Scythe

by Neal Shusterman

  There were men and there were women. The subjects represented different ages, ethnic mixes, and body types, from muscular to obese to gaunt. He yelled and screamed and grunted with every thrust, slice, and twist. He had trained well. The blades sunk in with perfect precision. Once he began, he found he couldn’t stop. Bodies fell, and he was on to the next, and the next. They didn’t fight back, they didn’t run in fear, they just stood there and took it. They were no different from the dummies. He was covered in blood. It stung his eyes; the smell was thick in his nostrils. Finally he came to the last one. It was a girl his age, and there was a look on her face of resignation bordering on sorrow. He wanted to end that sorrow. He wanted to complete what he had begun, but he overrode the brutal imperative of the hunter in him. He forced himself not to swing his blades.

  “Do it,” she whispered. “Do it or I won’t get paid.”

  But he dropped his blades to the grass. Twelve deadish, one left alive. He turned to the scythes, and they all began to applaud.

  “Well done!” Scythe Goddard said, more pleased than Rowan had ever seen him. “Very well done!”

  Ambu-drones began to descend from above, grasping his victims and spiriting them away to the nearest revival center. And Rowan found himself smiling. Something had torn loose inside of him. He didn’t know whether it was a good thing or not. And while part of him felt like falling to his knees and hurling up breakfast, another part of him wanted to howl to the moon like a wolf.

  * * *

  A year ago if you’d told me that I’d know how to wield more than two dozen types of blades, that I would become an expert at firearms, and that I would know at least ten ways to end a life with my bare hands—I would have laughed and suggested that you ought to get your brain chemistry tweaked. Amazing what can happen in just a few short months.

  Training under Scythe Goddard is different from under Scythe Faraday. It’s intense, physical, and I can’t deny that I’m getting better at everything I do. If I am a weapon, then I’m being sharpened against a grindstone every day.

  My second conclave is coming up in a few weeks. The first trial was nothing more than a simple question. I’m told it will be different this next time. There’s no telling what the apprentices will be expected to do. One thing’s for sure, there will be serious consequences for me if I don’t perform to Goddard’s liking.

  I have every confidence that I will.

  —From the journal of Rowan Damisch, scythe apprentice

  * * *

  25

  Proxy of Death

  The engineer liked to believe that his work at Magnetic Propulsion Laboratories was useful, even though it had always appeared pointless. Magnetic trains were already moving as efficiently as they could. Applications for private transportation needed little more than tweaking. There was no more “new and improved,” there was just the trick of different—new styles, and advertisements to convince that stylishness was all the rage—but the basic technology remained exactly the same.

  In theory, however, there were new uses that were yet to be tapped—or else why would the Thunderhead put them to work?

  There were project managers who knew more about the ultimate goal of the work they did, but no one had all the pieces. Still, there was speculation. It had long been believed that a combination of solar wind and magnetic propulsion would be required to move about in space with any efficiency. True, the prospect of space travel had been out of favor for many years, but that didn’t mean it would always be.

  There had once been missions to colonize Mars, to explore Jupiter’s moons, and even to launch to the stars beyond, but every mission had ended in utter and disastrous failure. Ships blew up. Colonists died—and in deep space, death meant death, just as completely as if they had been gleaned. The idea of irrevocable death without the controlled hand of a scythe was too much to bear for a world that had conquered mortality. The public outcry shut down all space exploration. Earth was our sole home, and would remain so.

  Which is why, the engineer suspected, the Thunderhead moved forward on these projects so carefully and so slowly as not to draw the public’s attention. It was by no means underhanded, because the Thunderhead was incapable of underhandedness. It was merely discreet. Wisely discreet.

  One day, perhaps the Thunderhead would announce that while everyone was looking the other way, humanity had achieved a sustainable presence beyond the bounds of planet Earth. The engineer looked forward to that day, and fully expected he’d live to see it. He had no reason to expect that he wouldn’t.

