~~Young~~

Chapter Twenty

   “Uh…” Greed looked over his list, “I’ve got a man that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got his ass blown to pieces by a car bomb.”

   “Nah,” Gage shook his head, “Lucifer had a woman in his chambers the other day and he usually binges for a while on one or the other. How about suicides?”

   “Suicides, suicides…” Greed mused, “I’ve got about…thirty of them.”

   Thirty? There were thirty suicides in this one chamber? To Gage that seemed like an awfully high number considering how regularly the souls were marched out. It didn’t do anyone any good to just leave them in here to commiserate.

    Gage ran a hand down his face with a sigh. This was turning out to be a lot more work than he expected. At any moment the Senator’s soul was going to drop in and he wanted to be out of here before then, just in case he had some coherency and recognized him. “Can you get them in a group for me?”

   “Sure,” the demon agreed cheerfully and gave a whistle towards the ceiling.

   In response two ghostly blue hands dropped out of the walls, their palms opening towards Greed awaiting their orders. They were the other reason no one escaped this chamber despite the gaping hole in the ceiling, anyone even attempting to climb the slick surfaces was struck down by their massive forms. Each hand was twice as tall as Gage without the claws at the end.

   They were the hands that collected the souls as they were dropped off to Hell’s gates. Without them the souls simply dropped from the top of the pit, landing with a thud one atop the other on the chamber’s floor.

   “Suicides,” Greed ordered them, “make a pile in front of us.”

   They pressed themselves together for a moment and then flew around the chamber picking up bodies at random intervals. Several let out cries as they were yanked by arms, legs, even heads off the floor and dropped in front of Gage, others because they were knocked around in the hand’s search. A moment later there was a large group of naked bodies in front of them…it was a start…

   “Back to the hole,” Greed jerked his head to them before turning back to Gage, “there you go brother, thirty one suicides.”

   “Thirty-one?”

   “Yeah, another one just dropped in,” he said casually, “I gotta get back to work, just let me know which one you’re taking that way I can cross them off the list. Don’t need to make that rumor seem true now do we?”

   “Uh…no, think I’ll skip that."

   He strolled through the lucid and semi-lucid souls, quickly thinning out the men, then the older set. He must have discarded twenty of them in the first ten seconds.

   “Not finding what you’re looking for?” Greed shouted over to him.

   “Not yet,” Gage threw back, “I was hoping for something a little more…young.”

   “There’s a couple in the back,” he offered, “if they don’t work I’m sure you won’t have to wait long for some new ones.”

   “Thanks,” Gage called and pushed aside another soul. Just then he caught a glimpse of some very familiar yellow gold hair, a little reddish actually and it stood out in this dull world. He pushed through the remaining souls and grabbed the girl, “Lizzy,” he whispered to her, “Lizzy its Gage. The man who stopped you’re torture, do you remember me?”

   She merely stared at him with a pinched brow, as if she couldn’t even understand his words. Okay, so she wasn’t with it yet, but maybe that was okay. It was probably better if she didn’t recognize him from earth. That way if anyone stopped them for questioning they wouldn’t know their connection.