The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  Some shit I seen, I wish like hell it were true for me as well.

  THEN

  The sun rose over the battleships to the east of me, dull patches of pale gray amidst a sea that blazed with the full spectrum of the sun’s rays, scattered to rainbows by the undulating waves. Gun battlements flanked me by some fifty yards on either side, two points in a dotted line that studded the white-sand beach as far as the eye could see, guarding against surprise attacks from Japanese fighter planes eager to steal this hunk of rock back from Uncle Sam a second time. A little nothing of an island in the tropics by the name of Guam – two hundred square miles of beach and rock and jungle on which many men on both sides had lost their lives. I hadn’t heard of it before this morning, although I hear tell the US has occupied it since the 1890s; Lord knows why the Empire took it from us in the first place back in ’41. But in the wake of Pearl Harbor, them taking it was enough to make us want to take it back. So take it back we did – ten months ago, this was, in ’44 – landing Marines at beaches north and south and pushing back the Japanese until they ran out of ground to hold.

  Strategy or vengeance, I wasn’t sure. But it sure was a pretty place to watch the sun rise, so long as you don’t mind the warships mucking up the view, or the B-29s juddering overhead as the runway spit them northward toward Japan. Word around the mess hall was a few hostiles had taken refuge in the jungle, living wild and popping out every now and again to slash Jeep tires or trash supply sheds. Consensus was they wouldn’t last out there for long, though history would prove that consensus wrong. The last holdout would not surrender until ’72, nearly three decades after we reclaimed the island, and even then, the fella came in under duress. Turned out he’d been living in a jungle cave the whole time, certain there was a war still on, and that the Americans who’d by then put their conflict with his nation in the rearview were still the enemy.

  Amazing the conditions folks can live through. The fear. The loneliness. The constant struggle to survive in hostile territory. I guess any situation becomes your normal if you live it long enough. Though I couldn’t help but wonder how relieved he felt when, instead of a trip to the brig, he got loaded onto a commercial airliner bound for home. Maybe not back to the world he left behind, but one that wasn’t trying to kill him at every turn, at least, or turn him into something less than human.

  The sand was cool as night beneath my well-worn military fatigue pants as I sat, tank top-bared arms hugging knees, shivering beneath the waxing light as it chased the stars westward. But it wasn’t on account of the sand’s chill my new vessel – a Marine named Seamus Scanlon, according to his dogtags – was goosebumped and trembling.

  No, that was on account of Hitler.

  When I closed the door to his bunker office wearing the flesh of his betrothed, I knew I didn’t have long to make my move. The anemometer supplied to him by his apparently quite mystically inclined science advisor Mengele may have shaken itself apart, but there was still the pesky matter of me not speaking a goddamn word of German. Not to mention the fact I was inhabiting the body of the most evil man in all of history’s new bride; if that icky motherfucker got all randy on me, there’d be no stopping the barf-fest that ensued.

  Actually, come to think of it, I thought as I clicked shut the door behind the guards ushering an unconscious Goebbels to the brig… and then I puked all down the front of my housedress.

  Son of a whore. Lilith warned me that’d happen every time, but even after Goebbels and the Hitler Youth getting all ralphy on me, I still didn’t see it coming.

  When I threw up, Hitler was by my side in a flash. At first, I thought the jig was up once more. Maybe Mengele had warned him this was a side-effect of possession, and he was planning to attack me, or summon a fresh batch of guards. But instead, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close asking, “Bist du in Ordnung, meine Liebe?”

  And though the nuance of his words was lost on me, I got the gist. This human garbage was worried about me, and hoped I was okay. Hard to say what specifically he thought had gotten to me. Maybe the poisoning of the dog he’d made me watch, maybe the cold-cocking of a dear friend. But one thing was clear, this fucking stain on our whole species, this monster who’d rounded up Jews and dissidents and slaughtered them en masse and who’d caused bloodshed the world over, was deeply concerned about his new wife’s tender tummy.

