die in Apple Valley, another pleasant Minnesota suburb.)

No family, not anymore. A few friends from work, but mostly Tim kept to himself. Making and then cultivating friendships took too much time and energy, and there were Ritz triple-decker sandwiches to stack and devour.
Everything
took too long. Including this: his death. The doctors had assured him they would control the pain and had been as good as their word. He had refused chemo, refused everything. They were going to move him to a hospice by the end of the week, per the instructions of his HMO. “But until then,” his oncologist assured him, “we'll take good care of you.”

“Eh. As it is, it'll take too long.”

“What will?”

“Everything. The paperwork, the transfer. Dying. All of it. I'm slow at everything. Even this.”

And he was right! And as was often the case, there was zero comfort in being right. Still, he at least had the knowledge that—

Wait.

What?

The room was getting darker. And smaller, and quieter. Which was impossible; it was noon on a Saturday, visiting hours were in full swing, his roommate was in the bathroom humming “Irreplaceable” while shaving and getting ready to go home, and the sun was shining. Dammit, he was missing a beautiful late-winter day in Minnesota.
Good
late winter, the kind with the promise
of blooming flowers and green grass, not the mud and unearthed-garbage kind of winter. So why was everything . . . ?

Oh.

Oh.

This was it! He was dying,
finally
, and it was exactly as the movies had portrayed: everything was going dark and quiet. It wasn't even scary. Thinking about it had been scarier than experiencing it. He supposed he should be

*   *   *

grateful.

“Hi, I'm Betsy, welcome to Hell.”

He blinked and looked around. He knew this place. He'd been there before, reluctantly. It was—

“Did you say welcome to Hell?”

The girl—woman, he supposed, she was probably in her twenties, and they didn't like that, being called girls—nodded. “Yep.”

Only death could be both surreal and familiar at the same time. “Hell is the Mall of America?”

“Yep. Sorry.” She shrugged at him. “It was all I could think of.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

He took a closer look at her. Tall, slender, fair skinned, bright blue-green eyes. Sounded like a Minnesota gal, but what were the odds of that? Long legs, knee-length black linen shorts, a red short-sleeved shirt, reddish blond hair pulled into a ponytail. She was wearing a silver men's watch that was too big for her slender wrist, silver pointy-toed flats, and a
Hello My Name Is
badge over her left breast, which read
Satan 2.0.

“So I'm dead?” He looked around. Yep, the Mall of America and no mistake. He and the strange girl—
woman
—were
standing beside a large information kiosk. There were other people around, many of them in a hurry, and there was an overall feeling of tense bustling.

And it was some big costume party, too, because there was a gal dressed like Cleopatra and another one dressed like she was on her way to a ball in a green gown with a billowing skirt, and an awful lot of the men were wearing hats. And not many of them were proper baseball caps. Lots were old-fashioned hats like Lincoln wore. Women in hats, too, big fancy ones like they wore in the old days, or in London for a royal wedding. The people were all intent on
something
, because they paid him no attention at all. It took him a second to realize what they
were
paying attention to: her. His . . . guide, maybe? But no one was approaching, or even staring. They'd send skittering glances her way, like they were afraid she'd look back. Maybe not a guide. Maybe a supervisor?

He opened his mouth and was annoyed when nothing came out. Tried twice more while the gal waited patiently, and finally managed to croak out, “This is death?”

“No, this is Hell,” she corrected him. “And since it's 12:08 p.m., that makes you—uh—Tom Anderson?”

Oh no! Death is just like life!
“Tim Andersson, double
s
,” he said in Hell, as he had hundreds of times in life.

“Dammit, I
knew
that.” She stomped one of her feet, which was as startling as it was charming. “What I'd like is a clipboard with all the info on it I need for work today, all of it accurate and easy to find.” Then she just stood there with her hands out, like those statues of the Virgin Mary you saw all over, often on lawns with plastic pink flamingos. Sometimes it looked like the statue was feeding the flamingos, which he always got a kick out of.

Now she was holding a clipboard.

Tim blinked, wondering if it was a hallucination. It had been that sudden—she asked for a clipboard and bink! There it was.

“And an Orange Julius,” she added, and bink! Now she was slurping orange glop through a straw, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked like the drink was about to be yanked away. “I will never get used to this,” she mumbled at him between sips. Then she was looking down at the clipboard. “Yep, Tim Andersson, got you right here. Sorry, I'm
so
bad with names. Okay, well, like I said, welcome to Hell. I'm not seeing a religious affiliation here—”

“Lapsed Presbyterian,” he replied absently, still staring around.

“Uh-huh, so not a regular churchgoer?” At his head shake she added, “So why d'you think you're in Hell?”

