Grim Reaper: End of Days

Epilogue

The medieval town rose above undulating fields of golden wheat like an ancient Gothic island. Thousand-year-old walls, the mortar worn smooth, dated its baronial fortification. Narrow cobblestone streets weaved through rows of half-timbered houses. Ancient bridges traversed the Eure River, the inky waters of its three tributaries winding beneath archways of stone.

Chartres. Located sixty miles southwest of Paris, the French commune was a magnet of history, bearing witness to some of humanity’s darkest days.

Black Death: The Great Mortality.

Crowning the hill upon which the village had been erected was Our Lady of Chartres, one of the most magnificent cathedrals in all of Europe. Two towering spires, their unique designs representative of the architecture of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, soared more than 350 feet into the heavens, rendering them visible for miles in every direction. Flying buttresses high-lighted a Romanesque basilica and massive crypt, its foundation encompassing 117,000 square feet. Gothic carvings adorned its facade, stained glass its portals.

It was just after midnight, and the streets surrounding the cathedral were deserted. The word had been passed — not a soul ventured outside, lest one tempt the wrath of God.

They approached the church on foot, each member having been sequestered in the village earlier in the day. Entries were purposely staggered, made through an earthen passage concealed within a dense patch of foliage adjacent to the church grounds.

Nine men: Each cloaked in a heavy hooded monk’s robe that concealed his face.

Nine men: Their names never spoken, their identities kept hidden lest one of their comrades be apprehended or tortured.

Nine Unknown Men.

The subterranean war room lay three stories beneath the church, its walls seven feet thick. The chamber contained its own power generator, and was equipped with sixteen-channel night-vision surveillance monitors and three wraparound computer security stations. One member of the Nine occupied a console, the other seven were situated in comfortable high-backed cushioned chairs that surrounded a circular oak table. Eight men, transformed by recent events. Awaiting the arrival of their leader.

Pankaj Patel was seated in the seventh chair. The psychology professor appeared to be speed-reading from an ancient Aramaic text.

Yielding to his curiosity, Number Five, a thirty-seven-year-old Austrian technowizard sharing the same bloodlines as Nikola Tesla, left his security post to speak with the sect’s newest member. “You are reading the Zohar?”

“Actually, I’m scanning.”

“What happened, Seven? Did you lose a bet with the Elder?”

“I’ve seen things, Five. I walked on water.”

“I thought it was ice?”

“It was a miracle, plain and simple. Now I am a changed man. I pray. I scan. I am even writing a spiritual book, with the proceeds going to the new Children’s Hospital in Manhattan.”

“Admirable. Tell me, Seven, when you pray, do you pray for the soul of Bertrand DeBorn?”

“Blow me, Five.”

“Seven!” The Elder entered the chamber, his opaque eyes scolding Patel. “Remember, my friend — restriction.”

“My apologies, Elder.”

The Nine men took their assigned places around the oval table. The Elder began. “Number Three, so good of you to be here, especially in light of your new responsibilities within the Politburo. Will our Russian friends agree to President Kogelo’s new disarmament plan?”

“If you had asked me two days ago, I would have emphatically said no. Since then, four of the communist hardliners have suffered fatal heart attacks.”

“Must be something in the water,” quipped Number Eight, a Chinese physicist in his sixties. “Two of our more radical communist leaders also died last week. No foul play is suspected, but, as the Elder likes to say, there are no coincidences.”

“You wish to comment, Number Seven?”

“It’s got to be Shepherd,” Pankaj stated. “Look at what happened to those neocons in Israel… the hardliners in Hamas. And don’t forget the two radical clerics in Iran who died before the election.”

“Every action has a reaction,” responded Number Six, a Mexican environmentalist bearing a Zapotec heritage. “While Shepherd attempts to micromanage the physical world, Santa Muerte grows stronger in the darkness below.”

“How do you know this, Number Six?”

“Somehow, the female Reaper managed to open a fissure that allows her access from Hell into the physical world. Two weeks ago, she exhumed the remains of a priest who had died in Guadalajara of swine flu and danced his contaminated remains at a local wedding.”

The Elder laid his head back against his chair. “Mr. Shepherd must learn to restrict himself as Emperor Asoka and Monsignor de Chauliac before him. We must find a way to communicate with our new Angel of Darkness. Number Seven, has your wife had any supernal communications since you and your family moved back to Manhattan?”

The professor looked uncomfortable. “None, Elder.”

“What about… your daughter?”

August roasted New York’s five boroughs in a midday broil, the heat rising off the sidewalks transforming the cement into a baking stone. The Hudson River, its surface stagnant to the naked eye, cascaded a subatomic tsunami of water molecules upward into the atmosphere, contributing humidity to the parade of cumulus clouds already forming to the west.

In the city below, a lunchtime crowd sweltered. Businessmen hustled between air-conditioned enclosures, red-faced vendors sought relief from umbrella-drawn shade and portable fans.

After forty days of inspection and 153 days of construction, debris removal, and public Masses, the Big Apple once more had a pulse. Manhattan’s population now approached six hundred thousand, with lower rent ceilings promising even more transplants.

The cemetery’s caretaker was sleeping off a hangover in his office. Venetian blinds were pinched closed above a window-unit air conditioner that had outlived its warranty. There were no graveside ceremonies on the schedule, and the summer heat had kept the visitors away—

— save two.

