by Wesley Brown
“A gift?” Reaper asked.
“Yes, I thought you might like it,” Blink said.
“Is it a new suit? The Romans took mine.”
“It’s not,” Blink answered. “Wait, does that mean you liked that suit?”
Reaper shrugged a little and shook his head.
“You liked it.” Blink smiled from ear to ear. “Did you or your guys look in my bag?”
“No, I kept them ” Reaper walked over to a small table and tossed Blink his bag.
“You are a very wise man, Reaper,” Blink said. He opened the bag and pulled out a shiny brown item that made a strange sound when it rubbed against other objects. Blink held it out toward Reaper. “Here, it’s a Snickers.”
Reaper took it from Blink’s hand slowly. “Snickers?” Reaper asked as he examined the wrapper. “What is a Snickers?”
“Delicious,” Blink said.
“This is food where you are from?” Reaper asked.
“Really depends who you ask. I call it a snack,” Blink said. “I brought myself a Kit Kat.”
“Kit Kat?”
“It’s another delicious snack,” Blink said. “If you like the way that tastes, I may bring you some Twinkies. But from before Hostess went under—they really haven’t been the same since.”
Reaper had a blank expression.
“Forget all that; let’s eat.” Blink opened his wrapper with ease, but Reaper was having some issues with it. “Let me get that for you.” Blink took Reaper’s Snickers and opened it for him. “This is a nice place you got, Reaper. Settle in a place that would accept you exactly as you are. It’s smart.” He broke his candy apart and ate it one stick at a time.
“Where do I need to go?” Reaper asked.
“Not until you’ve taken at least one bite of that candy bar,” Blink said. Reaper rolled his eyes and took one bite. As he chewed, his eyes widened. He kept chewing even after the point that you or I would have swallowed. Finally, he swallowed. Blink smiled widely, teeth and all. “So?”
“This is delicious,” Reaper took another bite.
“Yes!” Blink pumped his right fist. “Twinkies next time.”
Reaper finished, he cleared his throat. “The mission,” he said.
“Of course,” Blink said. “You remember where Mount Vesuvius is?”
Reaper remembered the look in Perseus’s eye when Reaper had failed to rescue him. He turned away from Blink.
“I remember,” Reaper said as a tear fell from his eye.
“I need you to go there,” Blink said.
“I will not,” Reaper said with a hostile tone.
“Why?” Blink asked. There was silence, but then it struck Blink. “Where’s Perseus?”
“I lost him. I lost him to Specter on the side of the mountain,” Reaper said, his voice now shaking.
“Reaper, I’m sorry, man. If it makes a difference, I know what it’s like to lose people. I lost my whole family. All this time it was my own fault.” Blink said. He took a deep breath. “Let’s call it a story for another day. Here’s the thing, I know this mission is gonna hurt even more now, but I’ve got some good news.” Blink held out his hands more, not knowing what else to do with them. “You won’t actually be going to the volcano. I just need you to be in Pompeii or Herculaneum on August twenty-fourth in the year 79.”
“Who am I looking for?” Reaper asked.
“Nobody,” Blink answered.
“What am I going to do there?” Reaper asked.
“You’re just going to wait. Be in one of those two cities one day early,” Blink said. “Then just wait.”
“Wait for what?” Reaper asked.
“You’ll know it when it happens.”
“You mean to say that I will know what to do?”
“That’s a way of looking at it,” Blink said. “You gotta head out right away, so make up a good story for your village.”
“Goodbye, Blink,” Reaper said.
“Goodbye, Reaper. I’ll see you after,” Blink said, and he was gone.
Reaper went out and told the people in the village that there was somewhere else he needed to be. Not one person in the village was happy to hear that he was going to move on. After many tears drenched his clothes, Reaper started out on the road. A few men wanted to accompany Reaper, but he told them that where he had to go, they physically could never make the journey.
