The trouble, for Death, with collecting thirty thousand
souls at once, isn’t that she can’t bring them all to the other side at
once. The problem is wrangling all of
them. It’s difficult enough getting a
group of forty people to all do the same thing at the same time. Just as in life, without someone explaining
what is expected of them, souls have a tendency to just wander off to do their
own thing.
And when there are thirty thousand of them, a whole bunch of
them can wander off to do their own things.
Death had, of course, done massive collections in the
past. The difference was that those had
been planned. She’d had a strategy for
dealing with the sudden mass of freshly dead folk.
This collection was unplanned, though. Her phone had been beeping almost
constantly. She had, in fact, just
turned the volume down all the way so it wouldn’t keep bothering her. The last thing she needed at the moment was
an extra annoyance.
Death had been trying to wrap her head around how to get all
of these people somewhat organized and crossed over, and then how to track down
as many of the souls that had wandered off as possible, when another problem
occurred to her. She had other
collections, scheduled ones, which still needed to be made.
Ares had said something that had Death a little
worried. He’d asked her how Andi could
be trusted to stay in her apartment. At
the moment, she was hopping very much that Andi was exactly where she’d left
her, because she was going to need some help collecting all of these souls and
keeping up with the regularly scheduled collections.
The souls still in the stadium would have to wait a little
longer, and the ones that had wandered off would have to be dealt with when Death
could get around to it. She had to go
and get Andi and put her to work.
As long as she hadn’t run off to play with her friend again.
Death took a deep breath and travelled to her apartment.
“Andi?” Death said. “Hey,
are you here? There’s a situation I need
help with.”
There was no reply.
Death furrowed her brow, and took a quick walk through her apartment on
the off chance Andi was in another room.
Of course, she wasn’t.
When Death got back to the living room again, she noticed
something a bit off about the desk. It
took her a second to figure out what was different, but then she saw it: Andi’s
clipboard and stopwatch were on the desk.
“Oh, shit,” Death said.
One more soul she was going to have to try and track
down.
Death noticed the little bell on her desk was silent. She took her phone out, and noticed it had
stopped scrolling alerts as well.
OK, things were definitely going to be hectic, but at least
they were settling down. Death turned
the volume up on her phone again, and went back to the stadium to deal with
that mess.
She wondered where Andi might have gotten off to. She worried for a moment that perhaps Andi
had stolen her motorcycle, but then dismissed the idea as paranoia. Andi had shown bad judgement a few times, but
she hadn’t done anything before that would suggest she was the one who had
stolen Death’s motorcycle.
Death went back to the stadium. It didn’t seem like too many of the souls had
left, the place was still chock full of them.
There were also ambulances, EMTs and police present. They didn’t seem to be doing much. The EMTs couldn’t really do anything, and
there wasn’t any obvious disorder, or any evidence at all of what had happened
for the police to deal with.
Death called out to the souls, “Would everyone please gather
on the field? I’ll get you out of here
and on your way as soon as possible.”
As the souls made their way down to the field, Death thought
a little more about Andi’s departure.
She felt betrayed and angry. Andi
was supposed to have been at the apartment, planning deaths. Death really could have used some help at the
moment, and instead had discovered that her intern had up and quit.
The field in the stadium was filling with souls, so Death
hurried down and started bringing groups over to the other side. Her phone beeped once, alerting her to
another collection. She felt a little
pang of anxiety as she realized she wasn’t going to be able to go and handle
the collection. She really could have
used a hand. As it was, she was going to
have to hope that the soul that was due now wouldn’t wander too far.
It took quite a while, but Death steadily made her way
through the entire group, at least the ones that were still there, bringing
them over. When, at last, she was in the
stadium by herself, she tried to figure out her next step. Did she track down the ones who had gone
elsewhere? Did she go and collect the
people who had been scheduled to be collected?
She was going to be scrambling for a while to keep up,
anyway. And then, if she ever had a
spare moment again, she was going to have to try to find her bike too.
Death decided that the souls who had been scheduled to be
collected would take priority over the ones who were out wandering now. At least with the scheduled collections, she
would have a bit of an idea of where they might be.
She checked her phone.
Incredibly enough, it looked like she had only missed three scheduled
collections, and they’d been fairly close together. There was a chance they’d still be hanging
around where she was supposed to collect them.
Death traveled to the first address listed in her
alerts. She was about an hour late.