  Until the day a team of scythes laid siege to his research facility.

  • • •

  Rowan was awakened at dawn by a towel hurled at his face.

  “Get up, sleeping beauty,” Scythe Volta said. “Shower and get dressed, today’s the day.”

  “Today’s what day?” Rowan said, still too groggy to sit up.

  “Gleaning day!” said Volta.

  “You mean you guys actually glean? I thought you just partied and spent other people’s money.”

  “Just get yourself ready, smart-ass.”

  When Rowan turned off his shower, he heard the chop of helicopter blades, and when he came out onto the lawn, it was waiting for them. It was no surprise to Rowan that it was painted royal blue and studded with glistening stars. Everything in Scythe Goddard’s life was a testament to his ego.

  The other three scythes were already out front, practicing their best kill moves. Their robes were bulky, and clearly loaded down with all nature of weaponry sheathed within the folds. Chomsky torched a potted shrub with a flamethrower.

  “Really?” said Rowan, “A flamethrower?”

  Chomsky shrugged. “No law against it. And anyway, what business is it of yours?”

  Goddard strode out of the mansion. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!” As if they hadn’t all been waiting on him.

  The moment was charged with the adrenaline of anticipation, and as they strode toward the waiting helicopter, Rowan, for an instant, had an image of them as superheroes . . . until he remembered what their true purpose was, and the image shattered.

  “How many are you going to glean?” he asked Scythe Volta, but Volta just shook his head and pointed to his ear. Too loud to hear Rowan over the chopper blades, which made the scythes’ robes flail like flags in a storm as they crossed the lawn.

  Rowan did some calculations. Scythes were charged with five gleanings per week, and to the best of his knowledge, these four hadn’t taken a life in the three months that Rowan had been there. That meant they could glean about two hundred fifty today and still be within their quota. This wasn’t going to be a gleaning, it was going to be a massacre.

  Rowan hesitated, falling back as the others got in. Volta noticed.

  “IS THERE A PROBLEM?” Volta shouted over the deafening chop of the blades.

  But even if Rowan could make himself heard, he would never be understood. This is what Goddard and his disciples did. It was how they operated. This was business as usual. Could this ever be that way for him? He thought to his latest training sessions. The ones with living targets. The feeling he had when he had rendered all but one deadish, revulsion fighting a primal sense of victory. He felt that now as he stood at the entrance to the helicopter. With each step deeper into Goddard’s world, it became harder and harder to retreat.

  All four scythes were looking at him now. They were ready to go on their mission. The only thing holding them back was Rowan.

  I am not one of them, he told himself. I will not be gleaning. I will only be there to observe.

  He willed himself to step up into the helicopter, pulled the door closed, and they rose skyward.

  “Never been up in one of these, have you?” Volta asked, misreading Rowan’s apprehension.

  “No, never.”

  “It’s the only way to travel,” Scythe Rand said.

  “We are angels of death,” said Scythe Goddard. “It is only fitting that we swoop in
from the heavens.”

  They flew south, over Fulcrum City, to the suburbs beyond. All the way Rowan silently hoped the helicopter would crash—but realized what a pointless exercise that would be. Because even if it did, they’d all be revived by the weekend.

  • • •

  A helicopter landed on the main building’s rooftop heliport. It was unexpected, unannounced—which never happened. The Thunderhead piloted just about everything airborne, and even if it was an off-grid chopper, someone onboard would always announce their approach and request clearance.

  This thing just dropped from the sky and onto the roof.

  The closest security guard bounded up the stairs from the sixth floor and onto the roof, in time to see the scythes stepping out. Four of them—blue, green, yellow, and orange—and a boy with an apprentice armband.

  The guard stood there slackjawed, unsure what to do. He thought to call this in to the main office, but realized that doing so might get him gleaned.

  The female scythe, in green with witchy dark hair and a PanAsian leaning to her, approached him, grinning.

