Eearly Departure

“Look! Footprints!”

Asmodeus sauntered around the girl’s body, landing lightly on one foot, then the other.

“Yeah, that’s great, Ash, now we should-“

“Oh you won’t believe it! Nomi, you won’t believe it! Are you ready?”

“They’re not the girl’s-“

“They’re not the girls! They’re too big!”

Euronymous pulled at his collar. These shirts made his second head itch and he could hear it growling from where he’d tucked it away. With a touch of witchcraft and a hint of human stupidity, it could easily be mistaken for a hunchback, even though Euronymous stood upright and much taller than most humans.

“Oooh they must be a man’s! Do you think she was having an affair? Or was she too young? It’s hard to say!”

“Raise her soul and ask her.”

“No, no, that’s cheating!”

“C’mon, Ash, I don’t have time for this.”

Ignoring his brother’s desperate “no, no, no, wait!”, Euronymous waved his hand and watched the girl’s soul get to its feet. It looked misty and almost immaterial in the human world, but it would get some shape once it crossed the gates of hell. It knew it was dead, but it still clung to hope that it might not be, as human souls often did. It was so annoying.

“Morning, kid. You are now officially deceased-“

“Kid?” the soul protested. “I’m sixty-seven!”

Euronymous sputtered a laugh with the arrogance that only a being that had seen several millennia go by could master. “Oh, how precious! You are Ethel Lea Bram, of Barry, Ontario, born 1955?”

“Yes.”

“And you made a deal for, uh…” Euronymous flipped through the pages on his enormous register. “For… ‘the death of that bitch, Carol Lee, and her disgusting pies’ in exchange for 100 years of hellish servitude?”

The soul’s misty eyes blinked slowly at Euronymous.

“…No?”

“Nice try. This is my brother, Asmodeus, and he’s going to get you to where you gotta-“

“How did you die?”

Ethel’s soul stared at Asmodeus with large eyes that were drained of any color but were still expressive enough that they would convey panic as needed.

“Ash, you’re standing too close and you’re freaking the deceased out.”

Asmodeus had two rows of teeth that he sharpened every other decade so that they glinted under the moonlight. His girlfriend loved it, but Euronymous just found it unnecessarily vain and quite detrimental to his job. No dead person wanted to look at sharp teeth after death. If he could tuck his second head away for efficiency's sake, Asmodeus could damn well stop smiling.

“Is he going to eat me?” Ethel asked and, oh no! It seemed like this one was on the verge of tears. Euronymous hated when they cried. It attracted so much attention on their way down and it made them both look like idiots - and idiots don’t get promoted to managerial roles.

“No, of course not! Ash, take a step back!”

Asmodeus did so, but his bright, white eyes kept staring at Ethel. “Was it stabbing? It looks like stabbing.”

“Oh lord!” Ethel's soul cried out and, yup, here came the waterworks. “Oh, good lord! What is he going to do to me?”

“Ash, stop smiling! And you!” Euronymous pointed a finger at the soul. “Stop being so dramatic. We stopped raking humans ‘cross the coals millennia ago.”

“You’re gonna rake me across hot coals?” Ethel shrieked.

Fucking humanity! Their poor listening skills and loud emotions never stopped baffling him.

“As I just said, we no longer do that. You’ll probably be stuck on a desk job, filling out paperwork for fifty years. Maybe you’ll feed the beasts of hell for another fifty, if they’re short-staffed- And by that, I mean, literally feeding them,” Euronymous added when Ethel let out a wail. “With food. There will be an orientation video on your way down.”

Euronymous snapped his fingers at Asmodeus, who took his queue and opened a portal to a yellow-brick road lined with dead flowers. HR had decided to make the path a little cuter in recent centuries. They found the absence of fiery pits and dangling chains caused humans to scream less.

Ethel’s soul looked back. Euronymous nodded forward dismissively and went back to placing check marks on his book.

Asmodeus rested his arms on top of the portal and looked down at Ethel. At least this time, he made sure not to show his teeth when he smiled. There was nothing he could do about the hollow cheeks and the white eyes, which gave his face a skull-like appearance that almost caught the attention of the living when they walked the Earth.

“Can I ask a question before you go?” he asked Ethel’s soul. It looked up at him, likely glad to delay the torments of desk duty for another minute. Euronymous couldn’t blame the little soul. A century of filing old reports was the worst kind of torture hell had ever invented. Asmodeus continued, “Those are stab wounds, right?”

“Y-yes, I think so.”

Asmodeus snapped his fingers. “Oh, I knew it! I’m getting good at this, Nomi! And a man did it, right? I think it was because your males usually have large shoes.”

“I don’t know. I had my back to them.”

“No - way! Nomi, did you get that?”

“Hm-hm,” Euronymous hummed, absentmindedly.

Asmodeus pointed a long finger at Ethel’s body, now slumped in the middle of the living room.

“So you get home, and someone jumps out of the…” he looked around and chose a door to point to. “The closet, yes?”

“That’s the kitchen.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant to say, of course.”

“I think…” a little wrinkle formed on the nearly transparent forehead. “I think I was running… yes… yes, my feet hurt. I think I was running before they jumped on me and… well…”

It looked at the empty vessel on the floor that it had once inhabited. Asmodeus lacked the emotional complexity to understand the feeling of being confronted with the absolute nothingness of your own existence, so he didn’t even worry about offering comforting words. Instead, he grinned widely at his brother.

