As an atheist, Ryan had assumed that death meant eternal blackness. Although the idealistic heavens that various religions believed sounded preferable, he rejected such pretty delusions. He doubted that someone like himself, who harbored a hatred for most people, could belong in such a happy place anyway.
Therefore, it perplexed Ryan that his vision was progressively brightening. After delivering his parting words in the realm of the living, he spent an infinitesimal time surrounded by darkness. It was like he'd just awoken from a deep sleep; the world around him gradually came into focus. The afterlife wasn't nearly as grandiose as he'd heard. In fact, it was downright puny; he found himself in a single building. Beyond the windows he saw on endless white landscape stretching far into the horizon, though it wasn't much of a horizon because no sun or moon was in sight. Only the building that Ryan found himself standing in seemed to exist. The structure itself brought him nothing but dread. It was scenery that he had seen countless times; he would never mistake the people infested restaurant that was his Culver's. A long counter decorated with three registers ran down the room. Beyond the partition, a luminescent menu board displayed salivating pictures of burgers, fries, and their specialty fresh frozen custard. It was a sight that he knew well and considering that the usually bustling place was devoid of people Ryan felt a tinge of love toward the place.
Then, a customer walked through the front door. She was middle-aged woman with short blond hair in a bob. Outfitted in black, her one-piece dress looked far too expensive for the fast-food eatery. In one hand she held a leather, designer purse; in the other a brown paper bag emboldened with the navy blue of Culver's.
"Excuse me!" she screamed.
"I'm sorry how can I help you?" Ryan responded with his best customer service voice. He was wearing the button-up blue Culver's uniform he had died in, and so he acted the part.
"How could you help me!?" the woman sarcastically echoed. She crumpled the paper bag into a ball and hurled it at him. "I'd like you to get my order correct!" The bag bounced off Ryan's shirt, dampening the bright blue fabric with spots of grease.
Ryan kept his composure, although he did designate the woman as a "Karen" in his mind.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. What was wrong with your order today?" Ryan cordially replied with the most apologetic smile he could muster.
"Um, actually, it's not just today. Do you know how often I come here?"
Ryan opened his mouth to answer.
"A lot. And let me tell you, you guys mess up my order every single time. I mean, how hard can it be!? Today I ordered two things: a burger and an order of cheese curds." The Karen complained with ferocity comparable to a beast of prey. She lips moved the fluidity of a versed debater.
I highly doubt we mess up that frequently. And assuming it's true… why do you keep coming back here, Ryan thought.
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
"But was that what I received?"
Ryan glanced towards the discarded bag that now lay on the tile flooring of the lobby. Someone would have to clean that up, and with no other employees in sight it seemed it would fall on him. He didn't bother to answer the woman's clearly rhetorical question.
"No! I received my burger… and fries. FRIES! I ordered cheese curds, you idiot! What the hell are you people doing!?" The woman shouted, a vein in her throat pulsating under the strain of her hysterics. Her nostrils flared and her hands flailed about wildly.
She's certainly animated, Ryan thought.
"Well, ma'am. I'd be happy to replace your order. We'll get another burger and cheese curds out to you right away."
"And…?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am. What else would you like me to do for you today?" Ryan's smile was close to that of a grimace. He bowed his head downward to hide the fury in his eyes. Maybe he hadn't been sent to heaven, after all. If this was the afterlife it was nothing less than his personal hell.
"A refund, duh. Not only are you going to remake my food for me. You're going to compensate me for the inconvenience."
Normally, a customer would receive a refund or a remake of their order. Not both. But Ryan didn't care. He would do anything he could to make this woman leave.
He circled around the counter, input the refund into the register, and pulled out the two fives, a dollar bill, and a handful of coins from the till. Reaching over the counter, he offered the money to the woman, which she half-accepted, half-grabbed from his hand.
"It's sad, really. You work in fast-food, but even that's too much for you. I almost feel bad for you, but sympathy would be wasted on you," she spat out the words like venom.
"You idiot." The woman smirked like a Chesiree cat.
In that moment, something inside of Ryan snapped; having been battered for years without restraint, the woman's words killed the restraint Ryan had honed. The job of a customer service worker was to serve, to never lash out. At Culver's, Ryan had been faced with a mountain of complaints and insults, which he greeted with a smile. Few customers had affected his psyche, but the rare customer managed to boil his blood. The woman before him had done just that. He was unsettled; her thoughtless comment stood atop a heap of verbal abuses he had endured, the last of which he wouldn't forgive.
