Broken Fate

by Jennifer Derrick

  School lets out at 2:45. I hurry to the parking lot, jump in my car, and speed home to kill my latest victim. I can’t remember anything about this guy other than he needs to die at three o’clock. In my defense, the humans tend to run together after a while. His thread is already waiting for me when I enter my workroom. One quick snip and the deed is done.

  I sit down at my desk to check my schedule. It’s going to be another busy night, although the afternoon is slow. A tornado outbreak will plow through the Midwest, and a skyscraper hotel in Dubai is going to catch fire. Thousands dead. Yippee.

  I double check to make sure I’ve entered everything into the computer so it will pull and sort all the lines I’ll need to cut tonight. Everything is correct, and I can rest until seven thirty. I should just stay down here and work on my homework but since I’ll be here all night, I want to get out for a while. At least that’s the lie I tell myself.

  I glance at the clock on my desk. It’s ten past three. I have time to get back to the school and meet Alex—if I want to. Part of me wants to see whatever it is he wants to show me. The other part of me knows that encouraging him in any way is insanity. I can’t even be friends with him without putting both of us in an awkward position. Staying away is the right thing to do.

  I lean back in my chair and study the lines hanging around the room. Mom said I’m missing out on life. Maybe so, but my life isn’t like the ones that hang on my racks. I’m immortal, and that makes things different. I don’t know what it’s like to have limited time—for things to really matter. Every day is the same to me, and nothing matters beyond getting the job done. Indifference is the only way to stay sane. It’s best to let the lives of the humans pass me by like a never-ending circus parade.

  What if I had a little fun… just once? Would it kill me? Of course not. Nothing can kill me. It can make me miserable, but it can’t kill me. And I’m already pretty damn miserable, so what would really change?

  I think about Alex. He wants to spend time with me in spite of my nastiness, and he’s excited about showing me something. I could go with him today, see whatever he wants to show me, and then forget him. Chances are that he’ll turn out to be an idiot like the rest of the humans are, and it won’t go any further than one outing. I could satisfy my curiosity about him, maybe have a little fun, and no harm would be done. As a bonus, I could show Mom a good faith effort to get out more and get her off my back for a while.

  I get up and pace the room for a few minutes, thinking this through. Alarms in my head are screaming, Bad idea, but there’s a small part of me saying, It’s just one afternoon. Go. I battle the voices, trying to force the smart, sane one to win, but I lose the war.

  I look at the clock. It’s now 3:17. Well, that’s good. The decision has been made for me. Alex has probably already left school. I procrastinated long enough. Disaster averted.

  I feel smug for about a minute, and then I do the stupidest thing I’ve done in three thousand years. I yank open my workroom door and slam it shut behind me, not even checking to make sure the locks are engaged. Running upstairs, I dash out the front door and leap into my car, gunning it down the driveway. I take the corner at the end of my street practically on two wheels, and I run the two red lights between my house and the school. At the second one, I dodge an elderly man crossing the intersection on his scooter. Not that it matters. I can’t kill him if he’s not supposed to die today, but it’s the principle of the thing. Mowing people down is just bad form.

  The turn into the school parking lot is a sweeping right-hander with a posted speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour. I hit it at forty-three. A couple of teachers are talking on the sidewalk, and they shoot me dirty looks as I fly past.

  When I reach the front of the school, Alex isn’t there. I’m nearly ten minutes late, and it’s just as well. My moment of insanity has passed, and it’s better that nothing came of it. Rather than linger, I drive toward the exit on the other side of the lot. Maybe I’ll swing by the bookstore and pick up some new releases. That’s a sane, safe activity.

  As I’m waiting to turn left, I glance to my right to check traffic and see Alex on the sidewalk, walking away from the school. He’s hunched over under the weight of an overstuffed backpack.

  I can turn and go home, and he’ll never see me. He’ll never know I came looking for him. That’s the sensible choice. Or I can continue with my stupidity and honk the horn. Again, I choose stupidity. Alex turns in my direction, and I wave. He hurries to the passenger side of the car. I roll down the window, and he leans in.

  “You came,” he says.

  “Well, yeah,” I say, unwilling to reveal my personal struggles. “I was curious.”

