by C. L. Bevill
Tavie looked at her feet. She was wearing the ankle boots that were the most comfortable on the job. She was going to be wearing those for an unknown eternity? She concentrated and one of them turned into a patent leather stiletto with five inch heels. It just went from ankle boot to stiletto. Just like that. She crossed her legs so that the stiletto covered foot was on top and she could admire it better.
“You’re shockingly unruffled for a newbie,” a man said from next to her.
Tavie very nearly jumped, but she was used to pretending she hadn’t been startled. People, no, deadies, moved quietly around the area. There wasn’t the crush and grumble of big crowds. Sticks didn’t break under their feet and the shuffling was minimalized, as if none of the dead were allowed to scuff their feet along the ground. She turned her head and saw a man with dark hair and dark eyes five feet away. It was he who had spoken to her.
Normally, she wouldn’t have thought much of him. He was a few inches taller than she was and his build was lean, inclined toward wiry. His t-shirt was tight enough to show the sinewy musculature. His face was just as lean as the rest of his body, showing cheekbones that slashed down. His wasn’t the pretty face of a movie star or the billionaire hero of a hot novel. Aside from the exotic tilt of his eyes, his cheeks were scarred with the pitting of some long ago healed disease and his lips thinned into a grim line as he waited for her judgment. In fact, Tavie felt an instant of déjà vu. Here was an individual she had seen before, but she knew it wasn’t during the time she had woken up with Arnold the clown about to swipe her wallet and the present.
“Someone else said that, too,” Tavie said. “Kind of.” She watched the man look at her. She had a good idea what he was seeing. She was middling tall for a woman at five foot seven inches. She had a strong frame and she wasn’t bordering on starvation. She liked to eat too much for that. Her hair was long and brown when she didn’t have it bound in a French braid or in a ponytail. She had been in too much of a hurry that morning to do anything with it except brush the strays away from her face, so it remained loose and spilling down her back. Her eyes were the kind of hazel that thousands of other people had and there wasn’t much to be done with that. She’d never thought of herself as ugly and she knew that most men thought she was striking. She’d been hit on enough to know that. She heard more than her fair share of lines in her work.
“They’re more used to that,” the man said and pointed to the crowd.
Two people threw themselves to the ground and had what appeared to be temper tantrums equal to that of an aggrieved three-year-old. “I’m not dead, I’m not dead, I’m not dead!” one wailed while beating his hands on the ground.
The other one just bawled his guts out while curling his hands into the dirt.
Tavie could see that there were many unnerved individuals in the group. Emotions were evident on their faces. They were unsure, confused, frightened. The rug had been yanked from underneath their feet.
“I’ve never found that getting upset was the answer to anything.” Tavie would have smiled if she had felt like it. The words were straight out of her mother’s mouth.
The man chuckled and she glanced at him. The curve of the smile on his face changed nearly everything. He was still scarred, but he wasn’t ugly. The humor transformed him and she stared. “My name is Nica,” he said. He sat a few feet away, clearly trying not to crowd her.
“Tavie,” she said. “I’d offer to shake your hand but I’m not sure if I should do that here.”
Nica nodded. “There are deadies here who would try to suck energy from you through a contact of the flesh.”
“How do I stop that?”
“You don’t allow it.” He motioned at her feet. “I like the stiletto but you might want to go with the boots for now.”
Tavie stared at her feet. It took her a few seconds but the stiletto vanished and was replaced with the ankle boot. The clunky heeled Rocket Dogs were just the thing for a day on the job doing what Tavie did best. “At least I didn’t die with my Uggs on.”
Nica tilted his head. Tavie looked at him. He was wearing the plain black t-shirt and a pair of black jeans. His shoes were some kind of Dr. Marten boots. “It’s a type of ugly boots,” she explained at his look of confusion. “They’re popular, but not so much anymore. Kind of like Crocs.” She considered. “Or democrats.”
“We don’t always keep up with the latest and greatest here,” Nica said.
“No loss there.”
