Chapter 4: Paperwork of the Damned

Chapter 4: Paperwork of the Damned

The phantom echo of being torn apart lingered long after Kael materialized in front of the Slurpee machine. Back in his trailer, the swamp cooler’s rattle sounded like grinding metal, and every shadow seemed to twist with jagged edges. He’d died. He’d actually, truly died, and the only proof was a nauseating sense of vertigo and the memory of a pain so absolute it had rewritten the definition of the word.

He was running a shaky hand through his hair when the Soul-Tab, which he’d left on his kitchen counter, buzzed with the angry insistence of a pissed-off hornet. The screen lit up with a single, blood-red message:

IMMEDIATE ATTENDANCE REQUIRED. DESERT DIVISION OFFICE. COMPLIANCE IS MANDATORY.

Kael’s stomach turned to ice. This wasn’t an assignment. This was a summons. He’d been caught. They knew he’d interfered. He was about to be fired from the afterlife’s worst temp agency, which was a concept so absurd it almost made him laugh. Almost.

With a sense of profound dread, he drove back out to the middle of nowhere, the GPS coordinates on the Tab guiding him to the spot where the elevator had been. He half-hoped it wouldn’t be there, that this was all a terrible, heat-addled dream. But there it was, a sleek, impossible scar on the face of the desert.

He pressed the button, and the doors slid open. The ride was the same—the silent, disconcerting non-movement, the flicker of starfields in the polished steel—but this time it felt less like a commute and more like a ride to his own execution.

The doors opened onto the familiar, soul-crushing bleakness of the office. The Administrator was waiting, seated behind his metal desk. He wasn’t looking at Kael. He was staring at a new stack of paper that hadn’t been there before, a teetering monolith of triplicate forms that cast its own oppressive shadow.

“Mr. Vance,” the Administrator said without looking up, his voice drier and more brittle than ever. “You have generated a report.”

Kael’s throat was sandpaper. “A report?”

“A Form 7-Gamma-Alpha,” the Administrator clarified, finally lifting his inky, exhausted eyes to meet Kael’s. “Unscheduled Employee Reinstatement. An operational anomaly of the highest and most irritating order.”

He knew. He had to know. Kael’s mind raced, searching for a plausible lie. His only advantage was that the system itself seemed to have blind spots, like the sigil. Maybe, just maybe, it was blind to intent as well.

“I… I don’t know what happened,” Kael began, forcing a tremor into his voice he didn’t entirely have to fake. “I was just… driving by. That old junkyard. I heard a noise, went to check it out. Thought maybe someone was hurt. Next thing I know, some kind of loading crane or something… it just collapsed. It was… fast.”

He was a bystander. An innocent victim. It was the only story he had.

The Administrator stared at him, his gaze a physical weight. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. Kael could feel the Soul-Tab in his pocket, a cold, silent witness that could probably tell if his heart rate was betraying him.

“A loading crane,” the Administrator repeated, his tone utterly flat. He gestured a skeletal hand toward the mountain of paper. “This ‘loading crane’ has necessitated cross-filing with Chronal Integrity to verify the integrity of your timeline, a requisition from Bio-Essence Reclamation for the reconstitution of your physical form, and a provisional waiver from the Paradox Prevention subcommittee, which has to be stamped. In person. Do you have any conception of the celestial gridlock this single event has caused, Mr. Vance?”

The anger radiating from him wasn't about Kael’s death. It wasn't about the monster, or the broken rules, or the scrapper who got away. It was about the paperwork. The sheer, soul-destroying inconvenience of it all.

In that moment, Kael understood. This wasn't a system of morality. It wasn't about good and evil, or saving souls. It was a bureaucracy, infinite and indifferent. His life, his death, it was all just data. And he had just corrupted the file.

“I… I’m sorry for the trouble,” Kael said, the words feeling inadequate and absurd.

