The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) (12 page)

Once Howard was inside, Midnight Smoke set a piece of metallic fabric over the top, securing it in place with a silver ribbon.

“That was the easiest one yet,” Puce said, his voice a low growl.

The Harvesters watched as the funeral home men slipped Howard’s corpse into the body bag already laid out on the gurney to receive him. The cold hiss of the zipper knitting itself together over Howard’s face bore the hallmark of finality.

“Yes, it was,” Midnight Smoke agreed gamely, looking down at the iron jar.

“Easy as pie.”

*   *   *

as soon as
the fighting started, Gerald was out of there, braving the fog to find his Vespa.

His brain had been kind of fuzzy ever since he’d woken up in the bungalow. He’d felt strange, lighter on his feet somehow, but now he did what he could to shake off the lethargy. He had to find Molly and get out of there before anything worse (than getting hit over the head and being left for dead on a bed) happened.

He took off down the drive, running in the direction of the highway, his sights set on the hedges where he’d left Molly. He’d often been told he sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants whenever he ran, but to his surprise, he practically flew down the drive on silent feet. His body was as buoyant as a helium balloon, ready to sail up into the sky the moment someone let go of its string.

He wasn’t even winded when he got to the hedges, but his heart froze as soon as he realized Molly wasn’t there. Like a dog chasing its tail, he spun in a circle, eyes searching for the missing Vespa. A sense of panic overwhelmed him, but then he had a calming thought, one that kicked the panic’s butt and gave him hope.

Maybe he was confused! Hadn’t he gotten the wrong bungalow to begin with? Maybe he’d just gotten the wrong side of the hedges, too!

Feeling a lot better, he jogged around to the other side of the greenery, but his hope was immediately extinguished when he found no trace of Molly there, either.

He felt like he’d been punched in the gut…someone had stolen his Vespa!

“Damn it,” he said. “God damn it!”

A lone car flew past him on the highway and he glared at it, wishing it was him and Molly speeding down the highway instead—and the thought made him want to cry.

Forgetting about the fight happening behind him, or his need to escape it, he ran down to the highway’s shoulder, eyes scanning the carports of the other bungalows. But he saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was no trace of Molly. The panic he’d fought off earlier began to claw at his throat again, making it hard for him to breathe. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He couldn’t lose Molly. He just couldn’t.

He started bargaining with God. If he found Molly, he would quit his job at the dispensary and never, ever deliver weed ever again. He would be a better son and take out the garbage without having to be asked. He would never run a red light or sleep past nine in the morning. But even as he made these promises in his head, he knew they weren’t going to help.

He was being punished.

His mom had known something like this would happen.
She’d been against him taking the job at the dispensary from the beginning, warning him bad things would happen if he did. She said marijuana was the Devil’s drug and his soul would be forever tainted by his proximity to it.

But he hadn’t listened. He’d laughed at her, told her she was being silly. He wasn’t going to smoke the stuff, just give it to the sick people who needed it.

Now he knew his mom had been right. If he hadn’t been working there, none of this would’ve happened. He’d run on the wrong side of God and he was gonna pay for it.

With his Vespa.

The realization he’d probably never see Molly again hit him like a ton of bricks and he began to cry for real, hot tears blinding his vision as he stumbled down the road. He didn’t see the red Fiat Panda as it rounded the bend in the highway and shot forward, speeding toward him at an aggressive clip, its daytime running lights like two evil eyes emerging from the fog. His own eyes red from crying, he looked up just in time to see the car barreling toward him. Unable to get out of its way, he just prayed the pain wouldn’t be too terrible.

The driver of the Fiat didn’t even touch the brakes as the car slammed into him.

And then that was it. The whole thing was over so fast Gerald didn’t even feel it.

He looked up, astonished to see empty road in front of him. He spun around and his eye caught the Fiat’s red taillights as the car rounded another bend and disappeared into the fog.

