Hell, Yes!

Chapter 1: Terms and Conditions May Apply

The clock on Gerald Moody's desktop read 2:07 AM, and the decaf was hitting different tonight.

Not hitting harder, mind you — Gerald would never touch the real stuff, not after the Great Caffeine Incident of 2011 when he'd accidentally brewed a full pot of Folgers Classic Roast and delivered a ninety-minute sermon on Leviticus that left three elderly parishioners weeping and one convinced the Rapture had begun. No, decaf was Gerald's speed. But tonight he'd had four cups, which for Gerald was the equivalent of a college student shotgunning energy drinks before finals.

He sat in his cramped office at the Briar Falls Community Church of the Redeemed Spirit — a name far too grand for the converted hardware store it occupied — surrounded by the cheerful detritus of small-town ministry. A "Hang In There" poster featuring a kitten dangling from a branch. A coffee mug that read "World's Okayest Pastor." A framed photo of his congregation, all nineteen of them, squinting into the sun at last year's church picnic.

Gerald loved every single one of those nineteen people with the ferocity of a golden retriever who'd been told they were all very good boys and girls. He loved Mildred Hoffman and her aggressive casseroles. He loved Pete Danziger, who fell asleep during every sermon and denied it afterward with the conviction of a man on trial. He loved the Kowalczyk twins, who were seventy-three and still pinched each other during hymns.

But Gerald wanted more. Not more for himself — Gerald's personal ambitions extended no further than a working furnace and maybe, someday, a church with actual stained glass instead of the sun-faded decals Mildred had found at a garage sale. No, Gerald wanted more souls to love. More people to help. More Wednesday night potlucks to organize.

Which is how he found himself, at 2:07 AM on a Tuesday, filling out an online missionary application on a website called GlobalMissionsConnect.org.

The site looked like it had been designed in 1998 and hadn't been updated since, which Gerald found reassuring. Flashy websites made him nervous. This one had a cross made of clip art and a scrolling banner that read "GO FORTH!" in Comic Sans. It felt like home.

Gerald filled out the forms with the careful attention of a man who believed every word mattered. Name: Gerald Theodore Moody. Age: 52. Denomination: Nondenominational, but friendly about it. Special Skills: Potluck coordination, active listening, basic plumbing. Preferred Destination: Guatemala.

He'd always wanted to go to Guatemala. He'd seen a documentary about it once and had been moved by the green mountains and the children's smiles. He'd been studying Spanish from a cassette tape series he'd found at the Briar Falls Public Library, and while his accent was described by the one native Spanish speaker in town as "heroic but painful," he felt ready.

The application was seventeen pages long. By page fourteen, Gerald's eyes were swimming. By page sixteen, he was operating on pure faith and muscle memory. By page seventeen — the Terms and Conditions — he was essentially sleepwalking.

The Terms and Conditions were 47,000 words long. They included, buried in paragraph 312, subsection 7(f), a clause that read: "Applicant acknowledges that placement destinations are subject to interdimensional routing protocols and that GlobalMissionsConnect.org bears no liability for assignments resulting from celestial processing errors, acts of divine bureaucracy, or angelic negligence."

Gerald did not read this.

Gerald did not read any of it.

Gerald clicked "I Accept" with the breezy confidence of a man who had never once been burned by not reading the fine print, because Gerald had never once been burned by anything. Gerald's life was a testament to the power of showing up, being nice, and assuming everything would work out.

He clicked "Submit."

The screen flashed. A confirmation message appeared: "Thank you, Gerald! Your assignment is being processed. Please pack light and bring an open heart. You will be contacted with travel details shortly."

Gerald smiled, closed his laptop, and went to bed, dreaming of green mountains.

---

Six thousand miles above the Earth's surface — or possibly six thousand miles in a direction that doesn't have a name in any human language — the Celestial Administrative Processing Center hummed with the quiet desperation of any bureaucracy operating at 340% capacity.

The CAPC occupied a plane of existence that looked, to the untrained eye, like a DMV the size of Rhode Island. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Filing cabinets stretched to infinity in every direction. Somewhere, a printer was perpetually jammed.

At desk 7,714,002, an angel named Burt was having the worst shift of his eternal existence.

Burt was not the kind of angel you saw in paintings. He did not have flowing robes or a serene expression or a trumpet. Burt had the rumpled appearance of an accountant who'd been sleeping in his car, a tie that was slightly too short, and a coffee ring on his left wing that he'd been meaning to clean for three centuries.

Burt was in Routing. Had been for six thousand years. He'd put in for a transfer to Miracles twice and been denied both times. His supervisor, a crisply efficient seraph named Dolores, had told him he was "too essential to Routing to lose," which Burt understood to mean "too mediocre to promote."

Tonight, Burt was pulling his third double shift in a row. Heaven was understaffed — had been since the Renaissance, when the volume of prayer requests had spiked and never come back down. Budget cuts meant fewer angels, longer hours, and a break room that hadn't been restocked since the Reformation.

Burt's eyes were glazing over as he processed missionary applications. Guatemala, Guatemala, Honduras, Guatemala, Philippines, Guatemala — the applications blurred together. His fingers moved on autopilot across the celestial keyboard, routing each one to the appropriate earthly destination.

Then Gerald Moody's application landed in his queue.

Burt glanced at it. Guatemala. Simple enough. He began typing the routing code: G-U-A-T—

His phone rang.

It was Dolores. "Burt, I need the Q3 intercession reports on my desk in ten minutes."

"I'm in the middle of—"

"Ten minutes, Burt."

The line went dead. Burt set down Gerald's application, scrambled through a pile of folders the size of a small car, found the Q3 reports, sprinted them to Dolores's office, sprinted back, sat down, and resumed typing.

Except he didn't resume where he'd left off. His fingers, operating on exhaustion and muscle memory, typed a routing code he'd been processing all week for a completely different department.

Instead of G-U-A-T-7-7-4 (Guatemala, Central America, Earth), Burt typed N-I-N-T-H-9-9 (Ninth Circle, Lower Depths, Hell).

He hit Enter.

The system accepted it without so much as a warning prompt, because the CAPC's software hadn't been updated since the Council of Nicaea and the IT department had been "looking into it" for fifteen hundred years.

Burt moved on to the next application. He wouldn't realize his mistake for another seventy-two hours.

By then, it would be far too late.