  Alex lifts one eyebrow. “Curious about what I have to show you, or about me?” he asks.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I say. “I’m only interested in whatever you have to show me. You were right. I’ve had a bad day, and I’ve got a bad night coming up. I could use something interesting to take my mind off things for a while.”

  “Okay,” he says, a little smirk playing on his mouth. I can tell he doesn’t believe me, but no way am I going to admit I’m even a little bit interested in him as a person. I’ve gone too far with this lunacy already.

  “Get in,” I say, reaching over and lifting the lock.

  “Nice car,” he says as he slides into the passenger seat. “What is this, a ‘58 Thunderbird?”

  “’59,” I correct.

  “Wow. Who did the restoration?”

  Telling him the truth, that I bought the car new in 1959, isn’t an option. So I lie. “I did.” This is sort of the truth. I rebuilt the engine about fifteen years ago, and I perform all the maintenance on the car myself because I don’t trust anyone else with my baby.

  Alex looks at me, respect in his eyes. “No offense, but I wouldn’t have thought—” He trails off.

  I wave a hand in his direction. “I get it. There’s no right way to tell a girl that you’re shocked she can restore a car.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did. But it’s okay,” I say. “It is unexpected. Anyway, what do you want to show me?” I ask, changing the subject and bailing him out.

  “It’s not so much a ‘what’ as a ‘where.’”

  “Tell me where to go, then,” I say as I pull out of the parking lot. “I just have to be home by seven thirty.”

  Alex gives me directions that take us out of Asheville and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. I know the road well, and I soon realize he is directing me toward Mount Mitchell. I’m uncomfortable with the idea, but I don’t say anything.

  The reason my family lives in Asheville is because of its proximity to Mount Mitchell. Near the top of the mountain, off the main roads and hiking trails, well hidden among the rocks, is a gateway to Mount Olympus.

  Mount Olympus is a real mountain in Greece, but the part of Olympus that the gods use is shielded from human view. Humans can trek all over the mountain, but everything they see and experience is a hologram, crafted and maintained by Zeus. Every year, he adjusts it just a bit to make it look a bit more weathered and decrepit. Ruins, after all, are constantly deteriorating, and if there were never any changes, people would get suspicious. The real mountain beneath this hologram contains our palaces and homes, which look just as beautiful as they did three thousand years ago when we first built them.

  Almost every mountain on Earth has a gateway to Olympus. Zeus built the gateways when he allowed the gods and goddesses to live in the human world. His only restriction on our freedom is that we always live close to a gateway so we can get home quickly if we need to. The day Zeus said we could leave, Mom had us packed and off Olympus in a matter of hours. She left partly to get away from Zeus and partly to get away from the petty politics and jealousies that make up life among the gods. We lived in Tibet, near Everest, first. Since then, we’ve made the rounds of all the mountains on Earth. We’ve lived on or near most of them more than once
. I’d love to live at the beach, just once, but it’s never going to happen. Sand dunes aren’t mountains, and they can’t have gateways.

  If Alex wants to show me something on Mount Mitchell, I’m going to come up with some excuse to go home. While I don’t think we’ll run into any gods and the gateway is well hidden, I still don’t want Alex up there. I don’t want him near anything that has to do with who and what I really am.

  Alex interrupts my thoughts as I’m trying to come up with a good excuse to go back home.

  “The turnoff is coming up soon, so you might want to slow down.”

  “I know this road pretty well, and I don’t think there’s a turnoff here. Are you sure you’re not thinking of someplace else?”

  “I’m sure. Slow down and it’s on your right.”

  I hit the brakes to humor him and, sure enough, there’s a tiny clearing in the trees just wide enough for a car. After I turn, we bump down a rocky road completely covered by trees. Even though it’s still daylight and the trees haven’t fully leafed out, the canopy makes it so dark that I have to flick on the headlights.

  “Huh,” I say. “All the times I’ve been up here and I never noticed this road.”

  “Few people do. I only know about it because one of the guys at St. Luke’s told me about it.”

  “We won’t meet any oncoming traffic, will we? There’s not enough room for two cars in here,” I say.