On his long walk to Pompeii, Reaper had many thoughts one after another. More than once, he found himself getting angry at Blink for having him leave. Reaper had felt that he had found a place where he could make a difference for the greater good. All these missions going all over the world, fighting and killing, had become so tedious to him. One thought in particular kept gnawing at him: he felt like a puppet, and Blink was pulling his strings. The Reaper was nobody’s puppet. While he walked, there was a single moment where Reaper thought he might have heard Death’s voice. Reaper did his very best from that moment on to try not to focus on the things that weighed him down emotionally. Only, how? If Blink knows his loss, if they were the same, why was Blink holding so much back? What did he have to hide? These questions flooded Reaper day after day.
Reaper arrived in Pompeii one day before Blink had told him to be there, placing him at two days before Mount Vesuvius would erupt. In that time, Reaper did exactly as he had been instructed. He sat quietly on the ground with his back to a wall in an alley, the scythe lying on the ground next to him. He rested there for almost the entire time. Suddenly, the ground began to shake. No, “shake” wasn’t a strong enough word—the ground rattled and split, the plates making up that small part of the Earth suddenly at angry, vicious war with one another. Buildings shook apart, and it did not take long for the unsuspecting people to start screaming. Some began shouting in the streets that it was the end of the world. Reaper took the scythe and sheathed it, feeling that this was the mission. For this mission, the scythe would be no help, as he was not fighting someone, but something. Reaper ran into the city center and saw the ash and smoke rising from the volcano. He saw a light at the base of the ash clouds. He knew full well that the volcano would erupt. It was only a matter of time.
“Get out of the city!” Reaper shouted. He repeated this over and over again. He saw a woman with her child who had fallen. She had been trying to run out of the city with valuables in a large sack. When she fell, her ankle had broken. The woman’s baby screamed bloody murder. “You need to leave that,” Reaper said to the woman as he helped her up. She held her baby in one arm, the other over Reaper’s shoulders. He tried to run out of the city with her and her child, but there was suddenly a massive boom. Lightning flashed out from the enormous ash cloud stretching far above the ground into the stratosphere. Flying bits of molten rock fell around them as a colossal cloud of gas and ash came down at incredible speeds. Even the Reaper was afraid—not for himself, but for everyone else in the city. The hot ash rushed through and destroyed everything. The woman slipped and caught Reaper’s wrist. He started to pull her up, but it was fruitless. The two of them, as well as many hundreds more, were flash-heated to death. After the eruption ended, the city was buried and destroyed, yet preserved. The people too were dead and preserved.
Mire days had passed since Mount Vesuvius erupted. The heat had subsided. Blink stood over Reaper’s position. He took out a device that look like a metallic spinning top. He stuck the point to the ground, and it burrowed down to Reaper. It opened a blue field that pushed all the ash away. Blink felt the field open as the ash under him was pushed up. Blink teleported down into the bubble. He shuddered at the sight of Reaper trying to save the woman and her baby.
“Reaper, I know you can’t hear me. I am so sorry, man. I’m just doing what I was told,” Blink said. “I know how bad this is gonna hurt you.” He took out a small chisel and hammer. He struck Reaper on the right side of his head, then the left. The plaster cracked and fell off one tiny piece at a time. Reaper’s left eye showed first. The blue eye frantically looked
around, seared flesh surrounding it. The right eye and bridge of his nose came free next. Reaper tensed up with the muscles that had grown back already. His legs, biceps, abs, and upper back flexed hard and cracked the plaster. As chips fell away, Reaper’s charred flesh steamed. Reaper fell out onto his back. Most of him was still reforming, the muscle fibers spinning back into place around bone, with skin rushing behind it.
Blink handed Reaper his new clothes, which were practically identical to the first set, although Blink had also brought Reaper sandals this time. Reaper took the clothes and held them in front of himself. He stared at Blink and said nothing. He took a gulp.
“What could I have done?” Reaper asked.
“Nothing, man,” Blink said. “History records somewhere around two thousand people dying when Mount Vesuvius went off. There’s nothing that could have saved them.”
