“You’re telling me this ain’t Manhattan? So where, then? Brooklyn? Queens?”
“I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” Lilith replied. “I am to be your master, not your tour guide. And this is your first lesson as a Collector, not some meet-and-greet. Now how about you do as I’ve suggested and test those legs of yours?”
Two-thirds of everything this chick said made no goddamn sense, but she was right about my legs at least. I flexed each of them in turn, wincing reflexively in anticipation of the broken-glass crunch of bone on bone in my bum knee, only to be surprised when it extended smoothly and pain-free. “But how could I… what did you do to me?”
“Tell me, Collector, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“I was outside Elizabeth’s new apartment, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. She and I… we’d parted ways, but I hoped maybe I had a shot to change her mind. I saw her through the crowd, and called to her. Someone bumped into me, and the world went gray. At the time, I thought he reached into my chest and ripped out my goddamn soul. But that’s nuts, right? I mean, it was probably a stroke or something. A blood clot traveling from my heart to my brain, and making me think all kinds of crazy shit. Whatever it was, it hurt like hell. And then I woke up here. Next thing I know, I’m in that bathtub,” I say, nodding, “and now you’re here, talking some world-class crazy. You’re what – some kind of nurse? And all this nonsense is, like, one of them newfangled psychological treatments, meant to poke and prod me to see if my brain’s wired right?” After all I’d seen and done, it was a stretch – a fantasy – I knew. But I wanted desperately to believe it. It sounded better than I’d never see Elizabeth again.
“Would that it were, Collector. I’m afraid the truth’s somewhat harder to explain, and harder still to swallow. Perhaps it would be better if I showed you?”
Lilith extended a hand, delicate as a flower. I took it, and she lifted me off the floor as a parent would a child, damn near wrenching my shoulder from its socket in the process. She looked around a moment, and then – spotting what she was looking for – walked to the far end of the room and righted the toppled bookshelf. She kicked aside its former contents – a single dented pot, some bent utensils, a man’s shaving kit, the broken remains of several dinner plates – unearthing a small, face-down, paper-backed picture frame. A braided metal wire ran the width of it, frayed to splitting at the center. Above the sink was a square of darker plaster that matched the frame’s dimensions. At the center of it was a nail.
Lilith handed the frame to me. I turned it over, and found not a picture staring back at me, but a strange man’s visage, a starburst crack distorting his fresh-faced Aryan features.
I blinked in confusion. The stranger blinked as well. As one, our eyes widened in sudden realization. The constant patter of radio-German rose to a fever pitch, drowning out all rational thought.
The mirror fell from my hand, and shattered into a million pieces on the floor.
“How?” I asked her.
“Possession,” she replied. “Samuel Thornton’s corpse is, by now, no more than hair and bone – one of a thousand John Does interred last year in New York’s Potter’s Field. And it’s a good thing, too – we can’t very well have you slinking about for all eternity in a decaying sack of meat and bone, frightening the villagers. So, freed by death from the confines of your human body, you now require a living vessel. Well, that or newly dead, though I’d recommend against the latter. They are quieter, I understand, but after a time, they do begin to stink. And think of what would happen if you were to bump into any of their relatives? Believe me, it’s happened occasionally throughout the whole of human history, and it’s never been pretty. Half the time, your kind declares it a miracle, and the other half, they burn the poor undead bastard at the stake. Either way, it’s more attention than we care to attract.”
“Wait– Did you say that I was buried last year?”
“That’s right,” she said. “You died this October past. It’s now April 1945.”
“But only moments passed for me.”
“Consider yourself lucky, then. Your time was spent in the vast, formless Nothing of the In-Between, while your fate was being debated. If you remembered it, you’d wish you didn’t.”
“Debated?”
“Yes. It seems someone on high – or perhaps on low – has taken quite a shine to you. There was much discussion as to your ultimate fate. Perhaps that’s why you were assigned to me, rather than simply to a demon, as are most Collectors. I confess I was surprised. My last foray into supervising your kind was not the smoothest of endeavors. Truth be told, I’m not sure if our pairing is intended to punish you or me or both.”
