“There was a bus passing through town with a college baseball team. They are still trying to figure out what happened, but the bus drove straight into a concrete warehouse in a bad part of town and killed the entire baseball team. They havedefinitelybeen dead for the past three days while their school makes arrangements to pick them all up and bring them home. People give me shit about working in the morgue, but it’s usually quiet. I don’t knowwhatthose noises are, but I don’t want to go in there.”
Was it fucked up that I totallydidwant to go in there? Because I did. These were bad people. They died and ended up where they were going to pay for all the shitty things they did. This was rapists, murderers, dictators, and people who got off on watching other people suffer. They deserved everything they got, and I’d be damned if they got a second chance in some poor asshole’s corpse.
Yeah, Mom was a horror fan, and it was the eighties, so I was a horror fan when I was practically in diapers. When we walked in the morgue, I could hear moaning and thumping from the little refrigerated slots they were keeping the bodies in.
“Damn. If you kept them here, you could make a killing on haunted houses. That’s creepy.”
“So, the other princes don’t want anyone to know this, but demons can send them back, too. It’s not an angel thing. They like to talk about upper and lower demons, but you all have yourown strengths and weaknesses. You canallsend a soul back as long as you have their name.”
My demons were nodding, but Kujo looked seriously into this. I got it. I could see Nero and Celix being good with Cambion kids, but not Kujo. He wasn’t meant for that at all. I could see where he’d be miserable about it. He still didn’t have to be a dick to me, but I could see where he’d be unhappy.
“You got names, big guy?” I asked.
Satan handed me a cell phone that had a black case with red devil horns wearing a crown. Yeah, I guess he’d either gotten to know me in this short time or Wrathhog told him that was the case to get.
“Your old phone won’t work in Hell, but this one works in every realm. I’ve sent you a list. Twenty souls got out before the warden caught on and sealed the breach. I’ve taken four and given you each four.”
“What’d mine do?”
Because I was nosy and wanted to know.
“The breach was in the Greed and Dishonesty wing. There are alotof souls from the feudal system there who raised taxes more than they needed to for profit while people starved. We have several grotesquely rich people who had the profits to pay their employees enough to survive but didn’t and the only charities they ever donated to were their own as a tax write off. My daughter says they aren’t as fun to torture as the rapists, but there are several violent and non-violent ways to fuck with them.”
Ooh, yeah, I could see several scenarios where that could be interesting and fun. One of them figured out how to work the vocal cords in the body they’d jumped in and I heard them groan out a plea for help.
“Oh, fuck you. If that’s Tobias de Monthermer, I’m going to need you to get the fuck out of that body and go back to Hell like a good little Earl.”
Yeah, the one who figured out how to work a mouth wasn’t Tobias, but I was guessing the thrashing that picked up to my left was the wayward Earl on my list.
“Do your thing,” Satan said with a wink. “I took the few from feudal Japan since you won’t be able to speak Japanese until you get your magic.”
“What the what now?”
“Angels speak all languages. It’s built into our magic. It would take ages to list all the powers we have and we really don’t need anyone in here asking questions.”
Good point. I hadn’t adopted another one because I wasn’t ready, but my very ancient cat had crossed the rainbow bridge a few months before all this shit went down. I loved her to death, but she was stubborn and didn’t listen to a damned thing I said.
Convincing these souls to get back to Hell was like telling my cat to get off the counter or stop licking the fucking butter. They didn’t want to. My cat couldn’t talk back. She mostly just looked me dead in the eye while chowing down on my butter.
The corpses weretryingto talk, but it came out in these terrible noises because I guess rigor mortis. The one who’d managed to eak out of plea for help was trying to beg for his freedom among all of us calling names and trying to force all these fancy dead people back to Hell.
And our morgue friend must have made calls because she seemed like she was expectingus,but she must have called other people, too, because someone was trying to get into the morgue and they were being pretty forceful about it.
“CDC! We’ve got the DEA with us. Open up!”
“Bureaucracy and red tape usually mean we are gone before they get here,” Satan groaned.
“I’d imagine they have some kind of red alert if a morgue calls and someone who issupposedto be dead starts twitching, groaning, and chanting what they think is a dangerous street drug. This is going to keep happening and if a street drug could do any of this, it would be the CDC and DEA’s wheelhouse. You’re going to need a different badge next time.”
“Noted. Can anyone stall them while I used my devil voice?”
“Sic Sydney on them. I want to leave every time she opens her mouth,” Kujo said.
“You’re such a nard. I only punched you in the dickonceand you had it coming way more than that,” I said, stomping over to the door.
I opened the door a tiny crack, just big enough for me to slip through. Yeah, I wanted send the bad fancy people back to some eternal torment and maybe I should see a therapist about that, but I had a better understanding of modern humans than any of these guys.
“We’re investigating the bus crash. We think it’s related to Wrathhog. You’ll get your turn when we’re done.”
