The ringing didn't stop, it just changed frequency.
It shifted from the deafening screech of a gunshot to a low, persistent electrical hum; the kind made by fluorescent lights that hadn't been changed in a decade.
Jude opened his eyes.
He braced himself for the pain. He expected the crushing headache, the sticky warmth of blood, the cold tile of the gas station floor. He expected the shouting of the robbers or the siren of an ambulance.
Instead, he was blinded by aggressive, sanitized whiteness.
Jude squinted, shielding his eyes with a hand that felt strangely light. He was sitting in a chair; a hard, molded plastic chair that was bolted to the floor and designed, seemingly with malicious intent, to be incredibly uncomfortable.
He blinked, his vision slowly adjusting to the glare.
He wasn't in a hospital. He wasn't in a police station.
He was in a line.
The room was infinite. To his left, rows of orange plastic chairs stretched out until they vanished into a foggy white horizon. To his right, the same thing. The ceiling was a flat, featureless white expanse broken only by endless rows of flickering tube lights.
"What the hell?" Jude whispered. His voice sounded small, swallowed instantly by the acoustic deadness of the room.
He looked down at his hand. He was holding a slip of paper. Thin, flimsy receipt paper, the kind you get at a deli counter.
TICKET NO: 84,209,112-B ESTIMATED WAIT TIME: [1,892 YEARS]
Jude stared at the number. He looked around, trying to find a wall, a door, a sign, anything to anchor himself in reality.
That's when he noticed the people.
Sitting in the chair directly to his left was a man wearing full plate armor. Not a costume; real, dented, blood-stained steel. The knight was slumped forward, his helmet resting on his knees, tapping a gauntleted finger against the plastic armrest in an annoying rhythm. Clink. Clink. Clink.
To the knight's left sat a woman with a blowout hairdo, smoking a cigarette that didn't seem to produce any smoke. She was reading a magazine titled Better Homes and Gardens: July 1962.
Jude turned to his right. A man with a sloping forehead and a thick brow ridge, literally a Neanderthal, was picking lice out of a beard that reached his knees. Next to him was a guy in faded jeans and a frosted-tip haircut, aggressively playing a GameBoy Color.
"Is this..." Jude trailed off. The word felt stupid to say. Heaven?
If this was Heaven, God had a terrible interior decorator. It looked like the DMV, but bigger.
BING-BONG.
The sound was a generic chime from an unseen speaker.
"NOW SERVING: TICKET 84,209,112-B."
The voice was robotic and boring.
Jude froze. He looked at his ticket. He looked at the infinite sea of people stretching out for miles. The knight let out a metallic groan that sounded like a car crash in slow motion.
"Oh, come on!" a Victorian-era chimney sweep in the row ahead shouted, throwing his ash-covered hat on the floor. "I've been here since the cholera outbreak!"
"Rigged!" the Y2K guy yelled, not looking up from his GameBoy. "Totally rigged!"
Jude felt a thousand pairs of eyes stare into his soul. Jealousy. Rage. Exhaustion.
"TICKET 84,209,112-B. PLEASE APPROACH COUNTER 1."
Jude stood up. His legs felt like jelly. He shuffled past the Neanderthal, who grunted and pulled his legs back to let him pass.
"Sorry," Jude mumbled. "Sorry. Excuse me."
He walked down the central aisle. The floor was linoleum, patterned with those depressing grey specks reminiscent of a high school cafeteria. About fifty yards ahead, a row of plexiglass windows broke the monotony.
Counter 1 was the only one open.
Behind the glass sat a man. He was middle-aged, balding, with a comb-over that wasn't fooling anyone and a mustache thick enough to double as a piece of steel wool. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with a tie that stopped halfway down his stomach.
Jude approached the window and sat in the single chair provided.
The man didn't look up. He was furiously stamping a stack of papers. Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Name?" the man asked. His voice was fast, nasal, and sounded like he was trying to sell Jude a used car with 200,000 miles on it.
"Uh... Jude," Jude stammered. "Jude Miller."
"Jude Miller. Right. Gotcha here." The man grabbed a file from a stack, licked his thumb, and flipped it open. "Philly kid. Gunshot wound to the head region. Ouch. Rough way to check out, kid. Messy cleanup for the janitor, let me tell you."
The man finally looked up. His nametag read: BOB.
But Jude wasn't looking at the nametag. He was looking at Bob's back.
Protruding from the back of Bob's cheap dress shirt were two tiny, feathery wings. They were pathetic, maybe six inches long, like a pigeon's wings glued onto a grown man. They fluttered anxiously, buzzing like a hummingbird on 300mg of caffeine.
Bob took a loud slurp from a ceramic mug that said World's Best Angel.
"So," Bob said, slamming the file shut and leaning forward, his eyes narrowing. "You skipped the line. The Big Guys upstairs flagged your ticket. Priority boarding. Which usually means you're either very important, or you're in very deep shit."
Bob grinned. It was a lawyer's grin, all teeth and no warmth. "And looking at your credit score? I'm gonna guess it's the second one."
"I'm not dead," Jude said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. He gripped the edge of the desk, his knuckles turning white. "This is... I'm in a coma. Or I'm dreaming. Or this is some kind of stupid prank show."
Bob sighed, a long, drawn-out sound that seemed to deflate his entire upper body. He took another sip of coffee.
"Denial," Bob mumbled, checking a box on the form with a red pen. "Right on schedule. Look, kid, I don't know what to tell you. The body is a biological machine. Yours? The engine block cracked. Leaked oil everywhere. Totaled."
"I felt the bullet," Jude argued, his voice rising. "It hurt."
