by Blake, Bruce
My muscles tensed. I’d bumped into Hell’s version of me on a number of occasions, so I knew what to expect, though I didn’t like the way carrions shot fiery bombs out of their hands, since I couldn’t do the same. I thought I'd better take the offensive, so I lunged forward, my hand raised, ready to knock the stuffing out of this guy. At the same time, the second gunshot rang out at my back, stopping me, and the carrion raised his head, allowing me to see his face.
Except it wasn’t a him.
I looked at the blue eyes, the blond hair, the fair cheeks, and the surface of my skin went cold. My lips moved, fully intending to say the word ‘Poe’, but no sound came out.
My one-time guardian angel, whom I recently abandoned in Hell.
“Hello, Icarus,” she said, and smiled, but not the lopsided, shy smile I’d become used to. This smile held a dangerous quality I’d never seen in Poe.
“Wh--” The sound came out as no more than as exhalation of breath, so I stopped and cleared my throat. “What are you doing here?”
“Working, same as you.”
My eyes widened and I bit down hard on my back teeth; the muscles in my jaw bulged. “I don’t want to fight you, Poe.”
She laughed, and the sound didn’t resemble the Poe laugh I remembered. She looked so much like the Poe who’d spent her time hanging around me and doing a poor job of keeping me out of trouble, yet she was so different at the same time.
“Don’t worry. I’m here for someone else.”
As if to prove her point, a third gunshot resounded inside the green-and-white bungalow. My heart jumped with it—if the second shot hadn’t killed the young girl, surely the third did. Though my son was older than her, the thought made me think of Trevor, of how hard I’d worked over the past months to keep him safe...well, alive, at least. No child deserved to have their young life cut short, not by an angry archangel, not by denizens of Hell, and not by a psychotic gunman with a grudge.
I stared at Poe, mesmerized by the orange glow flickering in her eyes. Her smile remained, but she made no move to enter the house to collect the soul she’d come for, so I tore myself away from her hold, determined the little girl’s spirit would come with me, no matter which direction they wanted her to go.
Broad leaves slapped my cheeks and spilled the remnants of the morning’s rain down my neck as I rounded the corner to the front of the house, resisting the urge to see if Poe had lit out after me.
When I skidded toward the front door, I had to pull up short to keep from running into Poe, inexplicably at the door before me. This time I looked back over my shoulder, in case she had a twin hiding behind me. When I faced her again, the smile was gone off her lips, replaced by a noticeable sadness.
“Poe.” I held my hands up, palms toward her. “I’m sorry for what happened. I--”
“You had a choice,” she said. If a cartoonist had drawn her words in the speech bubble of a comic book, icicles would have hung off the bottom of each letter. “You believed her instead of me.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but then didn’t bother. She was right. I’d been blinded by a beautiful liar instead of trusting the guardian angel who risked herself countless times because of my stupidity, and now Poe was stuck in Hell. My arms fell to my sides, my shoulders slumped.
“I’m sorry.” Lame.
She showed me her back and walked into the house. I took a step to follow but stopped; she wouldn’t sneak the souls out the back door, she’d parade them past me to increase my guilt over my poor choice in condemning her. And I deserved it.
A second later, she didn’t disappoint me. She stepped back into the hall and came toward me, followed by the ghostly figure of a tall and gangly teenage boy, his red hair cut short and spiky, a stunned look on his face. With the way souls worked, I didn’t know which of the gunman’s victims this was. I once harvested a young girl from a tough cop, so I decided to determine his identity the only way I knew how.
“Who’s that?”
“Tim Franklin,” the teen said. For a second, I thought he’d offer his hand for me to shake, but he didn’t. I frowned at him, not for his lack of politeness, but because who the hell is Tim Franklin?
“The gunman,” Poe said, reading my thoughts. Normally, it annoyed the snot out of me when angels did read my mind, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather have happen than Poe doing it.
The third shot. He killed himself.