“A demon,” I echoed, disbelieving. “Like Dumas?”
“That’s right. Though understand, his human appearance was a projection, nothing more. He chose it to better pass among your kind. Most like him make no attempt to mask their true natures – and though they often walk unseen among the living, the dead such as yourself do not have the luxury of such blindness. The monsters at the edge of the map are, in fact, quite real. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.”
“You’re not a demon, though,” I said. “You’re human, like me?”
“I fear my ontological status is somewhat more complicated than that, but I was once human, yes. Though it was so long ago, I remember little of my life.”
“How did you wind up here? Did you make a deal, like me?”
“Would that I were given such a choice. No, I was cast out of Paradise for sins that, until I committed them, were as yet undefined, by a Maker as petty and mercurial as a poorly socialized toddler.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not nearly so sorry as you will be when you reach my age,” she replied.
Her age. Funny, she didn’t look a day over thirty. And that body hardly conjured images of shuffleboard and bingo. Stunning as she was, I found it hard not to ogle her.
She caught the meaning behind my lusty stare and raised an eyebrow. I blushed and looked away. “So,” I said, “this is what I’m going to look like from now on?”
She laughed then. Sweet Lord in heaven, did Lilith have a laugh. It curled toes, straightened other things, prickled my new flesh with goose pimples. I felt the color rising in my cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous, Collector. You’ll be here long after this vessel’s dead and gone. His grandchildren, too, should he survive long enough to have them. No, you’re just borrowing his body for as long as it suits your purposes. By assignment’s end, you’ll learn to take another at will, and to tamp down the thoughts of the individual inside.”
Realization dawned. “This goddamn radio I’m hearing – it’s no radio at all.”
“No,” she said. “The city’s been without power for at least a week. There’s not a radio to be heard for miles. Those are your vessel’s thoughts.”
“You’re telling me I hijacked a Kraut?”
“Jawohl,” she said. “A rising member of the Hitler Youth, in fact.”
“His chatter’s pretty goddamn annoying.”
“I would expect so. I imagine he’s not pleased with your sudden occupation of his body. The irony is delicious.”
“And your body,” I said, “is it borrowed too?”
“No,” she said. “Like Dumas, I look this way because I choose to. I’ve no need to drape myself in meat. Unless, of course, I find that meat desirable enough, and even then, I prefer to be on top.”
I’d never heard a woman make so frank an innuendo. And I’d never seen a woman as beautiful as Lilith in my life – not even on the silver screen. The combination was enough to take my breath away. Lilith seemed to delight in that.
Thunder struck once more, shaking the building so hard, my teeth rattled.
“We should move,” she said, crossing the room to the empty window frame and peering skyward. “They’re getting closer.”
“Who?” I asked, following.
/> She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. As I approached the window, I saw outside a ravaged city – streets cratered, buildings crumbling, tattered Nazi banners fluttering red and white and black from every flagpole and cockeyed lamppost – and above it, the slate sky was dotted here and there with fighter planes. Each wore a single star on its tail, and another on its fuselage. I recognized them from the newsreels that ran back home as Soviet Hunchbacks. As I watched, the nearest of them opened its belly and loosed a payload of bombs that once more shook the earth beneath my feet. Smoke billowed from where they landed some blocks away, and once the sound of their impact died down, I heard a woman’s anguished cry.
“Welcome to Berlin,” Lilith said.
Berlin. The thought – not to mention Lilith’s sudden closeness as we stood, touching, by the window – was exhilarating. Sam Thornton, bounced from recruitment station after recruitment station thanks to a bum knee and a lunger wife, dropped behind enemy lines on a mission to collect damned souls. I felt like a soldier. Like a superhero.
Maybe this undead thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“So,” I said, smiling for the first time since I awoke from the sleep of death, “you said something about an assignment?”
