Empire's End

Twenty / Strange People

Adam was lying in a bed in a small white room. Blankets were tucked in around his arms and legs, and he could feel the soothing moisture of wet wraps around his burns.

The woman entered. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen

Adam had not known the meaning of beauty in his former life, but he had admired (envied) Man’s creativity and often was taken by simple architecture. He had spent many long hours wandering the streets of great cities where buildings more than a century old stood beside new works, contrasting the minds of then and now, structures complimenting one another and holding the Reaper in sheer awe. He loved the geometry of it. Masons had once thought geometry to be the language of God. Certain angles and curves seemed to please him more than others, perhaps appealing to his supernatural essence, and he grew to favor specific artists.

In this woman’s face he saw a masterwork in flesh. Every angle and shade was exquisite in itself, and when it all came together, smooth angles framing the dark pools of her eyes… it was overwhelming.

“Stay still,” she said, moving to adjust the pillows behind his head. “I don’t know if I can heal you, but I’ll try. It will take time.”

“I… I’m not a man,” he croaked.

“I know,” she replied. “I’m not a woman.” And she smiled at him then, and he knew that she had once borne the Reaper’s burden.

He knew there had been others before him, but never had the slightest notion of what had become of them when they left their station. He’d wondered what had made them quit. He’d wondered what they looked like, which mortal myths each embraced as their guise — but he’d never imagined that someone like the woman in white could be one of them.

“It’s snowing,” she said. “You’ve been here a day and a night. For a time, I thought you were gone. What did this to you? Surely not the undead. Were they living?”

“No, no,” he coughed. “It was an undead. A strange one. There’s something else driving him.”

“Do you have a guess what it was?” she asked.

“No.” He studied her face. She just looked too… too human. Too real. And yet—”You were a Reaper,” he said.

She nodded. “A long, long time ago. You are probably the one that took it on after me. It’s been ages since I’ve met another. Tell me — why did you leave your post? I’m always curious.”

“I’m just as curious about you,” Adam said.

“Tell me yours,” she said, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

“It was a child,” he said. “I couldn’t let her die. Not like that. But there was nothing I could do… then it came to me. Quit. Just quit. And all I had to do was do it, to exercise this will. That was it.”

“Did you save her?”

“I think so.”

“I’m glad.” She pulled over a small hand-carved chair and sat beside him. “Relax your body. I’m going to try to relieve your pain.”

“What about your story?”

“Patience,” the woman cooed. She gently laid her hands on his belly. He gasped in pain… then it was gone.

“Civilization was young when I fell,” the woman said. “And civilization, which I thought would save Man, only led to more reasons for war and greater means by which to shed blood.” She massaged his legs as she spoke. “Early men fought for basic needs. Now they fought for status, influence, pride. I wept for humanity as I realized that they would only get better at harming one another.”

The way she laid her hands on him was almost sedative. He forced himself to sit up straight and asked, “You said you fell…?”

“We are all fallen,” she answered. “Those of us who are born into our stations, as we are, never to grow or change — when we do change, we fall and become like men. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

“There was a time when I thought civilization and faith heralded the dawn of a new peace, but I was so wrong… so inhuman then. I didn’t know Man as I do now.”

Adam nodded. “The American government actually made the plague… I believe the power existed long before that, in some form, but they willfully created afterdead. That was when I first became aware of them. It’s how I became aware of them, I suppose.”

A small, sad smile crossed the woman’s face as she looked at him.

“Adam,” he said, unsure what she was searching for.

She laughed. “I didn’t know you had a name.”

“Don’t you?”

“I could never settle on one. Sometimes I wish God had named me the way parents name their children. But we’re not His children, are we?”

“You speak as if you know Him.”

“I do, in my way. There was a time when I had memories of being in His presence — I think — but they’ve long since faded. Now I can only pray, and imagine, as they do.”

Adam clasped her hand. “What of the afterdead?”

She told him. She told him about gods long dead and about humanity’s rotten luck.

He didn’t take it well.

“Not even God knows what it is or what to do about it? Then how are we to stop it? Do you even try to fight them?”

“When I must,” the woman said. “I concentrate on healing. I have a hope, silly as it may seem, that one day I might heal the undead.”

“It does sound silly,” Adam muttered. “Ridiculous. You were the one who said the plague was without reason. That even Creation is random in nature. So how…?”

She turned over her left hand and opened her palm. There, right in the center of her soft flesh, a seedling sprouted, green and healthy. Alive. Life from nothing.

“We are potential, you and I,” she told him. “We’re not just clay. There is still power within us, such as what you used to make your scythe… it’s just a matter of channeling it.

“Once, we were simply bookkeepers, watching life come and go, observing the random. Now we are part of it.”

“Remarkable.” Adam touched the seedling. It curled away from his fingers, withering to dust.

“You’ll learn,” the woman in white said, still smiling. “You have eternity.”

The Omega had returned to the hillside to find Adam gone. He broke north, drawing on all his energy until he was starving once again.

Now he crouched on a snowy ridge, watching a pack of rotters below. More than a pack — an army. Hundreds. Following a dead man who hurled brilliant flames high into the air. The Omega nearly started after him, but the voices interrupted his rapture.

We need to eat!

Yes, eat… then find the Reaper!

The Omega slipped down from the ridge.

There were several stragglers at the rear of the pack, undead with broken legs or limbs nearly rotted off. The slowest was a female walking on what looked like sticks. Sweeping through the night, the Omega swung the shovel and cleanly decapitated her.

He tore a handful of ragged meat from the stump of her neck and stuffed it in his mouth. A few of the shambling rotters glanced back, then continued on their way.

“Sleep now,” the woman in white said to Adam. “Dream,”

“Of Lily,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

The woman paused in the doorway to watch him sleep. It was something she couldn’t do. He seemed to find happiness there, though, there in the dark.

She wondered if he’d been replaced yet.