  “Not likely. There’s a place to pull over just ahead. We’ll pull off there and then walk the rest of the way. It’s way too steep for this car, and I don’t want to scratch your paint job,” Alex says.

  “Smart man.”

  I find the spot where the road widens just a bit, pulling the car off the road. We get out and start walking. The incline increases quickly and we hike in silence, both of us concentrating on our footing too carefully to talk.

  “Is it far?” I ask after we’ve been hiking for twenty minutes. Thank the gods I’m in good shape. Alex, I notice, is a bit pale and panting, but he’s not laboring so I don’t worry about it.

  “Another quarter mile,” he says. “It’s worth it. Trust me.”

  We continue hiking and what was a road becomes nothing more than a pathway up the mountain. It’s nearly overgrown in places, and it’s hard for me to see the trail, but Alex obviously knows where he’s going.

  In addition to the steep climb, we’re battling small trees and big plants that slap and scrape at us. Just as I’m about to tell Alex to forget it, that I’m not this much of a nature girl, we climb one particularly rough patch and heave ourselves over a rocky ledge.

  I lie there panting, not willing to go any farther.

  “We’re here,” Alex says. He’s sprawled beside me on the grass, breathing harder than I am.

  “Great. Where is ‘here,’ exactly? What was worth nearly having a heart attack to see?”

  “Get up and see,” he says.

  I stand and look around. We’re on a flat, open spot near the top of the mountain. It can’t be more than two acres of land. Three sides of it are open to the view of the valley below and the neighboring mountains. In front of me looms a sheer rock face that falls down from the top of the mountain. Against this wall is what Alex wants to show me. At least, I assume it is.

  “It’s a church,” I whisper.

  “Well, it was,” Alex says, sitting up on the grass. I extend a hand down to him and help him up. He sways a bit on his feet before he stabilizes.

  “Are you okay?” I ask him. “You’re really pale.”

  “Fine. Just not used to that kind of exertion,” he says. “Been a while since I’ve been up here.”

  I wander toward the church. Alex is right. “Was” is the best term for the building. The wooden roof of the stone structure fell in years ago, and the windows are long gone. The stone steeple still stands, attached to the front wall of the church rather than the roof as is common today. Surrounded by the tiny wildflowers of early spring, the church is beautiful, even if it’s broken.

  I head for the hole in the wall where the front door used to be and enter the sanctuary. It’s a small church; there are only four rows of pews on either side of the center aisle. Running my hand over the polished stone of the pew on my left, I marvel at the beauty. Although they are worn, moss covered, and pitted with weather damage, I can tell they were once works of art.

  The end of each pew is carved with scenes from the Bible and the backs are inscribed with dates and names. Probably the names and birth/death dates of influential members of the church. Some of the names have small birds or other animals carved next to them.

  There is no choir stall or baptismal area here. A small stone altar is all that graces the front of the church. While I’ll never understand the human obsession with religion, this sweet, simple church speaks of more than hell and damnation. It was once the heart of a community of friends and families. Another aspect of human life I don’t understand, but that I wish I did.

  I glance behind me and see that Alex hasn’t come in. He’s leaning against the doorframe, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, grinning.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “I thought you’d like it. I come up here when I need some peace.”

  “I can see why,” I say as I move around the altar and gaze up at the round hole in the back wall that used to be a window. Sunlight streams through into the church, and the occasional bird flies in to rest among the few remaining rafters.

  I walk back up the aisle to Alex. “Do you know how old it is?” I ask.

  “Come on,” he says, indicating I should follow him outside.

  He leads the way to the front left corner and points down. There I see the cornerstone of the building. It reads, Dedicated April 12, 1773.

  That’s relatively young, to me anyway. I think of things as old only when they reach thousands of years of age. Even Westminster Abbey isn’t old to me, and parts of that church date from 1245 A.D. This is impressive for this part of the world, however. So many buildings in America tend to be destroyed well before they reach even this modest age.

  “Its isolation is what’s kept it safe,” I say.

  “That and, well, what else would you do with the land?” Alex asks. “You can’t get up here easily, and I doubt you could get a better road in here. Besides, no one else can build here.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t shown you the best part, yet,” Alex teases. “The thing I really wanted you to see.”