“I did, at that,” Lilith replied, skipping gaily toward the door. “Now follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Fear not, Collector, I suspect you’ll find the task to your liking.”
“C’mon, spill it. What’s the job?”
Lilith beamed, all dimples and pearly whites.
“You and I are off to kill the Führer.”
1.
Even before the Welshman drew down on me, I was pretty sure I was in trouble.
I’d spent the morning minding my own business, paying my respects to a dead friend. A friend I thought I’d long since lost – over a girl, because that’s too often how these things go. We had the kind of falling-out that feels like it’ll last forever, and in the case of folks like me and Danny, I suppose it could have. Only it didn’t last forever. We patched things up just in time for me to lose the boy for good.
Least he didn’t die for nothing. Hell, technically, he didn’t die at all, or at least, not recently. The sack of meat and bone that was Danny’s mortal vessel was three decades in the ground before I ever met the guy. Danny, like me, is a Collector. Was, I should say, since he ain’t much of anything anymore.
That girl I mentioned? She – another Collector by the name of Ana – took Danny for one hell of a ride, which culminated in the destruction of his immortal soul. Sucks, huh? Only Danny got the last laugh. If her batshit scheme had gone to plan, she would have broken her bonds of servitude to hell, but at vulgar cost. Last time any of my kind pulled that sort of juju, it triggered the Deluge – you know, Noah and a big-ass boat – and damn near wiped humankind off the map. This time woulda done the same, had Danny not stepped in. So I guess you could say the poor bastard died, or whatever the hell you call it when the dying guy’s already dead, saving the world. If that ain’t worth a few moments of quiet graveside reflection, I don’t know what is.
So that’s precisely what I did. Went to Danny’s mortal grave – a humble, weather-beaten headstone already draped with moss in a quiet, half-forgotten corner of a quiet, half-forgotten cemetery deep in the Kent countryside this fallen hero’s only monument – and said my piece. I didn’t figure the universe would begrudge me a few minutes’ mourning.
I didn’t figure, but I should have.
You wanna know what really irks me about being damned? It’s not the big stuff – the guilt, the torment, the recriminations; those I figure I’ve got coming. It’s the little things that get me. Drop a hundred slices of toast, and none of ’em will land butter-up. Flip a hundred coins, and not once are you gonna call it right. Take a bad beat from the cosmos, lose a friend, and need one goddamn morning to yourself to get your head straight? Well too bad, because that’s precisely when the Welshman in the Bentley’s gonna show.
I’m not talking metaphorically or anything. I mean I was standing in the cemetery, the chill November mist beading up on my meat-suit’s pea coat, when this dove-gray Bentley – mid-Sixties, if her curves were any indication, and in fresh-off-the-floor condition – splashes up the rutted drive, and out steps this big bruiser of a guy with arms like trees, no neck, a crooked nose, and a suit he probably coulda bartered for a second, lesser car. Black worsted-wool and well tailored, it somehow only served to accentuate his massive frame, his cauliflower ears, and his meaty boxer’s face. A pewter cravat hung around what passed for his neck – how it looped around and tied, I’ll never know – and a matching scarf was draped across his shoulders. Black leather gloves stretched tight as he flexed his ham-hock hands. He eyed me a moment in my borrowed meat-suit, a rail-thin teenaged boy who’d been struck down by an aneurism just last night. Then, in a heavy Welsh accent – all odd angles and hairpin turns – he said, “Sam Thornton?”
“Never heard of him,” I replied, in my best attempt at cockney.
“Your accent is bloody rubbish,” he said. “And anyway, you are him.”
“Okay, I’m him.” I was aiming for nonchalant, although inside, I was reeling. When you make your way through the world in stolen bodies, hidden behind borrowed faces, you come to expect and even value a certain level of anonymity. Collectors ain’t the type to get bumped into by old classmates at the grocery store. “And you are?”
“Just the hired help. The boss would like to meet you.”
“Who, exactly, is the boss?”
“That’s really for the boss to say, isn’t it?”
“So I’m to come with you right now?”
