The last thing I remembered before I was standing in a supremely long line was the headlights of the semi that ran a red light and subsequently hit me as it turned a corner illegally. I didn’t feel anything, thankfully, but that didn’t change the fact that I was dead. In fact, the pain of having to wait in a line for at least three hours so far was making me wish I’d felt every moment of the semi’s wheels going over me.

Now that I thought of it, I wondered what my corpse looked like. Probably ground beef chuck.

I looked at my watch for about the fiftieth time and saw that three hours was about right. I’d been run over at noon, and it was now three twenty-six. I looked at the line ahead of me and saw that it really hadn’t shrank in any way since I got there. In fact, there was now a line just as long behind me. I guess those “someone dies of this every yadda yadda” commercials on TV weren’t as off as I thought they were.

“How long you been here?” somebody behind me asked. I turned around to see a woman who appeared to be in her sixties and probably smoked her whole life.

“Three hours,” I said.

She coughed. “What killed ya?”

“Semi. You?”

“Lung cancer.”

I couldn’t say I was surprised. I tapped the shoulder of the man in front of me, looked like a soldier. “How long have you been here?” I asked him.

He looked at a watch that I swear had six smaller watches inside it. “A couple days. Got taken out by ISIS on the Iran border.”

“A couple days? Has the line moved since you got here?”

He shook his head. “There’s a pool going on how long the line will get before the guy in front actually gets accepted somewhere.”

I sighed. I couldn’t believe the afterlife was so goddamned boring. If I’d known it was nothing but standing in line, I woulda actually listened to that wiccan cult girl I tried hitting on at the library who was talking about living forever. Maybe if I’d gone along with it, I coulda gotten up from that hit and run and been just fine.

The wait kept up for six more hours before something happened. Good thing I didn't seem to be getting tired in limbo, because otherwise the wait and the fatigue would be killing me. At present it was just the wait and god only knew if I could actually die of boredom waiting to find out if I belonged in Heaven, Hell, Valhalla or any of the other holy lands or places of damnation I saw in the complimentary brochure.

An angel walked into the room with a clipboard under his arm. He didn’t look too happy to be there, and appeared to want to blow his brains out with a gun if he had one. “Good… Whatever time it is in relation to when you died. Some of you, it’s morning, others not.” He pulled the clipboard out from under his arm. “My name is Hadraniel, I’m supposed to be the keeper of the Second Gate, and your holy books describe me as being insanely tall, but those reports are clearly exaggerated as you can see.” His voice reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t quite place it. “Over the next few hours, you’ll be given tags with your number on them, you’ll be given access to Mobil Avenue where you can at least have something similar to fun.” He yawned. “I won’t speak for any of you, but I know standing in this line can be a pain in the arse.”

After another thirty minutes, another angel came up to me and handed me a piece of paper with “572,804,178,209” printed on it. If that was how many people were waiting ahead of me, I was worried for the people behind me. Limbo was a really, really fucked up place.

The gate to “Mobil Avenue” wasn’t much easier to get through, though it was faster. I was only waiting there for a little over two hours. At some point, I wondered why there was actual time in limbo, but my mind only came up with so many answers that all pointed back to “For the sake of the people who come here.”

I passed a bar called Heaven is the Head that Wears the Crown, adorned with a cartoony image of the standard look for God drinking out of two mugs. I wondered briefly if limbo had the same age restrictions for bars that Earth did, then I decided that it really shouldn’t matter. I pushed the door open and walked inside.

The bar looked like it crawled out of a western fan’s wet dreams. There was a piano, a couple card tables, a simple bar with a myriad of drinks behind it, all of it was wood, and there didn’t look like one person who actually belonged in a wild west saloon. In fact, at least a couple angels were there, drowning their sorrows. The idea of that sounded funny to me.

I walked up to the bar and sat down on one of the stools. The bartender didn’t walk over to me, didn’t do anything aside from shine the glasses and mugs. I sighed. Of course nobody was paying attention, I was number whatever-the-fuck billion.

Hadraniel sat down beside me and waved the bartender over. “I’ll take a vodka cocktail, mix it with whatever you want, Harut.” He turned to me. “What are you drinking, kid?”