He unconsciously reached for the register monitor that sat on the counter. It was lightweight, which was good. It meant he'd be able to swing the instrument with force. Lots of force.
He took in one last look at her face. Condescension and entitlement writhed in every crease of skin. At that moment, Ryan didn't see a woman. He barely saw a person. In her face was every likeminded individual that abused service workers. In that moment, everything became simple.
Kill her.
Why did people allow themselves to be yelled at? Why did she feel safe yelling?
In the real world, there are consequences for your actions. It was a fact of life that most people knew. Not this woman. She seemed to think you could degrade, shame, and verbally assault someone without consequences.
Kill her.
In the world, there are plenty of bad people. Many far worse than her: thieves, murderers, domestic abusers, pedophiles, the list continues.
Did that make it okay? For people like her to do what they did? Is it okay for her to disturb my workplace, my day, my life?
Kill her.
With a trembling hand he lifted the monitor overhead. The woman looked scared, but Ryan didn't care. He crashed the monitor onto her head and felt an overwhelming satisfaction. The woman struck in the head would no longer cause trouble for others. She crumpled to the ground like a ragdoll.
Breathing heavily, Ryan discarded the blood-splattered monitor. Gazing at the woman's motionless body, he contemplated why he'd hit her. His violent outburst had been so sudden that he hadn't processed what he was doing. Maybe it was because he was already dead, but the morals that kept such behaviors in control didn't seem to apply here.
A small pool of blood had begun to form around the woman's head. The irony scent filled the lobby of Culver's, overriding the smell of burgers and custard that was engraved into the tile floor and walls.
Once again, Ryan found himself alone. He hadn't thought to ask the woman where she had come from. However, she had found the Culver's of the white void. Perhaps, others would as well.
Realizing that he knew very little about his new environment, Ryan decided to leave the woman behind and explore the remainder of the building. Assuming the layout was the same as the Culver's he knew, past the counter would be a kitchen and further beyond would be a fully stocked pantry and freezer. This space existed as some form of afterlife, so he didn't think that food was a necessity, but Ryan could always eat. One of the few upsides to working at Culver's had been the food. Sit-down restaurants were a step above, but as far as fast food was concerned, their food was the best.
A mouthful of creamy decadent custard could send him straight to heaven, assuming he wasn't there already. One of their burgers would have the same effect. His mouth salivated as he reminisced on the many cheeseburgers he'd devoured.
"Don't you ever get tired of eating at Culver's every day?" his mother had frequently chastised him for his diet that consisted of cheese, meat, and quarts of frozen dairy product.
However, as he wandered through the back of the store, he found no trace of food. The freezer in the kitchen, empty. The bread shelves in the pantry, barren. Even the walk-in freezer, which was typically stocked with several thousand dollars of ingredients was as stark as the white void
A detail flashed through Ryan's mind. The woman said she'd been given a burger and fries. She had crumbled the bag, and the food was likely in poor shape, potentially half-eaten, but it was still food. Ryan promptly exited the freezer and darted back to the front of the store.
As he reached the counter, eager to find the scraps of food the woman had left, Ryan was met with a horrific sight.
The woman was standing upright. Still cloaked in blood with a brutalized skull, she had risen from the ground. Her eyes bored past the counter, meeting Ryan, not with the malice one's murderer expected. They looked amused. A trickle blood caught on the hint outline of a smile etched into her face.
"I'm surprised. You've really lost it haven't, you?" a voice came from the woman.
It was nothing like the shrill words of abasement she had spoken minutes earlier. Deep and slightly amused, the voice sounded like that of a different being.
Ryan hesitantly inched away from the counter, seeking distance from the living dead. He suspected that death worked a little differently here. Thinking back on his actions, he realized it was stupid to think a person could die in the afterlife. Immortality was a given.
"One moment. I'm rather tired of this guise." The woman discarded her handbag and began stretching. She pulled her left arm across her body, relaxing the tension of rigor mortis. Spring-like, the arm continued extending. Joint and bone cracked as the arm succeeded its range of motion. Until the ligament connecting shoulder to deltoid collapsed. Fresh blood gushed forth and strands of sinew and muscle hung limp like broken threads.
In no need of a severed arm, the entity masquerading as a woman tossed her former appendage aside with the same frivolity that she had discarded the bag housing her incorrect order. Though, it seemed she needn't worry about the amputation for long. Within seconds a new left arm began forming. Burly and rife with veins, it was disproportionate to the frail body of the woman. Easily three times the size of her former arm, it was big as her torso.
