The Big Reap tc-3

by Chris F. Holm

  The fire contained, this self-made monster, Dr. Frankenstein and his unholy progeny both, grabbed a fistful of my shirt and hoisted me upward. He swayed a bit as he did, staggering as he regained his balance, his strength sapped by the drugs and magic. He said to me, short of breath and slurring: “I confess, Mr. Thornton, you had more fight in you than I suspected. If you can hear me in there, I commend you. But as you can see, your efforts, as in Los Angeles, have proven futile. But fear not; you shall slumber soon enough. Perhaps you’ll even come to understand that for the kindness that it is. After all, is an eternity of dream not preferable to one spent in slavery to hell?”

  It was a fair point. An angle I’d not considered. So I thought about it for a good half-second before I decided to roll the dice and stick with hell.

  Then I stabbed him in the chest.

  He released me when I came to life in his hands, but too late to deflect my blow. The skim blade pierced the desiccated flesh of his chest like scissors going through paper, and I felt his sternum beneath it shatter.

  And that’s when things got really weird.

  Once the blade passed through Magnusson’s chest, it began to thrum in my hand, as if coursing with an electric current. Magnusson’s eyes went wide, and then clenched shut as the blade burst out of his back, shattering his spinal column to dust. At the blade’s end was the shriveled little walnut that passed as Magnusson’s soul — no light left in it, no experiences washing over me as it separated from his body. Removed from its earthly vessel, said vessel began to crumble like a mummy exposed to the humidity of the open air after centuries spent entombed.

  We fell to the ground, his flagging strength no longer capable of supporting my weight. As we landed, he slid down the blade, and then my arm. My hand was clean through his chest, blade still extended, the dead husk of his soul impaled upon it.

  Brown faded to ash. Firm became fragile became so much dust. Soon, I was lying broken and bloodied but alone in the charred remains of the dead man’s office, a tumorous nodule skewered like morbid fondue-fodder at the edge of my blade, and a bloated, blackened Gareth beside me.

  I lowered the blade, raised my free hand to Magnusson’s soul. It crumbled like chalk between my fingers.

  My vision dimmed. My meat-suit failing.

  I slipped away.

  Exquisite. Excruciating. As if some sadistic needle-fingered creature was tearing every nerve out of my meat-suit’s body one by one like a gardener yanking up a particularly pernicious root, and running them across a bed of lemon-juice-soaked sandpaper before lighting them on fire.

  It took moments.

  It took forever.

  And then, next thing I knew, I was in Guam.

  4.

  “Good evening, Collector. You’re looking well.”

  She was lying, I was pretty sure; I must’ve looked like shit. My leg-wound seeping lymph through its bandages, my thick dark hair on end, my meat-suit’s early-twenties baby-face dusted here and there with patchwork stubble. Of course, the fact that Lilith was lying to me was no surprise.

  That she was complimenting me, on the other hand, was a major cause for concern. It set off big red lights and klaxons in my borrowed brain. Then again, that could have been the booze. Cause I’m not going to lie, by the time she tracked me down, I was pretty fucking drunk.

  I opened my eyes and lifted my head up off my threadbare beach towel, propping myself up on one elbow, which dug into the powder-fine sand through the thin layer of tropical-fish-printed fabric. The sun was setting over the Philippine Sea, a disc of lava that bled orange across the horizon on either side where it touched. As the green afterimage of the brilliant sunset faded, I saw that Lilith was standing some ten feet down the beach from me, her creamy white skin untouched by sun despite our tropical environs. And my, how much skin she showed.

  She wore a string bikini of royal blue, stunning against her pale white skin, three scant triangles covering her naughty bits, intended, it seemed, more to heighten anticipation than out of any sense of the demure. A gauzy white sarong was tied about her waist and fluttered in the southern breeze, as did her thick mane of lustrous red. Her feet were bare. Nails painted crimson, hands and feet. My footprints cratered the white sand in a meandering dotted line from trail head to where I lay just above the high tide line, churning the beach in a rough circle around my chosen spot, but Lilith stood among a field of pristine white.

