Spoiler Alert

11 - Love Smacking

I had mentioned this before, right?

You simply cannot prevent the deaths.

In the beginning, when I first noticed my power, I wanted to use it to save people. Losing my mom had been a sucker punch to the ol' reason to live. I didn't want others--even total strangers--to experience such a crushing sadness. So I tried to play God.

Maybe you don't believe in God? I do, and proud of it! I believe he's a jerk who likes to breathe life into delicate, precious bundles of potential, then cruelly smears them out of existence with his mighty thumb of crappiness. I believe in him, alright. And I hate him worse than plaid dinner jackets.

My attempts at playing him (not wearing a plaid dinner jacket, in case you were wondering) and my attempts to save the lives of ungrateful strangers had ended in almost complete and total life-wrecking horror every time.

The first tactic was to point-blank tell the soon-to-be-deads that they were going to succumb to arrhythmia or a stroke or whatever. 

You guessed it, no one believed me.

The second tactic was to force them into the emergency room by whatever means necessary, sometimes, even, blunt force. 

Got arrested not once, not thrice, but four or five times. They called is assault. I called it love smacking.

The third tactic was to try to do the saving. I took away car keys, I rushed into streets, I called the police ten minutes before the sudden heart event. 

Each time I tried, the Reapers could sense it. They would come rushing in and quietly, politely attempt to kill me. I would run away, and the deaths I had labored so hard to prevent would still take place. 

The Reapers killed them. Brutally, violently. Their peaceful heart attacks turned into bloody hazmat scenes.

So when I saw Marina's future demise and explained to her the odds we were up against, she made no attempt to prevent her own death. I made no attempt to prevent her death. Instead, we became friends like nothing would ever happen, like were two normal singles just trying to make it in New York City, a la a sitcom. She turned away from her fitness boyfriend and ate and ate and gained weight, determined to go out with a bang, not a whimper. 

But still, that image of me smiling next to her as she drew her last breath haunted me--especially after our friendship became one of the most important features of my life. What would make me so happy? Even wickedly so?

"Come up, have a bite," I said as Marina dropped me off at my crap apartment, a shanty building that lay crookedly in the middle of one of those suburbs that have turned to drug-infested sewers of human poverty. A.k.a. "Home sweet home."

Marina took one look at my Hot Pockets and shook her head. "Look, I'm sensing something weird surrounding this area. Those Reapers weren't the only ones. I think . . ." she cocked her head, as if trying to hear something.

"Spit it out," I said.

" . . . I sense something big," she said quietly. "Something really big is coming."

At that moment, the apartment door opened. The big thing was here. Big and hairy and bleary-eyed from too little sun and too much video game playing.

My brother, Tony.