The car must’ve swerved,
he thought to himself, his body numb with shock. But he knew that wasn’t what had happened. There were no skid marks on the asphalt, and he’d heard nothing to indicate the car had even
seen
him, forget swerving to get out of his way.

His anguish at losing Molly was replaced by another emotion. The fear that maybe he, Gerald McKelvie, wasn’t with the living anymore. Terror tunneled through his brain, and he began to shake uncontrollably. It was as though his body was made out of Jell-O instead of muscle and bone.

Then the day began to melt away and he blinked, rubbing his eyes to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

All around him sunlight was disappearing, the foggy ocean haze somehow consuming the light and excreting darkness in its place. He scanned the horizon, looking for the storm clouds he knew had to be gathering, but there were none. The darkness was being manufactured by something other than the weather.

There was a sonorous
crack
as a bolt of blue lightning shot across the sky, its electric light illuminating the empty highway, making everything look ghostly in the haze.

There was another
crack
and the air around him sizzled and shimmered. He jumped back, thinking he was about to be electrocuted, but instead, two women in slate blue ruffle-necked dresses manifested in front of him, their eyes obscured by round glasses with smoky gray lenses. They were both holding parasols above their heads as if they were expecting rain.

One of the women was shorter than the other, her long black hair pinned up at the back of her neck. She carried a long-handled butterfly net in her free hand, the exposed skin at her wrist, milky and white. Her neck was sapling thin behind the thick blue ruffles that sat up stiffly at her throat.

“Gerald McKelvie?” she said, a sultry smoothness to her voice.

He was so overwhelmed all he could do was nod.

The other woman smiled at him and lifted her left hand, revealing a tiny silver bell hidden within her palm. She was a little taller than her partner, but even thinner. Pale blonde ringlets as thick as sausages fell to her shoulders, the buttery yellow skeins glistening in the darkness.

“We can help you,” the blonde said, her voice even more melodic than her partner’s.

“You can?” Gerald asked, still bearing the irrational hope that if he could only find Molly, then everything else would be okay.

Both women nodded, but neither expanded on how they could help him. Instead, the blonde lowered her parasol, its shiny black material folding in on itself as she set it at her feet. She stood back up and smiled at Gerald before slipping a skeletal hand inside the blue ruffles at her throat, retrieving a small iron cylinder from the folds of the fabric. She uncorked
the cylinder and let the top, which was strung onto a silver chain that hung from her neck, fall back against her concave chest.

“All you have to do is jump in,” she said, holding up the cylinder as though it were a talisman. “It’s the simplest thing in the world.”

“And Molly will be there?”

The blonde’s smile only lengthened, exposing shadowy dimples.

Gerald wasn’t really expecting her to answer him. Besides, he’d already made his decision.

*   *   *

the man in
Gray stood by the edge of the cliff, looking down at the valley below him. He’d had a human name at some point in his existence, but he’d expunged it long ago. Not that it really mattered. After a time, all names became obsolete. Besides why should a name remain eternal when the physical entity had been so transformed that it would be almost unrecognizable as its former self?

So now he was the Man in Gray.

It was really more the
absence
of color than the actual gray itself, that appealed to him. He appreciated how gray brought no unnecessary attention to its wearer, was utterly forgettable.

From birth he’d been an inconspicuous man. Not because he chose this, but because his features dictated it. Eyes slid over his countenance without registering what they’d seen: the light gray eyes, pale lashes and brows, the long nose, and thin lips. It was a gift from God, or an anomaly of human genetics—he didn’t know which and didn’t care. His innocuous features had served him well over the many years of his existence.

Below him, the swarm was growing. Like ants to an anthill they flocked and it was all because of him. He’d overseen the creation of
The Pit
, had chosen its design and its placement over his own, former, jail. Now he stood above it all, watching as the Harvesters and Transporters came in larger and larger groups to watch the cloud of power amassing above
The Pit
, the souls they’d collected pinned and wriggling in the holding corrals the Man in Gray had built just out of sight. He knew it
wouldn’t do for the prisoners to see their final destination; to know they were bound for utter annihilation.