  As he enveloped me in his embrace, a burning rage fell over me. It thrummed through me like an electric current. He cooed his unintelligible German platitudes at me, my anger growing inside me like a living thing, so naturally, I assumed that the vibration I was feeling was my building fury, nothing more.

  It was only when he drew me tight to his chest that I realized the vibration was coming from him, not me, and that despite the fact it threatened to shake the fillings from this idiot woman’s teeth, the Führer here didn’t seem to notice.

  That’s when I remembered my last moments on this earth.

  Seeing my Elizabeth on the busy city street, child-plump and beautiful.

  Calling her name despite myself, even though I knew it wouldn’t matter, that she’d made her choice.

  The mad-eyed man in his pageboy cap and woolen overcoat, his smile manic, his mischief-glinting eyes locking on mine and never deviating.

  His hand reaching for my chest.

  Plunging inside.

  Grasping tight my soul.

  It wasn’t until the Führer screamed that I snapped back to reality, as unreal as that reality seemed. My hand was buried deep inside his chest, straight through his clothes though his body offered up no resistance, and there was no wound. His eyes were wide, his mouth an “O” of shock. My long, feminine, enameled nails grazed against something warm and round and alive, and instinctively, I grasped it. And just like that, the bunker office dropped away, as did the planet, and my own thoughts and memories to boot.

  It was then that I discovered what hell truly was.

  Touching that man’s blackened soul, atrophied from disuse, experiencing every moment that led him to my grasp. The choices he’d made. The lives he’d sacrificed. The delight he’d taken in the suffering of others.

  Lilith never told me it would be like this. That I’d see what he’d seen. Do what he’d done. Feel what he’d felt.

  She never warned me.

  Never said.

  She must have known I’d never do it if she had.

  You know the worst of it, of watching in mute horror as this madman’s blasphemous existence unfurled before me? It was experiencing the sense of smug self-satisfaction he felt. The entitlement. The bitter, petulant insistence even now that this fate which had befallen me (him protested the part of me that held on tight to who I was, him not me but him) was Not My Fault, Not My Doing, Not The Life of Greatness I Deserved. These feelings weren’t my own, you understand, but his, overlaid atop my own revulsion at his every thought and deed.

  That’s what I told myself. What I tell myself still, about that and every collection since.

  But the fact is, in that moment, experiencing the sum total of your mark’s life’s arc, there’s scarcely a job where you don’t – if only for a single, horrible, illusory second – get the secondhand sense of certitude at your (their/our) incontrovertible rightness. And it’s that moment of every job that steals a little bit of who you are. Because our actions can’t all be justified, and Lord knows those of the folks I take sometimes fail to come within a country mile. But still, to a one, they’re all so goddamned certain. Something about that reaches cold hands into the core of you, into that tight-tied hidden bundle of convictions and true things that make you you, and that you’ve kept so secret and well-protected all these years, and shakes it, hard.

  In that moment, you don’t know anything. You can’t know. You can’t believe. Because you know you’re just as likely to be misguided as were they.

  After all, why the fuck else would you wind up with a gig as a Collector in the first place?

  Th
at head-trip’s a lot to take in on any job. And Adolf Hitler was far from any job. It didn’t leave me rattled, it left me shattered.

  Annihilated.

  When I finally tore free his soul, it was by accident. I’d simply crumpled to the floor with my hand still wrapped around it, and yanked it out as I fell. The swirling morass and piercing discord that was his soul’s corrupted light and song vanished like someone had flipped a switch.

  I shook as if with seizure, so wracked with guilt was I when I was once more myself (or something like it, I thought, draped as I was in a strange woman’s flesh) it felt like a physical affliction. Snot and tears poured uncontrollably from me, from his lover’s face. My mouth was open in silent imitation of a scream; I think I would have wailed aloud had the horrors I’d just experienced not ripped the breath from my lungs.

  For a time, I was outside myself – my new self, I corrected, my meat-self, my borrowed self – hovering above my fleshly vessel it seemed, driven half-mad by all I’d seen. I drifted in and out of consciousness for what felt like days, but by the clock must have been minutes. When I finally came around, I found myself guilt-stricken sobbing with my head on the floor, staring across its concrete sheen at the lifeless body of the man I’d been sent to kill.

