“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?”
She looked at the clipboard again, then up at him. “Oh. Jeez. Look, not to be a hard-ass, but the only crackers we have for you are saltines.”
He nodded, resigned. Definitely Hell, then.
“And all cheese except spray cheese,” she said, reading from the clipboard.
Dammit.
CHAPTER
ONE
“Elizabeth!”
I was doing my best to ignore the dead priest, and it wasn’t going well. Had I thought he was persistent in life? Pshaw. In death he was indefatigable. That’s the word, right? Indefatigable? Never gets tired? Always nagging? Huge downer on my downtime?
“We’ve rescheduled the meeting three times.” He skidded to a halt in front of me, panting lightly.
Yeah, well, it’s about to be four times.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t debate Smoothiegate even one more time. You guys are just gonna have to accept that blackberries are gross and suck it up with raspberries instead.”
I got an exasperated blink. (That man can say more with his eyelids than most can with their mouths.) “Not that meeting. The, uh . . .” He trailed off, then made himself say it. “The Ten Commandments Redux.”
Heh. It was a great idea, if tedious in execution, and for no other reason than Father Markus really, really hated the name. “It’s Remix, and you know it.”
“Regardless. We have to get started.”
“I know.” (I did know.) “And while I was researching—”
“You researched?” he said, sounding shocked. Then he instantly corrected his tone. “Of course you did. Good for you.”
“Well, I had an idea for what to do with some of the souls that have been here for a while.”
“Which is?”
“I have to keep working on it.” I had no idea how my plan would go over: probably like an anvil. It meant big change. It meant changing the very nature of Hell. Father Markus was a good enough guy, but he was also a traditionalist. Baby steps. That was key. “I’ll tell you more about it. Later.”
He made a ttkkt! noise of disapproval. “Procrastination is another word for cowardice.”
“It’s really not.”
He’d switched from Reminder Mode to Cajoling Mode. “Now, Betsy.” Ohhh, I knew that tone. “You know the hardest part is just sitting down and getting started.”
“Mmm.” (No, the hardest part was keeping out of his way so I could avoid his eight zillion meetings. My own fault for being in Hell’s food court again!)
Father Markus, though he’d ended up in Hell after he died, still thought of himself as a priest. You could look like anything you wanted here, but most people stuck with what they were familiar with: how they looked in life. In Father Markus’s case, that meant the traditional priest garb: all in black except for the collar. He had a little bit of hair left, all white, which went around his head in a fringe, leaving the top bald and shiny. Like, really shiny. The king of the vampires once checked his reflection in it. His hands and feet were small and sleek; he was in comfortable black shoes, dull leather Dockers. He’d lived his whole life in Minnesota and had the same flat Midwestern accent I did.
But I liked his eyes the best: small and brown, intent and expressive. They scrunched into smiling slits when he was happy, and focused like lasers when he wasn’t. In life he’d been in charge of a pack of teenage vampire hunters, and since most vampires were murderous assholes, I couldn’t entirely blame him for assuming all vampires were murderous assholes. I broke up the decapitation-happy team and Father Markus went his own way until he died. Now he was stuck working with me, in case he didn’t already know he was in Hell. To his credit, he decided it was an honor, and never indicated what a pain in his ass I was. (Out loud, anyway.)
“The first meeting,” he was rambling, “is always . . .”
The dullest. The lamest. The boringest. Wait. Boringest?
“. . . the hardest.”
“Yeah, y— Wait.” I realized he’d put a hand on my elbow, and while we talked, he was gently nudging me toward the Lego store, where we held most of our meetings. “Are you steering me, you sly, nagging s.o.b.?”
“No, no. Escorting.”
“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean I can’t kill you again.” As threats went, it was about a 4.2 on the Lame-O-Meter.
“Just take a deep breath,” he suggested with a small smile. “It’ll be over soon.”
“Totally pointless; I don’t have to breathe. You don’t have to breathe.”
“It’ll all be over soon, then,” he said again. “I’ll stick with that one.”
