The Angels from Hell

Ala

Ala slunk down the corridor lined with lanterns that provided just enough light to be called lanterns rather than simply wall decorations. The building's infrastructure revolved around darkness. There were no windows and the smooth floor reflected nothing but blackness as if every step might cause someone to fall into the very void of space.

Turning a corner, she pushed through her office door and slumped into a chair. At least here she had privacy though she didn't think this office could be physically smaller than it already was. The entire wall in front of her was covered in screens. On one screen a twenty something woman was hanging out washing on a clothesline, on another an old man was yelling at a young boy.

She spun absentmindedly on the chair. So, Kell was leaving. There would be another manager who would be too loud, too quiet, too high strung or too relaxed. She should just go to bed.

Ala flicked open her workbook and scanned down the list. One hundred and eighty five thousand deaths today, a little higher than usual. The screens around her were constantly shifting to show new people, young and old from all around the world. The shouting man suddenly dropped down onto the ground and clutched at his chest. His eyes bulged and he spluttered something, sliding onto polished ceramic kitchen tiles. The boy rushed past him, nursing a cut on his lip as he fought to wrench the door of the house open. A dark shadow flitted over the old man's body and Ala watched the light in his eyes dim, his soul fade into the blackness. Ala felt a feeling of grim satisfaction. Another human to join the ranks of hell. She focused on the other screen, and she saw a man break burst through the door behind the woman hanging out washing, brandishing a gun. The woman shrunk back into the low garden fence and even though there was no sound, Ala read her lips, mouthing again and again "how did you find me." Ala swiped the screen back with two fingers and the scene reversed, the woman's face returning to a serene calmness, focussed only on the wet clothing in her hands. Again, Ala watched the man storm through the door, but she swiped the screen to the left before the gun went off. It shifted to show a toddler waddling unevenly towards an open pool gate. She swiped again and the suburban scenery darkened into a parched desert landscape. Under a bloody sky, a mother clutching a child to her chest. It was suckling at her exposed breast desperately, teering at the nipple. White light fluttered over the child's features, and it was still. Nothing out of the ordinary for now, the bad condemned to hell, the good to find peace in heaven, the world just as it should be.

The scene shifted again to a man lying on his apartment floor, bathed in shadows. Ala's eyes were drifting shut, pulled down by the weight of sheer exhaustion. In the sliver of her vision, the final rays of evening light momentarily lit up the apartment on the tiny screen. It filled the whole room with golden light and she was able to make out the man's face. Except, it was not a face. She sat up and zoomed in on the scene. Where a face should have been, there was instead a skeletal mask stripped of skin and flesh. Who was this? She scanned the books scattered around her for today's date and scanned down names of thousands of people, arranged in order of death. Ala had tracked Ava Nkosi's last days for a while and this person's name should be right after but after Nkosi was Lucas Davidson (car crash) and after that Sophie Dunkeshine (leukemia). He definitely wasn't Lucas who was now on a screen to her left, hospital heart monitors flatlining. Ala pressed herself closer to the screens when all the screens flickered and went blank. Damn it. Ala wacked the wall and about half of them grudgingly reactivated. Quickly, she moved forwards until her face was right up the small screen of the skeletal man and took in the drab apartment, peeling paint and water damage. She had studied everyone in the preceding days of death, prided herself in knowing everything about them. She did not know him.

There was knock on the door and she jumped.

"You coming, we're starting the party now to celebrate the boss retiring." Marla poked her head around the door. Ala faltered. If there was one thing hell did well it was parties. They were the one thing that demons never appeared to become bored of, even human punishment become old after a while. Ala looked at the screen where the nameless body was lying and shook her head slowly.