“Damn,” Ellie muttered. Just to experiment, she continued walking past the living man, who of course did not see her, but as she did the shine of the shard began to weaken.
“Is it inside of him?” asked Cookie, sounding fearful.
“This can’t be a coincidence,” said Jude. “The other one was inside someone, too.”
“Hear that?” Shawn said, and there was a grin on his face.
In the distance, a horn, long and billowing like the wind. Like the fog horn from a ship. Ellie glanced down at the tracks by her feet and corrected herself: or a train.
“No,” said Cookie. “Oh, no, no no...” Covering her ears with her bloodied gloves, she turned and walked several paces away from the scene. Ellie reminded herself: I’m part of the accidental deaths squad. But Cookie reaps the peaceful ones: the old, the ill...
“This is rich,” Shawn said, almost prancing. “Never seen a train mow a guy before.”
Jude looked at Shawn like he was crazy, which Ellie thought was not a bad estimation. Then Jude hurried to the young man’s side and began shouting.
“Hey! Hey, buddy!” He clapped his hands, and then jerked in amazement as the young man, clearly looking through and past him, moved to the side enough to walk around Jude and continue strolling down the train tracks, unconcerned.
Shawn let out a snort, and glanced at Ellie with a look that read amusement.
“Yo,” Jude said, and now he sounded pissed. “Hey, idiot, a train is coming.”
“He can’t see you,” Ellie said, figuring that she ought to tell Jude that he was invisible. “It’s a trick of being a reaper. We can’t interact with the living. You’re the same.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Jude, “Well try this.” And he turned, jogged to the young man, and then looped his arms around the other’s waist and lifted him off the ground, carrying him several paces away from the tracks. Ellie felt surprise appear over the planes of her face. She glanced at Shawn, whose eyebrows were high on his forehead.
Neither of them had seen someone physically move a living person before.
But when Jude released the young man, rather than reacting in confusion or even acknowledging he had changed location for an unknown reason, the man just paced back to the railroad tracks and resumed walking.
“This is crazy,” Jude said. He looked at Ellie, who shrugged.
“It’s what they do,” she said. “We’re invisible, and besides, when someone is fated to die, they die. Nothing can stop it. I’ve heard of reapers who tried and failed.”
Give it up, she thought, and her face must have said as much, because Jude set his jaw, said, “I’m not going to watch someone die like this,” and jogged back to the man.
The train horn was loud, now. A surprise that the young man could not hear the roar, even through his headphones, music, humming. The clank of machinery was audible. And Ellie could feel rumbling, slightly, through her shins. She moved away from the train tracks and kept walking, watching Jude shout at the young man.
“You total idiot!” Jude yelled, reaching out and knocking the headphones off. The young man paused only long enough to pick them up off the ground, brush the dirt off, and re-settle them on his ears. Completely deaf to the train. He just kept walking.
“This is almost as much fun as the asshole with pliers,” said Shawn, and Ellie did not know what he was referencing, but could guess. Further back on the tracks, Cookie still had her eyes shut and hands over her ears, but was hunched over, now.
Ellie was going to tell Jude that he should stop—not only because this person’s death had to be inevitable, but also because, if her suspicions were correct, then this man needed to die. If the shard was inside of him, there was no other way to retrieve it than to have it removed. And she suspected that death would remove it.
This logic was about as sensible—and twisted—as anything else in the world.
Then again, she thought, watching Jude’s efforts, I’m the one who was being told to stop trying to save the world. If anyone should not tell people to stop fighting the inevitable, it should be me. So go ahead, Jude. Make your best effort.
But for the sake of the world, if I’m right and this guy needs to die, I hope you fail.
There was something strangely exhilarating in thinking those words to herself. It was as though Ellie was playing God, deciding who lived and who died.
And she realized—perhaps the analogue was more literal than she first understood. Here she was, deciding between the fate of one man and the world. And she was going to let it happen. She wondered what would change in the scenario, if anything, if she was not just a passive observer. If she had to actively kill someone.
