“Just tell the vampires to STFU since you’re not just their queen; you’re also the devil. That ought to fix them. And the election.”
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to get away from that whole absolute-dictator off-with-your-head-if-you-don’t-like-it thing since the day I woke up dead.”
“Why?” Cathie asked and, ye gods, she was serious.
I had to laugh a little. “What, why? Why d’you think? My entire platform—not that I ran for office, and not that I will run for office—is that vampires are no different from anyone else, and definitely not above the law. They don’t get to get away with bad shit because once upon a time they got chomped to death.”
“Well, too bad, because if you had run for office, I’d have voted for you. That’s a platform any murder victim can get behind.”
“Yes, it’s right up there with ‘a chicken in every pot,’” Antonia teased. She was as she always was, though she didn’t have to be. In life she’d worn lots of loud polyester
(ladybugs on a lime green background? why?)
and went through a can of hairspray a week. Her pineapple blond hair (color and texture) was pulled back and piled high in a sort of Kardashian meets Bride of Frankenstein effect, but not as classy as what you’re picturing. In life she’d also been shallow and bitchy. In Hell she was shallow, bitchy, and helpful. When she felt like it.
Meanwhile, Cathie had been murdered on laundry day and refused to go through the rest of her afterlife in granny panties. So she didn’t. Everything in Hell was mind over matter, including how we looked on the outside.
“Let’s move on,” I suggested. We were just outside the long, narrow conference room that, in the real Mall of America, was the Lego store. Cathie liked to build conference rooms out of the gigantic pieces (each Lego was the size of a brick), then dismantle them, then build them again. She found it soothing. I found it aggravating. Also, I kept tripping over the bricks she didn’t use. “Marc’s on his way; he stopped off to say hi to George Washington’s mom.” Have I mentioned Hell-bound old ladies loved Marc? They absolutely did.
“I thought he had a date.” My stepmother and my zombie had grudging, reluctant respect for each other. Thus her tone was polite, while her expression was that of someone who smells poop on a skunk. “At least, that’s what he was babbling about the last time. Some reporter? Ooh, is Marc going to be your mole amongst the media?” The Ant actually made this sound like a cool plan.
“First, never say ‘amongst’; I hate that. Or towards. I hate that, too.” So much! “Second, I might be a cynical bitch—”
“Yes, I know.”
“—but that doesn’t mean I think Marc should prostitute himself so I can one-up the Antichrist.”
“Hell is no place for your tiresome morality.”
“Wrong! It’s exactly the place for my tiresome— Okay, first, my morality isn’t tiresome.” I pushed past them into the conference room. “It’s a breath of fresh air here. That’s my story and you won’t shake it.”
“So he must have missed it,” the Ant finished, shrugging off my tiresome morality in favor of her one-track mind. “Or rescheduled.”
Cathie frowned. “But he was really looking forward to it—why’d he skip?”
By now I’d collapsed into a chair made of Legos, which was exactly as uncomfortable as it sounded. “What, like I know? I can barely keep track of my own social life.” Pathetic thing that it was these days. But even I knew that bitching about the dearth of date nights would be in really, really bad taste here.
“He’s hiding,” Cathie announced. “He finally met someone and he can’t handle it so he’s just avoiding the whole thing.”
“He’s not; it’s just a coincidence,” Antonia countered. “He lives to come down here, the goofy bastard. One of a few pathetic saps who were dumb enough to volunteer to help my stepdaughter.”
“You’re on that list,” I muttered. They both ignored me, because my life sucked.
“He’s hiding from his date,” Cathie insisted.
“Nope.”
“You wanna make it interesting?”
“Terms?”
My eyes, which had been slowly closing
(Do I have to be here for this? Sounds like I don’t have to be here for this. I wonder if that candy cock ring came from Amazon yet? Sinclair’s not a fan of sticky stuff on his nethers, so this will take some fast talking on my part. Which I am totally up for. Because— Wait, what?)
flew open. Bets were a very big deal in Hell. It was a deadly serious business with enormous stakes. Beyond life and death, even. Unlimited opportunities to crow about it if you won. Endless piles of scorn heaped on you if you didn’t.
