Page 4 of Riding the Reaper

Which, weirdly, is kind of flattering. All this effort just to mess with me? On any other night, I’d buy this dude a drink and laugh about it.

“Let’s pretend for a second I believe you,” I say. “I’ve got twenty-four minutes⁠—”

“Twenty-two.”

“—to live. What exactly are you expecting me to do with that information?”

“Truthfully? I was planning to wait a little longer. Let you light another cigarette. Maybe wander a bit. But you heard me. So it is what it is. Some people use the last few minutes to find religion. Some call their families. Most,” he says with a shrug, “just freeze. They’re in shock.”

“Yeah, I’m not really in a calling-my-family mood.”

“No? And you’re not feeling a sudden urge to pray?”

“Not even a little. They do enough praying in this town for all of us.”

“So why did you stay?”

“What?”

“You clearly hate it here. Small town, conservative, everyone in each other’s business. I’ve seen your file, Sam. You’ve been wanting to leave for years. So what kept you?”

The fuck?

“Where are you getting this information?” My voice comes out a little thinner than I’d like.

“Part of the job. We get... highlights. Enough to do our work. Not everything, mind you. Just the broad strokes.”

I stare at him. The wind picks up, cutting through the bare branches above us. The temperature seems to be dropping, too. Or maybe that’s just me.

“You ever try leaving a town like this with no money?” I say. “I wanted to go to college. Had the grades for it. But Dad needed me in the shop, and Mom was—” I stop. Why am I telling this to a maniac in a Halloween costume? “You know what? Never mind.”

“No, please. Tell me,” he says, and he sounds genuinely interested.

“Does it matter? I’m about to die, right? What’s the difference if I tell you or not?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “But the end is easier to face when you’ve said the thing you needed to say.”

He adjusts his stance, and the robe pulls tight across his shoulders. And I mean tight. I’ve never seen shoulders that broad.

“Hold on,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be, like… bony? Skull face, no muscle? What happened to the whole skeleton thing?”

“A common misconception. We take on a human form when we’re here. Can you imagine showing up as a skeleton? People would be scared to—” He stops. “Well. You get the idea. The form is based on who we were. Just… turned up a few notches.” He glances down at himself. “Death has its perks.”

This guy is so full of shit. But I’ve got nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and he’s more entertaining than my own thoughts. Plus there’s something about that voice that makes me want to keep him talking.

“So you were alive?”

“Once.”

“And you died? And then they made you a grim reaper?”

“There’s a process. Orientation. Training. A lot of paperwork, actually.”

“Paperwork.”

“You’d be amazed how bureaucratic the afterlife is.”

I snort. “So what, you filled out an application?”