Isn’t there a moral test on this? She wondered. Something about a train track, a divide in the tracks where the train is set to mow down five people but you are standing near a switch that will change it to only kill one person? And then you have to decide whether to throw the switch or not. It’s a no-win scenario and someone is gonna die either way.
I choose to save the most people I can. And really, in this case it’s about saving any people, any at all. I don’t know if the reapers will put people who have already been reaped back into their bodies. But there are people who haven’t been taken yet.
And as long as the universe at least survives, that’s at least something.
The train arrived so quickly that Ellie almost did not have time to react. One moment it was in the distance, the next it was blowing its horn in one loud continual blast, the driver clearly having spotted the man on the tracks, and then it was over.
Jude made one last effort. He seized the young man by the wrist and tried to pull him out of the way. But physics seemed to have stopped working—even though Jude was taller and bulkier, he had no strength. The young man’s arm lifted as Jude grabbed and pulled, but he did not even so much as lose his balance mid-step.
Like Jude was pulling at a tree. Something bigger and heavier and rooted.
The result of the pulling, however, with how Jude threw his weight into the motion, was that Jude was just far enough out of the tracks that he was not also struck. The train barreled past and Ellie saw Jude’s dark hair whip his face in backlash.
The young man must have died instantly. Hopefully. The screech of the brakes drowned out the sound of impact. Then he was a long smear on the side of the tracks, like his flesh was made of play-doh. His headphones were knocked off and still blaring music as Ellie knelt next to them, searching for the shard.
The one she held was glowing brighter, now, brighter, brighter—and there.
Ellie grabbed the new one and stuffed it into one pocket, the older bigger one into the other, to spare her eyes from the light and her hands from the heat. Then she glanced up at Jude beside her, whose face was unreadable, and down the tracks to where she saw Shawn had his finger on Cookie’s back.
Fishing out her pocket-watch, Ellie nearly made the mistake of clicking it directly. Which would have been a disaster—the rules of return would have brought her to two stops prior, which would have been Jerusalem, 1967—but she paused a moment to flick at the dials, aiming for the library, and then took Jude by the sleeve.
* * *
Cookie and Shawn had arrived first. Cookie was sitting on the couch, Shawn pacing and grinning to himself. And that was a strange image, Ellie thought—usually Cookie was always grinning and Shawn was muted in her presence, afraid of her.
“So,” said Jude. His voice was flat. “That just happened.”
“You get used to it,” said Ellie, and Jude turned his unreadable look on her. She waited for him to speak but he did not say anything. But his eyes began to soften as he digested what she said, what her words meant about her life as a reaper.
You better not feel sorry for me, came the thought. Ellie decided not to speak aloud.
Cookie wiped at the sides of her face. Heaved in a breath. Said, “That’s twice, now.”
J
ude glanced at her, nodded. “Old Arabian proverb: If it happens once, it is a mistake. If it happens twice, it will surely happen a third time.”
“A veritable found of wisdom, you are,” said Shawn, still pacing. The movement was ghoulish, Ellie thought. Like seeing the man die had given Shawn an energy burst.
“Fount,” said Jude. “Not ‘found’ of wisdom. Fount. Like a fountain.”
“Whatever,” Shawn responded. And then backed off several paces as Cookie stood. But despite the violence of Cookie’s sudden rise, she was not concerned with Shawn.
She held out her hand to Ellie. “Let me see it.”
Feeling dubious, Ellie fished the new shard out of her pocket and handed it over.
Cookie took the shard gingerly, between thumb and forefinger, as if it might bite her. Ellie felt the motion was familiar, but was kept from trying to remember by the look on Cookie’s face. She stared at the shard like it had answers to some bigger question.
Rather like someone looking at a murder weapon, Ellie thought.
“They didn’t die for it, Cookie,” said Ellie. “It’s the past, remember? These people have died already. You can’t change the past—” as much as Ellie doubted this rule, now, she knew Cookie did not—“so they aren’t dying for the shards to be found.”