When Uriah Drood had come to him with his plans, the Man in Gray had gotten excited.

Very,
very
excited.

He knew he was the only man in all of creation who possessed the knowledge necessary to do what Drood asked, so he’d bowed and nodded, obsequious as could be, listening as the rotund man had laid out his plans—but inside the Man in Gray was laughing. He’d spent countless lifetimes calculating his revenge, and now, without even begging, his dark prayers were being answered. Through the machinations of the weak, who could not see through their own greed, he would have this ultimate triumph.

Upon his agreement to do as Drood bid him, he’d been freed from his hidden prison, and then, unwitting fool that Drood was, he’d been given all the tools he needed to bring about the destruction of mankind.

For it was mankind’s destruction he sought. Not the pathetic restructuring of reality his latest master had decreed. But soon the denizens of the Afterlife and all of humankind would know the Man in Gray’s might—and they would rue the day Uriah Drood had set him free.

The thought made him laugh, the sound brittle even to his own ears. The laughter hurt his chest, bringing on the hacking cough he’d acquired after living in such a dank, underground prison for so many centuries.

Time is but an illusion,
he thought.

An illusion that is about to end.

An illusion.

That’s what Jarvis had said after he’d gone to the Hall of Death to look at the Death Records and found no notation of an untimely death in Anjea’s file.

“No one is allowed to tamper with the Death Records,” he’d said, the muscle of his right cheek jumping against the bone. “It’s not possible.”

We were in my father’s study, Jarvis sitting on one of the brown wingback chairs, hands clasped in his lap, looking pensive. He’d spent the day wormholing from Sea Verge to Death, Inc., and back. Now he just looked exhausted.

“You think Marcel and Anjea are in cahoots?” I asked, as I sat across from him in the other wingback chair, thumbing through an English copy of the original
How to Be Death: A Fully Annotated Guide
.

I’d spent the whole day reading the damn thing cover to cover and now when I looked at it, my eyes automatically started to blur. I thought (hoped) I’d retained most of the information I’d read, but I wasn’t placing any bets on myself to do well if Jarvis sprung a pop quiz on me.

“I just don’t know,” Jarvis said, yawning.

Neither one of us had gotten any sleep since we’d been back. The whole experience in Antarctica had been too traumatizing.

“What do they gain by me accepting Marcel as my champion?” I asked, closing my eyes so I could rub my aching eyeballs with the heels of my hands. “I can’t logic it out.”

I opened my eyes to find Jarvis giving me a withering glance—I got the impression he didn’t believe me capable of “logic-ing out” anything—then he stood up, his long body unfolding from the chair. As he stretched, the cords of his impossibly long neck stood out like guitar strings. He took a long breath, held the air in, then slowly let it run out through his nose.

“There has to be more to this than we’re grasping,” he said, shaking off his exhaustion as he walked over to my father’s desk—my desk now—and picked up the tiny, brown book lying on the blotter.

“I wish I knew how to read Angel,” I said, looking at the original copy of
How to Be Death
Jarvis was holding in his hands.

The English translation of the book in my own lap was safe for casual reading because it was missing the most important section: instructions from the Archangel Metatron on how to start the End of Days and destroy God’s last creation (humanity) forever.

Death—or rather
me
, since the job was now mine—was responsible for the safekeeping of the original book, tasked with making sure no one or no thing with evil intentions could get ahold of it and start something that, once set in motion, could not be stopped.

“It would take you years of study, and even then it might not be possible,” Jarvis said, but he was distracted as he spoke, the little book taking up all his attention.

“It would enable me to know exactly how to trigger the end of humanity. That might scare the shit out of anyone who wants to kick my ass.”

Jarvis looked up from the book, eyeing me.

“That’s a ridiculous statement,” he said, not amused.

I sighed and sat back in my chair.

“I know.”

Jarvis, seemingly satisfied I wasn’t a complete idiot, went back to studying the tiny book.