And I’m a long way from used to it.
But it wasn’t the dream that jolted me awake.
Something’s happening: A Stirrer, well, stirring.
Their god is coming, and they’re growing less cautious and more common: rising up from their ancient city Devour in greater numbers like a nest of cockroaches spilling from a drain.
Christ.
Where is it? I scramble to my feet.
Unsteady. Blinking my eyes, adjusting to the dark.
Stirrers, like their city’s name suggests, would devour all living things. They’re constantly knocking open the doors between the lands of the living and the dead; reanimating and possessing corpses in the hope that they can destroy all life on Earth and return the world to its pristine—as they see it—state. It’s the task of Mortmax Industries, its RMs and Pomps (short for “Psychopomps”) to stop them. To make sure that the path from life to death only heads in one direction. We pomp the dead, send them to the underworld, and stall Stirrers. Without us, the world would be shoulder-to-shoulder with the souls of the dead. Without us, the Stirrers would have much more than a toehold; they’d have an empire built on a road of our corpses and despair.
But sometimes the serious bloody business of pomping and stalling can get lost in all the maneuvering, posturing, and occasionally literal backstabbing that modern corporate life entails.
Work in any office and you know that to be true. The stakes are just a lot higher in ours.
My heart’s pounding: fragments of my dream are still working their rough way through my veins.
For a moment, I think the monster’s in the room with me.
But it’s a lot further away than that.
I get to my feet. My back cracks loudly. Lissa’s in our bed, still asleep. I don’t know why I’m surprised by that; after all, me wandering in here drunk an hour ago didn’t wake her. She’s exhausted from yesterday’s work, all my Pomps are, but she’s taken on so much. That’s the downside of knowing how things are run, of having the particular skills she has. I feel guilty about it but I need her to keep working: finding and training our staff, not to mention pomping the souls of the dead, and stopping Stirrers from breaking into the land of the living.
Lissa’s heart beats loud and steady. Forty-four beats per minute.
One reassuring sound at least, but it’s not the only heartbeat I hear. They’re all there inside my skull. All of my region’s life. All of those slowing, racing, stuttering hearts. They’re a cacophony: a constant background noise that I’m better at ignoring some times than others. Mr. D says that it becomes soothing after a while. I don’t know about that. Though I’ve discovered that stereo speakers turned up loud can dull it a little; something to do with electrical pulses projecting sonic fields. Thunderstorms have a similar effect, though they’re much more difficult to arrange.
And there are other sensations even harder to ignore. Each reminds me just what I’ve become.
Someone dies. It’s a fair way away, but still in Australia. Perth, maybe, certainly on the Southwest coast. Then another: close on it. The recently dead soul passes through a Pomp, and the echoes of that passage scratch through me. When I was just a Pomp that used to hurt; now it’s just a tingling ache, an echo of the pain my employee feels. Just enough so that I can’t forget, I suppose.
At least Mortmax Australia is running smoothly; though I wish I could take more credit for that. Our numbers are still low. But with my cousin Tim being my Ankou, my second in command, and Lissa running our HR department as well as leading the Pomps on the field, our offices have reopened across the country. It seems there are always people willing to work for Death. And we’ve found a lot of them.
Who’d blame them? The pay’s good after all, even if the hours can be somewhat… variable.
It used to be a family trade. Used to be.
I leave Lissa to her sleep, stumble to the living room, down a hallway covered with photos of my parents: smiling and oblivious of how it was all going to end. My feet pad along a carpet worn thin by the footsteps of my childhood and my parents’ lives. I can smell my mother’s perfume. It’s lingered; I don’t know how, but it has. This used to be their home. I grew up here, moved out, then my house exploded along with most of my life. Now I’m back. And they’re dead. And I’m Death. It’s pretty messed up, really.
My mobile’s next to a half-empty bottle of rum.
I grab my phone, flick through to the right app, marked with the Mortmax symbol—a Bracing Triangle, point facing down, a line bisecting its heart—and open up the schedule. Technically, I don’t need to look anymore. All of this comes from me, from some deep knowledge gained in the Negotiation. Still, it’s nice to see it written down, interpreted graphically, not just intuitively.
It was definitely a Perth pomp. One of my new guys, Michio Dugan, is on the case. There’s another, this one in Sydney—ably handled by a Pomp donated from China—and two in Melbourne. A stall accompanies one of those. The Stir that necessitated that was what woke me.
I close my eyes and I can almost see the stall: the Stirrer entering the body, and the corpse’s muscles twitching with this invader’s insertion. Eyes snap open. My Pomp on the scene, Meredith, grimaces as she slashes her palm and lays on a bloody hand. Blood’s the only effective way to stall a Stirrer, and it hurts, but that’s partly the point: We’re playing a high-stakes game of life and death. No matter how experienced you are, a Stirrer trying to breach into the living world is always confrontational. And my crew are all so green.
I feel the stall that stops the Stirrer as a moment of vertigo, a soft breath of chill air that passes down my spine.
The Melbournian corpse is just a corpse again.
Death Most Definite (Death Works #1) Page 27