Where the Bodies Are Buried

By Aeryn Rudel

The angel was not what Jorge had always imagined. As a devout Catholic, he’d expected some beatific winged creature, maybe even Saint Peter himself. Instead, the being hovering before him was made up of scintillating lights, like a rainbow and a heat mirage combined. He’d also expected pearly gates, fluffy clouds, streets of gold. In short, heaven. Instead, he floated in a murky gray void, an endless nothing.

“Where am I?” Jorge asked.

“That’s difficult to explain,” the being said. Its voice was a soft, whispering tone, like wind through a tunnel. Not threatening but slightly unnerving.

“Are you an angel?”

“Uh, no,” the being said. “I’m a fifth-dimensional being with purview over your section of space-time. My official title is arbiter.

Jorge wasn’t exactly sure what that word meant. “So this isn’t heaven? Oh, god. . .Oh, no, am I . . am I in . . “ The thought was too awful to contemplate.

“Hell?” the arbiter finished for him. “No, no, no. That place doesn’t exist, just like the other place.”

“Heaven isn’t real?!” Terror gripped Jorge’s gut with icy fingers. He suddenly looked down and realized his body was intact. He still had a gut to be gripped with dread.

“Not in the sense you think,” the arbiter said. “But, hey, it’s not all bad news, right? There is something after death. You people are always wondering that. That’s gotta be reassuring.”

Jorge had gone to church every Sunday, taken communion, read the bible, and tried to live up to the tenets of his faith. Had he based his life entirely around a myth? The answer was anything but reassuring. “What happens now?”

“Well, that’s kind of a problem,” the arbiter said. That a creature composed of light and sound somehow managed to appear embarrassed was more than a little odd.

“A problem? Am I just going to float in this fucking place forever?” Jorge said, thinking that would be as close to hell as he could imagine.

“Not forever,” the arbiter replied. “This is just a waiting room of sorts. The place you go before, uh, the place you go.”

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry. I’m struggling to relay these concepts in a way a three-dimensional creature would understand.” A slight pause, and then. “No offense.”

Jorge was slightly offended, but he had bigger problems. “Where do I go then?”

“What normally happens is . . . damn, what’s a word you’d understand?” the arbiter paused, and the tinkling noise it made changed in pitch. “Oh, reincarnation!”

“Like Hindus believe?” The realization that he might have chosen the wrong religion hit Jorge like a battering ram.

“I’ll admit they got closer than most of you.”

“So I’m going to be reborn in another body.”

“That’s the general procedure, but, uh . . .”

“But not this time?” Jorge’s terror faded and irritation took its place.

“Usually the number of metamorphic essences–what you’d call souls–are about the same as the number of new humans produced.”

“Oh, shit, you don’t have enough bodies,” Jorge said, not bothering to hide his accusatory tone.

“Hey, you people have been killing each other a lot. Like, a lot. So, for the first time, the number of the dead has exceeded the number of new humans.” Again the being managed to convey an emotion. Defensive huffiness.

“So I am stuck here,” Jorge said. “No wonder no one worships you . . . things.”

“That’s not fair,” the arbiter said. “We’re not trying to get worshiped. We’re not gods; we just have a job to do. Okay, I mean, to you we would be gods, but we’re not whatever you people cooked up down there on that three-dimensional ant farm.”

“So you don’t have a body for me?”

“No, we do,” the arbiter said. “But we’ve had to get creative.”

Jorge did not like the word creative one bit.

So I can give you a choice,” the arbiter continued. “You can remain here and get on a waiting list for a new human or you can take what we have.”

“How long would I be on the waiting list?” Jorge asked.

“Uh, let’s see . . . about four hundred years.”

“Four hundred years! I’d go mad.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, that has happened.”

“Well, fuck that. I’ll take whatever body you have now,” Jorge said. He could make the best of it. Anything would be better than spending centuries in this void.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay then. Good luck.”

Jorge opened his eyes to pitch black. Had he gone from the void to someplace worse? Then he realized he could feel cushioned silk beneath him, and when he raised his arms, his hands brushed something hard and unyielding.

Oh, god, I’m in my coffin!

Terror gave him strength, unnatural and terrible. He drove his fists into the coffin lid. It splintered and burst open. A cascade of earth flowed in, and Jorge dug through it, frantically burrowing up through the dirt. It was only when he reached the surface, bursting through the sod into bright moonlight, that he realized he hadn’t needed to breathe during his escape.

He stood and glanced back at his gravestone. He wasn’t alone. People clawed themselves out of their own graves all across the cemetery.

Jorge looked down at his arms and hands. The skin was an awful shade of gray, and bits of the flesh were missing. How long had he been gone? He tried to speak, but all that came out was a low, throaty moan. That same moan echoed from a hundred throats across the cemetery.

His fear drained away and was replaced by a terrible hunger. Jorge found that he could speak one word as he shuffled away from his grave.

“Braaaaaains!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aeryn Rudel is a writer from Tacoma, Washington. He is the author of the baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, the Iron Kingdoms Acts of War novels, and the flash fiction collection Night Walk & Other Dark Paths. His short stories have appeared in Dark Matter Magazine, On Spec, and Pseudopod, among others. Aeryn is a heavy metal nerd, a baseball geek, and knows more about dinosaurs than is healthy or socially acceptable. Learn more about his work at www.rejectomancy.com or on Twitter @Aeryn_Rudel.