  The beach was empty but for the two of us. Faifa’i Beach is secluded even by Guam’s standards, a jounce along a pitted gravel road into the jungle and a hike up the narrow cliff-walk trail past the rusted anti-aircraft gun leftover from World War II, and across a narrow wooden footbridge over roiling surf. Most of its visitors don’t relish the thought of making the sun-drunk trek back to their four-wheel-drives in darkness, which means they clear out early. Me, I don’t give a shit. If I fall and break my neck on the walk back, smart money says I wind up right back in Guam anyway.

  Besides, I wasn’t planning on walking back. My plan consisted of polishing off this-here bottle of rum which, I was surprised to discover, I was well on my way to doing, and passing out till morning. Far as I was concerned, the universe owed me a drunken night beneath the stars in a balmy tropical paradise after the cosmic bitch-slap that was reseeding. When my last meat-suit kicked, I found myself eyes-open on the floor, puking blood and grand-mal seizing in the middle of some cheesy island bar. Patrons huddled over me, eyes wide as those of the lacquered fish that graced the walls, while a short, lined Japanese woman dressed all casual and fanny-packed like she was on vacation held my shoulders down and wailed. By the time the ambulance arrived, my trembling ceased. I stopped puking before we pulled into the hospital. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t convince the docs to let me go, nor the poor, distraught woman who — language barrier aside — I was pretty sure was my new meat-suit’s wife to let me out of her sight. So after a night spent tossing and turning under her watchful, worried eye, I gave up on my new ride — a salt-and-pepper Japanese man of maybe fifty — and hopped a ride in the fresh-faced, indigenous Chamorro kid with whom I shared a room. He was maybe twenty-two or -three, and from what I could gather, came in sometime yesterday thanks to a sea-urchin-stick in his left leg while cliff-diving with his friends. I waited till my meat-suit’s missus ducked out to use the bathroom, and then body-hopped on over, puking in the trashcan beside his bed and pulling his privacy curtain before walking, flip-flopped and board-shorts-clad, right out of the hospital. I lifted a wallet out of some dumb-ass tourist’s beach bag, and then spent twenty minutes trying to track down a toothbrush and some toothpaste to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth, finally hitting paydirt at a strip-mall drugstore with signs in English, Mandarin, and Japanese. Woulda bought a pack of cigarettes there, too, but I feel shitty smoking in a meat-suit that’s gonna keep on breathing once I vamoose. Better to save the death-sticks for the already dead. Once I was minty fresh, I rounded out my shopping spree with a bag of fast-food burgers and a bottle of rum, and set out to find a nice, quiet patch of sand where I could drink away the memory of dying yet again.

  I shoulda known Lilith would come along all pretty-like and ruin my fun.

  “Evenin’ yourself, Lily,” I said. “Pull up some beach and stay awhile.”

  She hates it when I call her Lily. It’s kinda why I call her Lily. But this time, instead of correcting me, she just plopped down on the beach beside me. We sat awhile in silence, our eyes trained on the horizon, watching as the sun was slowly extinguished by the sea. As darkness descended, she plucked the rum bottle from its resting place between my knees, and took a long, slow pull. Then she offered it to me. I drank as well. Her lips tasted of peaches.

  “Lily, are you all right?”

  She took so long in responding, I began to wonder if she would. “The Truce is broken,” she finally said. “The peace has failed. The heavens are at war.”

  I digested her words a moment, took another swig of rum. “Funn
y — you don’t sound too happy about that. There was a time you looked to spark that selfsame war.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were pained. “There was, indeed. For centuries, it’s all I thought about. And if given the chance, I’ll regret that fact for centuries to come. It was a foolish act of rebellion against an absent father whose crass withholding I should have long ago accepted. It’s mortifying, really, the lengths to which I was willing to go for just a moment of His attentions — even if those attentions were in the service of punishing me. Now, I realize the cost is simply too high — and the payoff far too meager.”

