Fourth Horseman

Fourth Horseman: scene three

He rubbed his hand on his forehead and ran it through his hair. His mouth a catacomb, he exhaled a noxious gas into the cabin of the Airstream. His arm ached. He rubbed his left armpit as he rolled his shoulder and raised it above his head. He grimaced. The wound represented another dream waiting to haunt him at a later date.

He exhaled, more slowly this time. The tequila took the edge off, but he ached always, continually racked with nightmares. These were the tradeoffs. Being here meant he wasn’t there, reporting for duty, punching in for a job he could no longer bear.

He nudged the glowing box with his rattlesnake boot before rising from the mattress with considerable effort. His movements caused the trailer to creek as much as his joints. His mortal shell, the skin he put on when dwelling upon the surface, could not stand much more traditional aging. Not without a return to Megiddo.

Screw it. Opening the latch to the icebox, he took out a beer. Blowing a cloud of dust from the mouth of the can, he pulled the tab. The sound of carbon dioxide escaping brought an angry snort from outside the snot-plastered window. Death reached back into the sweltering icebox for another hot beer. He and ice had never gotten along.

Outside the dust had settled, the storm barely visible to the east. They were getting worse because of his presence, but mankind had started the apocalypse by itself. It was typically the sort of thing that would have cheered him, if he’d been working. He gazed upward toward the sun. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time. So much explosive potential. Such a waste. Outlined against the orb, a scattering of vultures circled while waiting out the last of the black blizzard.

He wrapped his soured mind around the heavenly computations. It had been six years since he first came here. Six years. How could such a short span of time last so long? He’d forgotten what the passage of time felt like in a chronological progression, and there was no way to know his cumulative age. September 16, 1924 was when he first became Death. So he chose that exact moment to return for his walk about.

It was an act he thought not so much ironic as poetic. After another moment of wracking his brain he concluded he had been thirty five, give or take. That would make him, using a twisted logic, roughly forty one. But it was ridiculous. That was a different life, one he’d left for another he now longed to leave as well.

How had it ever seemed fresh? He crinkled his face and sniffed the scorched air. He couldn’t distinguish the smell of sulfur any longer. He twisted his boot back and forth in the barren dirt, pushed it down against the grit, until it smoked like a hot iron. Nothing.

He lifted it to take a look, but there hadn’t been anything there alive in the first place. Around the backside of the trailer, Blue stamped and snorted his discontent. Yeah, yeah. Death took a draw off the beer in his right hand, blew the dust off the one in his left and sauntered around the trailer where he’d left his only companion before beginning his most recent bender.