“Are they?” said Cookie. Ellie’s mouth dropped, but before she could even think about how to respond, Cookie retracted, “Nevermind. I’m just a little shook, is all.”
Ellie did not know how to respond to dying souls, and she did not know how to respond to Cookie now, either. She glanced at Shawn and Jude, but neither were any help.
But Cookie interrupted Ellie’s search for what to say. She held up her compass to the shard, and the dials turned, gleaming, under the water. Then she said, “We’ll go with your splitting-up plan,” and she must have been talking to Jude, because she stepped closer and took him by the elbow. Then they were gone.
How industrious, Ellie thought. And then, in an echo, her sternum aching: Cookie...
There was still the other shard. Shawn stepped closer to Ellie, grinned, and raised his cube. He said, with a bit of exaggerated flourish, “Coming, Queen Bitch?”
* * *
A beach. Salt. Spray. Sunlight like daggers to the eyes. Ellie had never been to a beach, but she discovered that she hated sand and saltwater.
Shawn laughing as the little girl drowned. From her open, bubbling mouth, the shard emerged and floated to the surface. Shawn remarking, “It’s like a horror movie!”
Ellie wanted to punch him.
* * *
Cookie and Jude were waiting when Ellie and Shawn returned to the library, sitting together on the couch. Ellie caught the tail end of a conversation:
“—try to make them comfortable, is all,” Cookie was saying, and Jude responded, “But what about Hell? I mean, Hitler had to go somewhere. Is there a Hell?”
Cookie’s mouth opened, but Shawn interrupted: “Yeah. It’s a groovy place.”
Without thinking, Ellie whirled and struck at him. Even as she did, she knew there was no point, except perhaps that she was tired and stressed and everything seemed awful. Shawn was there and convenient and seemed to deserve something. So she hit him.
But she must have socked harder than she thought, because Shawn tumbled over to his side on the floor, ball-and-chain rattling. Then Jude was there, holding up his hands between them and saying, “Whoa, now. I don’t know what the deal is, but we don’t really have time for this, guys. Let’s fight after saving the world, okay?”
Right, Ellie reminded herself. Saving the world. Seems a priority.
Shawn was glowering at her as he stumbled back to his feet. Only Jude standing between them seemed to be holding Shawn back from revenge. Even still, Shawn kicked out with his ball-and-chain leg, and the lash of his foot sent the ball bouncing.
“What is up with that thing, anyway?” said Jude. Ellie could see that he was aware violence was still lingering between them and was desperate to distract everyone.
Moving between Ellie and Shawn’s line of sight, Jude asked, “Hey. So I’m a super-human, apparently. Do you need this chain thing, or could you do without it?”
Shawn snorted, and finally looked away from Ellie to Jude. “What do you think?”
“Well,” said Jude. “How about I try this?” And he knelt down and tugged at the chain.
Shawn wobbled, as if about to trip. He shot Jude a look of suspicion, but Jude said, “Wait, let me try one more thing,” and then gripped at the cuff around Shawn’s ankle.
Ellie sank down beside Cookie on the couch. She was surprised to feel Cookie scoot closer, their hips touching. She did not look Cookie in the face.
Jude strained at the cuff. “Doesn’t quite feel like metal,” he puffed.
“Well, it is metal,” said Shawn, peering down at Jude’s efforts with disguised curiosity. “Also, you gotta vein pulsing in your forehead. It’s super gross.”
“Hold on,” said Jude, and no sooner did these words leave him than there was a loud crunch, more like the sound Ellie could hear while chewing cereal than of metal snapping, but then he was holding up the broken cuff and smiling.
Shawn kicked his free leg a few times, experimentally. He did not say thank-you, but merely, “Huh.” There was a lot contained within that sound, though.
“Why didn’t we try this earlier? That has to be as annoying to drag around as it was to listen to it being dragged,” Jude joked, and stood, handed Shawn the cuff. “I think this is still yours?”