  I can’t imagine that it gets better than this picturesque little ruin, but I follow Alex around to the other side of the church. I gasp when we round the corner. In front of me is an old cemetery, complete with crumbling headstones, overgrown pathways, and out-of-control moss growing on every surface. It’s perfect.

  “Sacred ground,” Alex says, finishing his earlier thought. “No one can build here, even if they want to.”

  The cemetery is surrounded by a low stone wall. I climb over it, so eager to walk among the dead, the people I put here, that I can’t be bothered to find the gate. As I wander among the graves, I’m on the lookout for any snakes lounging in the weak spring sunshine.

  The oldest graves are in the front of the cemetery. The majority of the headstones here are broken or so badly worn that I can’t read the names or dates. The one date I can make out is 1775, but the name is long gone. I have no idea if the person here is male or female, or how old they were when they died.

  Farther back in the cemetery, I find the graves of a few Confederate soldiers. These headstones are in better shape than the markers in the front and most list names, ranks, and dates of birth and death. Squatting down, I clear away the weeds from one grave, and I am surprised to see the name of an individual I actually remember. Sergeant Tommy Andrews, killed at Gettysburg.

  I never met him, but I remember killing him, even though most of the three days of fighting at Gettysburg remain one long blur of line cutting and exhaustion
in my mind. He died July 2, 1863 on Culp’s Hill. Only sixteen, he wasn’t cut down by random cannon fire. That would have been too easy. He was killed by his older brother, James, who fought for the Union. I hated forcing one brother to kill another, but I needed to make a point about the evils of war. Not that it stuck in the human psyche. They’re all still far too willing to shoot each other for no good reason. Tommy’s parents are buried on either side of him, but James’ grave isn’t here. I can’t remember when or where he died, but evidently, he wasn’t welcomed back here. Not surprising, really.

  I rest my hand on Tommy’s grave. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I had to.”

  I stand and move on, looking at other graves but seeing no one else I know. I’m still lost in the past when Alex says, “I take it you like it.”

  I turn to find him sitting on top of an above-ground burial vault. The plaque reads, Amos Winton, 1872 - 1924. This looks to be the most recent in the cemetery. Either the church was still in use as late as 1924, or someone deliberately brought old Amos here after the church disbanded.

  “I wonder where the people who used this church all went?” I ask, looking around at the abandoned ruins, once clearly the heart of a community.

  He shrugs. “Who knows? Wherever their settlement was, it looks like it’s long gone. I’ve hiked around here, trying to find the remains of the houses, but I haven’t found anything. Probably one of those cases where the young people moved away for jobs and marriages and the old people just died out. I’m not the sentimental sort, but it’s kind of sad that a whole community just disappeared. But I guess everything dies eventually.”

  How right he is.

  Alex pats the space next to him, and I hoist myself up beside him on top of old Amos.

  “Thank you for showing me this,” I say.

  We sit quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the birdsong and the sunshine.

  “It doesn’t creep you out, does it?” Alex asks after a while.

  “No. Should it?”

  “I don’t know. Most people get creeped out by death, but you don’t seem to mind. After your comments about Amy this morning, I figured you could appreciate this place for what it is, and not see it as depressing or morbid.”

  I smile, thinking about just how little death “creeps me out.” Sure, there are some deaths that stay with me and seem unjust, as Tommy’s does, but for the most part, it’s easy for me to view death as a fact of human life.

  I don’t have the emotional reaction to death that humans do. Since I’m never going to die, I don’t view someone else’s death as a warning of my own mortality. Death is an abstract concept to me, more like how I imagine a human feels about the death of a star in the heavens. Interesting to watch and maybe a little sad, but not personally relevant.

  “Do you worry about death?” I ask him. It’s rare for me to talk to humans about death since most of them will do anything to avoid the topic. But I sense that this is something Alex isn’t afraid to discuss and maybe even needs to talk about. Maybe it’s why he brought me here.

  “All the time,” he answers. “That’s part of why I like to come up here. Being here reminds me that death happens to everyone, has always happened to everyone, and there’s no escaping it no matter how much I want to.”

  “That’s pretty deep,” I say, impressed by his acceptance of the inevitable. Most humans think they can somehow avoid me, that if they just do the right things or make enough money, I won’t come for them.