“This one is so cool, Nomi. Someone was chasing the kid around this puny apartment, but she didn’t even see them? Insane!”

Ethel looked at Asmodeus’ grinning face.

“Can… can I ask a question?”

“Yeah, sure, anything! You’ve made my day, kid!”

“What is the meaning of life?”

“Oh! Oh, that question… uh…”

“Oh, for fuck sakes!”

Euronymous waved a hand and sent Ethel’s soul spinning down the yellow-brick road. Asmodeus closed the portal.

“Always with the meaning of life!” Euronymous said.

“Yeah, that one is tricky.”

“There’s nothing tricky about it. You’re born. You fuck. You die. What else do they want? I swear, Ash, there’s something very wrong with humans.”

“Yes, yes, but Nomi...”

“No…”

“Nomi, it’s a murder mystery!”

“Not this again.”

Euronymous’ second head peeked over the collar to growl at Asmodeus, fangs bare and center-forehead eye glinting dangerously.

“She had her back to her attacker! We can go look for them!”

“Why?”

“For fun, of course!”

“That’s not fun! That’s a waste of corporate time.”

“But-“

“Ash, what are we?”

Asmodeus sighed.

“I’m waiting.”

“Rippers of the Debt Collection Office.”

“Precisely. And I am…“

“The Book Keeper.”

“And you are?”

“Bored.”

Euronymous glared at him. “Try again.”

“The Portal Keeper, I guess.”

“Precisely. Without us, souls can’t get to hell and they might end up stuck on Earth, and that would be an absolute waste of a pretty good resource, wouldn’t you say?”

Asmodeus grimaced, but he didn’t say anything. Souls were cheap office labor and they were good to keep things efficient and tidy. Besides, sometimes you could jump from under their desks and watch them scream. It was amusing, the first seventy times you did it.

“Fine… let’s go back to the office,” Asmodeus said, flexing his fingers to call another portal.

Euronymous’ second head nudged him under the chin to make way as it popped free of the tight polo shirt. Euronymous brushed locks of blue-ish black hair away from his eye, then turned his first head back to the book. This one had two eyes and a very thin nose that didn’t get in the way of reading. It also had a smaller mouth that wasn’t busy with fangs and was able to form words that humans understood.

“Great, can’t wait to clock out- ooh, shit. We’ve got another one.” Euronymous frowned. His second head, while intellectually challenged, was smart enough to know something was wrong and it peeked at the page though it didn't know how to read. “That’s… curious.”

Asmodeus interrupted the portal before it could be fully formed. “Did you say something is curious?”

Euronymous’ didn't care for curiosity. While Asmodeus was the kind of demon who’d cannonball into the caldera of a volcano just to see how hot it was, Euronymous was utterly unimpressed with anything. This time, though, he was sneaking his third arm out of his shirt just so he could scratch both heads at the same time.

“How old was the kid again?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“We collected her twelve years before their time.”

Asmodeus shrugged. “It happens. Humans can’t be on time to save their lives. Quite literally, in this case.”

Euronymous held up the book so his brother could see the name that had just been written in blood on the top of the page.

“We just got another early collection come in. Twelve years too early.”

Asmodeus took the book from his brother to be able to read the information taking form on the page. The sun was coming up and his eyes were almost useless during the day.

“That’s odd.”

“Yes. I’ll make a note of it to show Shaitan when we get back.”

Euronymous reached out for the book, but Asmodeus took a step back.

“Ash?”

“It’s two blocks from here.”

“What?”

“The soul we have to collect. It’s only two blocks away.”

He looked up with a bright spark in his eyes that Euronymous had long learned to associate with bad decisions.

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s gotta be connected!”

“Ash! No! We’re going back to the office and then Shaitan can look into it. This is way above my paycheck.”

“Or we could-“

“No.”

“But we’re already-“

“No.”

“And if we-“

“No.” Euronymous extended his three hands. “Now, give me back my book and get us home.”

Asmodeus sighed. Reluctantly, he snapped his fingers and a large circle opened up behind him.

“Thank you! Now the book, please-“

Euronymous’ second head growled. When he looked at its one eye, he understood what it was trying to say.

That’s not Hell.

No, no, that portal was still Barry, Ontario, which some people would say was equally bad.

And Asmodeus was already giving his brother the finger and diving back into the portal, Euronymous' precious, company-issued book of records in hand.

And then the portal closed.

For a good thirty seconds, Euronymous was too stunned to say anything and his second head was too stunned to make a sound.

Finally, he managed a pathetic little whine, like a human child whose favorite doll had just been stolen by a big, bad bully.

“He took my book.”

His second head managed a growl, but even that felt forlorn and depressed.

Both heads stared at each other, one thinking about just how much trouble they were in, and the other wondering what Asmodeus would taste like when they finally caught up with him. Defeated, both heads let out a sigh and Euronymous started the short walk two blocks down.

They would both get fired that night. He just knew it.

----

Story 1 of the Roll for Plot Challenge.

Genre: Crime

Trope: Survival Situations

Main Character: A Demon Who’s Just Had Enough of Everything