I looked from him to Poe. “And--?”
“The others are waiting for you inside,” she said. “I told them you’d be right in.”
She stepped off the porch and the red-haired teen moved with her like an invisible rope tethered them together. I watched them go and found unpleasant emotions gnawing the inside of my gut: grief, regret, anguish. My heart might actually have hurt.
“I’m sorry for what happened, Poe.” Pretty much just as lame, so I added a heartfelt: “I wish I could change it.”
She stopped, hesitated before facing me, the dead gunman’s soul stepping aside to allow her a clear view. The broad rim of her hat hid her face for a second and I hoped that, when she raised her head, her nervous smile I’d taken for granted would be back to put a Band-Aid on my aching heart.
Couldn’t have been more wrong.
Her eyes were icy, her face looked carved of stone by an artisan with a poor attitude. My chest shrank, compressing my lungs and making it difficult to take a sufficient breath. Poe paced toward me and I resisted the urge to run away.
“You could have taken me,” she said through clenched teeth. “You could have left the cop and taken me, after all I did for you.”
“I brought him back, I can bring you, too,” I said, embarrassed by my poor choice and by the note of desperation in my voice. “There must be a way.”
She barked an uncharacteristic harsh laugh.
“Do you think they’ll let you find your way back to Hell?”
My mouth opened and closed, but no words came out, my brain incapable of sending messages to my vocal chords. Poe had no such trouble.
“You left me in Hell, Icarus. And I will never get out.”
She spun away, the black overcoat wheeling out around her, and stormed off with the red-headed soul in tow. I raised my hand in a feeble attempt to stop her, my throat giving its best effort at speaking. One word squeezed its way out:
“Ric.”
Correcting her on what I like to be called did nothing to quell the ugly regret bruising my insides. My head sagged forward until my chin touched my chest, my hand fell back to my side. I’d never tell Detective Shaun Williams—the cop I rescued from Hell instead of bringing Poe back—that I made the wrong choice, but I had. Neither of them deserved to be damned, and both ended up in Hell due to my poor decisions, but it seemed Poe was the one to whom I wouldn’t be able to make restitution.
The only angel who believed in me.
One thing I learned during my time as a harvester: don’t mess with the plan. Fucking around with the blueprint can have massive consequences and I promised myself I’d never do it again. Whatever appeared on the scrolls given me by Gabe...that’s what would get done.
“Excuse me.”
The voice at my back startled me. I spun around to find the soul of Benjamin Trounce looking at me, the confused look on his face as comical as the surprised expression I likely wore.
“Can you tell us what’s going on?”
His essence looked identical to the way he did in life: same height, same age, same clothes. In my experience, this was uncommon. The woman beside him proved it. Alive, she’d been thirty-oneish, with short brown hair and plain features pleasant enough to consider her attractive, but not make her stand out in a crowd. Instead, the soul sitting at Mr. Trounce’s side looked like a girl of around sixteen, with flowing black hair, sparkling eyes, and wearing a skirt short enough to embarrass me for noticing it.
“I’m sorry to say: you’re deceased,” I told him, studiously keeping my eyes away from his dead
wife’s legs. I tensed in case they decided to flee, but they didn’t. Instead, Ben Trounce’s shoulders sagged like someone let the air out of him.
“I was afraid of that. What happens now?”
“I’ll help you on your way to--”
The appearance of a third face between them stopped me in my vocal tracks. I stared at the shining eyes, the crooked smile, the curly brown locks, an upturned pixie nose. Cutest little girl I’ve ever seen.
“Who the hell are you?” Not very polite, right? Whatever.
“Dallas. At least, I was.”
I reached beneath my overcoat and yanked Gabe’s scroll out of my back pocket, fumbling it open to see if I missed a name. I scanned the address, the time, the drop-off location (a pickle factory, believe it or not), and the same two names I’d seen before: Benjamin and Taylor Trounce. Somehow, I’d acquired one extra soul.
