And she’d told him, and made him understand why it was him, and he now knew what it was that had stirred deep in his soul, had made him restless all throughout his young life. Now he knew why he stared every night at the stars. They had beckoned, as she had; no longer afraid, he had taken her hands in his and accepted.
“A child,” Adam whispered. Lily took his hands in hers.
“I’ll always be here,” she said, “whenever you need me. Just call me.”
“Lilith,” he breathed. She nodded with a smile.
He knew she wouldn’t remember. Not at first. Perhaps later, with the passing of these strange aeons, they would find each other again, and he would tell her the story — her story.
Then she stepped through him, through space, and went to the place from whence he’d come.
Gaylen crumbled to the earth.
Epilogue / Afterlife
As dawn broke, Jeff Cullen breathed in the cloying scent of death and coughed loudly. Perched in the back of a Jeep, he called to the nearest soldier on the city perimeter. “How long do you suppose we need to stay out here?”
“You can go anytime you want,” the soldier muttered. “Your job’s done.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cullen snapped. “May I remind you that I am—”
He was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. The tip of a blade carved from bone pressed into his throat.
A charred man in soot-stained robes knelt over the senator. “You did this?”
Cullen started to scream and felt the point of the blade bite into his flesh. “Oh God. Lower your weapons!” he called to the soldiers around him. “Stay back! Lower your weapons!” But not a single one of them had raised his or her gun anyway.
“How many people did you kill today?” Adam snarled.
“I — we had to do it! We did it for the other cities! My job is to serve the greater good! That’s what I did!”
Adam came close enough for Cullen to smell his burnt flesh. He turned the blade as if readying to strike. Cullen’s rhetoric broke down into senseless babble.
“Resign your post,” Adam rasped. “No more. Never again.”
The senator nodded quickly. “Yes. Yes! Of course I will. I should. I’m sorry, so sorry…
Adam rose and was gone.
Soldiers looked down at Cullen with contempt. Surely they didn’t take what he’d said seriously, about resigning… but they were walking away from him now, and ignoring his pitiful cries.
Others glanced around in confusion at the man in white’s departure. One pointed toward the horizon.
The man in white sat on a pale horse. He raised his scythe into the air, a salute — then rode out of sight.
There was much work to be done.
AFTERDEAD: A.D. 2007
0 / Grinning Samuel
The air was musty and stale, choking Ryland with every ragged breath. Seated on a rickety old chair before a table coated with dust, he imagined he was in the waiting room of a mausoleum. He’d been here two hours. Seemed the Reaper was overbooked today.
Before him yawned the mouth of a maze: a series of catacombs cut deep into the earth. A bitter cold whispered at him from the blackness, further constricting his lungs. In contrast was the warmth of klieg lights on his back; his long face was made longer in shadows cast sharply upon the table. On second thought, this seemed less a mausoleum than a television studio. Backlit like a late-night host, Ryland crossed one leg over the other and tapped his gold wristwatch, waited on his guest. Flanked by the klieg lights at Ryland’s rear were his audience, a huddled contingency wearing insect-like night vision helmet, hugging their M4 carbines which would punctuate his words like a laugh track if the guest wasn’t being cooperative.
The hush in the entrance of the catacombs was palpable as the mold in the air. His men’s breath, filtered through their helmets, was inaudible. Ryland coughed on a mote of dust. The sound cracked and echoed like a rifle report. Then the hush returned.
The hush was anticipation.
Something shifted in the catacombs. Ryland straightened up a bit, as a formality; although what was shuffling through the dirt towards the klieg lights likely couldn’t see him, not because of the lighting but because its eyes had long crumbled from their sockets.
Still Samuel always found his way to the table. Sometimes Samuel found his way to other things.
He was attired in a soiled and worn shirt from the colonial era that had once been white, but was now a dingy brown; same with his loose-fitting trousers. Samuel never requested new clothing. He probably only wore these threadbare threads out of habit. If they finally fell from his shoulders, revealing his emaciated husk of a frame, he’d likely not react.
Everyone always noticed his hands first. Ryland’s gunmen heard the rusty creaking of Samuel’s metal fingers, crude constructs tethered to his wrists with wire; fitted over what remained of his original appendages with an intricate system of antique clock parts housed within the palms. The mechanical hands flexed continuously as Samuel plodded along.
Once interest in the fidgety hands had waned, there was nowhere else to look but at his face: brown flesh-paper so fragile thin, stretched over an angular skull; the holes were eyes and nose had once been to serve purposes now fulfilled by other means; and the jaws. Another mechanism, screwed into the bone and affixed with steel teeth. Ryland stared in wonder, imagining the blind afterdead seated somewhere deep in the catacombs, working with hands that were not his own in order to build his razorblade smile.
“Grinning Samuel” was his full moniker (Samuel not being his real name, no one knew what that was). He settled in a chair opposite from Ryland and placed a small burlap sack in front of him. Stared, eyeless, at the living.
He was uncommonly picky and any transaction with him came with certain rules of conduct. Some had been established from the get-go while others were learned at great cost. Most important was the invisible line running down the middle of the table, separating Ryland from Samuel, a line of principle as effective as an electric fence. No one crossed that line. This cardinal rule was established when Ryland’s predecessor had reached out to grab that little burlap sack. In the ensuing melee, all the gunmen had swarmed past the now-screaming-and-bleeding liaison with every intention of dismembering Samuel.
And he’d killed every single one of them. Every one. The liaison had watched and died as blood jetted from the stump of his wrist. Watched and died while blind, smiling Samuel stuffed the gunmen’s remains into his stainless-steel maw. He didn’t feed often, yet he still thrived down here, in these catacombs beneath a defunct Protestant parish; a walking testament to the potency of the earth around him… the earth contained in that burlap sack.
Opening a briefcase, Ryland turned it towards Samuel. This was the transaction. He slid the case to the center of the table, just shy of that invisible line, and the zombie’s mechanical fingers rummaged through its contents. Watch gears, springs, miniature coils and screws. Although whatever it was that infused this accursed earth had kept Samuel from rotting away entirely — he still needed to maintain his most-used joints, his limbs, his appendages, those terrible jaws. They creaked as he fingered a brass cog.
Seemed like it’d be so easy right now to snatch the burlap purse with its pound of dirt and to riddle Samuel with bullets, throwing the table in his face, cutting him to ribbons with automatic fire. To finally storm the catacombs. As Ryland felt his own fingers jumping anxiously in his lap, hr forced himself to picture his predecessor, dying on the earthen floor beside this very chair, dying on his back in a shitty paste of dirt and blood.