by Elisa Hansen
25
Manhattan!
Death made a noise that jolted Emily upright. Not quite a gasp, it sounded like a sudden shower of sand.
His fingers blurred over his screen like frenetic spider legs, while the hand gripping it contorted in a way she feared might crack its bones.
“What is it?” She leaned forward. “What does it say?”
He ignored her. A few seconds later, he stilled. The device dropped into his lap. When Emily scooted over to look, Death spread a hand to cover the screen. He shook his head, staring into the distance.
“What?” she whispered.
Death’s mouth opened. Emily didn’t know what she expected, but the expression confused her. Then his jaw closed again with a soft click. He stood, and Emily fell back on her heels. He wouldn’t jump out of the truck, would he? She almost grabbed a handful of his cloak to hold him back, but he sat on the tailgate and focused on his screen again.
Before she could ask a third time, he spoke. “Time and my brethren intend to destroy Manhattan.”
“What?” What! “What? Why? How do you know?”
“It’s complicated.”
Oh no he didn’t. “So am I. What do you know?”
Death pressed the device against his lap, his hands shrouding the screen. He stared over Emily’s head. She glanced over her shoulder. Too much dust coated the truck’s window to see through from so far, but something made her imagine Carol staring back at him in the rearview mirror.
“What do I know? I know that…” He paused, then started again. “Many lives in Manhattan are scheduled to end soon.”
Emily whipped back to Death. “How soon?”
He lifted his face to the sun for a moment, then returned to his screen. “Twelve days from now.”
“But they won’t, right? Because you can’t get there?”
“I can get there in twelve days. That’s not it.” He tucked the device away and tapped his fingers together. Then he pulled it back out again. “All around the world, there are concentrations of life whose scheduled terminations are being put off due to my absence. Murderers are showing unexpected mercy, suicides change their minds, executions encounter delays, accidents are narrowly escaped, and the ill and wounded linger with unheard of tenacity.”
“Whoa. Seriously?”
“But in these dark times, with the population so dwindled, and so many falling to undeath, there’s been little true dying left in the world.”
“Ha. Yeah.” Compared to before the Ecuador Explosion, of course. She recalled what he told her the night they met of how few people died that day. “Three hundred forty-si—”
“So little,” he cut her off with a perturbed look, “that all the people not dying today can still meet their proper end when I return.”
Proper end? Emily could only hope them not dying today meant they’d get an extra sixty years. Maybe not the mortally ill, but the people escaping all the violent situations for sure.
“I must return. Time must unbind me.”
“Right. But you have to catch him first?”
Death’s fingertips drummed the screen with sharp clicks. “The temporary delay of the deaths scheduled in the next eleven days won’t alter the balance too radically.”
He didn’t sound so sure. “Are you going to explain this balance thing?” she asked.
“On the twelfth day, however…in Manhattan…”
That was a no, then.
He sighed wistfully. “It is the largest concentration of end of life and potential life on schedule for, well, quite some time.”
Click, click, click. That couldn’t be good for his screen. Emily resisted the impulse to reach up and still his hand. “So you’re saying Time doesn’t want all those people to die?”
Death shook his head. “He must mean to destroy the balance by stopping me so near to when I should take so many.”
“Wait, wait. He has to know you can get there in twelve days, right? That doesn’t make sense. He should have stranded you in Fiji or locked you up or something if that’s what he wanted.”
“Bound by Space, I can only go one place at a time. He does not know Manhattan is where I choose to go.”
“Isn’t he like omnipotent? He’s Time. Can’t he like see and hear us right now?”
“I have not sensed his observation.”
“Sure. Okay. But even so, he has to know you’d choose to go to Manhattan.”
“Why?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Manhattan is where the Life Preservation Initiative is. And as far as I know, it’s the only place working to cure the plague. Cure undeath.” Wasn’t that what he meant by potential life? “What else is more important?”
“You say it’s obvious. It is important to you.”
“Don’t you want undeath cured?” Didn’t everybody?
“I want to protect the integrity of the balance.”
Whatever the hell that even was. Emily bit the insides of her cheeks as an uneasy feeling burbled up from her stomach. “Are you saying Time wants the plague cured, and that’s why he wants to keep you from going there and killing them all?”
“Reaping. And no. My absence would make it worse.”
What? “Can we back up, please? You’re saying he’s stopped you from being able to easily get anywhere you need to be to reap all the people you’re scheduled to reap. So now, you have to be more selective about where you go.”
“Correct.”
“And why wouldn’t he assume you’d go straight to the big one?”
Death sighed, but Emily didn’t care if her questions exasperated him. She dug her fingers into her knees and waited.
Despite how much the truck jostled and bounced on its floopy tires over the uneven road, Death remained completely steady perched on the tailgate. “Life follows the order of Time,” he said after some consideration. “He’d expect me to continue to reap chronologically. If he expected me to continue at all. He said…never mind what he said. I follow the order of life.”
“You have to?”
“If I don’t respect the balance, apparently no one will.”