  I was taken aback by her words, so blunt and so unguarded. Not once since New York, when she conspired to jump-start the End Times by framing an innocent girl for a vicious crime and attempting to condemn her soul to hell, had she ever admitted what she’d done. Not once had she expressed remorse. I was beginning to think she was incapable.

  And yet…

  If there’s one thing I should have learned in all my years with Lilith, it’s that she has a limitless capacity to surprise.

  “If heaven and hell are at war, what’s to happen to the human world?”

  “It’s difficult to say. This is but one of many realms, one of many potential battlefields. And this war has little to do with humankind, so as yet they remain untargeted. But of course, no realm is safe, and none of them will remain untouched. Already, many demons of the lower orders have taken the declaration of war as tacit permission to act on their more base desires without fear of reproach from their superiors. Surely you’ve heard the reports of mass rape and roving death squads out of central Africa, where resource-scarcity, ethnic divides, and political uncertainty leave some among the local populace ripe for plucking, and all too eager to succumb to demonic influence. Greed and envy have reached the boiling point throughout the whole of the Western world, where corporations who recognize no borders seem intent on choking the life from the very people they used to rely upon as customers. False prophets abound in the Middle East, preaching doctrines of violent intolerance. And all the while the gluttonous masses try to pack the gaping wound of their aching souls with yet more useless shit because they too can sense the shift — some paying heed to the hateful whispers of those demons who reside in dreams when that fails, and taking up arms against their fellow sufferers. In the absence of the constant ministrations of the Maker’s many servants, your world has been abandoned to the base corruption that lies beneath. It’s a veritable feast of sin — perpetrated not as part of any grand design, but instead by lone operators for sport — and it threatens to consume your kind just as surely as any overt offensive.”

  “So what are you and I supposed to do? Business as usual? Hunker down and wait it out?”

  Lilith smiled, but there was no mirth in it. She looked sad. Tired. Broken. In spite of all we’d been through — or perhaps because of it — I actually felt bad for her. “I wish I could tell you it was either, because the truth is, your current assignment is far from usual, and farther still from safe. I understand you had some fun in London since last we spoke.”

  I misread, got defensive. “Lily, listen, what happened in London wasn’t my fault. That crazy motherfucker came looking for me. I swear to God, I had no intention of killing him, let alone the faintest inkling I even could.”

  Lilith raised her hands, a placating gesture. “Relax, Collector. You’re welcome to swear upon your Maker all you like, but no one’s accusing you of any wrongdoing, and anyway, in my experience, it’s far more satisfying to swear at Him than upon Him. I only bring up your recent unpleasantness because it has a direct bearing on today’s business. I trust you know who and what your victim was?”

  “He went by the name of Magnusson,” I replied, though thinking back, I couldn’t help but fixate on Gareth the Welshman’s thrashing, bloated corpse and wonder if I’d left one victim in my wake that day or two. I took another glug of rum and wiped the excess from my lips with the back of one sand-gritted hand. My guilt receded, but only a bit. “And I hear tell he was Brethren.”

  “Magnusson is but one of many names he has assumed throughout the millennia,” she replied. “But yes, he was Brethren. And until yesterday, we were unaware his kind could be killed at all, let alone by the lowly likes of you. That, and the Truce by which we until recently abided, were all that prevented the Nine from being hunted down and slaughtered. Their very existence flies in the face of the natural order, and represents a slight to the Maker and the Adversary both. Have you any notion how you did it?”

  I thought it over a sec. “Wasn’t me. He had a skim blade lying around. In the scuffle, I managed to get my hands on it and put it through his chest. My guess is, whatever wacky demon mojo those things carry did him in.”

  But Lilith shook her head. “You guess wrong. That skim blade was, in fact, no such thing. It was a replica; sharp, beautiful, and expertly forged, but by human hands. The original upon which it was based was rendered so much slag by the ritual that freed the Nine. What’s left of it was chiseled free from the stone altar onto which it fused, and interred alongside the Ark of the Covenant at… Ah, but that’s a story for another time. The point is, the blade you wielded was not the instrument of Magnusson’s demise — you were.”

