“Whoa,” he says, appropriately. And this confirms my suspicion. All night, I’ve seen guys proudly showing each other their wounds. It’s cool in the frat world. And if that’s true, think about how much clout I’d have as a death replacement agent.
In one week, I’d be Jesse Sullivan, Queen of the Frat Boys.
Maybe then I’d show them how to throw a real party. With chocolate. And strippers.
Suddenly, as if I conjured it with my will alone, everyone starts taking their clothes off.
“What’s happening?” I ask. They’re pulling out a tarp and turning on the hose. One guy squirts baby oil all over his bare chest. I nudge Ally roughly. “What. Is. Happening?”
Oh god, is this an orgy? I’ve never witnessed an orgy. I’m not sure I want to witness one now. But all I see are butts. A sea of naked butts jiggling on impact as they throw their bodies onto the wet tarp.
“They’ve made a waterslide,” Ally says. She sounds either really horrified or really impressed.
“Drunk people and slick surfaces don’t mix. It’s like they want to die,” I say. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost two.”
“Two! God, I feel like I’ve seen 5,000 near-deaths and it’s only two?”
I turn and find her hair tousled and her makeup a little smudged. The fact she has a red solo cup in her hand makes it even cuter.
“Look at you!” I laugh. “You look like an honest to god co-ed.”
She laughs. “I did go to college. Albeit briefly.”
“Don’t rub it in.” I pout. “Some of us had to join the workforce.”
I look at her smiling over her solo cup. Her eyes shiny in the low porch light. Is this what it would have been like? If we’d graduated high school and gone away to college instead of all the horrible shit that happened instead? Would we just have been a couple of kids naked and stupid on a tarp at some party?
I’m starting to feel sad again. That sense of crushing mortality, or losing Ally, and the constant threat to our lives is creeping in on me. I feel my smile starting to droop at the same time Ally’s does. She senses my mood shift. She’s opening her mouth to ask me what’s wrong, because that’s what mother-hen Al always does, but before she speaks my vision changes.
The world of bonfire flickers and porch lights wink out, and what I’m left with is an aurora borealis of color and waves, not unlike wearing heat sensor goggles.
Fuck.
This is my five-second warning.
I grab onto Ally. “Where is he?”
She doesn’t say anything mean like, Open your eyes, moron. We’ve been at this too long. She saw me stumble. She knows that when my vision changes, I’m not seeing the world the same anymore.
So she takes my arm and pulls me across the lawn. The sound of running water grows louder and I smell the chemical sweetness of the oil. I bump into someone who’s laughing and the world spins. It’s like riding a coaster at night. The landscape is moving so fast that all I see is color, dancing.
I spot Jonathan before we actually reach him. His colors aren’t the same. Everyone around me is red and orange and vibrant with the heat of life, but there’s one kid whose orange glow is looking a little yellow, and the edge of him is tinged green, turning blue.
“He’s naked,” Ally says by way of warning.
“Yeah yeah,” I tell her. “It’s not the first time I’ll save a naked guy from himself.”
The green-blue blob moves toward me, wobbling unsteadily. “Hey. Are you drunk? Awesome party right?”
He giggles. Giggles like a little girl.
I’m looking around, trying to anticipate how this will go down. Is he going to break his neck on the waterslide ? Is a fight going to break out? Is the alcohol poisoning going to kick in?
That pull of death stretches my gut. Whatever is going to happen is about to happen.
“Get back,” I tell Ally.
“Jess—”
“Get. Back. Now!” I tell her. I hate how angry I sound. I’m not mad at her, really. But her being anywhere near death is not okay. I should have brought Lane. I should have brought anybody but her.
My vision flickers back to normal and it’s just Jonathan, naked and grinning.
The guy beside him is in boxers. “Hey!” He gives me an awkward wave. “I’m Paul.”
“Hold my drink, man,” Jonathan says and passes the solo cup over to the dude in boxers. Then he’s facing me and grinning. “Watch this.”