Next, a forest of dark, pointy hair enveloped the surface of skin. When the process was finished, it almost resembled the powerful arm of a gorilla. It elicited fear in Ryan, though he didn't even think of escaping the creature. Something told him that the appendage wasn't for show.
"That's better, now for the other." The process of stretching the arm out of its socket was unnecessary this time. With herculean strength the woman snapped her remaining arm free from its socket, and nonchalantly cast it aside. A second monstrous arm appeared.
"What the hell are you?" Ryan screamed with all the ferocity he had, though even he could hear fear reverberating through his voice. The sight before him would scare anyone, and he doubted that the transformation was over.
"I believe it's rude to watch a woman change, though, I suppose this may differ from the norm," the being said with a smirk.
Having worked in customer service for years, Ryan had seen his fair share of smiles: the awkward smiles of new hires and the emotionless smiles that plastered the faces of veteran employees. The smile before him was far from emotionless. It was far from awkward. It was downright murderous.
The being wasted no time in completing its transformation. With one hand on each side, she firmly grasped her head. Her blond hair, alongside every facial feature were eclipsed by dark wasps of arm hair. Seconds later a crisp snap crunched, and a geyser of blood sprung forth. The head was twisted like a screw, before eventually succumbing to the centrifugal force applied by the arms.
Ryan wasn't dumb enough to hope that it was over. A stabbed heart or decapitated head should've been the end, however, considering that the being standing before Ryan had beheaded itself, he held little hope that decapitation equaled death.
Sure enough, the body continued moving. It cast its head aside with the same blasé it had shown its arms. Predictably, a new head replaced the old. This one, hardly human.
Ryan had struggled to ascertain the familiarity he sensed from the creature's newly formed arms. They were certainly big enough to be those of a gorilla, but that seemed off. Goosebumps traveled downward like fallen dominos, starting at his fingertips, and ending near his ankles. He knew how dangerous apes were. It was said that a full-grown gorilla could tear a man limb from limb in thirty seconds or less, though that had never bothered him. There were lots of things that could kill him. An elephant could crush him beneath his toes, or an alligator could devour him with its razor-sharp teeth. That knowledge was irrelevant. To Ryan, those creatures only existed behind the locked cages of zoos. The tingle he felt rushing across the surface of his skin was unsettling, but familiar.
Staunching the fountain of blood, the new head began to form. A set of hairy fangs protruded from the sides of its cavernous mouth, which lacked any teeth of its own. Further along were a pair of black eyes that shone with milky white pupils. Dotted in the surrounding space in a semi-circle were several smaller, freckle sized eyes. The whole face was coated in the same black hair as the arms, except for the two fangs that hung from the creature's face. Those were colored an artificial green. They were a brighter verdant shade than could be found in nature; it was colored like that of radioactive waste or the small vials of poison that cartoon villains carried.
It was the head of spider, the creature that Ryan feared most. Their creepy, skittering movements and unusual number of appendages inspired fear and hatred. The added knowledge that some species were poisonous didn't help either.
When confronted as a child, Ryan would yell for his father to exterminate the crawly creatures, but, as Ryan had grown, his pleas had begun to fall on deaf ears. The phrase "you're a man" had been hurled at him.
Although reluctant to face his fears at first, Ryan eventually killed his first spider. His fear of the creatures didn't subside. He acted manically whenever he spotted an arachnid. His fear and hatred of the creatures overtook him, and he did everything he could to eviscerate the creatures. Though a single hit from the sole of a shoe would be enough, Ryan found himself delivering subsequent blows and grinding the spider's corpse between sole and wall. Sadly, he didn't think that his shoe would be big enough for the monstrosity in front of him.
"That's better." A voice like the shrieking of ice caught in a blender exuded from the gaping hole in the spider's toothless maw. The sound grated on Ryan's ears.
"I want answers," Ryan said. "What the hell are you?" Shock and fear from the creature's transformation were slowly ebbing, so Ryan sought answers. The many unknowns of the situation only added to the terror.
"I could tell you, but where's the fun in that?" the being's fangs swayed horizontally. Ryan didn't think he was being threatened, but the gesture gave him no security.
The humanoid spider unsettled Ryan, though, unlike the creatures that Ryan feared, the being before him could speak. That fact alone gave him some small peace of mind. There were too many unknowns about this situation. He wanted answers, and he had a feeling that the spider-man could give them to him.