“I’ve got terms. If I’m right and we find out he’s hiding because he doesn’t want to get back out there,” Cathie said, brow furrowed as she thought of something the Ant would find sufficiently disgusting and/or unpleasant, “you have to . . .” What? Eat live snakes for every meal every day for fifty years? Sleep with Henry VIII and let him cut your head off when you break up? Shovel out the Augean stables with a salad fork? (We had those down here—the stables, I mean—and they stank like you wouldn’t believe.) “. . . say at least five nice things to Betsy every time you see her for the next hundred years.”
“No!” we both blurted, then stared at each other, appalled. Probably for different reasons. The Ant likely found the thought of being nice to me, her nemesis since I was a teenager, to be revolting and impossible. I found the idea of working with her for the next century equally revolting and impossible.
I knew I’d formed the committee to help me run Hell, but I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, y’know, eternity. Though maybe I should have. Yeah, I definitely should have. Anyway, I figured one or two decades in, we’d have the kinks worked out. Hell pretty much ran itself anyway. It was difficult and confusing now only because I was making so many changes.
“Three nice things,” the Ant countered, and who could blame her? Even I couldn’t say three nice things about myself every time I saw myself. Two, maybe. If having great taste in footgear counted as one nice thing. “And I don’t have to say the three nice things the second I meet her. It’s per visit.” She shivered. “I’d need a minimum of several hours to come up with something. Anything. Anything at all.”
Cathie’s triumphant grin lit up her face. “Done! And if you win . . .”
“If you lose,” the Ant said, eyes narrowing (pale blue eye shadow? Was it 1976 in Hell?*), “if we find out he’s not hiding from dating, you have to give me a massage every time I ask for the next hundred years.” Hmm. Interesting! Cathie had just gotten her massage license when she was murdered, so she presumably knew what she was getting into. “Whatever you’re doing, you have to drop everything and work out my kinks.”
To steal an Archer-ism, “Um . . . phrasing?” Since they both died before Archer was a thing, it went over both their heads. In fact, I was pretty sure they’d forgotten all about me. “Guys? Did you hear me? Because she said kinks? Guys? See what I did there?”
“Done,” Cathie said, and they shook hands so firmly, their knuckles went white.
I sneaked a glance at my watch. The watch was incredibly important, because it was the only timepiece in Hell that told me how long I’d been away from the real world. When I first started trying (and failing) to get a handle on this job, I’d go to Hell for a couple of hours and come back and find I’d been gone three days. The havoc this wreaked on my love life was insane. I’m embarrassed to tell you how long it took me to think up (ta-da!) the newfangled invention known as a wristwatch.
Nothing to fear—even though it felt like I’d been here a day and a half
(“You’re gonna lose, and it’ll be terrible for you.”
“You’re going to lose, and I’m going to laugh my ass off whenever you have to pound my glutes.”)
it had been only five minutes.
“If you two are done gambling the next century of your afterlives away, maybe we can get to business?” Times like this, I almost missed Satan. She’d been the one who’d been a stickler for meetings starting on time. For meetings at all. Sure, she’d been trying to obstruct me at every turn, but by God, we stuck to an agenda and meetings ended on time. Not that I knew she was the devil then. Because nothing’s ever simple, y’know?
“Yes, yes, we can start,” the Ant replied, waving away my whining. “We just have to— Marc! Hoo-hoo! Marc!”
“Hey!” Cathie let out an eardrum-shredding whistle. “Over here, Marc! Get your butt over here!”
Marc, who’d been hurrying through the food court, looked momentarily surprised to be greeted so enthusiastically. He shot a cautious glance at me and I shrugged. It wouldn’t be fair to tip him off. Also, it would be huge fun to see my stepmother and favorite ghost falling all over him to figure out the state of his love life so they could decide which one would be the other’s slave for the next hundred years. Why would I ever stand in the way of that?