My new rule didn’t last long.
Chapter Three
The pickle factory smelled of—you guessed it—pickles. I’ve never been fond of the things; I always picked them off my Big Mac and gave them to Rae, or threw them away on the many occasions I found myself gorging on fast food alone. Considering pickles are cucumbers soaked in evil, this place seemed an odd choice to bring souls finding their way to Heaven.
Being the middle of the day on a Wednesday didn’t help our situation. It meant a shift in full swing and too many people around for us to be inconspicuous. To my surprise, none of them wore yellow protective suits and inhalators like the guys on Breaking Bad, but regular clothes and hair nets instead, as if they worked in a place devoid of the stink of cucumber death.
We gained access by way of a back door propped open with a broken piece of brick, presumably placed there by someone sneaking out for a smoke. I marveled at the size of the place. We hadn’t stumbled into a Heinz factory, just a local operation, but it was huge. Fluorescent lights dangled from the high ceiling, their harsh glow reflecting on the surfaces of gleaming silver vats and pristine machinery; the interior sparkled with a level of clean to make most hospitals jealous. But neither its cleanliness nor the fact it showed up in my scroll brought it close enough to godliness for me to consider devouring one of the hated little things.
“Why are we here?” the little girl, Dallas, asked. Not the first question she’d posed as we made our way across town to the drop-off, which shouldn’t have been a surprise for a child her age. Two-hundredth might be a more accurate estimate.
“Don’t worry. You’re safe.”
I glanced at her and swear I didn’t have to look down as far as when she first appeared. Did she grow? No, more likely I wasn’t paying close enough attention to a child. Not the first time—ask my son.
We wended our way between sealed barrels that, in my opinion, should have been labeled with toxic waste symbols on the side, avoiding the workers busy mauling perfectly good cucumbers into little slices of Hell. Somewhere amongst the clattering labyrinth of machines, we’d find a well dressed man who wasn’t really a man, but my new friends’ conduit to Heaven.
The Trounce family trailed behind me as we searched for the angelic escort, the three of them holding hands and looking around with a sense of wonder as if on their first trip to Disneyland. I’d once heard a rumor that Walt Disney had his body preserved while they searched for a cure for what ailed him. Urban legend? Or might Mickey Mouse’s father be folded away in one of these barrels?
After five minutes of finding dead ends and avoiding hair-netted workers, I located the fellow we searched for seated in a cramped office on the farthest wall from where we’d entered. I think they wanted me to walk through the toxic wasteland of pickles, inhaling their deathly fumes. See the sense of humor angels have?
The four of us shoe-horned ourselves into the office and I shut the door behind us, then cranked the blind closed on the window looking out onto the factory floor. Once closed in, the angel regarded us as though he didn’t notice our arrival.
“Icarus,” he said, standing.
“Ric,” I corrected, more out of habit than with any hope an angel would develop the ability not to use my full name.
The overhead fluorescent light turned the escort’s whiter-than-white suit, shirt and tie combo blinding. The walls and ceiling of the office glowed with white paint. If not for the desk’s brown laminate top and the off-white file cabinet beside it, we might have thought ourselves lost in a snowstorm tainted with the reek of pickles.
“Benjamin and Taylor Trounce, I presume?” the angel asked in a dulcet tone hinting at an English lilt, or perhaps German. Russian, maybe.
“And Dallas,” I said, stepping aside for him to see the young girl. She raised her hand and one corner of her mouth and twiddled her fingers.
The angel shook his head.
“I am to escort two.”
My eyebrows dipped and the annoying crease my forehead didn’t possess a few years ago showed up. Obviously, three souls accompanied me, so there must have been a mistake.
“There must be a mistake,” I said. I looked over at Ben and his teen bride, saw concern in their expressions, so gave them an ‘I’ve got everything under control’ hand gesture, despite the fact I didn’t think it the truth.
The angel shook his head. “What did the scroll say?”
