Chapter Text
I screamed as I fell through air. Shocked when my back hit the ground seconds after falling from the roof. I looked around the blank room. Everything had a slight red hue to it, the floor, the wall, even the ceiling. The most noticeable thing was the lack of anything in the room. No doors, no windows, not even a light source. As confusing as it was to suddenly be here instead of falling to my death. My death! I was supposed to dead? Dying? I felt across my body sitting up trying to piece it all back together. How was I here?
One minute I was on a rooftop throwing myself at our kidnaper, who was pointing a gun at my little sister, before I and our assailant went flying over the edge. The next I was here.
I must be dead, I thought. That was the only reasonable explanation for being here and not at the bottom of the 15 floor walk-up me and my sister lived in.
Sophia! Eyes widening, I whipped my head back around the empty room again. “Sophia!” I cried out, lunging up and spinning in the room.
With a loud crack and a small puff of red smoke a figure stood in front of me. He looked like a man, except he had long black and white horns coming from his inky black hair. He towered over me. Not that it was unusual for anyone. At just 5 feet tall, I was considered short by anyone’s standards. But this man, he was easily 7 feet or more.
I warily eyed the man, inching back away from him. The man let out a long sigh and rolled his eyes. Bringing a clipboard up from the folds of his rather intimidating, yet plain, robe as he perched reading glasses on his nose with his other hand.
“Cassandra..... Smith? Smith-ie?” He boomed, an hesitation in his voice.
“Smythe. S-MY-TH,” I responded weakly. The constant correction of my last name a habit at 28. “Am I dead?”
The man, demon? before me rubbed his forehead. “Sorry, ‘bout that. You weren’t supposed to die for another…. 46 years,” he flipped through some of the pages, “looks like you took an unexpected path. But now you’re here, waking me from sleep on my on-call shift.” He grumbled.
“So… I am dead? Is my sister dead?!” I question, trying to see around his hands to whatever the mysterious clipboard of his had on it.
He cleared his throat, giving me a quick glare for trying to look. “Yes. This is Purgatory. No, your sister doesn’t appear to be dead. It looks like you had a…. balanced life?” He said the last part as a question, raising an eyebrow.
After a quick sigh of relief that Sofia was still alive, I rolled my eyes. I was a good person, or at least as good as the next. Sure I wasn’t a saint or anything, but I was trying my best to give my sister a better life than the one I had growing up. Taking on the responsibility of raising my kid sister at 22 when our parents died.
“It looks like you have a choice.” The demon-man rumbled. My eyes shot up at that. The choice between Heaven or Hell? Why would anyone chose eternal damnation.
“It appears you haven’t actively chosen your faith. Lucky for you, since you were a good person, you have the choice to accept God into your heart yada yada yada,” he said with a wave of his arms. “You’ve definitely heard the speil before while you were alive, so I’m not going to waste my time repeating it.”
He gestured in a circular motion, a red ball of smoke forming into an orb in his hands. It floated lightly down in front of me before images started to glow from it. “This is heaven. With all the beauty and love a person could ever want for,” he said with a bored tone. Video of what I assumed must be heaven flashed in the orb. It was beautiful, I thought, and all the people looked happy.
“And this is hell.” The images quickly darkened, my face twisting with disgust as I watched the -people? They were being massacred. By… Angels?
“What the fuck?” I yelled at the orb, looking up at the demon-man. “Angels murder? H-how… no… WHY! Why are they killing those… demons?”
“These are sinners. They deserve death. This is a yearly extermination to quell the sinners of Hell. Those Angels are on a Holy Mission from Heaven,” the demon-man said with a sternness to his voice.
“But they are defenseless?! How can Heaven say that this is okay? And..” I said quickly as I put my hand on the sides of my face, “what does dying in Hell mean? Do you just come back to be murdered again?”
“No, once an Angel kills a sinner they cease to exist.”
I stare at him in absolute horror. “And Heaven condones this?”
“Yes.” He said with a note of finality.
I felt the anger start to burn in my gut. Swinging my eyes back to the orb, where it continued to show images of sinners being slaughtered.
“So, I assume you don’t want to die. Again. I just need you to say that you accept the authority of Heaven and won’t question what-“
“Fuck that!” I huffed, shaking my head, “If Heaven condones what’s happening in Hell by their own Angels, then I want no part of it!” I jabbed a finger in the direction of the orb as I got louder.
The demon-man let out a long-suffering sigh. “Your funeral,” he said and snapped his fingers.
————————————
Instantly I was unceremoniously dropped in the middle of a crumbling city. My ears hurt from the sounds of wailing, screaming, and yelling. There air was thick with a sulfur smell and a haze lay over everything. Once again, a red hue tinted everything as took in the dilapidated buildings on what looked to be any major city block. There were bodies everywhere. The streets, the sidewalk, hanging from windows. Everywhere my eyes darted I saw another gruesome scene.
A large shark-shaped man ran past me, shoving me to the ground roughly. “Move!” he shouted. As I fell to the ground I saw an Angel swoop past, giving chase. I quickly pushed myself up in to crouch, choosing to ignore the question of whether the liquid that now smeared my pants was water, some kind of sewage, or blood.
Glancing from my hiding spot of… bodies… awesome… I looked to the skies for more of the Angels. I heard a loud cry from behind me, it almost sounded like a… child? Turning toward the sound, it was in fact a child, well a monkey-shaped one at least. The kid was running crying, trying to cover his head as he darted for cover. An Angel must have also heard them crying, as it darted from the rooftops, scanning the decaying bodies for its target.