“So, if not for me telling you Manhattan’s more important, it’s not where you would have chosen to go? You would’ve gone after everyone on your schedule in order? Even if the first was in Alaska and the second in Timbuktu and the third back in Alaska again?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you just said—”
“Emily, I cannot say what would have occurred if our paths unfolded in different directions. Or what choices I would have made. It didn’t happen that way, so I don’t know. There are many places nearer in space where I am required sooner in time.”
“You mean like if there was one forty miles south of here scheduled for tomorrow?”
He nodded. “With what’s become of the world, I may forever lose the deaths I pass over while I travel to Manhattan. Because those humans will not die according to schedule, they may instead un-die, and the plague will grow more than it would have. Considerably more. Irreversibly more.”
“So if you don’t kill the guy forty miles south of here tomorrow, he’s going to become a zombie instead?” No extra sixty years, no life at all.
“There is no guy forty miles south of here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And I don’t kill.”
“You know what I mean!”
“Very well, yes. In your hypothetical situation, that is what I am saying.” His shoulders sagged as he looked at his screen. “Unless I make Time unbind me when I catch him at New York, I cannot touch the thousands of dying people there all at once. I don’t even have my scythe. My attempt would be desperate and ineffectual. If not for my interaction with you, yes, I may not have scrolled so far ahead and afield in the schedule. For me, it’s…” He sighed. “I may have felt driven to pursue the nearer lives instead. It would certainly be less demoralizing.”
Emily blinked. “Did you just say thousands?”
“Why would he not want me to take them?” Death murmured to his screen, stroking a fingertip over the list of words—names?—as if it were a kitten’s spine.
“Thousands! Why would you want to take them?” Emily got to her knees and gripped the tailgate. “Hello? This is a good thing! If so many people there—there of all places—were going to die all at once, and now they’re not, maybe the world can be saved.”
“Not when they un-die instead.”
When? No… He knew for sure? If she weren’t holding the tailgate, she would have fallen.
“Do not misunderstand me, Emily. For a life to linger and escape me, I feel no prolonged malice. It is exceedingly rare, but if something naturally occurs to change someone’s course, it is possible their scheduled time can change.” He paused, his hand curling into a fist against his thigh. “There are those who have cheated me, but they always came to me in the end. If these lives in Manhattan were to be spared so that I might claim them later, I could be satisfied.”
He didn’t sound satisfied. He sounded just shy of disgusted. But she got what he was saying.
“But they will be stolen from me for undeath to claim them instead. That is a robbery I cannot abide.”
She was really getting what he was saying now. She was feeling sick. “That’s why you want to get to Manhattan? To kill all those people? The same people I told you were so damn important?”
“Reap. And better that than they un-die.”
In theory, Emily should agree. But, no. No, this was all wrong. There had to be more to it. Some other option.
“But you just said your attempt would be pathetic anyway!”
“I didn’t say ‘pathetic.’ And only as long as I’m bound by Space and Time. But if Manhattan is where Time and my brethren concentrate themselves when this event occurs, I will intercept them and regain my power.”
“And then you’ll just kill all those people?”
“Reap.”
“I swear to god—”
“They will be mine.”
Emily gritted her teeth, biting back the urge to scream. She twisted her fingers into her hair, but the lack of resistance from the loose roots in her spongy scalp made her freeze. For a moment, she’d forgotten what she was.
If breathing still came naturally, she couldn’t have managed it as she scrabbled to absorb everything. If the scientists in Manhattan died or got zombied, the cure would be lost. But maybe…maybe when Death said they’d un-die instead, he meant turned into vampires? They could still do their work then. Vampires needed to stop the zombies and keep humans alive, too, right?
But the politics would be all thrown off. The LPI would be finished, anyone left alive would fall to the slave camps, and human rights would become ancient history. No, it was bad. Every option was bad. This couldn’t happen.
She stared at her purple-green-gray hands, but it did nothing to stop their shaking. Easing to sit between her heels, she eyed the pool of Death’s robe. The urge to lift it and see if he had any feet under there caught her off guard. She slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.
Oh god, she was losing it.
Above her, Death sighed once more.
“So.” Her voice squirmed out, too high-pitched. “You’re telling me the world is doomed either way? There’s no way the humans in Manhattan can live?”
“Yes.”
No.
“It is scheduled.”
“How can you be so calm about this!”
“I am not calm. Time and my brethren mean to cheat me on the grandest scale imaginable. I will not allow it.”
All those people. Thousands didn’t constitute a grand scale by standards of mass-deaths in humanity’s history, but by current standards, it encompassed a significant chunk of the population. The most important chunk. Not only would they be lost, but so would all the people they had potential to save with the cure and the LPI’s initiatives. The future would be lost.
“You—you just want them to die rather than let your brethren get them.”
“Very much.”
“But you don’t even want to…to consider…” What? What else could even be done? She felt like she was choking.
“I do not want to do anything, Emily, other than ensure that they die in twelve days. All of them.”