  “And mature. There are a lot of people five times your age who can’t accept the inevitability of death,” I say.

  “It’s silly, I guess, but coming here actually makes me worry about it less. You’d think it would be the opposite,” Alex says.

  “No, I can see that. When you know what’s coming and you can look it in the face, it’s easier to deal with than when you hide from it. Regardless, you have plenty of time before you have to worry about it.”

  He shrugs. “I guess.”

  He goes silent, and I wait. He’s swinging his legs and kicking his heels against the side of the tomb, head down in thought. I can tell he’s grappling with something, so I let him work it out. Finally, he lifts his head and looks at me.

  “You asked earlier why I drove my car through the headmaster’s office.”

  I nod. “But I stand by what I said. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I want to. I’ve wanted to tell someone for a long time and you seem, I don’t know, nonjudgmental.”

  I shrug. “I try to be.”

  “My mom died from breast cancer a year ago,” he says. “I couldn’t handle it. I got stuck in the angry phase of grief and lashed out at everyone. Then I got some more bad news, and I lost it. That’s when I drove through the office.

  “While I was in the hospital, a friend at St. Luke’s told me about this place. He said it helped him to deal with his grandmother’s death. That seeing something so old helped him put it in perspective. He was right, and I’ve been coming here ever since.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I wait to see if he’ll go on.

  “Hey, I’m sorry to dump this on you. I barely know you, and here I am telling you about my horrible past.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. And I’m surprised to find that it is. For the first time in decades, I haven’t minded listening to a human talk about their life. Weird.

  “It’s just that I can’t talk to my dad. He’s worse off than I am. And my friends from St. Luke’s cut me loose when I got expelled.” He looks down at his lap, and I can see the rejection still hurts.

  “I understand. Really. I know what it’s like to want to talk about things but have no one who you can talk to.” That sums up my entire existence. If I want to talk about the pain my job causes me, I’m out of luck. Mom and my sisters don’t want to hear it, and Zeus just tells me to quit whining.

  “I didn’t mean to bring it up. I guess starting school on the same day someone died just dragged it all up again. All those depressed kids.”

  I snort, and he glares at me.

  “Sorry. It’s just I know that very few of those kids are really depressed or grieving. Most of them are simply having their first brush with mortality and finding they don’t like it. They don’t know death the way you do. You’re entitled to your grief.”

  “Thanks, I think. You have a strange outlook on death and grief, you know?”

  “I’ve been told,” I say. “I’m sorry about your mom. What was her name?”

  “Helen. She was thirty-eight years old. It wasn’t fair.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  Helen Martin. I think hard, but I can’t remember her. I hate that I’m responsible for Alex’s pain. Well, technically, Lacey’s responsible since she decreed that Helen’s life would be so short. That she added cancer to Helen’s fate just gave me a convenient cause of death. I could have chosen something else, but Helen still would have died young. It doesn’t matter how I choose to kill someone. It always comes back to the same thing—I am the monster who actually ends a life. It’s hard not to feel guilty, even though I never have a choice.

  I think of what I might say to ease the grief I see etched so plainly on Alex’s face. Tears have welled up in his eyes and I can see he’s breathing deeply, trying not to let them fall. Coming here might be soothing on the whole, but talking about Helen clearly upsets him.

  I lay my hand on his arm. “It wasn’t fair, but maybe it was necessary,” I venture.

  He turns to me and I see the fury in his eyes, along with raw grief unhealed by a year’s passage. I realize too late that I chose the wrong words.

  “Necessary? It was necessary to take a young mother from a family that needed her? That still needs her? My sister was only twelve. She still needs her mother. My father needs his wife. Don’t talk to me about necessity.”

  Pushing my hand away, he slides off the vault. He starts pacing the cemetery.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you he
re. I should have known you wouldn’t understand. You’re just like the rest who say, ‘Get over it, it’ll be okay.’”

  “Hey,” I shout at him. “I do understand. Maybe more than you think. Let me ask you something,” I say, sliding off the vault and walking over to him. I grip his arm to hold him still. “Do you believe in fate, or a divine plan, or anything like that?”

  “I used to, until it seemed too cruel. I was raised in church. We were taught that God has a master plan, but His plan sucks if that’s true.”