“Nothing. Just got here.”

He turned back to the bartender. “Get him one, too.” Back to me. “How long have you been waiting?”

“A few hours. Well, half a day or so.”

“What happened to you?”

“Run down by a semi that ran a red light.”

The drinks arrived. Hadraniel took his and spun around. “Five-eight-three, nine-nine-oh, six-one-one, eight-two-four?” he asked, addressing someone in the bar. Same amount of numbers as mine, but off by about eleven billion. A man raised his hand, then went back to doing whatever he was doing. “That’s the man that ran you over. Died of internal bleeding, massive head trauma and liver failure brought on by driving under the influence and a history of severe drinking.” He spun back around to the bar. “Happened about four hours after he hit you. Bloody painful, too.”

I took a slow sip of the vodka mix. “So…”

“So, maybe the two of you could bond over the experience. Or, maybe he’ll just a little angry at you because you stepped in front of his tanker while he was drinking.”

“He’ll be angry?”

“He swerved to miss you just after he killed you.” He took a long drink. “Ran into a condemned building and killed a few stray cats on his way in.”

“I still don’t see why he should be angry instead of me.”

Hadraniel laughed. “Oh, he shouldn’t be. He’s already on his way to Hell for beating three of his ex-wives to death. He was married to two of them at the same time and they both found out about the other.”

I took a little longer drink. “How do you know all that?”

“I’m an angel, mate, I’m supposed to know this sort of thing.” He set the glass back down on the bar and waited for Harut to pour him another. Mine still wasn’t even half empty. “God doesn’t pay me to slouch on my job.”

“God pays you?”

“No. But I always get that response.” His glass was returned to him full and he downed the whole thing in an instant. “Go ahead and have as many of those as you want. Humans don’t get drunk here, but we bloody angels do.” He got up from his seat and stumbled his way to the door.

---

Mobil Avenue was nothing short of a large city filled with people who were waiting to go somewhere. After I left the bar, I wandered past every number of building from grocery stores to hotels to porno shops to libraries to a movie theater showing whatever you ask them to when you walk in. All of it free, because there didn’t appear to be any currency in Mobil. At least none that humans were allowed to have, and based on Hadraniel, angels didn’t have any either.

I didn’t really stop anywhere, because I really didn’t want to stop anywhere. There were people everywhere, all of them doing what they were enjoying and then some. Some people were having sex right out in the open, but I guess what with this being the last place they could enjoy carnal sin before being judged for their carnal sin, they wanted every last moment they could get.

I looked at my watch and realized it had been almost twelve hours since I left the bar. Time seemed to slip by as you walked around an almost endless city full of people. That brought to mind the actual number I’d gotten. There were only seven billion people on Earth, and I highly doubted five-hundred something billion had died since the dawn of time. I wondered if things like unborn children (either abortions or just miscarriages and such) were counted as well, or if the number was just arbitrary and they wanted it to look larger than the actual number of people currently waiting in limbo.

I walked into a tunnel that looked large enough to fit a submarine in. The place wasn't lit very well and didn't look all that inviting, a far cry from the rest of Mobil Avenue. I went to pull my phone out of my pocket to use it as a flashlight before I remembered that aside from the clothes I was wearing and the watch I had on, I didn’t have anything from when I was alive. I instead kept to the wall and made my way further in.

The tunnel went on for miles and miles, for hours and hours. I finally found something other than more wall about six hours and god only knew how many miles later. This no fatigue in limbo thing was really coming in handy.

The thing I found was a doorknob. In the piss poor light, I could see that there was an “R” engraved in the door. I stood in front of it for a little while debating whether or not I should open it before I finally decided that I had nothing better to do while I waited for my number to be called, so I reached for the doorknob and turned it.

The room beyond was a lounge style room with a fireplace on the wall opposite the door, a couch and coffee table in the center facing a TV hanging above the fireplace, what looked like three changing rooms on the wall to the left of the door and across from those was a simple desk with a simple chair. There was a chandelier hanging above the coffee table and couch, and a scythe hanging on the wall above the changing rooms.

