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Chapter 39: Unholy Alliance
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The Reaper's Pet Epilogue: The Bureau of Transmigration
Everything fades into regular, high-pitched beeping. I open my eyes to the disorienting sight of tubes snaking from my body. {Where in God’s name am I?} I sit bolt upright and tear some of the tubes off my chest. This starts a rapid alarm from the machinery next to the bed I’m lying on. {Sol’s at the park,} I remember vaguely. {No, that can’t be right. Sol’s visiting me…} {…at the beach house…} All the memories of the past week come flooding back; a literal information overload. The surrealism of my experiences strains my grip on reality and triggers an alarm on the EKG monitor. But thankfully, incredibly, my brain succeeds in reducing everything to a manageable size. Nurses rush into the room with their mouths hanging open. “I know everything,” I whisper to myself. “I know who I am now.” **** The rebellion that spilled over to the surface world shall be known forevermore as the Battle of the Bolgias. A great number of Death’s loyal guards, the Helter-Skeltals, have shed ma
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 1: This Damned Timer in my Brain
They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison. They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 2: Raptures of the Deep
All at once I’m in the kitchen getting ready for a dive. It’s like this when the infernal timer is abuzz in my brain; I move around in a fog. I decide to leave a note for Sol because she might arrive this morning as per the old schedule. {How can we be soulmates}, I write, {if I don't have a soul of my own?} I pin the note under a fridge magnet before I can chicken out. Our slow falling-out is hurting both of us. The timer inside my head and my oneiric visions have given birth to a secret third presence. Like a fat black Buddha sitting cross-legged between Sol and I, it keeps growing and pushing us apart. But maybe that’s for the best. Sol awakens in people a thirst for life they never knew they had. Sol; her skin baked to a golden-brown heaven so every time she smiles there’s the jarring contrast of pearly teeth. I can never resist freediving for those underwater gems that beckon for three-minute breath holds. A part-time influencer and full-time vet in an animal shelter, Sol’s Fili
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 3: Welcome to the Flip Side
With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea. I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull. I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 4: The Terminal of the Dead
Wet and warm sensations all over my face, in a slobbery, affectionate way that for a moment I think I’m back at Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje and being woken up by Gamby. Then I remember the stray puppy has been dead over a decade ago and my eyes snap open. A bear of a dog is licking my face – or rather, the blood dripping out of the open wounds in my face – while something close is making a hissing sound like a pit of snakes. I drag my ass through the muddy bank and scream. Another dog turns to snarl at me and then a third, till my brain registers that all three heads are attached to the same giant, thickly-muscled neck. {Kerberos}. Greek mythology from high school floods over me and I whimper. {The Hellhound. Sibling to the monsters Chimaera and Hydra}. All three heads are barking a volley of thunder so I press my hands over my ears to protect them from further damage, but then my eyes fall on the curious mane down the dog’s broad back. I note how the hair is sort of glistening,
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 5: The Elevator Ride
No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare. Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood. There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 6: Mr. Beaky
“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike Kharon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will paralyze you right where you stand. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave: gravelly and frosty,giving the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal underworld. The elevator operator makes the big mistake of doubting what he has just heard and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a smooth, round mass of flesh. The face is as heartrendingly crude as a stickman’s face traced in dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death, they bulge. No sight could be more apt for the expression “eye-popping
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 7: Those Left Behind
Sol’s Umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks vaguely familiar because of the band posters on the walls. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless acoustic guitar and sobbing piteously. Back on Sub-level 5, I must’ve drunk some of the River Lethe’s water mixed in with the slime of the River Styx because it still takes a moment for me to put two and two together and realize that Sol’s grieving. For me. All at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the speed and force of a hundred grams of ecstasy, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence: {In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sol that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The woman lying in the hospital bed is Jan but at the same time not her. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell. She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pal
Latest chapter
- The Reaper's Pet Epilogue: The Bureau of Transmigration
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 39: Unholy Alliance
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 38: The Massacre
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 37: World's End
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 36: The Mutiny of the Ravens
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 35: Master Hand
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 34: The Monster
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 33: Hell-breaker
- The Reaper's Pet Chapter 32: The Jam Session