“That’s right.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
The big man shrugged. His gloved hands tightened into fists. “Find out,” he said.
I thought about it. Decided not to.
“No,” I said. “I’ll come.”
And so I did.
We drove for just over an hour, first on country roads, puddles gathering in the hollows of the tire-buckled tarmac and reflecting back a dotted line of cold gray sky, and then on roads with proper lines, and pale brick homes on either side. Eventually, we hit the motorway and headed north-west toward London. The whole time, my driver never said a word. My only company was the clatter of the tires against the pavement, and the swoosh of the wipers clearing the constant drizzle from the windshield. For a time, I tried to question him as to who his employer was and where, exactly, he was taking me, but the big mook just smiled at me, gap-toothed and crooked, in the rearview. So eventually, once his choice of roads tipped London as our likely destination, I gave up, settling into my leather seat back as warm and supple as first love and sleeping fitfully. It’s rare I find myself in such refined environs, and wherever he was taking me, there was no point in being exhausted when we got there.
When the Bentley rocked to a halt, I woke with a start, unsure at first what continent I was on, or what meat-suit I’d dozed off wearing. But the swank interior of the Bentley’s cabin and the pale gleaming pate of my taciturn companion brought me back to the here and now right quick. If only I had a better handle on where here was, or what was gonna happen next. This steroided-out hunk of lab-grown meat didn’t seem too likely to fill me in on either.
“We’re here,” he said. “Get out.”
I got out. Looked around. Saw nothing familiar, not that that surprised me any. London wasn’t really my beat. In all my years as a Collector, I’ve never been able to suss out any geographic rhyme or reason to the assignments on which I’ve been sent, but for whatever reason, I’ve never snatched a soul in London proper. Oxford, sure. Manchester once or twice. Snagged a couple dozen sinners in Ireland in my day, a Scot or two – and one very surly Welshman. But never London. So unless this suited ape had dropped me on the banks of the Thames within spitting distance of Big Ben, it may as well have been Sheboygan for all I knew.
But wh
at I did see suggested Sheboygan might’ve proven a step up.
The driver and I stood on a narrow strip of weed-split sidewalk hemmed in on one side by the low-slung curves of his boss’ vintage Bentley, and on the other by a crooked, handbill-plastered plywood construction barrier whose panels zigged and zagged as though tacked up by a cadre of impatient drunkards, none of whom had any facility with a hammer. The building beyond was gargantuan – occupying an entire city block, as near as I could tell – but its shape and purpose were lost to me behind layers of sheet plastic and scaffolding and yet more plywood, which was tacked over what few windows faced the street. Truth be told, it was a hard place to pin down; it seemed to resist being looked at. And when I tried to force myself to do so, I got the disquieting impression those blank plywood eyes were looking back at me.
Spooked, I diverted my gaze. The feeling passed. I tried to play it off like I was taking in the neighborhood at large, but from the smug grin on the driver’s face, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t buying it.
Across the street from us sat an ugly yellow brick building stained gray by exhaust and tagged here and there by artless vandals. Its tired façade and the makeshift curtains that showed in its windows – a tapestry here, a beach towel there – suggested low-income housing. Despite the chill and the escalating rain, several of the building’s windows were open, and from them poured an olfactory cacophony of discordant yet not altogether unpleasant spices representing at minimum three continents’ cuisine, and the song and conversation to match.
To my right, across a narrow side street, was a shuttered convenience store, its dented stainless steel overhead doors down despite the fact it was scarcely midday. The cars that lined the street’s low curb were old and cheap and not worth stealing. The Bentley aside, of course, since it was parked along the curb as well – its driver had somehow managed to not only find a space that accommodated this beautiful behemoth of an automobile with scant inches to spare, but to parallel-park said behemoth without disturbing my beauty sleep until the deed was done. An impressive feat, to be sure, but not half as impressive as simply having the balls to leave such a stunning work of automotive art parked in a dodgy neighborhood without so much as locking its doors.
The Big Reap Page 2