Nica’s eyes caught hers. His were pitch black. It was like falling into the deepest shadow in the most distance sunless universe. Tavie was momentarily stricken mute.
The moment lasted until she thought she might fall over. It was similar to staring down a rabid beast except there was no madness there. Finally, Nica looked away and Tavie felt like she could breathe again. “I’ve got something to do,” he said, standing up.
“Really?” Tavie asked. We don’t have to eat or drink. If something gets chopped off it’ll come back, but I have to breathe? “Got a hot date?”
“Something like that,” he said and spun on his heel.
Tavie’s face creased into a frown. Mysterious people weren’t limited to the land of the living. Imagine that. It was as if Nica had been making sure she was all right.
Nica vanished into the crowd of people, and she lost him in the gloom. She could see the movements of other people as they meandered about, looking for something to do, or perhaps searching for something to grasp onto with all of their might.
Tavie looked away. She was going to take a long look around Deadsville. It was a town. It had its enclaves and its secrets and she had some time to figure out what the deal was. She climbed to her feet and brushed herself off.
There was a scream from the crowd and it parted again. Silence dropped down on the area like a curtain on a particularly shocking show at the theater.
What had Thérèse said? Don’t turn off the road and don’t talk to anyone dressed in a black cape carrying a scythe. Tavie had thought it a cute phrase or a joke. She hadn’t taken it seriously. The people here were dead; some of them wore their cause of death on them like a badge. No one was reaping their souls.
But he towered over them at seven feet tall, cruising through the crowd like a Great White Shark, the schools of fish parting before him. The cape was yards of endless shadows and sailed out behind him. The hood concealed his features but as his head turned to one side, Tavie could see the red eyes that burned there. Those fiery eyes probably could be seen from a thousand miles away. And in his right hand, a hand that was gleaming white bones was a huge scythe, its metallic bowed blade glittered in the bluish lantern’s light.
Reaper.
Chapter 3
Death has no mercy upon anyone. – Lebanese Proverb
~
“Dead is dead.” – Common saying in Deadsville
~
The reaper passed through the silent audience, a lethal predator radiating his implacability from close and from afar. Deadies retreated as if his slightest touch would make them shrivel into dust. They withdrew from his vicinity like he was a deadly snake and made Tavie think of an old nursery rhyme about poisonous reptiles. Inevitably she made her own version suit the occasion. Red next to black, venom he lack, red next to a black shell and a big curving blade, everyone run like hell.
The tall shape with a bottomless pit of a cape and the scythe that glinted even in the murk, paused on the far side of the group. Tavie couldn’t see what he was looking at it but she had an idea that his burning eyes focused on a single individual.
After all, what did a reaper do? He reaped. He reaped souls.
A single man burst from the crowd and darted down a street, trying to make the ill constructed buildings a barrier between him and the reaper. Tavie saw the blonde hair of the runner as he passed between buildings, running like his life depended upon it. Or perhaps it was that his death depended on it.
For a moment, Tavie thought that the reaper would go
after that man. Others in the crowd tried to watch both the reaper and the runner, swiveling their heads back and forth. The runner vanished into the gloom and the reaper slowed to a stroll. The runner wasn’t his prey, but only collateral damage.
Then the reaper stopped completely. The momentum of the scythe didn’t stop. It twisted effortlessly and gently touched a tall woman who looked to be in her fifties. Her eyes opened wide as the tip of the curved blade drifted like an errant snowflake over the curve of her cheek.
“Not me,” she protested, and it was half a plea. The two words cut into the crowd.
The reaper nodded. “Lena Louise Ogden,” he said. His voice was deep but not as hollow as Tavie would have expected. He sounded like a large man would sound. “Accept your judgment.”
Lena gulped and then nodded. She spread her arms wide, showing an eighties style suit with the padded shoulders. The skirt was a matching shade of brown and the blouse had ruffled. She might have stepped off a street in Manhattan sometime during the eight-year administration of a former Hollywood actor while wearing classic Ray-Bans and listening to a Sony Walkman.
