Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 27

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

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He opened his eyes when he smelled tea.

He looked beneath the branch he was sitting on and their was a man in a sort of floppy tweed suit sitting at a table with a white linen table cloth and a silver tea service and a plate of …cakes. It sounded like he was humming something….Rule Britannia?

Not being a person who practiced recklessness in strange situations, he decided to stay silent and bide his time. He would sit and wait and see what happened. Being mostly hidden from the ground by dint of sitting on top of a ridiculously fat Cedar branch, most likely the man below had know idea he was there.

“I know you are there.” said the man on the ground. “Would you care for some tea, or perhaps…some exercise?”

He swung down and walked up behind the man, whose body language surprisingly showed no fear of having someone behind him. As he walked by the man never turned his head, but instead, refilled his cup.

“Have a seat,” he said. “It’s Darjeeling. And do help yourself to the cakes.”

“Who are you, how did you know I was here, how did I get here….and, as long as we are on the subject…where is here?”

The tea was quite good.

“My name is Rogers, Mr. Rogers. This is what some call Heaven. But we who toil here prefer to call it AL for the…the After-Life. This section is colloquially known, much to the chagrin of the Higher Ups as, unfortuantely ‘The Happy Hunting Grounds,’ and was once a receiving center for Native Americans…and white people who had watched too many bad Westerns.”

He looked around at the valley covered in prairie grasses and rimmed with red Sandstone cliffs and pine trees and oaks and cedars, in all different sizes, and he saw deer and rabbits and pheasant and over where the stream that formed the waterfall slowed down and formed a pool there were fish, what looked like large trout, jumping. A pair of Red-Tailed Hawks were having a conversation with a raven that was trying to shoo them away from its nest.

“You got here because you were killed, and when people are killed, they quite naturally go to the Afterlife. I am your guide to ‘Heaven.’ And you are Abraham Marley Smythe. Born in the Brazilian jungle, raised by traders in contraband information and subsequently kidnapped by the jolly gentlemen at The Center, and up until a short while ago when they executed you, you were employed as their trained killer.”

Abraham just blinked.

“And now you are my trained killer, or will be after you undergo your rather rigorous and abbreviated training, that is”

Abraham fell out of his chair.