“Two,” I conceded.
“There is no mistake.”
“But you can take one more, right?”
He stared at me with an expression one might consider a glare on the face of someone less angelic, but didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to, I’m pretty good at reading between the non-lines.
“But the guy shot her. It couldn’t be an unscheduled death.” My gut stirred with discomfort, and not because the odor of dill coaxed it into doing flips.
“Actually, that’s not completely true.”
Despite the fact we spoke of her, I’d almost forgotten Dallas’ presence in the room. The four of us turned to her.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The man shot my mom,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone she might have used while discussing geography rather than her own death. “The bullet went through her and killed me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded once, apparently satisfied at possessing a fact the grown-ups didn’t.
“An unscheduled death,” the angel said. “She stays here.”
“No,” Taylor cried. “What do you mean?”
The angel didn’t respond, leaving it to me to be the one who explained how things worked.
“Angels have sticks squarely up their asses,” I said and peered sideways at the escort. If he insisted on making me break the bad news to these people, I’d do it my way. “They only do what they’re told.”
Taylor’s eyes widened and moved from me, to her daughter, to the angel and back with a concerned expression strange to see on the face of a teenage girl. The escort cleared his throat, prompting me.
“If they do anything beyond what they’re supposed to, bad shit happens.”
“Bad shit?” Benjamin said. “What’s worse than leaving our daughter behind?”
“People going to Hell when they’re not supposed to.” Saying it made me think of Poe again. My eyelids sagged shut and I gave my head a shake.
“You have to do something,” Taylor said. I opened my eyes, surprised to find her talking to me.
A well-buried part of me wanted to tell her I could help, or at least that I’d try, but my give-a-hand quality felt a little raw after recently seeing the guardian angel I abandoned in Hell the last time I ‘did something’. Instead of spouting supportive bullshit, I shook my head. Taylor began to cry.
Great.
“It is time,” the angel intoned. I raised my eyes to him and it seemed his bright suit had become brighter; it took a second to realize it was because he’d begun to glow.
“No, we can’t leave her,” Taylor cried. She put her arm around the young girl’s shoulders, pulled her close.
&nbs
p; “What will happen to her?” Benjamin Trounce asked, his eyes penetrating me, begging for the right answer.
I swallowed hard. The angel’s glow increased, smearing the desk and file cabinet at his back into a hazy blur. The emanation crept across the floor toward us, and Ben put his arms around his wife, who hugged their daughter tight against her chest. If not for the expressions of stark fear on Ben and Taylor’s faces, it might have made a nice family portrait. In contrast, Dallas appeared to be enjoying the proceedings.
The glow touched their feet and they stepped back, but couldn’t move far in the tiny room; it made its way up their shins toward their knees like floodwater on the rise. It tickled me, too, and I glanced down to see my lower legs gone, hidden in the white light. For an instant, I thought maybe he’d given in and decided to take all of us. Delight flashed through me at the prospect of seeing Sister Mary-Therese again, but it died a quick death. No way he’d take either of us. It didn’t work that way.
The angel had become an outline in a bank of fog and the emanation climbed to our waists. Both Ben and Taylor looked at me, their desperation poking a hole in my tough guy facade. I nodded once before they disappeared.
“I’ll take care of her.”
It was the right thing to say, but I also suspected I’d end up regretting it. The white light engulfing everything didn’t help my mood; the last time I’d seen it was when I died. Not pleasant memories.
A second later, the light disappeared, leaving me standing in a tiny, sparse office with a curly-haired child wearing a smirk on her face. I ignored her to survey the room, surprised to find the white walls different than a moment before: one sported a cork board littered with schedules, memos and notices; another bore pictures of—that's right—pickle jars; on the third hung a clock with hands inching close to quitting time.
“What happens now?”
I frowned down at Dallas; shook my head, too, for good measure.
“To be honest, I’m not sure, Dallas.”
“Never liked that name. If I’m staying, can I change it?”