  Wrong church, wrong god, I think. But at least he understands the principle.

  “Okay, then. If you believe that things happen for a reason, then your mother’s death was necessary and had a purpose. That doesn’t make it any easier to take, I know, but maybe you can find solace in knowing that it was preordained and that there was nothing you could do about it.”

  “But it wasn’t fair.”

  “No one has a fair life,” I say. “Name one human who doesn’t face the death of a loved one, an illness, an injury, or some other horrible, life-altering event.”

  “I can’t do that,” he says.

  “I know, and that’s my point. Everyone suffers. You’re just suffering at a younger age than some. But if you believe that there is some sort of master plan to the universe, then you have to believe that suffering has a purpose, too. Yours and hers,” I add.

  “And what is the purpose of losing a mother so young?” he asks.

  I think for a moment. There are lots of purposes, and Lacey and I have used them all over the years. “Maybe you needed to learn how to handle grief. Maybe you and your sister needed help in growing up. Maybe your father needed to learn to stand alone. Maybe your mother had completed her life’s work and it was time for her to go. Maybe the population needed balancing.

  “I don’t know what the purpose was, and you’ll never know either. Somehow, you have to learn to be okay with that or it will eat you up inside. It already is,” I say.

  Alex stares at me. His eyes are intense, and the color reminds me of the ocean just before the storm rages. I drop my hand from his arm and step back, afraid that I’ve made him angrier. I’ve said too much, gotten too involved, and probably hurt him more than I’ve helped. But something about him kept me talking well beyond the point when I should have simply shut up.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s not my business. Let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”

  “No, wait,” he says, running a hand over his face and walking toward the back of the cemetery.

  Sensing that he doesn’t want me to follow, I walk back toward the church and go inside, giving him a moment to calm himself. Sitting in one of the pews, I think. I can look in the computer at home and find the exact reason why Helen died so young. For one crazy second, I think about looking up Helen’s file and giving Alex the answer he so obviously wants.

  I shake my head. That is definitely forbidden. I am not permitted to discuss fate with a mortal. If I tell Alex anything about his mother, I will be punished. Besides, knowing why his mother had to die won’t make it okay for him. Dead is dead, and the reasons don’t matter.

  I look up at the open hole behind the altar and see that the rocks beyond are no longer brightly lit by the sun. It’s getting late, and I need to get home. If Alex doesn’t come back soon, I’ll have to drag him off this mountain.

  After a few minutes, I hear footsteps behind me, but I don’t turn around. Alex comes down the aisle and sits down beside me.

  “Sorry,” he says, bumping my shoulder playfully with his. “I brought you up here to cheer you up, and I ruined it.”

  “You didn’t ruin it. You did take my mind off my problems,” I say.

  That gets a rueful smile from him.

  “Do you want to walk around some more?” he asks. “Talk about lighter things?”

  “I would, but I have to get home.”

  I’m surprised that I am sorry I can’t spend more time up here with Alex. He’s complicated and dark, but with a lighter side that cares deeply about other people. Not so different from myself. And this place is calming. Even with the recent drama, I feel better than I have in a while.

  “Yeah, you mentioned you have a bad night ahead of you. Homework?” he asks.

  “Something like that.” It’s as good an evasion as anything else.

  “We could study together, if you want,” he offers, and I hear the hope in his voice.

  “No, thanks. I don’t work well with others. I’ll get everything done much faster on my own.”

  “Okay. Will you come up here with me some other time, though?” he asks. “If I promise not to drag you down with my problems?”

  “I’d like that,” I say. And I mean it.

  We head back down the mountain to the car, and I drive Alex home. With Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” cycling on repeat in the background, we spend the hour talking about the books we’ve read and what’s in our To Be Read piles. He’s read almost as much obscure stuff as I have, and he hasn’t had thousands of years to do it. He’s the first human I’ve met who can match my reading ability and taste. I’m impressed.

  When he gives me directions to his house, I realize he lives less than a mile from my house. That’s disquieting in some respects and comforting in others. We say goodnight and I drive home, thinking about how a day that started out so badly could end up so well. I find myself looking forward to school tomorrow for the first time ever.