Because Death did not tire, he walked well into the night, and reached Coney Island by morning. It was nice to watch the sunrise from the beach. The ocean hummed with its own cycles, hardly changed by the presence or absence of humanity. He spent an hour or two just listening to the surge and sough of the waves, and remembering all that had been. He was not like many of his fellows, who were confined to the places where they had been conceived and nurtured. Where there was life, there was death, and where there was death, was his domain. He was one of the few who could, if he wished, travel the whole world. It was good to be Death.
When the sun was well-risen, he turned away from the sagging rollercoaster and the midway, with its stands full of mildewed lumps that had once been stuffed animals. The Aquarium stood open, the glass of its doors long since shattered and washed away in the hurricane that had hit the city not long after its abandonment. Inside the Alien Stingers exhibit — the only building still standing — Death found mostly darkness and silence. He moved quietly between the still, dark tanks, looking for nothing in particular. Just walking. Listening. He sensed now that something had drawn him to this place. He didn't know what, but he knew this: it was a sensation he had not felt since before people had gone. That in itself was enough to merit his attention.
As Death reached the south end of the building, he found that it had been torn open by long-gone wind and rain, leaving a great, gaping, splintered hole. Debris, itself mostly buried in sand with the passage of time, paved the way across the tumbled wall of the sea lion tank, between the manmade hills (now flat) which had bordered the site, and through the crazily leaning pillars which were all that remained of the Boardwalk. The building's guts trailed away in a clear path all the way down to the water.
Here, Death found something odd. A series of peculiar, curlicued scuff-marks moved along this trail of lathing and salt-rotted wood, cutting across the windblown drifts of sand. Following them, he found that the marks petered out a few dozen meters from the water's edge, washed away by the tide-line. Backtracking instead, he found them continuing into the aquarium — but where the sand gave way to the building's cheap, nearly-indestructible carpeting, there were no marks for him to follow.
Death did not have much imagination. He did not require it. He was patient, however, so lacking any other means of fathoming the mystery, he sat down beside the trail. The marks were fresh, after all. Perhaps whatever had made them would eventually return.
And finally, as dusk fell, he saw movement down near the beach. An animal, dragging itself out of the surf. At first he thought that it was another new thing, like the black flower, and the red peacock. Then it drew closer, and belatedly he realized it was just a small, dark blue octopus, walking its way along the lathing and sand. As it came, he saw that it carried an old blue plastic cup that read SLURPEE in faded letters, balanced carefully atop two of its tentacles. Water sloshed over the cup's lip now and again, though it was clear the creature was making an effort not to spill the liquid. It used the other six tentacles to walk, Death saw, leaving behind that familiar curling pattern.
Now and again the creature stopped, set the cup on some flat surface or against a rock, and thrust its head into the water. Death watched it breathe in and out, its color flickering momentarily lighter blue, like the cup. When it had finished this procedure, it withdrew from the cup and resumed walking.
It paused when Death rose to follow it into the Aquarium. He stopped when it did, and felt himself actively considered by the creature's strange bar-pupilled eyes. When he did not approach more closely, however, the creature finally resumed its laborious march.
Inside, they both proceeded to one of the building's vast, double-walled tanks. Here, unlike the rest of the tanks — most of which no longer had any need of his services — this one still flickered in glowing, vibrant blue. There was a hole in the tank's uppermost corner, where the glass met the plaster of its display case, and something had cleared away the killing algae from the water's surface. Above the tank was a skylight in the aquarium's ceiling, which let in plenty of the setting sun's rays. Thanks to this, Death could see that the tank was still halfway full with water, the water-mark just at his eye level. The water had gone murky, the glass speckling with age and wear — but beyond the speckling, he could see many small things darting and moving.
Before he could identify this, the octopus stopped beside this tank, then laboriously climbed the glass wall, still carting the cup. It poured the water into the tank, dropped the cup — Death had already noticed many other cups, cans, and coconut shells littering the floor here — then wriggled through the gap in the glass. Here it paused, clinging to the glass above the water-line, gazing through a clear patch at Death. Again, Death felt himself considered.
Then one of the darting things in the water flicked up and attached itself to the plastic too, and he understood. It was a tiny copy of the larger octopus — a baby. There were likely hundreds of them, if not thousands, in the tank.
Death leaned close to the glass, looking the elder octopus in its — her — odd little eye. He considered her in return.
"Shall I kill you?" he asked. "Is that what you want?"
He felt her deep weariness. This was the way of things, he knew then: the mother died, her flesh granting the young a last bit of strength so that they might survive. It had happened for countless generations already, since the destruction of the Aquarium had provided her ancestors with such a convenient, safe nursery for their young. How many more octopi had survived their youth, thanks to this happenstance, than there would have been in the wild? How many more adults had learned to leave the ocean, carrying their water with them as they found safer shelter somewhere along the empty seaside?
The octopus did not answer. She could not speak. Yet he knew, because he was what he was, that she understood what he was. She was not a red peacock or a black flower, yet she was, in a similar way, a new thing. Or an old thing, taking advantage of a new opportunity. It did not matter. Of such opportunities, embraced and exploited, were new things born.
One of the mother octopus's wet, attenuated tentacles curled over the edge of the broken glass, twitching slightly. Nodding, Death touched this. A moment later the octopus turned gray and dropped into the water. The tank roiled with movement as her children swarmed in for a last loving taste of her.
The small octopus that had leapt out of the water, and which had continued to cling to the glass, observing, while Death killed its mother, remained where it was. Death nodded to it, solemn, then turned to go.
Movement caught his eye. The small octopus had begun to scurry up toward the hole in the glass. Death stopped.
"No," he said, recalling that its mother had not come ashore 'til dusk, with the tide. "Wait until morning, near dawn. Bring water with you."
The baby octopus stopped, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe out of the water. He had no idea whether it understood him. If it did, it would wait, and have that much better a chance of surviving the trek to the ocean. Perhaps a few of its siblings would attempt and survive the journey too, and in turn they would pass on the necessary skill, and the intelligence to use it, to the young who came after them. And in time, with luck and other opportunities...