Death Co Re-Write (1)

This year for November Write a Novel Month (NanoWriMo), I've decided to re-wrtie one of my short stories in novel form. I'll post almost every day in November, so I apologize that these posts will be rough with very few edits. Let me know what you think of the content!

1. On the Business of Death

Job requirements: 1. Must be dead, they’re a real stickler for that one. While there are plenty of those among the living who fancy they could keep up with the pressure, no one has ever lasted longer than an eight hour workday. 2. Experience in the legal system is preferred. This regulation can be bent if the applicant is more of a “people person”. 3. Have to be desperate enough to live forever, but hopeless enough to spend a good chunk of that forever filing paperwork. 4. Must have a strong stomach. As you can imagine, this line of work can often get messy, and a queasy agent can make the first day a bit of a drag. Other than that, being an agent of death is very simple; Show up at the right place, at the wrong time, and bring back what the creator saw fit to throw down to the earth in the first place.

It all seems very poetic, and maybe it was at one point, but the truth of the matter is that time and explosive population growth have necessesitated that death become more of a business transaction than anything. It wasn’t always that way, and perhaps the origin of the corporation is the best place to start. Otherwise these might seem to be the half-drunk ramblings of a man on the edge of a psychotic break, which I can assure you that I am not. Everything bound between these pages of what I can only assume to be post-mortem trees (oddly appropriate) is factual.

Where to start. In the beginning there was only one. A man rode through the sands of time and across the bleak and barren earth on a pale horse named Buttercup, collecting the souls of the nearly-human race. He was a strong silent type, mostly because he hadn’t developed the ability to talk as an early Cro-Magnon man. His name was Ug, and he was the first man to take up the mantle of Death.

The story of how he came about the position is actually quite tragic. He was out for a hunt with a group of what he would have described as “Ugs”, but what we describe as compatriots, when an accident befell him. They were busy hunting the great wooly mammoth to extinction, a noble endeavor as those creatures stunk to high heaven (I’ve visited the petting zoo in high heaven, and you can smell them for miles), when everything went tits up.

The hunts thathe engaged in were a simple affair. Find a group of suitable prey near a very high ledge, run them off, and collect the bloody mass of steak that piled up at the bottom. Unfortunately for Ug, he had forgotten to tie the primitive straps on his loin cloth well that morning, and as he was running, their flapping skin caught on the tusk of the very mammoth he was attempting to drive over a cliff. The mammoth roared victoriously at the thought of snaring the hunter, and turning around what had been a life-long struggle between their races, but all was not well. As the mammoth roared, he also realized that the ground below him no longer existed. He tried to run midair, much like the cartoons that would become popular millennia after the extinction of his species, and plummeted to the earth, taking Ug with him.

For Ug, the moment was full of vicious hand waving, and guttural shouts that no doubt would have been offensive, if he had possessed the capability to produce language. Instead, his promethean questioning of the creator was limited to nonsensical gibberish, cut short by the sound of meat colliding with the sharp stones below. The pain Ug felt was immense, but for some reason unbeknownst to him, he survived.

Well, survived is a rather strong word. Ug continued to exist, rather than transcending into ethereal dust like so many who had come before them. From the pile of mammoth carcass and blood, Ug stared into the sky, understanding for the first time in the history of the world what it was to question one’s creator. Luckily for him (depending on how you look at it), God was having a slow day, and managed to catch Ug’s death on what can only be described as an omnipotent television set. Something about the undying nature of the puny caveman brought pity to his heart (not a common thing, see Sodom and Gomorra).

Before that day there was no afterlife. Occasionally God and the devil would play games of dice with weather patterns and natural disasters, but didn’t pay much attention to what happened as a result. To be honest, before the days of man there wasn’t really much need for an afterlife, and God couldn’t be bothered to create one. He was tired after wiping out a large race of majestic lizards with a massive fireball.  So for the most part, heaven was a plane of existence with a large group of brontosauruses floating in confusion while still munching on their last pieces of prehistoric grass.

In any case, Ug was experiencing what could have been seen as deep, intellectual thought, for the first time. God wanted to reward his progress for the species, and took it upon himself to raise Ug from the pile of mammoth flesh, snap him back together in a way that was reminiscent of a Lego set, and then bestowed upon him the title of Death. He was given a spectral steed which he later named Buttercup, and at that moment, the position of Death was conceived.

