All Reapers Come
by Ronald Linson
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
conclusion
It did seem that the plane had been aimed at the now exploding natural gas tanks. The apartment building had taken a direct hit and was now a flaming heap of rubble. The momentum of the impact had probably thrown some of the debris into the tanks, igniting them. And when the tanks blew, the nearby homes went up, too.
Chad strode carefully over the intervening distance, watching for signs of manifesting spirits. The smoke and flame were frozen in this moment of Dead Time, making it difficult to see very far.
He passed through a thick cloud of gray smoke and saw a hand sticking out of a concrete block, groping around blindly.
Chad took hold of it and pulled. The spirit of an elderly man emerged. He resembled his former vessel, except he was wearing nothing and was colorless and translucent.
“Thanks,” the spirit said. “I thought I was done for.”
“Sorry,” Chad said, “but you are.” He placed a hand atop the spirit’s head and exerted his will. The spirit shrank into his hand, forming a baseball-sized object, which he dropped into a pocket of his robe.
He collected two more spirits in similar circumstances, then came upon a Reaper from another district engaged in conversation with the spirit of a young woman hovering beside its corpse. The corpse was wearing a charred flight attendant’s uniform.
“Yes,” the spirit said, “he kept shouting that he was a tool of the Devil and a whole bunch of other stuff I didn’t understand.”
Chad stepped up to them and addressed the Reaper. “Hey, we don’t have time to chat. Just collect her and find the next one.”
The Reaper, a young fellow with scared eyes, gulped. “Uh, she was telling me about the guy who hijacked the plane.”
“That’s not important to us,” Chad said. “The mortal investigators will handle it. Our job is to reap souls.” To prove his point, he reached out and clapped a hand onto the spirit’s head and collected it.
“But,” the young Reaper said, “but—”
“You’re new,” Chad said.
The Reaper nodded. “First week.”
Chad sighed. “Ralph, the guy with the silver trim, he told you not to bother with standard procedures, right?”
The Reaper looked confused, but didn’t say anything.
“They should never let rookies go out on ARC calls,” Chad muttered to himself. To the Reaper, he said, “Look, if they talk to you, just apologize and reap them. It’s not like they’ll care all that much, anyway.”
“O-okay,” the Reaper said and hurried off.
Arthur jogged past and waved. “Gotta dump out my pockets in the van.”
Chad’s immediate area seemed to be clear, so he chose a likely direction. Amidst the wreckage of the plane, he discovered a spirit hiding in the remains of the lavatory.
“Go away,” the spirit said, formerly a young man in his twenties. “I’m waiting for my master.”
Chad reached for him.
“Lord Satan, help me!” the spirit cried.
Chad’s fingertips brushed its head, and the spirit batted his hand away, which should not have been possible. Chad recoiled in shock.
The spirit began to mutter what sounded like a prayer. It appeared to solidify, growing noticeably less ethereal. Its eyes blazed with dark flame, and it advanced on Chad.
Holding his scythe protectively in front of him, Chad backed away. “What are you?” he asked.
The spirit grinned, revealing rows of sharp, pointed teeth. “I am not,” it said in a deep, guttural voice. It scooped up a shard of broken glass — something else it should not have been able to do — and lunged at Chad.
Chad blocked the first swipe with the handle of his scythe, but the spirit was fast. The second blow caught Chad across the face, leaving a burning streak on his cheek and nose. He stumbled backward, tripping over something and landed flat on his back.
“See you in Hell,” the spirit said, laughing maniacally. It raised the shard, preparing to strike.
Mortimer tackled the spirit at a dead run, slamming it to the ground. He pinned it down and pounded its face with a ham fist.
Chad sat up, gingerly touching the wound on his face. The laceration seemed mostly superficial, even though it was bleeding profusely. He’d have a nice scar for sure.
The spirit kicked Mortimer off, seemingly with little effort, and fled.
Chad got to his feet and grabbed Mortimer’s arm before he could give chase. “Wait, what the hell was that?”
Mortimer wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “A demon-possessed soul. It’s covered in the employee manual.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Chad said. He’d skimmed through the manual when he’d first become a Grim Reaper over eleven years ago, but hardly looked at it since.
“Come on,” Mortimer said. “We’d better tell Ralph. They’re bad enough when their host is alive, but a free-range demon in spirit form is like an enraged elephant on angel dust.” He peered at Chad’s face. “Whoa, you’re bleeding pretty bad.”
“I’ll live,” Chad said.
There was a distant scream.
“That way,” Mortimer said, pointing in the direction of a ruined house down the street.
Other Reapers had heard it too and were converging on the location, but Chad and Mortimer were the first to arrive. In the back yard of the house, they found the possessed spirit with its hands clamped around the throat of a Reaper.
Chad recognized the Reaper as the rookie he’d chastised earlier. The poor fellow was trying desperately to break the spirit’s grip.
Chad raised his scythe. “I should have used this when I had the chance.”
“No, wait,” Mortimer cried, trying to grab Chad as he sprinted forward, but was too late.
Chad swung the scythe, bringing it down diagonally onto the spirit’s shoulder, intending to cleave the demon in half.