"Yeah, dying usually does. It's a design flaw. We've sent memos to management, but..." Bob shrugged, his tiny wings giving a pathetic little flap. "The suggestion box looks an awful lot like a trash can."
"I want to go back," Jude snapped. "I have to go back."
Bob stopped writing. He lowered his pen slowly, resting his chin on his clasped hands. The sleazy, fast-talking demeanor dropped for a fraction of a second, replaced by a cold, penetrating stare.
"Do you?" Bob asked.
Jude blinked. "What?"
"Do you really want to go back?" Bob tapped the file with an unkempt fingernail. "I'm looking at your transcripts, kid. I'm looking at the internal monologue logs. You've been staring at the exit sign for years. You've been begging for the curtain call since you were sixteen."
Jude opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The coldness in his chest, the one he'd felt in the gas station, returned.
"You stood in front of a gun," Bob said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "You didn't fight because you were brave. You fought because you didn't care if you lost. So don't sit there and tell me you're fighting to get back to a life you were already trying to throw away."
Jude slumped back in the plastic chair. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, loud and oppressive. "I..."
"Exactly," Bob said, the mask sliding back into place. He stamped the paper with a heavy THUD. "Now, normally, you'd be sitting in that chair for about six hundred years waiting for processing. Purgatory is backed up. Too many wars, not enough clerks. But you? You got the VIP pass."
Bob reached under the desk and pressed a button.
Behind him, the air rippled. The bland white wall of the DMV office split open, tearing like wet paper. A swirling vortex of gold and soft blue light spun into existence, humming with a power that made the hair on Jude's arms stand up.
"Where am I going?" Jude asked, staring at the portal.
"Upstairs," Bob said, gesturing with his thumb. "The Penthouse. The Boardroom. The Big Show."
"I'm meeting..." Jude swallowed hard. "Jesus?"
Bob snorted, nearly choking on his coffee. "Hah! No. The Boss is on sabbatical. Has been for about two thousand years. Said something about 'burnout' and 'humanity is a lost cause' and went to paint landscapes in Honolulu. You're meeting the Council. The Steering Committee. The folks who keep the lights on while Dad is away."
Bob pointed his pen at the swirling portal. "In you go, kid. Don't keep them waiting. They get cranky."
Jude stood up. His legs felt heavy, like they were filled with lead. He walked around the desk toward the portal, the hum growing louder.
Every instinct in his mind told him this wasn't real. That this was a sick dream. That he could just wake up.
"I can't do this," he whispered, starting to turn back.
"Kid," Bob said.
The voice was different. The manic energy was gone. It had dropped an octave. It sounded tired. It sounded... human.
Jude turned. Bob wasn't stamping papers. He wasn't fluttering his wings. He was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped, looking at Jude with a strange, sad respect.
"I was an actuary. In 1984. I spent forty years predicting risk, avoiding danger, and making sure nothing bad ever happened to me. And then I choked on a ham sandwich in the breakroom."
Bob sighed, rubbing his forehead.
"I died safe. And I died boring. You? You died stupid. But for one second... just one second before the lights went out... you were the bravest guy in Philadelphia."
Bob pointed a finger at him. No jokes.
"They're gonna scare the hell out of you in there. They're gonna try to weigh your soul. Don't let them see the kid who wants to give up. Show them the guy who tried to punch a gunman to save a stranger. That guy? That guy has a shot."
Jude stared at him. He nodded, a slow, solidified nod. "Thanks, Bob."
Bob's mask snapped back on instantly, his wings fluttering. "Yeah, yeah. Get out of here. You're tanking my metrics. Go!"
Jude turned and stepped into the light.
The transition wasn't instantaneous. It was a sensation of being unmade and remade, pulled through a tube and reassembled on the other side.
When his vision cleared, the sterile horror of the DMV was gone.
He was standing on a floor of polished marble so white it looked like a solidified cloud. The air was cool, crisp, and smelled of lilies and high-altitude wind.
He was in a cathedral, but that word felt too small. The ceiling arched miles above him, supported by pillars of gold and chrome that defied physics. Stained glass windows the size of skyscrapers depicted scenes of wars that hadn't happened yet.
Jude felt like an ant. A very small, very sad ant.
Towering above him was a crescent-shaped formation. Eleven podiums curved around the room, looming twenty feet in the air. Sitting in them were figures shrouded in heavy, shimmering robes, their faces hidden in shadow. They sat perfectly still, like statues, looking down at him.
But in the center, below the crescent, sat a throne.
It wasn't a chair; it was a throne made of woven gold and vines, sitting atop a flight of marble stairs.
And sitting in it was her.
She was ten feet tall, at minimum. She wore a white toga draped with a gold sash that seemed to shimmer with its own light. Her hair was a long waterfall of vibrant, beautiful white, spilling over her shoulders and down the back of the throne. Massive, feathery wings, pristine and white, stretched out from her back, spanning the width of the podiums above her.
She looked like a goddess. She looked terrifying.
Seraphile leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand. Her eyes were striking, gold irises that seemed to see right through Jude's skin and into his nervous system.
She didn't look benevolent. She looked like a CEO who had just found an accounting error in the quarterly budget.
"Welcome, Jude Miller," she said.
Her voice didn't boom. It didn't echo. It simply existed everywhere in the room at once, clear and authoritative. It was the voice of a woman who had never been interrupted in her life.
Jude stood there, his mouth slightly open, wearing his bloodstained hoodie and cheap jeans. He felt absurd.
"I..." Jude stammered.
Seraphile raised an eyebrow. It was a movement of pure, devastating elegance.
"Close your mouth, Jude," she said, her tone dry and unamused. "You're letting the draft in."