She arrived at a nice little house outside of Seattle. It was modest but tastefully decorated, and
well kept-up. Matthew Braaten, fifty
seven, was in the living room, pacing around and working himself into an
ever-increasing freak out.
“I just don’t believe this,” Matthew said to himself as he
was pacing, “I spent the last five years in this house alone and mostly lonely,
and now I have to spend the afterlife here too?
It’s just not fair.”
Well, that’s probably
not good, Death thought. But at least he’s here and not out wandering
somewhere.
Matthew hadn’t noticed Death yet, he was still pacing
around, getting more and more worked up, apparently.
“Matthew Braaten?” Death said.
Matthew spun around quickly to face Death.
“Who the fuck are you?
How did you get in here?” Matthew said.
He spoke quickly, and sounded extremely suspicious of Death.
Death smiled kindly and said, “I am Death, I’ve come to
collect you. I can go where ever I need
to go, that’s how I got in here.”
“So, what, you just come around whenever you feel like
it? You leave me here wondering if I’m
going to spend eternity in this house and then just show up and tell me you can
go wherever you want, is that how it works?”
Death did her best to maintain her patience. Matthew did have a good reason to be upset,
after all.
“I can go where I need to go, I didn’t say I show up when
and where I want to,” Death said. “Anyway,
I’ve come to collect you and bring you out of this world and into the
next. Would you come with me?”
“Have you got some other pressing matters to attend to? You don’t want to, oh, I don’t know, stick
around here for a cup of tea? You just
show up and expect me to come with you?” Matthew said.
“Well, I’m sorry you’re upset. I have no doubt you’re feeling a little
freaked out from having to wait, but I assure you I didn’t mean to leave you
here for so long,” Death said.
She was starting to think about the other two collections
that were waiting for her to come and get them.
She hoped they’d be in slightly better moods than Matthew. She understood he was simply reacting to the
situation he’d found himself in, but she wished he could be a little more stoic
about it, and a little less of a sarcastic asshole.
“You’re sorry I’m upset?
Oh, man. You know what? You can go ahead and fuck right off. I think you need to leave now, to be honest,”
Matthew said.
“Did you just tell me to fuck off?” Death said. She went from being slightly impatient to
very ticked off, quickly. “OK,
then. I tried to be nice about this, but
I’ve had just a spectacularly shitty day, and you’re going to come with me the
easy way or the hard way. Your pick.”
“You’ve had a shitty day?” Matthew said. “You have had a shitty day?”
Matthew had bad timing in addition to not knowing who he
should vent his annoyance upon. As he
started in on how Death didn’t have any idea what a shitty day way, her phone
started to beep at her, a lot. Again.
Death took her phone out, and was dismayed to see another
scrolling list of “Immediate” collections.
She lost her patience with Matthew.
“OK, I tried,” Death said.
She grabbed Matthew’s nose, hard, and pulled him to the other side with
her.
“Ow! Led go!” Matthew
said.
“Nope,” Death said. “I
gave you the option to do this the easy way, and you decided not to.”
The gateway appeared, and Death gave Matthew a healthy shove
into the brilliant light pouring out.
Her aim had been a little off, perhaps because she was distracted by her
phone that sounded like it was never going to stop beeping again, and Matthew
bounced off the frame of the gateway.
He groaned and staggered back. Death caught him by the upper arm.
“Oops,” Death said. “Well,
let’s try that again.”
She pushed him in the right direction again, and this time
he made it. The gateway closed quickly
once he was through, and Death hustled back to try and figure out what to do
about this new emergency.
The first thing she did when she got back was turn on Matthew’s
television and look for news of another disaster of some sort. There wasn’t anything obvious yet, apart from
the usual blood and gore on the news.
That stuff was all pretty isolated, and things she had either already
handled, or that were someone else’s problem to deal with.
Her phone had stopped beeping relatively quickly, compared to
the racket caused by the stadium catastrophe, so she took it out to see what
the deal was.
All of the deaths were at sea. They were on a cruise liner, about two thousand
five hundred people.
Death wondered who was screwing with her now, and again
wished that she had some help dealing with the situation.
The upside, she supposed, to the catastrophe being on a
cruise liner out in the middle of the ocean was that there would be
significantly less temptation for the souls to wander away. It would take most of them quite a while
before they would realize that the ocean didn’t hold any dangers for them now
that they were already dead.
Thank goodness for
small favors, Death thought.