I walked into the room and looked around. It was pleasantly lighted, despite no one being in the room. Then again, magic electricity was all the rage in limbo, it seemed. I looked up at the scythe on the wall and vaguely wondered if this was where Death spent his time relaxing. The idea of a skeleton in a cloak just chilling on the couch and watching TV was amusing to me.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” someone behind me said. I spun around to see a smiling cute girl in classic secretary garb standing there. Then I noticed she had horns. Then I noticed that she was about four feet taller than me, and I’d hit six foot before my sixteenth birthday, which was actually two weeks away. “I’m Wendi, I’m your secretary.”

“Muh… My secretary?”

“Oh, that’s right, you probably don’t know yet.” She walked over to me and ushered me into one of the changing rooms. “Just put on your cloak and come back out, I’ll have all the information ready for you to look over.”

I saw the cloak hanging on a hook. My reflection looked a thousand percent confused and I was basically on autopilot as I reached for the hook and pulled it down. I didn’t take my clothes off as I slipped the cloak over my head and slid my arms into the sleeves. I popped my head through the neck hole and the reflection made me do a double take.

Standing where I had been standing was a girl my age, a good seven inches shorter. Her face was the picture of adorable, high cheekbones, a small nose, large eyes and a cute little mouth. Her chin-length hair was pure pink, like a dye job gone outrageously wrong. I could see the cloak pressing outward where her breasts were, and though the cloak had been loose on me it was almost form-fitting for her, hugging her curves like a slightly larger second skin.

What scared me more was that when I looked down, I got the exact same image. From the point of view of the girl looking down at her body.

I backed into the door to the changing room and grasped for the handle to open it. I wanted away from that reflection, away from the room I’d stumbled upon in the tunnel, and away from Mobil Avenue. If I was to wait out in limbo for years, so be it, because I just wanted gone.

The door opened and Wendi grabbed me. She was taller now, almost absurdly so, and Hadraniel was standing in the corner. “You turned out better than I thought you would, ma’am,” Wendi said, then she let go of me. “Now, I’ve readied the paperwork for your transition to the job.”

“Job?” I asked. My voice sounded high-pitched and cute, and I hated it.

Hadraniel rolled his eyes. “Why did you even walk in here if you weren’t ready to take the job?”

“What job?!” I screamed.

Wendi handed me a stack of paperwork that already had my name on all the appropriate places. “You, Daniel McCallum, have just taken the position of Death. Shepherd of Lost Souls and Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

“Horseman of the Apocalypse?!”

She nodded. “It’s not something you’ll need to do in your lifetime on the job, but it is a part of the position.”

“But I didn’t… How did I take this job I didn’t know about?”

Hadraniel stepped closer. He looked younger than he was earlier, I swear. “You walked the tunnel and entered the room. Not anyone can do that, only someone innocent to the ways of death.”

“Is every Death a teenager?”

He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. The last one was, but I didn’t know him that long.”

“Was he a girl that became a guy by putting on the cloak?”

Wendi answered, “No. That’s a part of the Death Cycle. Each Death is the opposite gender from the last, it’s a system used to maintain balance. Some already are the gender of the current cycle, some aren’t.”

Hadraniel took a drink from a flask I didn’t notice he had on him. “Look, Danny, you’ve got the bloody job now, and we’ve already got your first assignment.”

“Assignment?” I asked.

“Yes. Lucky you, it’s your home town and you know him.” He handed me a file folder with a picture of my best friend, Kevin Sykes, on it. “Long story short, he’s been having a hard time recently and he wants to bow out the permanent way, if you catch my meaning.”

“Hard time?”

Wendi’s smile had faded. “Seems he lost his best friend a day or so ago, and he doesn’t know how to go on.”

I pointed at myself. “I’m his best friend!”

Hadraniel laughed. “Well then, you’ve got more experience with the assignment than I thought you did. Now, get your arse out there, follow the light in the tunnel and you’ll find yourself back on Earth. The boss expects him in a few hours unless you can convince him otherwise.” He put his hands on my shoulders and started pushing me out the door.

As I was being pushed, I asked, “Wait, convince him otherwise? Isn’t Death supposed to bring people here?”