"Is this place the afterlife?" asked Ryan.
"No," the creature responded. "Are you familiar with the concept of limbo? It's that," the creature said simply, until it saw the confusion on Ryan's face. "This isn't heaven or hell. It's the place where we sort souls after they've died. You'll stay here until we decide on your placement."
"Okay." Ryan nodded in understanding. "We," he muttered to himself. "Are you some sort of god?"
"Yes," the spider answered. "We're a pretty big pantheon, but we don't need to bring up the rest of them. I'm the god of a lot of things: hate, death, rebirth. Oh… and revenge."
The spiders answer sent fresh goosebumps cascading across Ryan's entire body. Normally, revenge meant getting even. Ryan had tried to kill the woman, though, that had been this spider god in disguise. He hoped that his punishment would be too severe.
"Are you mad at me for killing you?" Ryan blood quickened, as he anticipated the god's answer. He was at its mercy.
"I guess so." The spider-faced god spoke as though the thought had just occurred to it. "That was hardly nice, killing me over something so silly as a bad attitude. No normal person would even consider lashing out as you did."
"Sorry," said Ryan. He thought that an apology would placate the god, but…
"I don't accept," the god cut him off. "I thought I'd mess with you under the guise of an entitled customer. You humans call them 'Karens', I believe. And then you killed me," the god's hair stood erect, while his fangs snapped menacingly.
"And I'm very sorry about that," Ryan said with a bow of his head, still trying to placate the god.
"That's well and good, but you're only saying that because I'm still alive. I'm sure any murderer would do the same if their victim rose from the grave."
Ryan wished he could refute the god, but he spoke the truth. Before seeing the resurrection and subsequent transformation, his biggest concern had been finding something to stuff his face with.
"I do admit that I'm curious. I understand that my behavior was rude, but did it really justify murder?" the spider-faced god questioned.
Ryan contemplated his motive for a moment before responding.
"I guess I felt like I had nothing to lose. Of course, I encountered plenty of people like that while I was alive, but I never considered killing any of them. It wasn't even an option because I knew I'd be punished. If you kill someone, then your life is forfeit. Worst-case it'd be the death penalty for me, at best I'd spend the remainder of my life locked behind bars," said Ryan.
"A foolish mindset. Murder always has consequences, even for the deceased," the spider god lamented.
"Like what?" Scared though he was of the god, Ryan couldn't think of any repercussions. He was already dead. Hell seemed the likely candidate, but Ryan figured he'd be placed there regardless of his prior actions. He hadn't lived a life of virtue. Helping others had always fallen behind helping himself. Working a part-time job and paying taxes were his only contributions to society. In the Bible his mother revered, only those who spent their lives in service to others ascended to heaven.
"Being a god of rebirth has its benefits. I'll simply bring you back to the world of the living."
"That doesn't sound like a punishment," Ryan said.
"Trust me, it will," said the spider god. Though I won't be bringing you back to your world. That place is too soft. I'll send you to a more fitting place of torment."
Ryan blinked, and the spider face god disappeared from his field of view, though he could still sense it's presence. A great shadow loomed over the young man from behind. Then, he felt an unbelievable pressure restraining his body. The gargantuan arms of the spider god held from behind in a full nelson. Thousands of his needle-like hairs brushed against the boy's skin, sending spasms of revulsion through him. He'd never directly touched a spider before, the sensation of the hair was unlike that of a dog or cat, hair that felt heavenly to touch. It felt like the embrace of a porcupine.
"I'll give you some advice. Try not to die. It hurts, you know," the spider god's shrieking voice whispered into Ryan's ear.
He could feel the god's hot breath on the nape of his neck. Then, a searing pain as the god's bright green fangs descended into his flesh. An ooze tricked down his shoulder, as the wound overflowed with the viscous substance the god has injected into his body. The pain from the insertion point was soon forgotten, as the poison coursed through Ryan's veins. It felt like his insides had been lit ablaze, which spread from the wound until there wasn't a single cell waiting for the end.
The god released his grip, and Ryan crashed to the floor. During his car accident his body had felt numb due to his head injury. Now was different. His body racked with pain, consciousness was the last thing to fade. If he could move, he would surely try to end his life. If he could speak, he would beg his killer to end his suffering. Seeing as he could do neither, he was forced to endure the mind-numbing pain until his body went into shock. So, he died for the second time that day.