  “But the blade… it, I don’t know, hummed or something.”

  “So I understand. The working theory is that what you experienced is simple conductance, nothing more.”

  My eyes narrowed. Suspicious. “What do you mean, So I understand? How could you, when you weren’t even there?”

  “Whatever protection spell Magnusson had erected around his lair collapsed when you… when he expired. Since then, our chronomancers have had their run of the place, casting their minds’ eyes backward to generate as complete an account of the scene as they can manage. As you well know, their discipline is inexact at best. They truck mostly in impressions, sensations, and static images, but in this case, you and Magnusson, and his manservant in particular, threw off enough trauma-echoes to afford them a fairly detailed picture. That’s why you’re being lauded rather than strung up, by the way. And it’s what makes you so valuable now. You’ve accomplished what few can. What even fewer still would dare, particularly now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Great Truce may have rendered the Brethren off-limits, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been ignoring them entirely. We’ve kept tabs on them throughout history, to ensure they do not exert undue influence on the course of human events, or through their actions pose a material threat to hell’s dominion. Over the course of our surveillance, a number of them have… reverted, shall we say, to scarcely more than feral beasts, and as such, we’ve left them to wander as their instincts and hunger led them. But others have grown stronger as they’ve weathered the storm of ages, amassing fortunes, building empires, befriending the great movers of the world, abetting some of humankind’s greatest atrocities. They, we’ve kept a close eye on indeed.”

  “Like Magnusson.”

  Lilith nodded. “Magnusson is one of four kept under watchful eye,” she said. “Though you needn’t concern yourselves with the others — yet.”

  My stomach dropped. I was beginning to see where this was going. “Yet?”

  “Last night,” she said, “once word of your little adventure in London Town spread throughout the Depths, the powers decided — after no small amount of debating, I’m assured — that Magnusson’s move against you constituted a significant enough breach of the terms of the Truce, and his death a significant enough demonstration of vulnerability, that the remainder of the Brethren were to be eliminated.”

  “And?”

  “And apparently Magnusson’s not the only member of his kind to have taken precautions. The other three members of the Brethren whose whereabouts were known were moved on twelve hours ago by a small cadre of foot-soldiers. None survived.”

  “That’s good, right? That means we got ’em.”

  “You misundersta
nd, Collector. None of the foot-soldiers survived. There were forty-two in total, all lost.”

  I puffed my cheeks, and blew out slow. Wished I had a goddamn cigarette. A year and change back, I killed two demons half by accident, and it earned me one hell of a rep in the Depths. The Brethren took out forty-two. “How many of the Brethren were killed?”

  “None, and not for lack of trying. Seems your blade-through-the-heart routine only works if you’re, well, you.”

  “Come again?”

  Lilith flushed then, closer to flustered than I’d ever seen her. “Not you specifically, you understand, your kind. Collectors. You see, whatever the Brethren are now, they’re human at their core, and their souls — such as they are — will only present themselves to one with the ability to collect them.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “I assure you, I am not. In all your years, you must have wondered why hell would employ lowly monkey middlemen to do their dirty work when every demon in creation is chomping at the bit to get their cloven hooves on a real, live human soul. The fact is, they physically cannot access a living soul. If they could, it would be a bloodbath, which is why Collectors are employed. Your kind are mediators of sorts — final arbiters, so to speak. Or at least that’s how the role was envisioned to be. Ever since the last Great War, and the shaky Truce that’s followed, the autonomy of Collectors has been on the wane. Hence you having me.”

  “So you’re saying only a Collector can kill a member of the Brethren.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what? We’re gonna mount up a Collector army and march on the remaining three?”

  “Something like that,” she said, “with only two corrections.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Correction the first: there is no army. It’s been decided the assignment falls to you and you alone.”