by KC Grifant
(1000 words)
The sun shone bright and Death felt fine.
Death today was a man too skinny. Greenish limbs hung from his tattered robe. His olive hair twisted with dirt, while beetles dropped, tear-like, along his face. The fates that sent him on his task had tried to approximate human features to allow him to move more easily in their world, but it was never quite right.
Not the worst. Not the best, he thought, studying the sunlight flitting against the facsimile of his hand. But he’d take it. He’d always take it.
Maybe today would be different, he thought hopefully while he passed a soot-smeared child dragging a body long expired. People moaned around him, from sickness and war. Back when he was human, the sight of such extreme destruction would have set Death’s bloodlust raging. Now, such tragedies made him curdle, made him want to leave this all behind and do nothing more than lay in the grass and watch the clouds.
But duty called.
He surveyed the work of the Summoned, his brothers and sisters by fate. Famine and Plague, War and Infestation, Madness and Despair, strode among the ruins. Madness, appearing as a scrawny naked man with a knotted beard, ran faster than a monkey to touch as many bodies as he could. Famine, corpulent and twice as large as any man, strutted past food stalls, leaving a trail of rotten produce in his wake. Death waved to the specter of Plague, today taking the form of a large-bosomed woman in purple robes and a wooden mask over her eyes. Her blistered hands coaxed viral companions into the air to wipe out as many people as possible. She nodded back, unsmiling.
Always so serious, Death thought. Though they heralded destruction, there was no need to be so grim.
Death walked on. He followed his inklings of intuition, like tracing threads of a spider’s web, to the center of the crisis. Something in the air had brought the Summoned here, something that meant it was time to cull, to pave the way for new things.
To destroy.
This was their duty: whenever destruction reached a threshold and a society was beyond recovery, the Summoned arrived to hasten the end, to scrub a place for a fresh start. Time had no meaning. Death had found himself roaming caves in prehistoric Pangea; atop rubble in a Roman villa; or, like now, searching through a devastated town from a war-torn country circa 1300s.
There.
He stopped in front of an adult daughter who stretched, bloodstained, in her elderly mother’s arms. Occasionally humans, in the delirium of extreme distress, might be able to spot the Summoners, but mostly they passed unseen. Now though, mother’s eyes, wide with hysteria, fixed on him.
“Don’t take her!” The woman wailed. “You’ve taken too much!”
“This is not my doing,” Death said, his usual spiel. Funny, as a human he would have enjoyed smiting those in his way. But now, the pending death weighed him down. “Most pass onto the next life. I only come for those who require special…treatment. Who cannot be allowed to continue onto the wheel of rebirth. She—” His greenish hand gestured to the land—“brought us.”
The daughter struggled for a breath. Her gaze bore into him, so charismatic it nearly pulled him in. He evoked fragments of her past: her rise to power through seduction, the words of violence she slipped into men of high ruling; her laughter as more neighbors hung. She was one born with an innate power, an ability to sow the seeds of change, to bend others to her will. Some with this gift advanced the world. Others, like her, spread fear fast as wildfire. Like a cruel guiding star, she had helped lead this land to its destiny.
But there was still a chance she could make things right, even now.
“You…” the daughter whispered as he crouched next to her. The mother beat against Death’s back, ineffective as bird wings.
“You have not taken care of what you spread,” Death said. “Think of what you could do with a second chance. Rebuild. But for this I need a promise of servitude.”
“Yes…” the daughter panted. “In your wisdom, teach me how. I will do whatever you say.”
He paused. Hope that he might not need to kill again bloomed a tiny star in his chest.
Until she looked up.
Behind her charming gaze crashed other things: anger, contempt, disgust. Even for him.
“You lie,” he said flatly.
Someday he would unlock the perfect words to sway evil. But not today.
“You can go…back to hell,” the daughter spat between mouthfuls of blood.
He opened his cloak and the mother screamed.
His body buzzed a hive of souls, rock-sized orbs that glowed yellow from the open cavity at his chest. The hardened globes of energy piled onto each other like a cancer, a collection of the kernels of evil he had purged over time to keep the Fates healthy. He kept them restrained, their hatred and sorrow thrumming into his core for all time.
He used one hand to choke the daughter and worked his other like an invisible loom, pulling out her inner contents and shaping her soul into a lump. He set the daughter’s orb into his chest to join the others, ignoring her shrieks of fury that reverberated on a frequency only he could hear. Now, her soul sat discreet, contained, a bit of overgrowth removed from its host.
Somewhere, the Fates hummed approval. Yet another extremity was removed, restoring a balance. A force tugged him back toward the nothingness that was his home, until the Summoners were needed again.
He ignored it. He left the collapsed mother, the daughter’s body, the Summoners. Fate would force him back to his duties soon enough.
Until then, he headed toward a grassy knoll, the light warming his shoulders.
It was a sunny day and Death felt fine.
END
KC Grifant is a Southern Californian author who writes internationally published horror, fantasy, science fiction and weird west stories for podcasts, anthologies and magazines. Her tales have appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Unnerving Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Dark Matter Magazine, the British SF Association’s Fission Magazine, Tales to Terrify, the Lovecraft eZine, and many others.
In addition to her Weird West novel, MELINDA WEST: MONSTER GUNSLINGER (February 2023), she has also written for dozens of anthologies, including: Chromophobia; Musings of the Muse; Dancing in the Shadows – A Tribute to Anne Rice; Field Notes from a Nightmare; The One That Got Away; Six Guns Straight From Hell; Shadowy Natures; Beyond the Infinite – Tales from the Outer Reaches; and the Stoker-nominated Fright Mare: Women Write Horror.
A co-founder of the San Diego HWA chapter, she enjoys chasing a wild toddler and wandering through beachside carnivals. For details, visit www.KCGrifant.com or @kcgrifant.