“No, wait!” I leap for him. I want to grab hold of him, but I’m a little slow. His wet body hits the tarp and takes off. I grab his leg at the last second, and then I’m careening after him. I’m not sliding as well since I’m in jeans and a hoodie. So we stop about ¾ of the way down the tarp, about ten feet from a kiddie pool.
“Oh man,” Jonathan whines. He sits up and wiggles his leg away. “You ruined my shot. I was going to flip into the pool.”
“And break your neck or drown or something,” I grumble. God, I sound like my mother.
I try to wipe my baby oil slick hands on my jeans but it doesn’t really help. I manage to pull myself up close to him and look him over. “Are you okay?”
Glass breaks. I look up in time to see something hurling through the shattered window. A stick? No, too thick. It’s more like a staff... with a metal arrow on the end.
And then I know exactly what it is a half-second before it punches a hole through my chest. A freaking Roman spear.
Lana Harvey
Hospitals in big cities were always a madhouse, no matter what time of day I dropped in for a harvest. And leave it to me to make my entrance on the busiest level.
I sidestepped around a gaggle of ER nurses as they prepared for a shift change and had to press my back against a hallway wall to avoid being run over by a gurney as it sped ahead of me toward an open elevator. The male nurse piloting it paused to adjust a sheet draped over a lumpy figure, tipping me off to their destination. I vaguely wondered if my catch was under that sheet. Fat chance, I knew, but I slipped in after them anyway, sandwiching myself between the elevator wall and the gurney.
The nurse was on the cusp of middle age. Gray hairs lined the bald spot in the center of his crown, and when he turned to finger the corners of his seventies mustache in the metallic reflection of the elevator, I noticed the nicotine stains on his fingers. It amazed me how reckless humans could be with their health, especially the ones exposed to death on such a regular basis. Maybe they’d grown numb to the inevitability of it. The souls I’d harvested in the modern era did seem to exhibit a more apathetic response to being reaped than their predecessors.
Kids today. I sighed to myself.
The nurse in the elevator couldn’t see me. Being a reaper had its benefits on the mortal side. Still, it was hard not to take offense when he let a loud fart rip right after the doors slid closed. My supernatural abilities only shield me from so much of the living condition. I guess olfactory protection cost extra.
While we descended, I distracted myself from the stench by patting down the gurney passenger, feeling for the familiar spark of a soul beneath the sheet. Nothing. This one had already been harvested, but I’d expected as much.
A fair number of souls are collected at the time of death, especially if the event is traumatic and there’s a risk that the soul will separate from their body without grim intervention. Being able to collect everyone from a morgue or a funeral home would have been a cakewalk—but another factor we have to take into consideration is that not everyone makes it that far. Like those who sleep with the fishes. Or many homeless folks who expire in condemned buildings and other seldom patrolled areas. There are all kinds of exceptions.
Nearly 90,000 people are missing, in the United States alone, at any given time. Obviously, that doesn’t mean they’re all dead. A good chunk of them are runaways—not that that makes my job any easier. Reaping 101: when a soul evacuates their body prematurely, the first place to look for them is their residence. T
hat tip goes out the window when dealing with runaways.
The elevator doors pinged open on the basement level, and I took a rasping breath as I scrambled out ahead of the nurse. He cleared his throat and smoothed the corners of his mustache again before rolling the gurney into the quieter hallway. I followed him from a safe distance, just in case his ass cannon was still loaded.
The basement level was cooler, which was nice, considering my uniform was a thick, black robe. Air blasted the top of my head as I passed under a ceiling vent. I breathed in the freshness of it and tried to fill my lungs, preparing for an even worse funk. If three hundred years had taught me anything, it was that the smell of rotting corpses was not an acquired fragrance. And the chill of a morgue did little to mask the perfume of death.
Sliding doors hissed at the end of the hallway, catching my attention, and I jogged to catch up to the nurse as he wheeled his charge inside the darkened morgue. He didn’t bother flicking on the overhead lights, guiding the gurney by the pale glow of a lamp hovering over a desk along the inside wall.
