Souls - XV

I dream of those six dead men sometimes, the ones I woke up to in that mega-mart. I remember their eyes, all of them open, all of them staring at me with the glassy stare of nothingness. I was their Sun, I was their center.

I don’t know how they died, I don’t know if it was me or if it was them. The way they were arranged made me think they did this themselves, a ritualistic show of their decision to end it all right there. I didn’t know it at the time, but death was different in this new world. I’m not sure if they knew either, but they had a head start on me. Their glassy eyes showing a hint of a discovery I was yet to make. When the sky went away death only played by one real rule: you can’t die of natural causes. 

No-one really knew why, but the working theory was that we were all  in hell/purgatory/wherever now so our hearts couldn’t wear out, we couldn’t die of cancer, we couldn’t even age. This means the only way to die was a very decisive murderous or suicidal action. This led to the question of where we go when we kill ourselves if we’re already in hell/purgatory/wherever. Scholars, priests, wisemen, all scoured through holy texts and attempted to find the truths that were somehow hiding behind the obvious contradictions on display.

No-one ascended that day, there were no piles of clothes left behind. The whole world just fell apart, shadows begin to move, and the Devil started up business in a high-rise in Kansas City. This was not exactly how it was foretold. 

It was all very confusing. 

Maybe the most confusing part was how silent God was during all of this, not even a peep from the big fella actually. Satan showed up directly, smiling in well-tailored suits, but no God. This really set everyone off. That’s how the world really fell apart, how humans really proved they are not an entirely stable species.

None of the glassy-eyed sextuplets surrounding me knew any of this, they were dead, but one thing became crystal clear to me in this moment. 

We were all in a lot of trouble.

That’s when I heard the footsteps. A single pair at first, then two pairs. The source of the first pair of footsteps appeared in my line of sight. It was a man wearing a suit and carrying a bag. His only distinguishing feature was fear. His face was trying to force stoicism but the truth was in his eyes, he was terrified. He kneeled before one of the men, pulled that cylindrical tool out of his bag and poked it through the dead man’s glassy eye. He gagged a little when it popped. 

That’s the first soul I saw, surging into that cylindrical tool I grew to know all too well. The man stood when it was finished and moved to the next glassy-eyed man, and then the next, and then the next, and so on. Soon it was just me and him left.

He turned to me, our eyes meeting. He froze. 

“You’re, you’re alive.”

I just stared back. 

He then looked past me, past my eyes and to the source of the second pair of footsteps. I begin to tingle.

“Do I have to?”

“You do.” I felt my whole self shake, my body failing in the presence of this voice.

I couldn’t move. My fear had left fight or flight behind and went straight to paralyzation. 

The man nodded, his face losing all attempts at stoicism. He moved towards me. 

The sharp end of the cylindrical tool moved within inches of my eye. This was it, I felt it touch the wetness of my eye.

Then there was a blast. It came from me. The man flew backwards into a wall.

He was on fire. 

This blast wasn’t like the first one, it was more of a warning shot. I didn’t explode, I didn’t lose consciousness, it was the love-tap equivalent of exploding. Regardless, the man in the suit was burning to ash, the embers of his biology slipping to the floor of the mega-mart.

Soon, all was quiet. No more screaming man, no more burning flesh, just simple silence. Then the second set of footsteps began to ring out.

“So it was you. It’s always the last mortal you check.”

My skin tingled and my hair stood on end. The shape that I learned to be Lucifer entered my periphery and made his way to face me. He kneeled and smiled. 

“You’re the human that killed several of my men, how interesting.” He held out his hand in an attempt to help me stand. “I have a proposition for you.”

I bolt up, I am back in my daughter’s home. Apparently I had actually fallen asleep. It felt like nighttime but it’s hard to tell when the sky is just a pulsating mass. Waking up from a sleep you didn’t know you were having is as close to a resurrection as humans will ever know. 

A knock on the front door rings through the house, impossibly clear and loud considering the distance of the door from my bedroom. A voice that caused my skin to tingle rang out with an equally impossible clarity. 

“Hello dear, I’m afraid we are going to have to have a talk.”