“Every time I think that, something new and terrible happens. I get fired. I get run over. I die. Someone I live with dies. I die again. I become a queen. I get tricked into running Hell. I’m forced to wear humiliating name tags. I—”
“I miss the blowout sale for summer sandals. I get shriller and shriller rather than learning from my mistakes. I go all dictator-ey and banish blackberries from smoothies.”
“That doesn’t affect you one bit, Cathie! (A) You hated smoothies in life—”
“How has the smoothie industry tricked you into thinking pulverized fruit and yogurt and old ice cubes from the back of the freezer is a terrific plan?”
“And (2) you’re always in Hell.”
“Truer words,” my “friend” Cathie replied. She was already building another conference room out of Lego bricks. (The one she built yesterday had too good a view of the amusement park, or, as we called it, the Vomitorium. If you hated amusement parks or were prone to severe motion sickness, and subconsciously decided you needed punishment after you died, guess where you ended up? With a permanent season ticket?)
“Almost done,” she added, like I had an enduring interest in her temporary architecture. She could whip rooms up in no time. It helped that each Lego (or would that be LEGO®?) block was the size of a stereo speaker. One of the ancient ones, two feet high and a foot wide. Not one of the new ones you can’t actually see. “You’ll be bitching about the things you constantly bitch about in no time.”
“Drop dead,” I replied, which was redundant at best, lame at worst. Her evil snicker proved it was on the lame end of the meter. Cathie had faced down the serial killer who’d killed her; as a ghost, she wasn’t scared by bitchy vampires even a little.
I’d never known her in life, but in death she was pretty great. When she first appeared (manifested? intruded? trespassed? stalked?) she was mega-pissed over being murdered. So employing the “unlikely partners” trope, we’d teamed up. The end result: a dead serial killer, a vengeful ghost’s revenge, and the Antichrist’s temper tantrum, which resulted in a dead serial killer and a vengeful ghost’s revenge.
(I’ll go into the whole estranged-from-the-Antichrist thing in a bit. Really can’t stand even thinking about her right now. Long story short: she’s as dead to me as my dead father, who isn’t dead.)
Unlike a lot of new spirits, Cathie had no problem looking different from how she looked on the day she died. As she explained, “I got foully snuffed on laundry day; I am not plodding through eternity in granny panties and a sweatshirt. Besides, my clothes aren’t real. Probably I’m not real.
So why not embrace it?” Excellent advice, and today she was in boyfriend jeans, a blue T-shirt with If you don’t sin, Jesus died for nothing in white letters, hair in an elaborate French braid (“Finally! The trick to mastering French braids is not having a body, or hair that grows on the body!”), and battered blue loafers, sans socks. Why she refused to manifest nice shoes would be an eternal mystery.
“Gang’s all here?” she asked, still messing with Lego pieces. She’d made the room, I slunk inside, and she was now working on the table.
“Mostly.” I sighed. “We’ll have enough to get through the meeting.”
“Which you’re seeing as a disaster for some reason.”
“Kind of.”
“Suck it up, buttercup.”
“Y’know, you could pretend to be intimidated by me. Or even acknowledge that I’m your boss and am chock-full of sinister powers.”
“Nope.”
Well, good, I guess. Throughout history, most dictators became douches because they were surrounded by yes-men or, in my case, yes-roommates/ghosts/vampires/zombies. Having people around who aren’t afraid of you is crucial if you want them to tell you what they really think, instead of what they think you want to hear. Though on days like this (nights? what time was it? Hell was like Vegas: no clocks), a little nervous deference wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world . . .
I’d known running Hell wouldn’t be easy, but hadn’t planned on it being boring. It had everything I hated about my old office job (meetings, organization, meetings) and none of the stuff I liked about my old office job (paid vacation, holidays, all the Post-it notes I could steal).
But meetings, like the IRS and the DMV, were a necessary evil. It was a whole new ball game since I’d killed the devil, banished the Antichrist, yelled at my father for faking his death (badly), banished my not-dead father and the Antichrist, and taken over the care and feeding of Hell.
Luckily, I had something the devil never had, not in her five million years of punishing the damned and being pissed at God: friends willing to pitch in and help.