The Afterdeath (a comedy)

Johnathan Cooper had been waiting in line a very long time.  He wasn't entirely sure just how long; there were no clocks, no calendars, no time pieces where he was.  There was only The Line.  A seemingly endless line of individuals, strangers, occasionally shuffling forward, amidst a bright world of eternal day.  It was pleasant, if featureless and boring; a fluffy white fog seemed to cling low to the ground, in every direction.  It was hard to tell if he had moved at all.  It was hard to tell how long he'd been standing there.  Did he just get here? He was pretty sure he'd been standing for a while.  It was hard to tell.  Everyone else in line seemed to agree.

No one ever got out of place in line - there was a a tacit sense that doing so Simply Wasn't Done - and so conversations proceeded largely with one's immediate neighbors in line.  Stories would travel up and down the line, but usually became garbled in the manner such things did.  John didn't know the people around him, but apparently that seemed to hold true for much of the line.  Everyone had seemed to live fairly good lives though; good, God fearing men and women.

Just how long had he been waiting in line? He didn't know.  Patience is a virtue, he thought.  Well, not officially, but it's a good thing, he quickly amended.  It didn't seem to matter, however.  There was nothing for the line but to wait.  He couldn't even fall asleep from the boredom.  He'd tried counting the people in front and behind him, that he could see; he'd arrived at 67,332 repeatedly.  He was confident it was an accurate number.  He couldn't be totally sure either, but it seemed like each time he'd counted, it were the exact same people in the exact same order.  Possibly that would be the next thing to try; he was saving it for when he got tired of simply counting.

At least the weather was pleasent; a sunny blue day, a few fluffy clouds in the sky.  He couldn't quite tell where the sun was though.  In fact, it never seemed to change - it just seemed to come from everywhere.  Not too hot, and not direct - which was fortunate, because he was pretty sure he'd forgotten his sunscreen - but simply omnipresently radiant.  Just right.  Like the temperature.  Strange, there were no birds.  No animals of any kind; no insects either, but that was just as well.  He couldn't stand insects.

There just didn't seem to be anything but The Line; if he hadn't been standing on it, he wouldn't have been sure there was a ground at all.  He was moderately sure there was; he seemed to be standing on something, at any rate.  Did that cloud move? No, no it hadn't.  Maybe.  It was hard to tell without any points of reference.  He stared at it suspiciously, as if daring it to move.  Or perhaps it was staring at him? He took a step forward, along with the entire line, and then came to a stop again.  He'd moved hadn't he?  He, and not the cloud?

He sighed.  Always, The Line.  Nothing to do, he supposed, but to count again.  One, two, three...

===========

The Devil was angry.  Indeed, he was Greatly Upset.  This was not, in itself, unusual.  He would not have described himself as being particularly given to calm or happiness.  Not in the usual sense, at any rate.  He worked hard, all day, every day, dealt constantly with whining, complaining scum; and the screaming.

The screaming never stopped.

He'd tried to convince himself once that he enjoyed the screaming.  The screaming, he had thought in an altogether agreeably malevolent manner, is as a soothing lullaby, whispered to my weary soul to comfort me.

But no, it was still just screaming.  Always, the screaming.  it never stopped.  He had thought it was his own fault, particularly after the Scream Louder and I Will Torment You Harder campaign (which had failed spectacularly, but he refused to give them any victory, and so the tactic continued).  Once though he had tried simply not tormenting the damned: not searing their aetheric flesh, not puncturing their bodies repeatedly with glowing hot, poisoned, implements of torture, not playing dubstep (that one had been more a relief for himself than any kind of attempt at anything), not recreating their vile (or even the rather less vile, fairly innocent, more-of-a-misunderstanding-really-than-an-out-and-out-sin) sins (everything was a boring rerun by now anyway), not freezing over at random with skin peeling cold.  In short, being just a place, rather than an altogether unpleasant place to spend any amount of time.

That hadn't worked either.

The latest development was, however, just too far.  It had always been accepted that Hell would eventually reach capacity; the Devil had argued about the inevitability with Management.  The response had been to introduce remediation programs and the possibility of parole to free up space, and a promise to look into acquiring more real estate for expansion in the future.

Except real estate prices only increased; real estate owners lobbied against zoning that permitted the expansion of Hell into their area on grounds of blight (as well as Blight) and decreasing value.  So they'd just have to make do.

Only it had been only around two thousand years and Hell was full.  Literally.  There was not a free centimeter anywhere; the Devil couldn't even get in, and had to furlough a large number of his demons (which had caused a great deal of discontent, itself not normally a terrible thing in Hell, but now there were rumblings of unionization which would be a right pain to deal with).  Those still working were generally working around the door, or simply jabbing souls in line.

That had been new.  There was a line to get into Hell.  It had, at first, been something of an ironic innovation (he wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of it first, in all honesty) and he played around with ideas of assigning "boarding zones" (which would never be called), lines that led in a circle, lines that led to other lines, and so forth.  In the end, he'd had to: the back up had grown to ridiculous proportions.  He hadn't even the space to do anything truly cruel with the floor; they'd settled for sprinkling tacks on the ground, which the Damned surreptiously swept out of the way with their feet.  Everyone pretended not see anything. It was all quite embarassing and, even more, inconveniencing.

And so the Devil was in Heaven.  It was uncomfortable.  It was awkward.  It was bright and shiny and, frankly, he stood out.  He hadn't had an opportunity to take so much as a shower before coming, and Hell was hot, sweaty place.  To be entirely honest, he wasn't entirely sure which place he'd found more uncomfortable: Heaven or Hell.  It just wasn't something that ever really came up in his day-to-day.  But now he was here, waiting for his appointment to talk things over with The Management, although he felt certain they'd send him some know-nothing junior official to blow him off.

 And then He came sauntering over.  Jesus.  The Junior.  It was looking to be, in what had been an unbroken string of bad days, an Especially Bad One.