With each step, Marc looked more and more bewildered. It was a good look for him, though, because Marc was criminally cute. Black hair he kept chopped in a Caesar cut (which he insisted on calling a George Clooney cut), bright green eyes, pale skin—like most of us, because (a) dead and (b) Minnesota—long legs, quick and clever hands. He usually wore scrubs so often washed they were almost velvety (as well as going from green to a washed-out gray). An ER doc in life, he didn’t trust his zombie reflexes to do much more than skilled first aid in death.
I thought he was being overcautious—it’s not like the flesh was rotting off his bones or anything. He’d delivered Jessica’s weird babies with no trouble. (For him. Jessica was pissed that he was unable to rig an epidural in her bedroom. I can still hear her: “I get to push? What, like it’s something I won? How is that an incentive? What the fuck is wrong with you?”) In fact, as long as we hung out together, Marc would only ever appear to be seconds dead. Maybe just one second dead; that’s how (ugh) fresh he was. He could also heal with ridiculous speed, which made no sense.
The trouble would start if I abandoned him. Or took my power away from him . . . not that I had any idea how to do that. I still had no idea how I’d turned him into a zombie in the first place.* Argh, hindsight! That’s how I should have answered all of Diana Pierce’s questions: “I have no idea how I did that.”
Moot, anyway; I’d never leave him. He became my friend the day I woke up dead and has stuck by me ever since. Not to belittle my mom or Jessica, but they’d loved me before I died. Marc only knew me as a bitchy vampire and he still thought I was worth getting to know. So there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for him.
Except warn him where this was going, of course. I got so few kicks from running Hell, I wasn’t keen on derailing this train until we knew who won.
“—just tell us why you were late already!” I could see the Ant had gotten tired of her version of subtlety and was just nagging the shit out of him so they could settle the bet.
“But why do you even care?”
“Of course I care!” the Ant yelped. Boy, talk about a half-truth. She cared, but only because she didn’t want to be my compliment slave. Also, I didn’t want her to be my compliment slave.
“What difference does it make if I had plans?” He was looking from one to the other with a dazed expression on his face, like he was trying to focus on a tennis match after several beers. “I’m here now.”
“Did you have plans?”
“Why?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Did Will put you up to— No, wait. That’s idiotic. Right?” He looked at me. “Will doesn’t have any influence down here. You haven’t even seen him since your mom beat him up.”
“She did not beat him up!” By now I’d gotten up off my chair and was standing in the doorway. “She gave his ear a twist, which under the circumstances was excellent. She did catch him sneaking into our home, remember?”
“On a scoop! That’s what journalists do!”
“Not to be mean, but I’m not sure a weirdo with a ghost blog qualifies as a journalist.”
“He is not a weir— Um, he is too a journalist!” He rounded on the Ant and Cathie. “And why are you two so interested? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you work together for a good cause. Why’s my famously arid love life so interesting all of a sudden?”
“It’s a bet,” I explained.
“So? Why does—whoa.” I could see he got it right away; like I said, bets in Hell were major.
“So there you go. Serious business is afoot. Anyway, Cathie thinks you’re hiding from what’s-his-toes—”
“Will Mason.”
“Right. She thinks you’re too chicken to date him, which is why you’re in Hell instead of trying to get some among the living. But Antonia is betting it’s just a coincidence, that it was just a scheduling conflict and of course you’re not hiding from dating. Or sex.”
“That brings up a new one,” Cathie said. “Can you even have sex? Do you . . .” She made a vague gesture toward Marc’s crotch, horrifying every single one of us. “I mean, can you get an erec—”
“Marc, if you answer that question I am going to freak out,” I warned, and the Ant nodded so hard her hair almost wiggled. “And I’ve got no time for a freak-out today. The earliest I can lose my shit is Friday. And even Friday’s pretty crowded.”
“That’s what this is about?” Marc had an odd look on his face, as if anger and amusement and horror and glee all got together and his expression was the result. “My emotional state is something to bet on?”