“I’ll be there in five,” the nurse whispered. He’d fetched a cell phone from his pocket at some point during our field trip. It was cradled in the crook of his shoulder, and he was whispering sweet nothings to someone on the other end of the line. I heard him say second floor and janitor’s closet before he rushed out of the morgue in stealth mode.
The sliding doors whooshed closed behind him as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the low lighting. A wall of cold lockers loomed at the far end of the room, but only two of the doors had files attached to them. A quick peek inside revealed that they’d been harvested already too. Still, I felt the familiar call of a trapped soul nearby.
The thought of another reaper joining me soured my mood instantly. That didn’t make good sense. Why would Regina send two reapers to the same morgue on the same day? Surely she knew better than that by now.
A tiny window was cut into the opposite wall of the basement, and it showed a crisp moon against dark sky. It was late Friday night in Nashville, which explained the chaos upstairs. It didn’t, however, explain the corpse laid out on a table with what looked like a broken broom handle sticking out of her chest. Ouch.
My pulse pounded as I realized her soul was still trapped within. This was a textbook case of traumatic death, so it was nothing short of a miracle that her soul hadn’t jumped ship and wandered off somewhere more pleasant. Halfway through this realization, my eyes touched her face, and I did a double take before digging out my soul docket.
Jesse Sullivan, 25, 5’ 3”, 120 lbs., brown hair, hazel-green eyes.
I looked back to her blood-spattered face. I couldn’t see her eyes, since they were closed, but everything else appeared to match up. It wasn’t the most unique human description ever, but the similarities and timing were uncanny. Could this really be my catch? The girl who had been reported dead over fifty times?
There was no name on her file, and seeing as how she was still sporting the murder weapon in her chest and blood-soaked street clothes, it was pretty clear she was fresh. Even if this wasn’t Jesse Sullivan and another reaper had been assigned to her, she needed to be harvested. Leaving her in such a state was inhumane.
This would have been classified as a high-risk harvest for sure. And either the MIA reaper had a damn good reason for being late, or Regina had mucked the schedule up again. Despite the docket resemblance, it still seemed impossible that this catch could be mine.
But there was only one way to be certain.
Jesse Sullivan
A cool hand seizes my upper arm and pulls. I have this vague memory of naked, oiled butt cheeks. I’m thinking, god is it time to get up already? Five more minutes. I blink open my eyes and expect to find Ally there. She’s usually the first person I see after a death replacement. Only it isn’t Ally that’s tugging me awake. And it isn’t Kirk, the mortician who fixes me up after a replacement, using his skills with stiff bodies to arrange me in a way the doctors can’t. It isn’t even Dr. York, who I see if a death replacement goes wrong and I wake up in the hospital.
But I am in the hospital. The bright lights and the horrible pickled smell is unmistakable. I look at the hand on my arm, confused. It’s a pale hand, definitely female. I follow the hand up the arm to the face.
She’s beautiful. With curly black hair and big blue eyes, she looks like Marilyn Monroe’s evil twin. Curvy and huggable. And about the same height as Ally.
“Hi,” I say. I blink up at her. “How you doing?”
Shameless, I know.
“You’re Jesse Sullivan,” she says.
“If you want me to be,” I say. I hope I look debonair.
She practically breathes it. “Yes. You’re real!”
Not the response I’m expecting, but I won’t let that deter me. I’ve powered through many an awkward conversation before. “What’s your name?”
“Lana Harvey. Captain Lana Harvey of Reapers, Inc.”
“I know a captain,” I say, thinking of Gloria, the AMP who predicts deaths, and all her badassery. I’m about to say more but I see the robe she’s wearing. And I register the word reaper.
“I’m going to take you back to Limbo City, and everyone will be so impressed. It will be the find of a century. I’ll be interviewed. Maybe I’ll get an award. Book of Eternity Records, for the win! Positive press! For once.”
My blinking becomes less about attraction and more about confusion. Is this girl nuts? Because I have no idea what she’s talking about. She’s standing in the morgue and going on and on and wait, what? The morgue?