  “Knock, knock,” she said.

  He was too stunned to respond.

  “I said, knock, knock.”

  “Wh . . . who’s there?” he finally responded.

  She reached into her robe, producing the most awful looking knife the man had ever seen, but her arm was grabbed by the scythe in blue before she could use it.

  “Don’t waste it on him, Ayn,” he said to her.

  The scythe in green put her knife away and shrugged. “Guess you’ll miss the punchline.” Then she stormed past him with the others, and down the stairs into the building.

  He caught the gaze of the apprentice, who lagged a few yards behind the others.

  “What should I do?” he asked the boy.

  “Get out,” the boy told him. “And don’t look back.”

  So the guard did what he was told. He crossed to the far stairwell, bounded all the way down, burst out of the emergency exit, and didn’t stop running until he was too far away to hear the screams.

  • • •

  “We’ll start up here on the sixth floor and work our way down,” Goddard told the others. They came out of the stairwell to see a woman waiting for the elevator. She gasped and froze.

  “Boo!” said Scythe Chomsky. The woman flinched, dropping the folders she carried. Rowan knew that any of the scythes, on a whim, could have taken her out. She must have known that too, because she braced for it.

  “How high is your security clearance?” Goddard asked her.

  “Level one,” she told him.

  “Is that good?”

  She nodded, and he took her security badge. “Thank you,” he said. “You get to live.”

  And he moved toward a locked door, swiping the card to gain entrance.

  Rowan found himself getting lightheaded, and realized he was beginning to hyperventilate.

  “I should wait here,” he told them. “I can’t glean, I should wait here.”

  “No way,” said Chomsky. “You come with us.”

  “But . . . but what use will I be? I’ll just be in the way.”

  Then Scythe Rand kicked in the glass of an emergency case, pulled out a fire hatchet, and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Break stuff.”

  “Why?”

  She winked at him. “Because you can.”

  • • •

  The employees in suite 601—which took up the entire north half of the floor, had no warning. Scythe Goddard and his scythes strode to the center of activity.

  “Attention!” he announced in full theatrical voice. “Attention, all!  You have been selected for gleaning today. You are commanded to step forward and meet your demise.”

  Murmurs, gasps, and cries of shock. No one stepped forward. No one ever did. Goddard nodded to Chomsky, Volta, and Rand, and the four advanced through the maze of cubicles and offices, leaving nothing living in their wake.

  “I am your completion!” intoned Goddard. “I am your deliverance! I am your portal to the mysteries beyond this life!”

  Blades and bullets and flames. The office was catching fire. Alarms began to blare, sprinklers gushed forth icy water from the ceiling. The doomed were caught between fire and water, and the deadly sights of four master hunters. No one stood a chance.

  “I am your final word! Your omega! Your bringer of peace and rest. Embrace me!”

  No one embraced him. Mostly people cowered and pleaded for mercy, but the only mercy shown was the speed at which they were dispatched.

  “Yesterday you were gods. Today you are mortal. Your death is my gift to you. Accept it with grace and humility.”

  So focused were the scythes that none of them noticed Rowan slipping out behind them and crossing to suite 602, where he pounded on the glass door until someone came and Rowan could warn him what was coming.

  “Take the back stairs,” he told the man. “Get as many out as you can. Don’t ask questions—just go!” If the man had any doubts, they were chased away by the sounds of desperation and despair coming from just across the hall.

  A few minutes later, when Goddard, Volta, and Chomsky were done with suite 601, they crossed the hall to find suite 602 empty, save for Rowan, swinging his fire hatchet at computers and desks and everything in his path, doing exactly as he was told to do.

  • • •

  The scythes moved faster than the flames—faster than the flow of workers trying to escape. Volta and Chomsky blocked two of the three stairwells. Rand made her way to the main entrance and stood like a goalie, taking out anyone trying to escape through the front doors. Goddard spouted his ritualistic litany as he moved through the panicked mob, switching his weapons as it suited him, and Rowan swung his hatchet at anything that would shatter, then secretly directed whoever he could toward the one unguarded stairwell.