“Damned straight.”
“Sorry, Marc, but everything here is something to bet on. You know why.” We all did. The worst thing about Hell wasn’t the unrelenting torture some had to tolerate. It wasn’t separation from life or loved ones. It wasn’t knowing your life was over. It wasn’t knowing you were trapped in the worst place humanity could think up.
It was the boredom. Even waterboarding got dull after a few decades when you couldn’t really drown.
“So which is it?”
“It’s neither. We were supposed to . . . but Will had something come up fast so he texted to reschedule.”
“And there it is,” I commented as Cathie and Ant looked crushed. “The definition of an anticlimax, right before your eyes.”
Marc snorted. “Sorry one of you couldn’t profit off my social life. Or the lack of one.”
From Cathie: “Boo.”
The Ant: “Oh, fine.”
Me: “Guys? So, work time? We can work now? Guys?”
Marc gallantly presented his elbow, and I let him lead me back to the worst chair ever. Behind me, almost too low to hear (and definitely too low for Marc), I heard Cathie mutter, “Still on, right? Might take a couple of days to figure.”
“Damned right we’re still on,” my stepmother hissed back. “I’m not tolerating the next century with knots in my neck.”
Oh, goody. This could only end perfectly for all involved. Nothing to worry about. Also, whoever won would be gracious in victory and whoever lost would accept the consequences like an adult and oh my God, I couldn’t even finish that thought without snickering.
Was I too late to get in on this?
CHAPTER
SEVEN
“Okay, so, Jennifer Palmer. First candidate for parole. She’s been here . . .” I tried to remember. Failed. There were a lot of people to keep track of. I figured I knew a hundred souls by name at this point. A hundred out of billions.
“Thirty-one years,” Cathie said. “On food court duty where she slings Orange Juliuses. Juliuses? That doesn’t sound right. Julius-ii?”
“It sure doesn’t, the poor dope,” the Ant murmured, because she thought Orange Ju
liuses tasted like ass, and a job serving them appropriately hellish.
“I need a . . .” And poof! Except without any noise, and now I was holding my HelltabletTM, patent pending. I used to walk around with a magical clipboard, until I remembered it was the twenty-first century. So I converted my clipboard. Like everything here, it was a symbol to help me grasp the abstract. I mean, Hell didn’t really look like the Mall of America. And I wasn’t really holding a tablet. It was just the best way I could wrap my brain around the whole thing.
My HelltabletTM held any info I needed on anyone here. It was also waterproof. And fireproof. Nobody could read it but me. And I never had to charge it. Or maybe I was constantly charging it—I might be its battery. It always worked, was my point. Plus it perpetuated the illusion that I knew what I was doing. That was always valuable.
“Okay, yeah. We assigned what’s-her-face as her buddy.” Yes! One of the first things we’d implemented: the buddy system. No more did the damned have to suffer an afterlife filled with torture and not have any idea what was going on or where they were or where the bathrooms were or if you even needed bathrooms anymore. Now you had a buddy who would show you the ropes during your years of torment. “You know, the girl Lawrence the Vampire helped bring up.”
“Cindy—”
“Tinsman!” I shouted after sneaking a peek at my HelltabletTM. “The cheerleader turned vampire turned resident of Hell.” And her father was one of the reasons life up top was so chaotic right now. (Argh, it wasn’t “up top.” We weren’t below anything! Was I gonna have to put the MoA on top of a cloud so we all stopped referring to Hell as down below? And why did it bug me so much?)
“Okay, so . . . why her?” When Marc and I both looked at the Ant, she put her hands out in a “whoa, hear me out” gesture. “Whoa, hear me out.” (See?) “I think your parole plan is incredibly innovative.”
“Oh.” Um. A compliment from the Ant. I had no idea what to do. Where to look. What to do with my hands. Everything: blank and frozen. Was she mentally preparing herself to lose the bet? Getting in practice? I didn’t think I could handle three of those a day from her. “Thanks.”