  I found my feet, shambled over to him and kicked him hard across the face. It didn’t help, so I kicked again, harder. That didn’t make me feel any better, either.

  From somewhere a thousand miles away, I heard a voice like bourbon layered over honey. “Collector,” it said. “You’ve done well. Now we must bundle up his soul and go.”

  Lilith. I ignored her, dropped to my knees and pummeled the lifeless body before me with my fists. They were delicate and ineffectual, and soon swelled with every blow, hurting me far more than it could ever hurt him.

  He was gone. Dead. There was nothing more that I could take from him.

  But then I heard his wife crying in the back of her own mind, forced to watch as I’d felled her beloved, and shrieking ever louder with each blow I (she/we) landed on his corpse, and I realized that wasn’t true.

  I lurched toward the desk. Found the bottle with its amber pills. Dumped a handful into my hand, and tossed them into my mouth, Lilith shouting behind me all the while.

  I bit down hard, chewing until my mouth was full of deadly paste that stank of bitter almonds. Then I swallowed it all down.

  A stabbing pain in my gut doubled me over. I collapsed onto the surface of the desk, atop its mess of papers. Atop Hitler’s own gun.

  By force of will, I made my meat-suit stand. Her vision swam. Her limbs trembled as the poison kicked in, made picking up the Walther hard, ade standing harder still. I fell to my knees, straddling the Third Reich’s dead Führer. Then, Lilith shrieking, I stuffed the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  “Guess I’ll see you both in hell,” I said.

  Then I woke up, wracked with the pain of my first death experienced without the gauzy veil of blissfully numbing shock, in a barracks bunk in Guam.

  “You mind a little company?”

  The sun was full up by the time Lilith arrived. The sand was sun-warmed all around me, and my skin a darkening brown, but still my shivering had not abated. Just like at the flat in Berlin, I hadn’t heard her approach.

  She didn’t wait for an answer, which is for the best, because there wasn’t any answer coming. Instead, she plopped down on the sand beside me in a white bikini made, it seemed, from spider-silk and happy thoughts. We sat in silence for a good long while – an hour, maybe more – our shoulders close enough to touch. Her skin was warm against my own. A small kindness, a simple comfort. In that hour, my shaking finally abated.

  “Took you long enough to find me,” I said, not tearing my eyes from the horizon.

  “No,” she replied, “it didn’t. As your handler, I can locate you at a moment’s notice. I simply thought it might be best to give you a little space.”

  “You didn’t tell me. What it would be like. How it would feel.”

  “You’re right, I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose I didn’t see the point.”

  “You didn’t see the point?” Hurt; incredulous.

  “No, Collector, I did not. The job was yours to do whether you knew what you were in for or not, which means I would have accomplished nothing by warning you but making your task more difficult. I completed your collection, by the way, wrapped the soul and interred it as required. I’ve been assured by my superiors that the Deliverants who take responsibility for the soul once it is buried have deemed my actions acceptable – this time, at least. I suspect they’ll not prove so lenient again, which means next time the task shall fall to you and you alone.”

  I considered what she’d said about warning me, considered the ramifications of knowing and not knowing. Decided reluctantly she wasn’t wrong.

  “Sam,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “If we’re to work together, you should really call me Sam.”

  “No,” she said, “I shouldn’t. Do you know why? Because I am not your friend. I am not your ally. And I am certainly not your confidante. I am your jailor. Your tormentor. I am one of many architects responsible for constructing your own personal hell, and you would do well to remember it. That is why I choose to call you by your title. To remind us both precisely where we stand. Because I assure you, if you give me half an opportunity, I will use you. Hurt you. Betray your trust. Deceive you. I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal. It’s simply that I cannot help it. It’s in my nature. It’s who I am. It’s what I have become.”

  I shook my head. “I refuse to believe that.”

  Lilith smiled then, sad and wan. “You’ll come around.”