Wendi shook her head. “Oh, no, ma’am, that’s only one of your services. Over the centuries, a number of Deaths have been able to guide people back to a path of life. You are the Shepherd of Lost Souls, after all.”

“Now,” Hadraniel said, “off you go and do your job while Wendi and I fill out all your bloody paperwork.”

The door to the “R” Room closed behind me and I was left in the tunnel. This time, however, a light appeared on the end that I hadn’t come from. I laughed at the idea of having to head for the light at the end of the tunnel, even as I worried about what I had to do.

Before I got too far, though, the door to the room opened again and the scythe over the changing room doors was thrown out to me. “For the boss’s sake, you tart, you forgot your bloody scythe!”

---

I followed the tunnel until I came out in the middle of the sidewalk downtown. None of the people walking around seemed to notice me that I’d just appeared out of thin air, and the world just kept on doing what it was doing. One guy even pushed me out of his way because I was just standing there. Yep, I was home, alright.

I remembered that I was wearing a cloak about two seconds after the guy pushed me. I looked down and saw that the cloak and my clothes had been replaced entirely. Instead of a cloak over a tee shirt and blue jeans and a pair of tennis shoes, I was now wearing a black hoodie with pink writing on it over a spaghetti strap top and a white frilly skirt and a pair of pink sandals. Instead of a scythe in my hands I was holding… A teddy bear. An evil-looking teddy bear, but a teddy bear nonetheless. I wondered if this was someone’s idea of a joke.

I stepped in front of a store and looked at my reflection in the window. I still had the pink hair, which wasn’t a surprise. The writing on the hoodie read “I Heart My Scythe”, only the heart and the scythe were art instead of words. I looked like the goofiest person imaginable, but I also looked like an average teenage girl, so I guessed that was something. Granted, I knew very few girls who carried their teddy bears with them, but I knew a few girls that still had teddy bears. Another one of my friends, Bella, collected the damn things.

I looked at my watch (which now had a cute bear-shaped face and the hands were scythes; they were taking this thing far too far) and saw that it was four fifty-two. If I was lucky, Kevin would be home right now. I had three miles to go and I didn’t want to waste a whole lot of time getting there. Naturally, I broke into a run.

(If anybody on the street thought it was weird that a pink-haired girl carrying a teddy bear was running at breakneck speed, they said nothing about it. And honestly, I should have been paying more attention to the cars I was bobbing between, but, what the hell, I’d already died once this week.)

I got to the bridge over Hodge’s River and stopped. Mostly because I was out of breath, because apparently grim reapers didn’t get infinite stamina. That made me think about whether or not I could get drunk now when I got back to Mobil Avenue. The other reason was because I didn’t need to go any further, Kevin was standing right in front of me.

“Oh… Thankgod… You’rehere…” I said through gasps for air.

He ran a hand through his mousey brown hair. “Do I know you?”

I was hunched over trying to catch my breath, so my bangs were in my eyes half the time. “Yeah… Youdo…”

He scratched at his chin. “Funny, I think I’d remember a cute girl with pink hair.” He moved around me. “Nice meeting you, but I’m a little busy.”

“I know you’re here to jump off the bridge…” I gasped out the end of it, but I’d mostly caught my breath.

He spun around. “How can you know that?”

I used the railing to help myself stand a little straighter, but I was still tired. “Look, Kev, you really shouldn’t do this.”

He reached for me and lifted my face up so that I could look him in the eye. “How do you know me?”

“What day is it?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“The twenty-third.”

“Oh… Good… It was yesterday…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Yesterday, Danny McCallum died when he was hit by a truck.”

“That was in the news, yes.”

“And you’re distraught because he was your best friend and you two had a whole career future planned after high school, you were gonna get into the graphic design business because he was good at marketing and you’re good at art.”

“Danny and I never talked about that to anyone, how can you know that?”

I held up one finger. I was insanely out of breath. “I know because I’m Danny!” I nearly shouted, though not loud enough for anybody around us to hear. “I died yesterday, and I walked around limbo for like twelve fucking hours, and I put on this stupid cloak and now I’m a grim reaper and You! Cannot! Kill Yourself! Because of Me!”

He just stood there staring at me, and then I fell down.