How could he be so heartless?
How… Oh, god…
How could she have ever thought he would be otherwise? What had she seriously expected?
And yet he responded to her stricken look with a defensive edge. “You asked if I was okay. Twelve days from now, I will not be okay.”
Was she supposed to pity him because he was hungry? “Then go get the guy forty miles south of here! And then the guy in Alaska, and then—follow your stupid schedule!”
“No.”
No? No. He would rather starve himself to the point of what? Crazed ravenousness? And hold out so that he could smorgasbord on Manhattan? And this was a choice he made because of her?
He didn’t want to stop the apocalypse. He just wanted it to happen his way instead of theirs.
“Then why—why are you even with us? If you can get there in twelve days, why don’t you just go?”
Death’s gaze drifted past her to the window again.
She twisted to follow it. What? Scott? What about him? Oh god, was he scheduled to die soon? Did Death expect him to be like a road trip snack? “No…no.”
Death nodded. If he had lips, Emily was sure he’d be smiling.
“When?”
He lifted a languid finger to his mouth to shush her.
She was on the edge of a scream. How long had he known? Did he see it on his screen when he looked up all that stuff about Scott for her? Or had it appeared because she pursued him, because of her bullshit plan, because she dragged Death along? She messed with Scott’s future, meddled with his schedule. Scott wouldn’t have found the ranch without her. He wouldn’t be in this truck. She set him on this literal and figurative path. His life was going somewhere now it wouldn’t have otherwise.
And evidently not for much longer.
The shaking in Emily’s hands overtook her body. Why, why did she talk Death into following Scott? Soft, squishy, mortal, killable Scott. She wanted a way to the cure. She thought she could help Death out for the greater good. Well, she was helping him out all right.
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
Scott was doing them a favor; didn’t that mean anything to Death? God, an hour ago she was thinking about what friends they were. Death didn’t give a shit about camaraderie or loyalty or saving her world. How stupid could she be? This was Death. He wasn’t a person; he was a force of nature. Cold, unfeeling. He existed to consume, destroy. His precious schedule and rules didn’t make him moral. He was just another asshole opportunist. Why go after the guy forty miles south when one snoozed right here? Why leave her and get to Manhattan on his own when he could get a free ride and a snack if he hung around? Of course, Death didn’t play fair.
Idiot!
Digging her palms into her eyes, Emily slumped into the corner of the tailgate. Let her eyeballs pop out the back of her head. Go on, pop. She was a zombie. A completely useless zombie who made stupid decisions. She would bust herself to pieces, or she would get all weird with Scott the next time they entered an airless shed and he would blow her face off, or she would get nuked on sight at the Manhattan gates. And Death would waltz on in and devour everyone there. Or not. It didn’t matter. Either way, the LPI was done for and the communes would flourish, and no one would ever get cured, and undeath would inherit the earth, and that was it.
It was already over.
26
The Factory
The air felt degrees cooler when the truck slowed. Emily lifted her face for the first time in hours. She almost gasped. Remnants of civilization! The sight of approaching factory buildings mixed an excitement and dread cocktail somewhere beneath the place her heart used to beat.
Her mind was
made up. She would tell Scott everything, and they were going to get away from Death. As soon as she figured out how to phrase it without making Scott want to get away from her too. Considering how she talked him into letting Death tag along, she needed to approach it carefully.
But if they could beat Death to New York, then they could…do something. Maybe Scott would know what to do? They’d think of something. They had to.
As the truck rolled up a serpentine drive, Emily pointedly ignored Death and crawled to the window. She pressed her face against it but couldn’t see through the late-afternoon dimness. She knocked on the glass.
When Scott opened it, she almost recoiled. The sudden smell smacked her like a pie to the face. So rich and deep—not altogether unlike pie, if pie were freakin’ perfect—that she forgot entirely what she planned to say. It didn’t smell like the shed at the ranch, that sparkling clear water scent. No, this was warm and thick. Did Scott have food in there? Something cooked? Was that even possible? How could it be so potent?
“Yeah?” he asked.
“What is that?”
His eyes narrowed. “What’s with you?”
Emily shook out her head. Focus! “Um, I mean, are we stopping here?”
“Uh, yeah, that was the idea.”
Scott eyeballed her through the crack. She leaned closer. Those bloodshot eyes of his… She gave her head another shake. “No, I mean, that’s good.”
“Uh, yeah.” Scott looked her up and down again, then he moved to close the window.
“Wait!” Her hand shot out to stop it.
“What?”
The scent was so…so familiar, but what was it? She couldn’t name it. It didn’t literally smell like pie, maybe more like fresh baked bread or deep red wine. Yeasty. She didn’t see any food in there. What did he have? Would he share it? “After we stop, we’re gonna keep going, right? To Manhattan?”
“Uh, yeah.”
She nodded, nodded. An ache bloomed across the insides of her cheeks like a blood spill as her mind wandered toward a floating place. “‘Kay… Great.”