AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As I expected.
At the last moment I collapsed toward its legs. The Reaper with
the eyes didn’t communicate the move quite fast enough, and they tripped and went headlong into the bole with the dead branch, striking with a resounding thunk.
Still rising, I tore the Reaper tied on the blinded one’s back. I gripped it by the bottom of the torso and cracked it against the stump of a downed tree, the way some men will kill a snake by grabbing by the tail and cracking it like a whip. It hissed and shrieked and yowled.
The blinded one followed the sound, and I hurled the torso off into the woods. It spun crazily, its arms thrashing, and it fell with a crunch of leaves and brush. The blinded one ran past, and I struck it with my belt-wrapped fist with all the power I could put into the punch. It sprawled forward, and I leaped on it, got the belt around its neck, and planted my foot on the back of its neck. Then I hauled on the belt, putting my back into it as the bargemen used to say on the Missouri, until I heard cartilage crush and bones break.
With the legged one dead, it was an easier matter to hunt the other down and do away with it with my sharpened shovel.
It is strange, but when I take a life, even that of a neck-wrung chicken, I feel a moment’s kinship with the creature. A dead human sets me wondering what his mother once dressed him up in for the wintering ritual of Thanksgiving. Yet dead Reapers evoke nothing of pathos, just relief that there is one less deathdealer supporting the Kurian Order.
As I looked down at the dead duo, it occurred to me that I might have more in kinship with them than I knew. Neither of us was human. We were both easily recognized, even from a long way away. For the foreseeable future I would have a Reaper’s lifestyle, operating at night and hiding out during the day.
I started to disrobe it while the body was still limp and easy to manipulate. Reaper cloth was usually a valuable commodity, the first thing stripped off a dead one on the battlefield or ambush point. Usually Southern Command’s bloodthirsty madmen, the Bears, claimed the lion’s share of the substance.
The Reaper cloth, usually slick as oiled fishing line to the touch, felt rough in my hands, more burlap than silk. Taking a handful, I tested a piece, and it tore apart as easily as a workman’s dungaree material.
Clearly it wasn’t the usual bullet-stopping weave, obtained from some unknown source (rumored to be in the Southwest or Mexico).* Perhaps the Kurian or Kurians actually running the Coal Country were poor in whatever constituted wealth that allowed them to trade for more Reapers and garments to protect them in their dangerous duties—which seemed strange, considering the importance of coal to the richer surrounding principalities and the efforts made to keep it flowing.
Still, they looked like Reaper robes, sized for near to seven feet and with a heavy hood that could be pulled down to hide the face. On close inspection, however, my feet would give me away. Reapers, for all their size and strength were surprisingly light—designed that way, I imagine—and there would be no way my rowboat-sized tracks would be taken for a Reaper’s. Still, it might serve at a distance, and how many locals, seeing a Reaper head down a side road at night, would be inclined to follow to check out its boots?
You learned very early in the Kurian Order to keep out of a Reaper’s business. Any interview or interaction could end badly.
I surveyed myself as best as I could. My shoulders were perhaps a bit too broad, especially with my disproportionate—to human tailoring—arms. I tugged down the robe a bit, then decided to add a second underneath, wrapping the hood around my neck like a scarf. With the first pulled out and down, the hood came down across my eyes perhaps a bit too much—I could cut eye slits or try to fashion some sort of visor or sunglasses.
“That was amazing,” a voice said from the darkness.
I spun. It was Longliner, lately rescued from the van. He must have broken with the others shortly after I left them and followed me. It was an impressive feat in the dark, but then sometimes my fur does gleam in a little moonlight.
“Why didn’t they kill you?”
“I’m on their team.”
“Why would you wish to go to work for the Ordnance?”
“It’s better than here. Easy to get to Chicago or Ontario. I’m a good-time guy. If they can set someone like you up, why not me?”
He looked at the bodies, so pale they almost shimmered in the dark.
“How’d you get the better of them?”
Easily, I thought. They’d had their bells seriously rung by the coal-dust explosion. If only we could arrange for every fight with the Reapers to start with the overpressure of a major explosion.
Longliner looked at me in a sidelong fashion. “I bet it’s some brain voodoo that screws with their connection to the Old Man.”
I had no idea how a real Kurian agent would reply, so I elided the confidence of one long used to wielding power—something I’d only seen—with the much more familiar caution of an operative in a hostile land.
“I have no idea what you are talking about. For your own safety, it would be wise not to imagine further.”
“I’m clean; I’m clean with that. I’ll forget everything I saw here.”
“For a price, I suppose,” I said.
“One you can afford. Maybe I should say, one you can’t afford to turn down.”
“I’m ready to listen,” I said. “But not here, now. Let’s put some clicks between Number Four and us, before they sort out what went wrong. They already know that at least I escaped.”