“Nothing but knowledge of the future,” Reaper said crossly.
“They would not have believed you, Reaper,” Blink said.
“But I could have tried!” Reaper screamed. “Look at that woman, her child. I could have saved them! Why did you keep this from me?”
“This is what you needed,” Blink said wistfully. “You have already lived a long time, and you’ll live even longer. People will die—a lot of them. Sometimes, you can’t save everyone; sometimes you’ll have to sit out while people die. This is what you need to become a better hero.” He paused. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted to do this to you.”
Reaper’s eyes looked dead. Broken like a wild mustang, ready to follow the every whim of the bit in it’s mouth.
“We need to get out of here.” Blink pressed a button on the force field device. The field reconfigured to a narrow tube shape with a ladder coming down from the top.
“Where do I go from here?” Reaper asked.
“There’s a man in China. You need something from him,” Blink said.
“Tell me.”
Chapter Six:
Yeti
Reaper traveled alone to the Himalayas in China. He had been instructed to kill a man there. Reaper was struggling with this particular mission. Blink had told Reaper that this man was not a bad man. The only reason that Reaper was going to kill him was to get something from him. Blink had explained to Reaper that part of his power as the Reaper was that he could access the powers of the dead. Suddenly, it made sense to Reaper how he could use the strength of Asterion or Set. It was the same way that he could access the knowledge of the dead, as well as their appearances. Still in his mind Reaper just could not shake the feeling that he was doing the wrong thing by looking for this man to murder him, simply because this man was capable of something. It did not seem right. Somehow, despite how he felt about the situation, he was still looking for this man. Blink had not said that this man had a name. What kind of a man had no name? Even that beast in Crete had a name.
Reaper traveled south through Turkey and west through India. This was a route that he had traveled before. He felt that it would take him where he needed to be faster. As much as Reaper wanted to stop by his old village in India, he knew in his heart that these were the first people he had loved in a very long time. If he stopped to see them, he would only stay and jeopardize the future.
That is not to say that he did not stop on occasion. How could he not? His journey certainly had some beautiful scenery. Unfortunately, he never stayed more than a night in any one place. By the time he had made his way into the mountains, he wished that he had stayed in any of the villages that he’d passed on the way. He even considered going back and taking a joyride on an elephant. Being the man he was, however, Reaper continued his search into the snowy Himalayas. It would be a lot of work to find this man. Luckily for the Reaper, the suit that Blink had given him was designed to handle extreme weather. Of course, Reaper’s own healing powers also made him fairly resistant to the cold.
During his many years’ long search, Reaper was concerned about how he was dressed. The crimson and bronze was not exactly camouflage in the snow-topped mountains of the Himalayas. If this man spotted Reaper, it would be hard to stay hidden, especially if the man had been living in the mountains for years before Reaper ever arrived. The man would likely have hidden passageways and caches that only he knew about.
Three years and three quarters into the fourth year, Reaper finally caught a break. Actually, he fell on it—literally. One day, Reaper lost his balance on the cliff and slid until his head hit rock. He straightened back up with a groan, rubbing his temple, and glared at the uneven ground that had tripped him. An uneven stone ledge was protruding from the mountainside, and when Reaper brushed away the snow covering it, he was amazed to find even more ledges ascending up the cliff. It was a staircase.
Reaper thought for only a moment, then figured that he would be more likely to find this mysterious man if he were to go up, so Reaper walked up the stairs that rounded the mountain. Near the top, Reaper came across a cave, with no way to bring in light. Reaper thought about trying to make a fire, but instead had a different idea. If he could use the abilities of the dead, he might be able to go inside without any light. He thought about Asterion and the way his eyes worked. Asterion had spent nearly his whole life in the dark of the Labyrinth. His eyes had likely adjusted permanently to the dim light or even the dark. Reaper closed his eyes tight, concentrating on Asterion. When he opened his eyes, the light reflecting off the snow was blinding. He threw his hands up in front of his face and walked toward the cave. Once he could no longer feel the chilling wind whipping past his cheeks and nose, he opened his eyes.