The reaper put one skeletal hand on Lena’s shoulder and Tavie expected smoke and fire, or at the least a whirling cloud that would dissipate after they mysteriously vanished. Lena said, “I just want—” and they were both simply no longer there.
Tavie blinked. Poof. No fanfare. Gone.
Another long moment of awkward silence followed. Suddenly someone started singing “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”. Nervous giggles followed. Someone else yelled, “Shuffleboard game on Third Avenue!” Then deadies started to flow away.
There were a few new deadies left with the welcoming committee. Sternstein caught Tavie’s eye and shrugged. The tall man named Maximillian followed Sternstein’s gaze and interestedly studied Tavie.
I’m dead. I’m stuck in Deadsville, waiting for something like a reaper to judge me, and no one has anything better to do than play shuffleboard and sing Blue Öyster Cult songs. Wow.
* * *
Tavie spent the next unknown amount of time rambling around Deadsville. She didn’t really have an idea of the time and was only mildly curious. There wasn’t a sun. There weren’t stars. There wasn’t a moon. There wasn’t a clock tower that chimed on the hour. She didn’t have a watch and her cell phone was inside her Crown Vic on the other side.
Besides which what else did she have to do?
The purpose of her exploration went back to Charlie’s words of wisdom. “Knowledge is power.” He hadn’t made them up; he’d agreed with them wholeheartedly. He had told her that he had learned it the hard way while he’d been a patrolman in New Mexico. Ten years later, he’d moved to Phoenix and joined the force there, and the lesson had been well worth the effort. The more that Tavie knew, the better off she would be. So she walked around and she observed.
The dead didn’t change much from being living. They played the same games. They occupied their time in the same manner. Sins were apparent. People couldn’t help themselves, dead or alive. Tavie began to suspect that she wasn’t in a place where the sinless went.
It made sense. Tavie herself wasn’t without sin. On some level she was surprised she wasn’t roasting weenies in hell with Hitler, Jim Jones, and Caligula. In truth, her sins weren’t on their category, but there was one doozy.
Tavie frowned. She didn’t want to think about it. It was what it was. She had made her decision and now she would have to live with it. Or be dead with it, as the case may be.
However, in this place, there were many deadies who were living with it. By appearance alone, she could tell that a significant number had died violent deaths. There were others, like herself, who didn’t present their deaths on their sleeves. Tavie didn’t talk to too many people, but the few she did had gruesome stories. “My husband beat me to death with an iron.” “Bank robbery gone wrong. The guy shot in the air and it ricocheted off a ceiling fan into my head.” “Went to sleep in a hospital and woke up here.”
Wait. Went to sleep in a hospital? That didn’t quite fit the rest, but Tavie lost the man to a raging scavenger hunt. “The winner gets a liter of ecto juice,” the man said excitedly to Tavie and ran off, his hospital gown flying out behind him and revealing that he had gone commando while under medical care.
Games were the fun events of Deadsville. The dead didn’t like to be bored. There were also restaurants, stores, and what Tavie finally concluded was a brothel. She wondered about the trade until she realized that some of the people were trading periods of servitude as well as articles they’d owned in the living world.
Apparently, whatever a person died with, came with them. The Egyptians had gotten that correct. Wherever the pharaohs were located in Deadsville, they were set up. Tavie saw all kinds of interesting things that had made the transition from the land of the living into Deadsville. There were a few cars, albeit wrecked ones. There were tools and weapons, lots of knives and swords. There was a few golf clubs and an Adirondack chair, as well as a Cuisinart blender.
Most interesting was that not everything was paired off with the appropriate deadie. The blender was held by a man who looked like a bear had eaten him. An Inuit hunter dressed in sealskin brandished a golf club. A typical housewife waved a cordless brad nailer and yelled at a chef with a purple flowered patio umbrella held in the crook of his elbow.
There was lots to learn here, Tavie realized and it was better than dwelling on what had happened to her that brought her here.
She stopped once to play a game of horse with a group of oddly matched players. The basketball was old but worked very well on a makeshift dirt court. She was the last one in the game with only three letters of the word, horse. The pot was a nonfunctioning watch, a pen, a palm sized maneki-neko, and a Liberty Head double eagle coin dated 1864. The players were calmly accepting of their loss, except one who cajoled her to play one more game.
