"This. Is. Not. A. Dream."
The bastard punched Jim in the arm. Just balled up his smooth hand into a fist and fired the thing hard.
"Fuck!" Jim rubbed the sting - which was considerable. Pipe Guy might have been built lean and long, but he packed a punch all right.
"Permit me to repeat myself. You are not dreaming and this is not a joke."
"Can I hit him next?" Colin said with a lazy grin.
"No, you have horrid aim and you might strike him somewhere delicate." Nigel returned to his seat and took a small sandwich off a wheel of perfect little snackie-poos. "Jim Heron, you are the tiebreaker in the game, a man agreed upon by both sides to be on the field and settle the score."
"Both sides? Tiebreaker? What the hell are you talking about?"
"You are going to have seven chances. Seven opportunities to influence your fellow man. If you perform as we believe you will, the outcomes shall save the souls in question and we shall prevail over the other side. As long as that win occurs, humanity will continue to thrive and all shall be well."
Jim opened his mouth to shoot off some shit, but the expressions of the lads stopped him. Even the smart-ass in the group was looking serious.
"This has to be a dream."
No one got up to punch him again, but as they stared at him with such gravity, he began to get the creeping suspicion this might be something other than his subconscious talking while he was out cold.
"This is very real," Nigel said. "I realize it is not where you saw yourself going, but you have been chosen and that is the way of it."
"Assuming you're not full of shit, what if I say no?"
"You won't."
"But what if I do."
Nigel looked out over the distance. "Then everything ends as it stands now. Neither good nor bad wins and we are all, including yourself, over. No Heaven, no Hell, all that has gone before wiped clean. The mystery and the miracle of creation over and done and dusted."
Jim thought back on his life...the choices he'd made, the things he'd done. "Sounds like a good plan to me."
"It isn't." Colin drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. "Think about it, Jim. If nothing exists anymore, than all that went before was meaningless. So therefore your mother doesn't matter. Are you prepared to say that she is nothing? That her love for you, her darling son, is not valuable?"
Jim exhaled as if he'd been hit again, the pain of his past ricocheting through his chest. He hadn't thought of his mother for years. Maybe decades. She was always with him, of course, the only warm spot in his cold heart, but he did not allow himself to think of her. Ever.
And yet suddenly, and from out of nowhere, he had an image of her...one so familiar, so vivid, so achingly real, it was as if a piece of the past had been implanted into his brain: She was cooking him eggs over the old stove in their ancient kitchen. Her grip on the iron pan handle was strong, her back straight, her dark hair cut short. She'd started out as the wife of a farmer and ended up as the farmer herself, her body as wiry and tough as her smile had been soft and kind.
He'd loved his mother. And although she had given him eggs every morning, he remembered that particular breakfast. It was the last she'd ever made - not just for him, but for anybody.
She'd been murdered come nightfall.
"How do you know...about her," Jim asked with a voice that cracked.
"We have a vast knowledge of your life." Colin cocked an eyebrow. "But that begs the question. What say you, Jim? Are you prepared to relegate everything she did and everything she was to - as you would put it so bluntly - shit?"
Jim didn't like Colin very much.
"That's all right," Nigel murmured. "We don't care for him ourselves."
"Untrue," Bertie piped up. "I adore Colin. He hides behind his gruffness, but he is a wonderful - " Colin's voice sliced through the compliment. "You are such a fairy."
"I'm an angel, not a fairy, and so are you." Bertie glanced over at Jim and resumed playing with Tarquin's ear. "I know you're going to do the right thing, because you loved your mother too much not to. Do you recall how she used to wake you up when you were small?"
Jim closed his eyes hard. "Yeah."
His bed growing up had been a small twin in one of the farmhouse's drafty upstairs rooms. He'd slept in his clothes most nights, either because he was too exhausted from working out in the cornfields to change or because it was too cold to lie down without multiple layers.
On school days, his mother had come in singing to him...
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...You make me happy when skies are gray...You'll never know, dear, how much I love you...Please don't take my sunshine away."
Except he wasn't the one who had left her, and when she had gone away, it hadn't been voluntarily. She had fought like a wildcat to stay with him, and he'd never forget the look in her eyes right before she'd passed. She'd stared out of her beaten face and spoken to him with her blue eyes and her bloody lips, because she'd had no more air left in her lungs to carry her voice.
I love you forever, she had mouthed. But run. Get out of the house. Run. They're upstairs.
He had left her where she lay, half-naked, bloody, and violated. Ducking out the back door, he'd raced to the truck he wasn't old enough to drive, and his feet had barely touched the pedals as he'd started the thing.
They had come after him, and to this day, he had no idea how he'd managed to get that old truck to go that fast down that dusty dirt road.
Bertie spoke up quietly. "You must accept this as both reality and your destiny. For her sake if for no one else's."
Jim opened his eyes and looked at Nigel. "Is there a Heaven?"
"We are on the edge of it right now." Nigel nodded over his shoulder at the castle wall, which ran off into the distance. "On the far side of our gracious manse, the souls of the good tally in fields of flowers and trees, their hours spent in sunshine and warmth, their cares and worries no more, their pain forgotten."
Jim stared at the footbridge over the moat and the double doors that were each the size of an RV. "Is she there?"
"Yes. And if you do not prevail, she will be ever gone as if she never was."
"I want to see her." He took a step forward. "I have to see her first."
"You may not enter. The quick are not welcome therein, only the dead."
"Fuck that and f**k you." Jim walked and then ran for the bridge, his boots thundering across the grass, then echoing on the wooden planks over the quicksilver river. When he got to the doors, he grabbed onto the great iron pulls, yanking so hard his back muscles screamed.
Fisting up one of his hands, he pounded at the oak, then pulled again. "Let me through! Let me through, you son of a bitch!"
He needed to know for himself that she wasn't hurt anymore and that she didn't suffer and that she was okay. Needed that reassurance so badly, he felt like he was shattering as he fought to get past the barrier, his battering fists driven by the memory of his beloved mother on the linoleum in the kitchen, the stab wounds in her chest and her neck bleeding out onto the floor, her legs spread, her mouth gaping open, her eyes terrified and imploring him to save himself, save himself, save himself...
The demon in him came out.
Everything went white as rage took over. He knew he was hitting something hard, that his body was going wild, that when someone put a hand on his shoulder he took them down to the ground and pummeled them.
But he heard nothing and saw nothing.
The past always unwrapped him, which was why he made a point of never, ever thinking about it.
When Jim regained consciousness for the second time, he was in the same position he'd been in for the first coming-around: flat on his back, grass beneath his palms, eyes closed. Except this time there was something wet on his face.
Popping his lids, he found Colin's face right above his own, and as the guy's blood dripped onto Jim's cheeks, the "rain" was explained.
"Ah, you're awake, well-done." Colin pulled back a fist and cracked Jim right in the puss.
As pain exploded, Bertie let out a cry, Tarquin whimpered, and Byron rushed over.
"Right, now we're even." Colin hopped off and shook out his hand. "You know, taking human form has its benefits, indeed. That felt rather nice."
Nigel shook his head. "This is not going well."