  It was over in less than fifteen minutes. The building was in flames, the helicopter was now hovering above, and the scythes strode out of the front entrance, like the four horsemen of the post-mortal apocalypse.

  Rowan brought up the rear, dragging his hatchet on the marble, until he dropped it with a clatter.

  Before them were half a dozen fire trucks and ambu-drones, and behind that hordes of survivors. Some ran when they saw the scythes come out, but just as many stayed, their fascination overcoming their terror.

  “You see?” Goddard told Rowan. “The firefighters can’t interfere with a scythe action. They’ll let the whole thing burn down. And as for the survivors, we have a wonderful public relations opportunity.”

  Then he stepped forward and spoke loudly to those who hadn’t fled. “Our gleaning is complete,” he announced. “To those who survive, we grant immunity. Come forward to claim it.” He held out his hand—the one that bore his ring. The other scythes followed his lead and did the same.

  No one moved at first, probably thinking it was a trick. But in a few moments, one ash-stained employee stumbled forward, followed by another and another, and then the entire mob was apprehensively coming toward them. The first few knelt and kissed the scythes’ rings—and once the others saw that this was for real, they surged forward, mobbing the scythes.

  “Easy!” shouted Volta. “One at a time!”

  But the same mob mentality that propelled their escape now pushed them toward those life-saving rings. All of a sudden, no one seemed to remember their dead coworkers.

  Then, as the crowd around them got denser and more agitated, Goddard pulled back his hand, removed his ring, and handed it to Rowan.

  “I tire of this,” Goddard said. “Take it. Share in the adoration.”

  “But . . . I can’t. I’m not ordained.”

  “You can use it if I give you permission as a proxy,” Goddard told him. “And right now you have my permission.”

  Rowan put it on, but it wouldn’t stay, so he switched it to his index finger, where it was a bit more snug. Then he held out his hand as the other scythes d
id.

  The crush of people didn’t care which finger the ring was on, or even whose hand it was on. They practically climbed over one another to kiss it, and to thank him for his justice, his love, and his mercy, calling him “Your Honor,” not even noticing he wasn’t a scythe.

  “Welcome to life as a god,” Scythe Volta said to him. While behind them the building burned to the ground.

  * * *

  We are wise but not perfect, insightful but not all-seeing. We know that by establishing the Scythedom, we will be doing something very necessary, but we, the first scythes, still have our misgivings. Human nature is both predictable and mysterious; prone to great and sudden advances, yet still mired in despicable self-interest. Our hope is that by a set of ten simple, straightforward laws, we can avoid the pitfalls of human fallibility. My greatest hope is that, in time, our wisdom will become as perfect as is our knowledge. And if this experiment of ours fails, we have also embedded a way to escape it.

  May the Thunderhead help us all, if we ever need that escape.

  —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Prometheus, the  first World Supreme Blade

  * * *

  26

  Not Like the Others

  That night they feasted, although Rowan could not dig up an appetite, no matter how deep he mined. Goddard ate enough for everyone. He was invigorated by the day’s hunt, like a vampire sucking in the life force of its victims. He was more charming, more suave than ever, saying things to make everyone laugh. How easy, thought Rowan, to fall in with him. To be stroked into his elite club, just as the others had been.

  Clearly, Chomsky and Rand were cut from a similar cloth as Goddard. They held not the slightest illusion of conscience. But unlike Goddard, they held no delusions of grandeur. They gleaned for sport—for the joy of it—and as Scythe Rand so accurately put it, because they can. They were more than happy to wield their weapons while Goddard inhabited his role as the Angel of Death. Rowan couldn’t be sure if the man believed it, or if it was all artifice. Theatricality to add flair to the show.