“Where the hell am I?” I said when I appeared in a very familiar harbor, yet different.
“Hey! No using that word unless in a proper noun!” yelled a tired-looking guard in a bright red uniform. “Say it three times wrongly and you will get shot in a non-vital spot which will make you suffer for the rest of your death.”
“First, I’m dead?!? Oh, wait… German… right… And second, what happens when you get shot in a vital spot?”
The guy looked like he had explained this many times. “Yes, you’re dead, and you get reincarnated as a mosquito. Did you know that all mosquitos are dead people from hell? Now stop talking to me, I’ve got work to do.”
There were millions of people crammed here in… Pearl Harbor! The sky was red, the water was red and there was a red fog, but it was still Pearl Harbor.
“Why are we in Pearl Harbor?” I asked another guard.
It’s a dead city. They maybe already rebuilding it thanks to the five-year-per-hour-time-shift-thing, but this version is dead. Give it a while, it’ll change.”
Shure enough, it changed into a Nazi occupied town.
. . .
People were disappearing and more were taking their place and within ten minutes, I was disappeared. I reappeared in a, what else, red office.
“Hey, hey, hey! You’re speaking to the big man himself! Weeeeelllll, his clone. I am the devil!” the devil looked like whatever you believe the devil looks like, in my case, Adolf Hitler. Who for some reason spoke a Texan English. “Ah, we all speak deamonese here,” he said reading my mind. Not seemingly, but actually reading my mind. “Now, what shall your endless punishment be? Aw, you’re a soldier. You are lucky. My deal with the saint of soldiers or, as you may know her, Joan of Arc, forbids me from giving you harsh punishment with unless you did something bad without orders.”
“Really? Even though I’m areligious, remind me to pray to her.”
“Yeah, right. Anyways, you can be a guard for them,” he pointed out the window to the people in the now-town-of-Stalingrad. “You can be a tormentor, or you can be a dǽmon.”
Demon sounded cool. “Demon. Make me a demon.” I decided.
“Whoa, wait a minute. It’s actually dǽmon but I guess demon works. Also dǽmon are the real me’s agents in the middle world. Sorry, your universe or earth. Not just anybody can be a dǽmon. I need to check your file. 263 killed including those in the 63 tanks. All right, you’re in. follow your guard.
Kinda strange having that conversation with Hitler, no?