Shawn’s mouth opened, probably for a caustic remark, but then all four of them froze at the sound of chatter coming from the stairwell, down the hall through the bookshelves.
Ellie had only to glance at Cooke to realize everyone understood: with time frozen and the souls around them reaped, there was only one explanation for people talking.
Other reapers were in the library.
Chapter Twenty-One: Caught Past the Ninth Hour.
“I’m thinking they go into some kind of netherworld,” said one voice, which was familiar but Ellie could not place. “A big storage bag, just in case there’s a new universe.”
“Why would there be a netherworld?” the second voice said, also familiar. “God doesn’t need pre-existent matter to create a world. He just does it.”
“Creation from nothing,” said a third. “Ex nihilo.”
“Nigh-hill-low?” said the second. “Sounds like ‘nihilism’.”
“Same root,” offered the third.
“Yeah, I know that’s the traditional view,” said the first. “But I also heard some people say God and matter existed both independently, eternally. God’s just the thing that molds the matter into shapes and gives some of it life.”
“Yeah,” said the third. “And the people saying that were all pagans who thought God was a teapot.”
By this point, Ellie and the others had recovered from their shock, and had made a rush back into the stacks. Cookie made a beeline down the aisle to peer through the books on the shelves to the stairwell, to see who emerged.
Ellie recognized the three reapers when they came into view: Yellows, with his baseball hat askew, Sven Holzmann grimacing overtop his braces, and Marcus Greeves, who was toying with his reaper’s tool, a long contraption that Ellie recognized from an old high school documentary: a slide rule.
“But what if?” said Marcus, giving his reaper’s tool a twirl. “I mean, I guess it just gives me comfort. To know that everything isn’t all going to waste.”
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” said Yellows. “Ex nihilo et ad nihilo.”
“Their souls are gone, dummy,” said Sven. “Why mourn meat? Besides, what’s the point of a world without people in it?”
“Maybe it’s just a lot of effort, is all,” Marcus said. “Make a universe, then unmake a universe, then make another from scratch? How does that make sense?”
“Well, if
you’re all powerful, I guess there’s no thinking about waste or whatnot,” said Yellows. “Like, if you had a plane that never ran out of gas or food, would you ever land on the ground?”
“That metaphor doesn’t make any sense,” complained Sven.
“Look that that,” interrupted Marcus, with a laugh, but Ellie could not see what had caught his attention. “I’m glad I got to see physics go all wonky before we reap it.”
“Somebody didn’t like you, buddy,” said Yellows, and Ellie shifted to see: they were strolling down the corridor, had reached the body that Shawn had pushed over. The corpse was still caught between gravity and time: its clothes frozen pulled down though laying on its side. Yellows stuck out a foot and tapped it with his toe as he walked.
The body vanished.
There was no flash of light, no explosion. Just gone. Not even a shadow left behind.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” said Marcus, “There must be a netherworld. Even if they aren’t used to make a new world, they could go to kind of museum up in Heaven. You know, so the souls there can go visit their old meat suits.”
“If all matter goes to this museum, then what about the food we eat?” Sven said. “We don’t have stomach noodles, remember? Does that go to your netherworld, too? What a gross museum—all this mashed up food that never returned back to the universe.”
“I guess I didn’t think that far—” And Marcus paused. “Hold on, what’s this?”
Taking a few more steps down the stacks, Ellie realized what had caught his attention:
Shawn’s broken ball-and-chain.
That idiot, she thought, that absolute idiot, I’ll kill him for leaving that behind. Well, if they weren’t going to discover us before, they know we’re here now.
“Hey, I know this thing,” said Yellows, already solving the mystery. He raised his voice: “Shawn Vasquez? Hey, man, come on out here.”
Just let Shawn go out, Ellie would have said if she could have managed to keep her voice quiet enough. But then Cookie was moving, also. You’re too honest, Ellie wanted to hiss at her, don’t go—but she did not need to bother, because Cookie stopped just at the edge of the aisle, where she could watch everything.
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