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 haven't been changed in a decade.
Jude opened his eyes.
He braced for pain. The crushing headache, the sticky warmth of blood, the cold tile of the gas station floor. The shouting robbers, the wail of an ambulance.
Instead, he was blinded by aggressive, sanitized whiteness.
Jude squinted, shielding his eyes. He was sitting in a chair—hard, molded plastic, bolted to the floor, designed with what seemed like malicious intent to be as uncomfortable as possible.
He blinked, vision adjusting.
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 until they vanished into a foggy white horizon. To his right, the same. The ceiling was a flat, featureless expanse broken only by endless rows of flickering tube lights.
"What the hell?" Jude whispered. His voice sounded small, swallowed by the acoustic deadness of the space.
He looked down. He was holding a slip of paper—thin, flimsy receipt paper, the kind you get at a deli counter.
TICKET NO: 84,209,112-BESTIMATED WAIT TIME: [1,892 YEARS]
Jude stared at the number.
So this is it, he thought. This is what's on the other side of the exit sign. A fucking waiting room.
He looked around, trying to find a wall, a door, anything to anchor himself.
That's when he noticed the people.
Sitting directly to his left was a man in full plate armor. Not a costume—real, dented, blood-stained steel. The knight was slumped forward, helmet resting on his knees, tapping a gauntleted finger against the armrest. Clink. Clink. Clink.
To the knight's left sat a woman with a massive blowout hairdo, smoking a cigarette that produced no smoke. She was reading Better Homes and Gardens: July 1962.
Jude turned right. A man with a sloping forehead and thick brow ridge—an actual Neanderthal—was picking lice out of a beard that reached his knees. Next to him, a guy in faded jeans and frosted tips was playing a GameBoy Color.
Is this… Heaven?
If this was Heaven, God had a terrible interior decorator. It looked like the DMV, but infinite.
BING-BONG.
A generic chime from an unseen speaker.
"NOW SERVING: TICKET 84,209,112-B."
The voice was robotic, bored.
Jude froze. He looked at his ticket. He looked at the infinite sea of people stretching for miles. The knight let out a metallic groan.
"Oh, come on!" A Victorian chimney sweep in the row ahead threw 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 burning into him. Jealousy. Rage. Exhaustion.
"TICKET 84,209,112-B. PLEASE APPROACH COUNTER 1."
Jude stood. His legs felt like jelly. He shuffled past the Neanderthal, who grunted and pulled his legs back.
"Sorry," Jude mumbled. "Excuse me."
He walked down the central aisle. The floor was linoleum, patterned with depressing grey specks like 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. Middle-aged, balding, comb-over that wasn't fooling anyone, mustache thick enough to scrub pots. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie that stopped halfway down his stomach.
Jude sat in the single chair provided.
The man didn't look up. He was furiously stamping papers. Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Name?" His voice was fast, nasal, like he was trying to sell Jude a used car with 200,000 miles.
"Uh… Jude. Jude Miller."
"Jude Miller. Right. Gotcha here." The man grabbed a file, licked his thumb, flipped it open. "Philly kid. Gunshot wound to the head region. Ouch. Rough way to check out. 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.
Two tiny, feathery wings protruded from his cheap dress shirt. Pathetic things, 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. "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. All teeth, no warmth.
"And looking at your credit score? I'm guessing the second one."
"I'm not dead," Jude said, the words spilling out. He gripped the desk, knuckles white. "This is a coma. Or a dream. Or some kind of prank show."
Bob sighed, long and deflating. He took another sip of coffee.
"Denial." He checked a box on the form with a red pen. "Right on schedule. Look, kid, I don't know what to tell you. The body's a biological machine. Yours? Engine block cracked. Leaked oil everywhere. Totaled."
"I felt the bullet," Jude argued. "It hurt."
"Yeah, dying usually does. Design flaw. We've sent memos to management, but…" Bob shrugged, tiny wings giving a pathetic flap. "The suggestion box looks an awful lot like a trash can."
"I want to go back." The words came out before Jude could stop them. "I have to go back."
Bob stopped writing. He lowered his pen slowly, resting his chin on clasped hands. The sleazy demeanor dropped for a fraction of a second, replaced by a cold, penetrating stare.
"Do you?"
Jude blinked. "What?"
"Do you really want to go back?" Bob tapped the file. "I'm looking at your transcripts, kid. 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's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"You stood in front of a gun," Bob said, 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."
The coldness in Jude's chest returned. The same coldness from the gas station floor.
He's right, the voice whispered. You wanted out. You got out. Why would you go back to the cage?
Jude slumped in the plastic chair. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
"I…" he started.
"Exactly," Bob said, the mask sliding back. 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's backed up. Too many wars, not enough clerks. But you? You got the VIP pass."
Bob reached under the desk and pressed a button.
The air behind him rippled. The bland white wall tore like wet paper, revealing a swirling vortex of gold and soft blue light. It hummed with power that made the hair on Jude's arms stand up.
"Where am I going?" Jude asked, staring at the portal.
"Upstairs. The Penthouse. The Boardroom. The Big Show."
"I'm meeting…" Jude swallowed. "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's away."
Bob pointed his pen at the vortex. "In you go, kid. Don't keep them waiting. They get cranky."
Jude stood. His legs felt like lead. He walked around the desk toward the portal, the hum growing louder.
Every instinct told him this wasn't real. That it was a sick dream. That he could just wake up.
"I can't do this," he whispered, starting to turn back.
"Kid."
The voice was different. The manic energy was gone. It had dropped an octave. It sounded tired. Human.
Jude turned. Bob wasn't stamping papers. He wasn't fluttering his wings. He was leaning back, hands clasped, looking at Jude with strange, sad respect.
"I was an actuary. In 1984. Spent forty years predicting risk, avoiding danger, making sure nothing bad ever happened to me. Then I choked on a ham sandwich in the breakroom."
Bob rubbed 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."
He pointed a finger at Jude. 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 slowly.
"Thanks, Bob."
Bob's mask snapped back, 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 the 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 polished marble so white it looked like solidified cloud. The air was cool, crisp, smelling 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. Figures sat in them, shrouded in heavy, shimmering robes, faces hidden in shadow. Perfectly still. Looking down at him.
But in the center, below the crescent, sat a throne.
Not a chair—a throne of woven gold and vines, atop a flight of marble stairs.
And sitting in it was her.
Ten feet tall, minimum. A white toga draped with a gold sash that shimmered with its own light. Hair like a waterfall of vibrant white, spilling over her shoulders and down the throne. Massive wings, pristine and feathered, stretched from her back, spanning the width of the podiums.
She looked like a goddess. She looked terrifying.
Seraphile leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand. Her eyes were gold irises that seemed to see 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 or echo. It simply existed everywhere at once, clear and authoritative. The voice of someone who had never been interrupted.
Jude stood there, mouth slightly open, wearing his bloodstained hoodie and cheap jeans. He felt absurd.
"I…" he stammered.
Seraphile raised an eyebrow. A movement of devastating elegance.
"Close your mouth, Jude. You're letting the draft in."