Tavie shook her head, gathered her winnings, and wandered off. Her brothers had been serious on the court in their driveway. A girl learned how to play and how to keep up or she lost face. She’d bet her jacket in the game of horse, but she was glad she hadn’t taken it off. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen when people got a look at what was under the Ann Taylor coat.
Tavie stopped and sat a while later, leaning against a brick wall that no one seemed to be proprietary about. She didn’t feel like she needed to rest, but the thought came to her that she could sleep. She wasn’t exactly tired but she wouldn’t have minded a brief excursion into dreamland.
Then a plump woman in a jogging suit sat next to her, making herself comfortable by putting her feet and legs crisscross applesauce. Tavie glanced at her and nodded. The woman was in her late sixties and had gray hair scraped back into a severe bun. The jogging suit was purple but the t-shirt was white and proclaimed, “An apple a day will keep anyone away if you throw it hard enough.”
“So I hear you just came in,” said the woman in the jogging suit. “My name is Thana. I don’t really want anything you’ve got on you, but I would like to know if you liked television. Tit for tat, perhaps, you tell me something about TV and I’ll give you a little something to help you out.”
“Television,” Tavie repeated. Word got around quickly in Deadsville.
“Yes. What shows did you watch? The Walking Dead? The Voice? God, I would love to know what happened on The Blacklist.” Thana sighed hopefully. “Game of Thrones? Is there any character that George R.R. Martin doesn’t kill off?” She paused and then giggled. “Isn’t that ironic?”
“Sorry,” Tavie said. “I didn’t have a lot of time for television. Sometimes I watched the news. I can tell you who got elected on the city council. Or who the President of the United States is.”
“Pshaw,” Thana said. “Politics,” she added scornfully. “There’s tons of politics here. Lots of politicians too. Huey Long used to preach from on top a soap box at Allegory Alley. They’ve had a slew of Kennedys around here, too. Goodness
knows, you don’t want to get into a conversation about Obamacare with any of them.”
Tavie looked away. “Not exactly the typical neighborhood stuff around here.”
“Not really,” Thana said. “You sure you don’t watch something good on TV?”
“I had an ex-boyfriend who liked the Syfy channel,” Tavie said. “They started making the silliest movies. Dinocroc. Sharknado. There was one about the abominable snowmen eating co-eds.”
Thana rubbed her hands together. “I can’t believe I missed out on a movie called Sharknado. Give an old woman a break and tell me the plot.”
“Sure,” Tavie said. “It begins like all good B movies do…”
* * *
When Tavie was done, Thana sighed again. “You tell a good B movie story, kiddo. Listen, you shouldn’t trade things before you know the deal.”
Tavie shrugged. “I can’t see how it would hurt anything.”
“Too late,” Thana said and clamped a hand on Tavie’s shoulder. Tavie started to twist away, but the older woman had such a grip.
Tavie’s shoulder began to burn, like molten lava being poured onto her skin.
“Let me go,” Tavie cried and tried to pry the woman’s fingers away from the jacket. She attempted to grasp Thana by the thumb like she had done to Arnold the freaky sad clown, but Thana’s grip was inexorable. Her plump flesh felt like a block of ice despite the heat searing Tavie’s flesh.
The fire moved from Tavie’s shoulder across her collarbone and shot down the middle of her body. Tavie tried to take a deep breath but she couldn’t open her mouth. Her body began to shake and her legs juddered. They jerked so brutally one of her ankle boots came halfway off.
Thana said conversationally, “Sharknado. What will they think of next?” She paused as black dots began to appear at the sides of Tavie’s eyes. The dots swam and dipped and dove and joined together to form larger and larger dots until her vision was overwhelmed.
“I thought you would be easier to find,” Tavie thought she heard Thana say, “but you’re as much of a booger dead as you were alive. But hey, here’s my trade. Remember.” Tavie was almost unconscious when Thana said, “Look…and…see.”