After many sessions explaining to Ug what exactly the position entailed (he experienced deep thought once, but was easily prone to confusion and random acts of aggression), Ug agreed to take the position (or what can be seen as agreement when one can barely figure out the complex meaning behind a sandwich).

 God gave him a menacing scythe and a black cloak, and told him to ride around collecting the souls of the living as they died. For a while, this was a very simple task. Granted with heavenly speed and the gifts of eternal life, Ug and Buttercup rode through the ages, performing the task of death admirably. Many cultures began to develop rituals around their presence. The Romans would place coins on the eyes of the dead, which Ug would take, because he was fond of things that were shiny, Egyptians engaged in the process of mummification, which Ug greatly appreciated as it cut down on the smell factor, and the Catholics put their dead in wooden boxes, which Ug found very hard to open, and thus mostly ignored.

In any case, Ug grew to enjoy the job of death. As time passed, he developed a rather macabre sense of humor about the whole thing, and found that he was experiencing something close to satisfaction. This changed abruptly as the world’s populations began to skyrocket. Even with his powers, the daily death toll began to overwhelm him, and many souls ended up floating aimlessly, forming balls of aggravated corpses, which can only be described as both unpleasant, and scientifically mind-boggling.

Several times Ug took these complaints to God, but found that he was busy, cooking up new religions, and making Sunday bets with the devil. He had also become rather absorbed in a book some mortals had taken to writing called The Bible, which he found rather long, but also appealing as he was featured as a main character. These absorptions stopped him from aiding Ug, and on a crisp autumn evening, during the fall of the Roman Empire, Ug impaled himself on a Centurion lance, and made an end of it.

Or so he thought. The process of double-death, while messy, does not actually result in the death of the party, doing the double-deathing (confused? So were the scribes who wrote the bylaws, but that’s politics). Once again, Ug felt the cold embrace of death, but did not die, and did not pass on. Instead, he passed out, and came to at the end of what was one of the bloodiest battles of the ancient world. The great pain in his chest assured him that he was still living (pardon the term, but I’m going to continue using it), but the pile of entrails on the ground made him feel as though he should have been dead.

Only after 10 days of lying on the battlefield, morose and moping about the situation, did God come down to intervene. I can’t speak as to the exact nature of the conversation, but suffice it to say, he was pissed. Puragatory had long since overflown, and with the sudden rush of Greek and Roman soldiers who had insisted on bringing their weapons, the balls of corpses were quite pointy, and even more unpleasant than before. God expressed his displeasure, and cast Ug down to the deepest pits of hell, where he mostly drank lite beer and swapped stories with The Prince of Darkness.

In a consultation with the High Angels, it was decided that one person was no longer enough to fill the role of death. They settled on five, which was a good, solid, prime number, but this only lasted a couple more centuries. At present, we receive about 155,000 souls a day. Each comes through the door kicking, screaming, and pleading for their life back. It takes quite the staff to get the job done, and needless to say, there’s a lot more than five to do it.

After years of budget cuts, heavenly reorganization, and observation of human workspaces, the corporation known as Death was founded. It was meant to be an organization ran by the deceased, for the deceased, but in the end, it really comes down to a bunch of sods who weren’t done living, and loved power overwhelming. The first candidates were psychologists, as it was thought that their empathic nature would make them the best at dealing with death’s accompanying emotions. They spent far too much time talking with death, found themselves behind schedule, and as a result on the express train to Hell (yes, they built an express train, the people in HR thought a train seemed less threatening and more cos-effective).

In the end, Death Co. settled upon lawyers. A breed of lawless human beings with no moral code, and a strict adherence to misinterpretation of rules written by old white men on paper. This translated well to heavenly edicts, as loopholes were rampant, and judgement often required complex legal processes that had to be completed before the plaintiff managed to rot all the way from the inside out.

It wasn’t a glamorous job, but to a young civil advocate of 29, who had met what some would call an untimely demise, it seemed like the golden opportunity. When I opened my eyes for the first time to the grimy, grey walls of the corporations processing department, I knew I had found a home. My name is Jon, I’ve been dead for twenty years, and I specialize in soul requisition. My business is death, and business is good.