His eyes were discolored. The whites were a shadowy gray, and his irises were murky and hard to make out. Some kind of strange film seemed to cover them. It felt strange at first, seeing through eyes that did not belong to him. He could see the world the same way that Asterion had been able to. If only Asterion had not been locked away like a mad beast, he might have loved the world. Even through this cloud-like haze, everything held a kind of beauty. After Reaper felt that he was more used to the way new eyes felt in his head, he searched the cave, only to find that nothing and no one had been there for some time. But Reaper figured it likely that there would be more caves like this one. Perhaps the man would be back through here soon. It made more sense to Reaper than getting lost in the mountains again. Reaper made himself a supper out of the meat scraps lying about the cave. While eating he heard a sound outside. He returned to his natural sight, then went outside and peeked over the edge of the cliff in front of the cave entrance.
In the distance he saw an enormous man-like figure. It had to have been over seven feet tall, maybe even over eight. It was carrying three bharal over its shoulders, but didn’t appear to be even a little strained by the weight of the dead sheep.
He was singing and whistling out over the mountains, pausing between verses to listen for the echo. Despite his monstrous appearance, the yeti’s slow, lumbering walk and melodious whistling made him seem almost peaceful.
This only made Reaper feel pity for the man. He was somewhere around seven and eight feet tall. Gray skin and white hair covered his body. His hands where huge, like he could crush a watermelon in the palm of one. His feet were long and freakishly wide. A large amount of the hair on his body was dirty—partly because of how long he had been away from civilization. Reaper examined the man and forgot that he had been waiting in his home to kill him. Reaper turned, altered his eyes again, and ran into the cave to hide.
When the man finally came to his cave, he became less happy. He saw the disturbed snow that led into his cave. Reaper felt the ground shake as the man dropped his meal, then let out a roar and slammed his chest with both fists.
“Come out!” he shouted into the cave in Tibetan. Reaper had never encountered Tibetan before. He stayed hidden under some animal skins. “Come out, and I might not eat you.” The man entered the cave, his heavy footsteps shaking the walls. He sniffed around in the air, but could not pick up a different scent than his own. He
looked at the mess Reaper had made while preparing his meal. “How long have you been in here touching my things?”
Reaper could not understand the words being spoken, but he well understood the tone. The large, monstrous man was clearly angry. He began thrashing around at places that Reaper could have been hiding. Reaper was just about to reveal himself when the man tossed the animal skins and carcasses, Reaper along with them. He hit the ceiling of the cave, then the wall, and finally bounced and rolled onto the floor from the force. The wind was knocked out of Reaper, who knelt doubled over, wheezily gasping for air. Yeti heard this and turned. Reaper looked up, and the two of them locked eyes. The Yeti moved forward, but something was troubling him. This man had been hiding in his home fearlessly, and now appeared unharmed from a toss that should have killed him. And… was he smiling?
“Who are you?” Yeti asked calmly. “You do not fear me?”
Reaper still could not understand what Yeti was saying to him. He stood slowly with his hands held out and his head down. Yeti cocked his head. For a moment, he thought that Reaper might have been praising him, but Reaper was searching in his mind for a dead man who spoke the same language as Yeti. It took a moment, but he found the Tibetan language.
“Hello, Yeti,” Reaper said.
“Yeti?” Yeti asked.
“That is what…” Reaper paused. He could not say, “My friend from the future calls you that.” “…my people call you.”
“I am known of?” Yeti asked.
“It seems that there are many who know of you,” Reaper said.
“Are there more of you hunting me through these mountains?” Yeti asked.
“I am alone.”
“But you are hunting me.”
Reaper looked away. “Yes, I am.”
“I never meant to harm anyone,” Yeti said.
“What did you do?” Reaper asked.
“The people who sent you did not say?”
“No. No, I do not believe so.”
“May I tell you before you try to kill me?” Yeti asked.