I turn. I’m not in the hospital. I’m in the morgue. Okay, well the morgue is attached to the hospital, located in its bowels, which is strangely fitting, but this is all wrong. This is a giant problem.
Because I’m dead.
Like dead, dead because there’s my body on a slab with a freaking broken off spear sticking out of it. Blood is splattered up onto my face and more has run down the front of my hoodie and jeans. It isn’t very visible because of the dark fabric, but there’s so much, it’s impossible to miss. My hair isn’t looking awesome either.
And I’ve lost the red converse.
That more than seeing myself dead is what sets me off.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I stamp my foot. “I double-laced the damn thing!”
The girl in the robe stands behind me. “You lost a shoe.”
“I always lose a shoe. No matter if I glue the fuckers on, I lose shoes. I have a whole basket at home of solo shoes because this always happens. Why do I always lose shoes? I’m going to have to staple them to my freaking feet!”
“Well, I don’t think you need shoes where you’re going. So come on. Off to Eternity with you.”
I freeze. I wrench my arm away. “What do you mean off to Eternity?”
“You’re dead. I’m taking you to the dead people place now.”
I try to process what she’s saying. I look at my body. I look at the girl in the robe and replay what she said, I’m Lana Harvey of Reapers Inc. A reaper. A grim reaper. She’s got the billowy robe and everything.
Oh my god, she’s a reaper.
“I don’t go anywhere when I die,” I tell her. “I’m a zombie.”
“You’re going somewhere today.” Annoyance screws up her face and her hand goes to her hip the same way Ally’s does when she is prepared to argue with me.
“No, you don’t get it.” I try again. “I’m a death replacement agent. This is what I do. I die. I die so other people don’t have to, but then I wake up again.”
I look at my body and finger the edge of the Roman spear. I can’t feel it. Actually I can’t feel anything, which is awesome. Usually when I wake up from a death replacement I’m sore, ravenous, and miserable for at least a couple days. But this whole out-of-body experience is different. I feel like I’ve had a couple valium.
“I haven’t healed because they left this in.” I’m pointing at the spear. “I can’t h
eal up until they pull this out.”
“You’re a vampire? First, you’re a zombie and now you’re a vampire?” she asks with an arched brow. “Is this your giant wooden stake then?”
“Death. Replacement. Agent.” I can’t really show her my autopsy scar because of the spear so I undo my astral hoodie, which actually unzips, and start to lift my shirt.
“Look, I know this might be hard to understand, but you’re dead. I’m a reaper. I harvest souls. You’re dead and I’m here to take your soul to Limbo City. It’ll be fun!” She’s trying to hype this up for me, I can tell. “Whoa! What are you doing?”
“They’re just boobs.” I’m down to my bra now. “And they’re not even the cool part.”
I’m all bravado here because I actually hate my scar. It makes me feel ugly and deformed and it’s the single most reason that I swim in a T-shirt and board shorts instead of a bikini. But if showing her my scar helps her understand the death replacement agent thing, then here we go.
I step toward her, pointing at the scar. “See? I bet these souls you harvest don’t have autopsy scars.” And I know I’m right because she’s looking at her clipboard and frowning.
“So you really died over fifty times?” she asks.
“76,” I tell her. “The naked frat boy was 76.”
“But you wake up, so that’s why you haven’t been harvested?”
“Exact-a-mundo.” I tug my clothes back into place. “My brain has a neurological disorder called NRD. It pulses until I wake up again, like a myoclonic jerk. So as long as my brains aren’t damaged, I wake up. And my brains aren’t damaged.” I point at my body at the table. “Once they pull out the spear, I’ll reboot. My brain will kick on. I’ll heal up. Boom! No Limb City for me.”
“Lim-bo City,” she corrects.
“Oh good,” I say. “Because Limb City sounds like an indie horror flick. Limbo City conjures images of salsa music and conga lines. Do you salsa?”
“No.”
“The dip or the dance?”
She blinks at me. No laugh. No smile. Oh well. Can’t charm them all.
Limbo City Lights (Lana Harvey, Reapers Inc.) Page 10