Of all the things she might have asked, this had to be the most surprising. “You're Satan 2.0. Don't
you
know?”

Her brow wrinkled as she frowned. She was quite pretty, which was agreeable, and had magical powers, which he hadn't expected from a fellow Minnesotan. He was pretty sure. “You're from Minnesota, right? You sure sound like it.”

“Yeah, I live in St. Paul.” He barely had time to wonder at her use of the present tense—Satan lived in the state capital?—when she added, “Why did you call me Satan—oh, dammit!” She'd looked down at her name tag and ripped it off, crumpling it in her fist. “Ignore that. One of my horrible roommates stuck that on without me noticing.”

“How could you not notice when someone sticks a four-inch-by-four-inch sticker to your—”

“Hey, I've got a lot of responsibilities, okay? I don't have the leisure to read my left boob every five minutes. And I
don't
know why you're here. There's tons I don't know, which is why I'm playing Welcome Wagon.”

“Playing?” Say one thing: death wasn't dull. Then: “Welcome Wagon?”

She sighed, as if he was putting her to enormous trouble. “Before I died I was an office manager, but before that I was an admin assistant, and before that a receptionist. See?”

“Afraid not.”

“Before you can run the place, you have to know how it works on all the other levels. But I can't work my way up here—I kind of agreed to the top job—so I'm doing a real-life version of Boss/Employee Exchange Work Day. A real-afterlife version, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“Tackling it any other way would be insane.”

“You bet.”

She beamed at him, probably mistaking his stunned agreement with actual comprehension. “And of course my roommates' response to my incredibly sensible plan is to undermine me with stickers at every turn. So why do
you
think you're in Hell?”

The subject change made him blink. Apparently he still had to do that. He was also still breathing. And . . . he slid his fingers over his wrist and picked up a pulse. Did he
have
to still do those things? Or was it just habit now?

“Mr. Andersson?”

“Sorry, sorry.” He thought about asking her, but she didn't even know why he was in Hell. She might not know why he still blinked and breathed. “Got no idea. I've done some bad things—everybody has. Nothing to deserve an eternity of suffering in the Mall of America.” Now, if it had been
Home Depot
 . . . “But it's not like I, y'know, killed anybody or blew something up or did something really bad.”

“Did you just sort of assume you'd end up here?”

He shook his head. “Mostly I assumed Heaven, I guess. But I dunno. Heaven's probably great for the first few decades,
but I think it'd get boring after a while. Everything in my life was boring and/or took too long and . . . and here I am.” He was getting hungry while they talked, which made him happy. Which was not how he'd expected to feel in Hell. Toward the end, he hadn't wanted anything. They'd kept IVs with fluids running into him so he wouldn't dehydrate before the cancer could finish him off. For the first time in forever, he wanted a wax paper sleeve of Ritz crackers. Maybe a beer to wash them down.
Two
beers. With spray cheese on the side.

“I know I just got here and all, but I gotta tell ya, Hell's not terrible.”

“Thanks, you should definitely put that on the comment card later.”

“Comment c—?”

“Listen, Tom, I'd like to put a check in some of these categories.” She showed him the clipboard, on which were a number of questions with multiple answers. “So, religion? You were raised to believe you'd end up here so here you are? You lost a bet? You feel like you've left something big unfinished? I know, I know,” she added when he opened his mouth to reply. “Then you'd be a ghost, right? Makes sense? Except sometimes the soul ends up here instead. We're all trying to work on figuring out why.”

“You're not a ghost, though.”

She shook her head, making her ponytail whip around. “Nope.”

“But you're dead?”

“Yep.”

“But you live in St. Paul.”

“So?”

He shook his head. “Nothing unfinished. Except maybe the hospital bill.”

“Says here no immediate family. Alive, I mean. So the good news is, you'll never have to cough up the dough for that gigantic bill.”

“I was mostly bored. And if I troubled myself to do something, it was boring, or it took too long, or both.” He looked around the mall again. “I guess I just want something to happen. Something interesting.”

She grinned at him and he couldn't help smiling back. She was just the cutest thing, so studious about her clipboard while occasionally peeking down to admire her shiny shoes. “Oh, interesting we can provide. No problem. We can do interesting.”

“Yeah?”

“You bet. So come with me, and I'll show you around, and we'll figure out your damnation or new job or family reunion or rebirth or whatever.”

“Okay.” He was amenable, because the last two minutes had already been more interesting than the last five years (doctor's visits notwithstanding). This place sure didn't seem like Hell . . . though it explained everyone wearing different clothes from different eras, and how they were scared to look at Satan 2.0. “Listen, ah—” He paused, mentally groped for her name, found it. “Listen, Betsy, is there somewhere around here I can get some Ritz crackers?”