Note: Suzie, Carmelita, and Jaleh were introduced in Avernus Academy Ch. 00 (click on my username to see my stories), available in Novels and Novellas.
Chapter 1: The Waiting Room
Suzie, Carmelita, and Jaleh were sitting on a cushioned bench in a beige room. There was a glass table in front of them with some notepads and pencils. They all noticed they were naked, and Suzie and Carmelita immediately crossed their legs, hunched over, and covered their breasts and crotches with their arms and hands.
"Who are you people?!" demanded Suzie. "Where am I? What the hell is going on?!"
"Calm down, lady," said Jaleh, "I'm pretty sure we're dead."
Suzie stood up, half-turned away from the other two, and kept her crotch and breasts covered.
"Dead?" said Suzie. "Who are you? Why did you kidnap me? Why are we naked? Where is my husband?" She spun around searching the room.
Carmelita, after looking around and seeing no one but two other naked women, stood up without covering herself. "We need to find a door."
Jaleh stood up. "Sure thing, fellow corpses," they said. They held their hand out in an offer to shake Carmelita's hand. "Jaleh Parvin" they said.
"Tell me who you people are!" yelled Suzie.
"I just said, I'm the late Jaleh Parvin"
Carmelita shook her hand. "Sister Carmelita de Léon."
"What have you people done with my husband?!" snarled Suzie.
"Are you a nun?" asked Jaleh.
"Yes. Why do you believe we are dead?"
Suzie was now desperately looking around the room for a door. The room was fairly large, the size of a classroom or a hotel convention meeting room. The carpet was beige, as was the painting on the walls and ceiling.
"Because I am definitely dead. Which means you two are as well."
"How can you think you're dead when you are standing here talking to me?" asked Carmelita.
"Because the last thing I remember is being shot once in the chest and twice in the head. And look, not a scratch on me."
In addition to the bench and table, Suzie saw a bookshelf with what looked like less than a dozen books, a counter with four big labeled pots with lids on hotplates, a cabinet underneath the counter, and a sink.
"I mean," continued Jaleh, "I suppose it's possible I'm in a coma, and you two are just part of my weird dream, but I'm pretty sure I would have imagined you to be young enough to be fuckable."
"There's no need to be vulgar," Carmelita said.
"Well what about you?" asked Jaleh. "What's the last thing you remember?"
Carmelita hesitated.
Suzie looked at the walls and ceiling. The ceiling was bare. The walls had about a dozen pictures on them, mostly landscapes and animals. Roughly half seemed to be paintings, the rest photographs. There were no visible doors or windows. Suzie shimmied to the counter, still trying to hold her modesty.
"I was drowning in a bathtub," Carmelita admitted. "But there were a lot of other nuns in the convent who could have rescued me. If I were brought here, there wouldn't be any signs on my body of what happened. Or I could be in a coma like you said."
"Okay," said Jaleh, "If you were in a coma I could understand why you would fantasize about someone as hot as me. But why the hell would you dream up that ugly bitch?" They jerked their thumb towards Suzie.
"Don't try to play stupid mind games with me," said Suzie. "I didn't die. And if I had died, I would be with Jesus." The pots were labeled "Polenta", "Oatmeal", "Porridge", and "Grits". Hunched over and with her back to the other two, she opened the cabinet.
"The Sister here probably has a better claim on seeing Jesus than you do," said Jaleh. "I didn't expect to be anywhere when I died, yet here we are. So what's the last thing you remember before being here?"
"I went to sleep next to my husband," said Suzie. The cabinet contained four serving spoons, three teaspoons, three bowls, three glasses, dishwashing soap, and a towel. "Where did you people take him?"
"We've been stripped naked and brought here just like you," said Carmelita.
"Bullshit," Suzie replied. "Your insane stories about dying prove you are working with them. You want to convince me that I'm dead for some reason, but I'm not stupid. Tell me where you took my husband."
Carmelita shook her head dismissively. "I'm going to find the door," she said. She walked over to the bookshelf.
"Why do you think everyone's after your husband?" asked Jaleh.
"He's the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety. We were probably kidnapped to stop his efforts to thwart the Hispanic invasion at the border."
"The border exists because white people invaded," said Carmelita. The shelves were mostly empty. One shelf was labeled "Fiction ", and another was "Nonfiction." The bookshelf seemed fastened to the wall and would not budge.
"Ha! I knew you were working with them!" said Suzie.
"Seriously bitches, we are beyond politics now," said Jaleh.
This continued, with Suzie accusing the others of being part of the leftist Democrat plan to flood America with illegals, Jaleh insulting the others while continuing to insist they were all dead, and Carmelita scolding the others for incivility and lack of compassion while they all three searched for any sort of exit. It lasted for... half an hour, or an hour maybe? It was impossible to know for sure with no clocks, no windows, and no way to communicate with whatever outside world might exist.
They never found an exit or entrance. The sink had one handle and dispensed room-temperature water. The books in the Fiction section were Moby Dick, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, 100 Years of Solitude, and The Complete Dune Series. The Nonfiction books were Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Salt: A World History, and The Ohio Gang: The World of Warren G. Harding. The notepads had six grids for Tic Tac Toe on one side, and a grid full of dots on the other.
When they gave up looking for a door, Carmelita knelt to pray and chant the rosary, which she apparently did not need to actually have a rosary to do.
Jaleh started reading Double Entry.
After, oh, let us say three or four hours, Suzie gave up hiding her modesty and sat down with the others. She still eyed them suspiciously.
This state lasted a week or two, maybe a month or so. They never got hungry or thirsty, though they did try the food and water. The food was fresh but unflavored. The lights never went off, despite there being no visible light source. They never got sleepy and never needed to go to the bathroom.
Jaleh continuously pointed out these anomalies to Suzie. They also pointed out that none of them remembered arriving there, or even waking up. Eventually, Suzie broke down and cried for, let us just go with "a while", asking why Jesus had abandoned her. When she stopped, she was mostly depressed.
Comparing notes, the three discovered they had almost nothing in common beyond all of them being from the United States and all being "people with vaginas," as Jaleh put it, or "women, you woke moron" as Suzie put it. Suzie was Baptist, Carmelita was Catholic, and Jaleh was raised by immigrant Muslim parents but she never remembered believing any of it. Suzie was conservative about everything, Carmelita was progressive about most things, and Jaleh thought politics was a distraction from them getting what they wanted. They had no common artistic tastes or pastimes.
Tic Tac Toe quickly became nothing but pointless tied games. Carmelita and Jaleh had no idea what the grids of dots were for. Suzie taught them Dots and Boxes, which became the only activity they did together.
Carmelita continued to spend most of her time praying and chanting.