  “But not today,” I said, my hand finding hers, our fingers intertwining. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, but one of basic human kindness, for in that moment – and perhaps only in that moment – her beauty held no sway over me.

  She flinched as if stung, but she did not take her hand away. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

  “Look. You’ve done your civic duty. Warned me how big and scary you are. How you plan to chew me up and spit me out if given half a chance. But not today, right? Because today, for me, was a giant fucking shit sandwich. Today, I’ve had about all that I can take. So if you want to use me and abuse me, you’ll have to wait your turn, because today I’m already used up. Which is why it seems to me we may as well enjoy our time in the sun. Unless, of course, I’m wrong, and you plan on getting started ruining me today.”

  She looked at me a long while as if I were insane. But she never removed her hand. “No,” she said finally, resting her head upon my shoulder, “not today.”

  And so we two damned souls sat for hours beneath the blazing sun in silence, and watched its rays glint off the water, bright and pretty as God’s grace.

  21.

  It was dusk when I arrived at the temple.

  Temple was too strong a word, really, for the tangled heap of stone and jungle life I saw before me or, given said heap’s strange elemental majesty, too weak. In reality, the ravaged remains of the building didn’t look like a human structure in the slightest. The weathered sandstone spires seemed to rise out of the jungle as if not built but grown. The bas relief ornamentation – some Hindu, some Buddhist, and some animist – had been all but obliterated by the centuries, once telling tales of gods and men, but now nothing more than mossy crenellations on a wall. And in the thousand years since the site had been built – the nearly seven hundred since this site in particular had been abandoned – the jungle had done its level best to swallow the structure whole. Strangler figs pressed woody limbs through every hint of a crack. Massive thitpok trees draped surfaces with their fluid root structures which seemed to slither down across the rock face like the tentacles of a giant beast. Garlands of ropy vine strung themselves across every peak and column – always pulling, tugging, taking until the s
tone itself was forced to tender its crumbling surrender.

  Believe me, I knew how it felt.

  I’d been hiking for seven days, following Lilith’s vague directions – scrawled on a napkin from an ex-pat Irish bar in Phnom Penh – through the dense, forbidding wilds of Cambodia. The legends claim that Lilith has dominion over the warm Southern wind, and as the hot salt breath of the Gulf of Thailand blew ever northward with me, I couldn’t help but feel like she was with me – guiding, goading, or maybe just gloating it wasn’t her who had to carry the goddamn backpack.

  Honestly, the whole country was so hot and sticky, I’d soak clean through my shirt by the time I shrugged the damn thing on. The fifteen miles or so a day I’d manage on foot – twenty, if a fisherman took pity on me and ferried me up the Mekong in one of the ubiquitous low-slung fishing vessels that sprinkle the river like so much flotsam – would leave me looking as though I’d taken a dip in the briniest of ocean waters, and smelling like the locker room to boot. And the one day I managed to hitch a ride – thirty-five miles in the back of a rusted pickup with a pair of orange-robed monks, whose sandals were made from tire-rubber and whose rice bowls (for all the Buddhist monks I encountered on my journey carried rice bowls, which locals delighted in filling with food from their own tables, and which the monks were quite willing to share with a poor, starving stranger) were, sadly, empty – the plumes of dirt kicked up off the unpaved road left my eyes and hair gritty, and my benefactor’s insistence upon driving over every fucking pothole left my tailbone so bruised I could scarcely sit the whole next day.

  I was wearing the flesh of a middle-aged, middle-management Seattleite named McCluskey, who’d scheduled a layover in Phnom Penh on his way to inspect his company’s new call-center in Bangalore with the intention of exploring Cambodia’s ruins. I caught up with him when I overheard he and his wife Skyping in a Greenwood Avenue coffee house, not too long after the nightmare showdown in Bellevue. Thanks to me, he missed his bus to Angkor Wat, but I didn’t figure he’d mind. He’d shed a good five pounds of paunch on this little trek of mine, and anyways, I was showing him a real set of ruins – as in, the kind no one had laid eyes on since Columbus sailed the ocean blue.