I watched in horror for only a moment, sure that I couldn’t actually be seeing a real life Angel trying to take the life of a child. On instinct and pure adrenaline I quickly searched the ground for a weapon, anything I could use to-
A gun? Seriously? You have got to be fucking kidding me! A gun just lying in the middle of the street. I lunged for it, rolling into a firing stance and taking aim at the Angel. Just as they started to swoop down on the child, I pulled the trigger. It was a perfect shot. It should have killed them instantly, but the bullet just bounced off the Angel’s forehead.
All I had managed to do was piss the Angel off. The Angel turned, looking almost stunned before rage filled thier face as they raised their spear and dived right toward me. At the very last moment, a large hand pulled me out of the Angel’s reach. I once again fell to the ground, my head instantly shooting back up, looking for the Angel, and instead meeting the eyes of a large gorilla-like person.
“This should do more damage! Here try again!” A feminine voice said as the gorilla-person shoved a gold-tipped white rifle into my hands.
Without missing a beat, I shouldered the weapon, sighted the Angel, and fired. This time the Angel went down, falling from the sky like a hunted goose.
“How long will that keep them down?” I asked, turning back to the gorilla-woman. “Probably only a few minutes. I’ve never stayed around to find out. This way!” Gorilla-woman said as she scooped the monkey-child into her arms and ran for an alleyway.
Running for only a few blocks, ducking every now and then to avoid Angels. I only had to shoot 2 more Angels to clear our path. Following the gorilla-woman past a hidden doorway. It was dark inside for a few moments before a dim light clicked on. The gorilla-woman was shushing the child, “Its okay now sweetness, we are safe now. Shhhhh, no please don’t cry. Loddie is gonna make it all okay.” Her voice was thick and warm like molasses, definitely hailing from the American South.
“Are we actually?” I ask quietly.
The gorilla-woman gave me a quick glare before sitting in a rocking chair, rocking the now quiet child to sleep.
“For now,” she says. “The name’s Loddie. A wicked shot you have there. Something like that bring you down here?”
I shook my head. “No, I seemed to have pissed off the Powers That Be” the last part I said with a sarcastic tilt. “I’m Kassie. Thanks for pulling me back, I didn’t think I was gonna make it there for a second.”
Loddie let out a harsh laugh. “No one down here does. You just get here or something darlin’? No one in their right mind would take on an Angel. They are un-killable.”
“Yeah I got that,” I said with a smirk, “And yes ma’am. I just got here a few moments before all that back there went down.”
“Well shit! Terrible time to be dying! In the middle of an extermination. You’ve got some balls kid.”
Loddie put the now sleeping child down on a cot in the back corner of the room. “Now you tell ol’ Loddie what you think you did to piss upstairs off.”
I recounted everything that happened since my death to a bewildered Loddie.
“…and yeah, then he snapped his fingers and poof there I was,” I finish. Loddie let out a soft-whistle.
“Boy-howdy, you weren’t fooling when you said you pissed them off. I’m surprised you didn’t come with a giant ‘x’ over ya. Though I s’pose that explains the look.” Loddie gestured at my general direction.
I tilted my head questioningly. “What do you mean?”
“Well you sure as shit don’t look like no sinner I’ve ever seen before.”
I looked down at myself, feeling my face and head. “Huh?”
Loddie just shook her head, a small smile on her face. “Most of us down here take on an animal-esqe shape, somethin’ pertainin’ to whatever sin we did. Like little Simon back there,” she nodded to the child with her chin, “he stole food to keep his family from starving. ‘Parently that gets you a one-way ticket down here when things go awry.”
In the silence, I swept my gaze to the child and back to Loddie. “And you? What earned you a gorilla shape?”
A soft sigh was all that came from Loddie for a moment. “I was a nanny for a well known mob family in Chicago way back in the ’20s. Even though I didn’t condone the violence the Family did, I wasn’t going to not give them chillens a happy and loving home.”
I shook my head with a frown. Apparently the flawed system I’d already been shown was worse than I thought.
“So what about me then? What do I look like?” I finally asked.
“Take a look for yourself,” Loddie nodded to an adjoining door that lead to a small bathroom.
Hesitantly, I walked in and flicked on the light. I braced myself, expecting the worst. But it was… myself? I touched the mirror with one hand and my face with the other. “What?” I sighed softly. I looked precisely as I always had, if not a little haggard from all the fighting I just went through. I took in my trademark bubble-gum pink hair Thank God, I just spent a fortune having it redone. Everything looked the same, except my eyes. My once green eyes were now red. I slowly scanned the rest of myself. My still-short frame with just a bit more, curvy is what they called it back home. Well not home anymore, I thought as I looked for any sign of a tail in my pants. But all seemed just as it had before.
Stunned I walked back out to Loddie. “Does it take a while to change or…” I trailed off quietly, hesitant to know the answer.
“Nah hun. We appear in hell in whatever form we spend eternity in. You’re damn lucky to be keeping such a young face fer all eternity.”
“Well shit.” I whispered to myself. Taking a moment to take it all in.
Shaking myself out of it, I took a seat on the bench across from Loddie. “Are there more like you? And Simon? Sinners who barely did anything. Not enough to be sent to Hell for anyway?”
Loddie smiled tiredly, “Yes darlin’, there are a lot of us down here. We keep to ourselves mostly and try to stay out of trouble. Though honestly, most end up either giving in to sin and becoming the worst version of themselves or… selling their souls just to keep a roof up.” Loddie paused before telling me about the soul selling, almost as if she wished she hadn’t brought it up.
I folded my hand determinately, leaning forward and catching Loddie’s eyes, “Tell me everything there is to know about Hell.”