“I’ll guess it’s the latter,” Markus replied. “So then. How to get this information to the masses?”
“I dunno. Put up flyers?”
“Isn’t that a little late, though?” Marc asked. He was definitely more engaged in the meeting, which was really, really, really, really good. You know that whole “zombies need braaaaains” thing? It was true. But the movies got it wrong: zombies needed stimulation, not Dr. Hannibal frying up brains in butter. Marc needed to keep busy, to keep learning, to stay focused, to be alive. He was a zombie, but one who had been dead maybe a minute. Still (mostly) warm, still (for most intents and purposes) alive. He doesn’t need to eat or drink; he’ll enjoy his Caesar haircut forever; he’ll never have to worry about cancer or Alzheimer’s or arthritis. But if he went too long without stimulation and got bored, or was away from me for too long, he’d start to rot.
Nobody wanted him to rot. Especially after all he’d done for us from the moment I talked him out of jumping from the rooftop, BBC Sherlock–style: embracing our vampire natures, backing us up regardless of the Big Bad du jour, risking his life, being turned into a vampire in the future and a zombie in the present . . . endless. Endless sacrifices.
So we put up with him dissecting mice on our kitchen counters and reading and writing at all hours of the night and doing Sudoku (when will that puzzle trend die?), cleaning out the attic by dumping all the old stuff into the basement, then reversing the process to clean the basement, and roaming the mansion at all hours, always looking for something to keep himself occupied. Not that I had anything against roaming; Sinclair, Tina, and I did it all the time. (We’ve tried to keep the lurking to a minimum.) But it was less creepy when vampires did it, which makes no sense but is true regardless.
“Right? Betsy?” I blinked and realized Marc had been waiting for an answer.
“Okay, I see what you mean. If we put up flyers—”
“We’re not putting up flyers, for crying out loud,” Cathie muttered, staring down at the minutes. “What year do you think it is? Why not just round up all the town criers, have them disseminate the info?”
“—what good does it do? The people who ‘earned’ Hell, for lack of a better word”—There were kids down here, for God’s sake. No kid on the planet fucking deserved an eternity in a lake of fire and that was the fucking end of it. Although if a kid spent a century in a lake of fire, were they a kid still?—“they’re stuck here now. Knowing the rules won’t help them avoid Hell. It’s too late. Isn’t it?”
“It’s still a starting point. As I said, most of them know what they did to deserve eternal damnation.” Father Markus looked around the table at all of us. “But if I understand Betsy’s plan correctly, they can learn what to do to earn their—I don’t know how you’d say it—heavenly parole?”
“I can’t decide if they go to Heaven,” I said, shocked. “It’s absurd enough that I’ve got any say at all in what goes on in Hell! That’s . . . you know.” I pointed at the Lego ceiling. “Up to the big guy. So to speak. Once they’re paroled, they can leave here and go wherever.” Which reminded me: we needed some parole officers of the damned. I might not be as hard-core as the devil was, but I’m not about to release random spirits back into the wild without a way to keep an eye on them for a while. “Tina, while I’m thinking of it, could you make a note for us to talk to some actual parole officers, pick their brains?”
“Of course.” She tap-tap-tapped on her phone, which would have been impressive except I knew how much time she spent playing Cupcake Crash on the thing.
No one else had said anything, so I added, “Even if we could get the word to the living: ‘Hey, here are the new and improved Ten Commandments, even though that’s not for me to say—oh, who am I? Just a vampire who runs Hell on the side—anyway, I’ve got no authority on earth over regular people and God is probably generally disgusted with me, but just abide by the new (except not really) commandments as best you can and maybe you won’t end up with an eternal season pass to the Mall of America of the damned.’”
“That . . . probably won’t work,” Tina said, ever the tactician. (That’s what you call someone who’s super tactful, right?)
“Betsy has a point about not choosing who goes to Hell,” Markus said. “That’s completely out of her—your—purview.” He shifted his full attention to me. “All you can do is decide what to do with the souls who show up in your territory.”