There was a brilliant red flash, a deafening boom, and Chad found himself flat on his back for the second time in ten minutes. His ears were ringing and he was seeing double.
“Take it easy, man,” Mortimer said, helping him to sit up.
Arthur ran up, huffing and puffing. He knelt beside Chad. “Hey, are you all right?”
Chad nodded, and his head didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should. His vision began to clear, and he saw three things, two of which didn’t make much sense.
The first was the rookie Reaper, who was coughing and trying to crawl away. That wasn’t surprising, and Chad was glad to see that he was still alive.
The second thing was the spirit of the young man, apparently no longer possessed. He stood a short distance away, hands held up defensively. He looked terrified and confused. This, along with the third thing, didn’t mesh in Chad’s mind with the events of the last few minutes.
The third thing, and most definitely the worst, was the monster. It was about twice the size of a human and looked like a cross between a goat and a gorilla, with blackened, cracked skin oozing foul ichor.
“I tried to tell you,” Mortimer said. “A reaper’s scythe will separate a demon from its host, which is great for the host, but damn awful for everyone else.”
The demon growled and stretched out one long arm, grabbing the rookie Reaper by the back of the neck. There was a loud crunch, and the Reaper slumped to the ground.
“No!” Chad screamed, looking around for his scythe. He saw what remained of it, its burnt haft and shattered blade, lying nearby.
The demon turned and squinted at Chad, but made no other move. By this time, most, if not all of the Reapers had come, scythes at the ready.
Ralph pushed through to stand before the demon. Instead of a scythe, he wielded a great sword in a two-handed grip. Pure white light shone from its blade.
“I curse you, Rafael,” the demon snarled.
“I expect nothing less from one such as you,” Rafael said, raising the sword and taking a half-step towards the creature.
The demon cringed, let out an ear-splitting howl, then bounded off into the night.
Rafael lowered his sword and let his shoulders slump. After a moment, he let go of its hilt, and the sword vanished in a puff of white smoke.
The spirit of the rookie Reaper had manifested, hovering next to his corpse. The spirit of the formerly possessed man had retreated to the edge of the yard.
Rafael stepped up to the spirit of the rookie, spoke a few quiet words to it and then collected his soul.
“Shades,” someone shouted. “There!”
A shadow behind the spirit of the young man detached itself from the gloom, then another, and then two more. The first one drifted over to the spirit, who just stood there, staring vacantly.
When the shade touched the spirit, darkness quickly spread through its substance, until within moments, the spirit no longer resembled a human being, but was now a formless black cloud.
Ralph spun around. “Beat it!” he yelled. “We’re done. Time to go!”
A few hours later, Chad was standing on the roof of the Grim Reaper Services building, gazing at the pre-dawn sky. The moon had set, and the stars were especially bright.
He hurt. The cut on his face had been stitched, liberal amounts of ointment applied and bandaged. No, that pain was minuscule compared to the ache in his heart.
He had failed today, big time. He could have listened to the spirit of the flight attendant. He could have saved the rookie. He could have stopped a powerful demon from getting loose.
Why had he failed? Because, even after more than eleven years as a Grim Reaper, he still wasn’t good enough. Hell, he hadn’t even bothered to study the employee manual. Sure, he’d look stuff up when he had to, but reading a couple of hundred pages had seemed so tedious at the time and, because of his negligence, a man was dead and a creature from the depths of Hell was running rampant.
He picked out a few bright stars and then a couple of familiar constellations. And there, close to the horizon, shone the planet Venus, the morning star.
“It’s coming, you know,” a mellifluous male voice said.
Chad snapped his head around. A tall, slender man stood beside him. Chad hadn’t heard him approach.
“It’s coming again, I should say,” the man said.
Chad was struck by the man’s beauty. He had shoulder-length nearly-white blonde hair and a matching goatee. His suit was white, and so was the tie. He seemed to give off a subtle light of his own; Chad could see every detail clearly.
Chad had a suspicion about the man’s identity, But something told him that asking about it might not be the best of ideas. Instead, he asked, “What’s coming again?”
“A test,” the man said. “A test of humanity’s mettle. It’s morality, if you want.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
The man looked at Chad with pale, fathomless eyes. “No reason, I suppose.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You needn’t blame yourself for what happened.”
Chad thumped the wooden railing with a clenched fist. “It is my fault. If I’d known what to look for and what I needed to do, a man would still be alive, and that monster would be back in Hell.”
The man regarded him for long seconds, then said, “Perhaps.” He turned back to looking at the sky.
“And you,” Chad said hotly, “you’re responsible for that... that thing, aren’t you?”
The man did not respond at first, but there was great sadness etched into his features. Finally, he said, “I am blamed for everything he does.”
“Everything who does?”
“The enemy of Creation, the spirit of eternal destruction.”
Chad opened his mouth, then closed it again. He turned away, feeling as sad as the man looked.
“Remember,” the man said, “it doesn’t matter whether one passes or fails a test. What counts is what one learns from the experience. Good night, Chad Townsend.”
Chad looked back, but the man was gone. He sighed and returned to contemplating the stars, waiting for the dawn of a new day.
Copyright © 2018 by Ronald Linson