“Regret is an inefficient emotional response,” the Administrator sighed, pulling a single, multi-paged form from a drawer and sliding it across the desk. It was an incident report. His incident report. “Fill this out. Be precise. My ledgers must balance.”

Kael picked up the offered stylus. The form was terrifyingly detailed.

INCIDENT #734-DELTA. TERMINATION AND REINSTATEMENT OF FIELD TECHNICIAN K. VANCE.

He began to write, his hand moving stiffly.

Reason for Presence at Anomaly Site: He wrote, Investigating sounds of distress while passing by. A half-truth wrapped in a lie.

Nature of Terminating Event: He paused, the memory of shredding metal flashing behind his eyes. He wrote, Blunt and sharp force trauma resulting from industrial machinery malfunction. Vague. Plausible. Utterly false.

Presence of Unauthorized Entities or Anomalous Energies: This was it. The moment of truth. He thought of the creature made of rage and rust, the shimmering energy that held it together, the sigil that was its anchor. His finger hovered over the checkbox. He decisively ticked the box for None.

As he finished, the Administrator watched him, his expression unchanging. He took the completed form, his eyes scanning it with unnerving speed. He didn’t question a single word. He simply took a heavy, old-fashioned rubber stamp, inked it on a black pad, and slammed it down on the bottom of the page. The stamp read CASE CLOSED.

“For future reference, Mr. Vance,” the Administrator said, steepling his long fingers. “While your… durability… is a key feature of your employment, try to avoid utilizing it. The paperwork is, frankly, a nightmare. You are a census-taker, not a demolition derby participant.”

He gestured again to the towering stack of Form 7-Gamma-Alphas. “As a penalty for this procedural disruption, and as a valuable lesson in the consequences of creating administrative friction, you will process your own reinstatement documentation. Every last page.”

Kael stared at the stack. It had to be a thousand pages.

“Get to it,” the Administrator said, turning his attention back to his own endless work. “The universe waits for no one.”

For the next several hours, Kael sat at a small, cold metal desk in the corner, stamping, signing, and initialing forms that described his own death and rebirth in the most sterile, passionless language imaginable. Requisition for 18.4 gallons of biological fluids. Authorization for synaptic pattern re-ignition. It was the most horrific and boring task he had ever undertaken.

But as he worked, the numbness gave way to a cold, hard clarity. The Administrator hadn’t seen the monster. The Soul-Tab hadn’t registered the sigil. The entire cosmic system was blind to the real threat. They weren’t hiding it; they just couldn’t see it. They saw a man turn to salt, a technician die in an accident. They saw the result, not the cause.

He was completely and utterly on his own.

When he finally stamped the last form, his hand aching, the Administrator dismissed him with a weary wave. Stepping out of the elevator and back into the searing desert heat felt like surfacing from a deep, cold ocean. He was free, for now. He had lied to Death’s middle-manager and gotten away with it.

Back in his truck, he pulled out his phone. He looked at the photo of the sigil from the parking lot, its glowing lines a language he couldn’t read but was beginning to understand. Then he thought of the junkyard. The creature hadn't been rampaging randomly. It had a target: the scrapper. Just like the pillar of salt had once been a man reaching for his car keys.

These weren’t random acts of God or freak events. They were calculated. They were targeted. Someone was leaving these sigils like landmines, and Sunny Side Up was just cataloging the casualties without ever looking for the bomber.

A cold fury settled in his chest, replacing the fear. He was the only one who could see the weapon. He had to do something. He couldn't fight these things with a tire iron, and he couldn’t trust his employers. He needed help. He needed someone who was grounded in the real world, someone who looked at the impossible and, instead of ignoring it, tried to file a report on it.

He thought of the deputy at the salt pillar scene. The woman with the sharp, frustrated eyes who knew something was deeply wrong, even if she couldn’t explain it. Deputy Lena Petrova.

He started his truck. His job was to observe and report. Fine. He was starting a new report, his own report. And his first person of interest was a cop who had no idea the cosmic conspiracy that was about to land on her doorstep.