On a lonely summit beneath a relentless sun, a mother and daughter stood amid a metropolis of mausoleums and ancient graves, staring at a polished headstone. After ten minutes, the child asked, “Is this really where Patrick’s buried, Mommy?”

Leigh Nelson played mental dodgeball with the answer, debating which threads of truth would satisfy her child’s curiosity without leading to nightmares. “Patrick’s with God now. The headstone’s just a place where we can tell him how much we love him and miss him”—she tears up—“and how much we appreciate what he did.”

The Range Rover parked by the gated western entrance blared its horn.

Leigh smiled at Autumn. “Daddy misses us, we’d better go.”

“I want to stay.”

“I know, but it’s Tuesday and daddy needs to get back to work. We’ll come back another time, maybe on the weekend. Okay, baby doll?”

“Okay.”

Hand in hand, they made their way back down the steep hillside along the broken-slated path. Halfway down, Leigh saw the eleven-year-old Hindu girl seated in the shade of a concrete tomb. Waiting patiently for a private audience. Leigh waved.

Dawn Patel waved back. Then she hurriedly ascended the steep hill, her route through the grave sites guided by the headstone adorned with the sculpture of an angelic child.

She laid the first of two white roses on the older grave as she read the inscription silently to herself:

The adjoining headstone was new, erected by the thirty-six survivors discovered plague-free in the Statue of Liberty Museum two days after the horrors of the December Mortality.

The two adult inscriptions were eerily similar:

The girl placed the second rose on the tomb, the buried casket of which contained the prosthetic left arm of its deceased owner. Backing away, she sat on the edge of a nearby stone, its heated surface barely tolerable through her denim shorts.

After a few moments, she felt the female presence of her guardian angel on her left, the chill of the darker male force on her right. “The two of you were born on the same day. I think that’s so romantic.”

Dawn’s scalp tingled as the supernal female being played with the girl’s hair.

The Grim Reaper remained partially obscured in the shade of an oak tree.

“School starts soon. They say we’ll be combining grade levels until more people move back to the city.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The western sky took on a bizarre appearance — the cloud’s low-hanging ceiling undulating like a forty-foot sea, the distant horizon appearing lime green.

“Oh yeah, remember the miracle baby… the newborn girl they found alive in a neonatal enclosure at the VA hospital? She’s finally been adopted, only no one’s saying who the parents are. They think her mother was the one who released Scythe. God, can you imagine having to grow up with that hanging over your head?”

The upper leaves on the oak trees blew skyward. Telltale sign of an impending afternoon thunderstorm.

“Anyway, I wanted to come by and wish you guys an early happy birthday. I probably should go. My mother thinks I stopped by Minos for a slice of pizza. You know they named the baby after you. Patrick Lennon Minos. I thought that was pretty cool.”

The atmospheric change was sudden and electric, the static charge coming from behind the girl. Before she could turn to the source of the disturbance, the female spirit launched her sideways from her grave-site perch—

— a split second before the blade of the materializing scythe struck the vacant slab of concrete!

Regaining her senses, Dawn turned in horror to see the witch flying out at her from the iron-gated mausoleum, the female Grim Reaper wearing a wavy black wig and matching satin dress. The force from Hell reached for her with its ten fleshless fingers—

— only to be intercepted by her male counterpart.

The midair collision between the two guardians of death unleashed a bolt of violet lightning that shot skyward from the ground, splitting the century-old oak tree in half—

— the otherworldly charge inhaling the two figures into another dimension!

Dawn’s spiritual companion pushed and prodded the girl down the east side of the summit, her supernal mother refusing to allow her to rest until she reached Broadway.

Then she, too, disappeared.

The girl gathered herself, sweating heavily in the August heat. Overhead, the undulating olive green cloud formation has dispersed.

For the first time in this life, Dawn Patel felt alone.

The consciousness that was Patrick Shepherd awakens.

He is kneeling on a flat, rocky summit, enshrouded by darkness. Purple lightning illuminates the valley below, offering brief glimpses of Gehenna. A spark ignites a bush into an orange incandescent flame, the fire expelling sulfurous smoke but not burning.

The woman steps out of the shadows and into the light… revealing her nude form.

Her skin is composed of keratin, the fingernail-like substance as pale as reflected moonlight, her long, wavy hair as ebony as the abyss. Her naked body is the definition of sensuality, the raw musky scent of her pheromones releasing an involuntary paroxysm within her male counterpart’s being.

Her voice is deep and soothing. “Today is the ninth of Av, a time of reckoning. Reveal yourself to me.”

Within seconds, the male Reaper’s skeletal frame entwines in blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons, wrapped in the flesh-covered epidermis of Patrick Shepherd. “Who are you? Why have you summoned me to this place?”

She approaches slowly, each measured stride causing his pulse to quicken. “I am the tempest that awakened Adam, the spirit embodied in the Tree of Knowledge. I am a newborn’s giggle that haunts its sleep… the desire that causes adolescent males to pleasure themselves. And when the semen is spilt, it finds its way into my loins to father my demons. I am darkness personified, a black hole of existence where the Upper Light can never dwell—

“—I am Lilith, and you, Noah, are my soul mate.”