Reaper

Quick History

I stare at the clotted blood on my neck, watching as my skin slowly stretches over the teeth bites and fills up the holes. In a few minutes, the holes are gone, and just another scar maintains, taking over the other one that stood in its place.

They dot my neck, these scars. Curving in and out of existence all along with it. I've forgotten the origin of most of them. Only a few stand out. My first bite. The time my best friend died. The most recent from the rosery man. The rest are just lines and bumps on a page.

I look at the rest of myself and watch as my hair slowly turns from black to blonde again. It is so unnatural. Unworldly even, but I guess that is what I am now. Unworldly. Alone in on a planet filled with people I will never again be able to relate to. So is life, I guess.

I remember my master, my teacher. He was a tall man, growing weary at his age, a number that was never given to me. His bones pulled at him in their weight. His skin sagged with gravity. His eyes shrunk back into his head. Regardless of all these qualities, he still had the fire of a young man, and the kick of a jujitsu master. I sometimes still feel the marks his lessons left on me, even though they have long gone away. That man had a mean punch. His hair was his most striking feature though, and that was what made him look so strange in broad daylight. A dark black that stood up and disobeyed with the slightest wind or move. He lost the will to keep it down many years before I had met him. He simply would blow at it and swat it away, as if it were some type of gnat. But yes, he had the shiniest, most lively of hair even with the sagging of his bones.

I remember something he said to me some bit ago before the world went to shit. He said, "girl, when this world ends, I will end with it, and all the sayings of the past will come to pass." He looked at me then, his grey eyes filled with solemn forboding. "That is why I am training you. So that when I am gone, some of these people will still survive against what is coming, what I have told you. I have seen it all happen in my dreams, and you shall be their future. You shall bring forward the past." I said something snarky there, as I always did to his ramblings. And he hit me with the force of a bull, and I fell, and he snickered, and we continued to eat our dinner in silence. The way it was supposed to be. The way it always had been.

We were in the hospital when the bombs were let go. He was on his deathbed. As the world rained fire around us, he told me why he was dying and finally who he was. "Girl," he said, "this world has been cruel from the start. I have watched it grow colder with every passing year, and I have ushered the souls around me into other lives away from here. I have saved them from themselves mostly. I have discarded their sins and brought them from their wrongdoings into a world that was right. When I die, that world will too, and those creatures that I have mentioned, the walkings, the turned, they will be the souls left over that I can not save when I am gone. You have asked me many times why we have never left the temple I have trained you in. They could not see me. Humanity is blind to my existence, but you never were. You saw me because you were saved at birth from death, and I have always been in your sight. Recently, I have been flickering in the eyes of humanity, the closer I come to death. I can only pull the sins from so many before they weigh on me. I am dying because humanity has been dying. I survived because they did too."

"They call me the devil, but I am not the devil. They used to worship me you know. I was a god for some time. But now I am the devil, and I will die a regular man, but not before I make it right."

"You, my girl, are their savior. You will keep them alive after me, and you create a new world to usher them into. I give you my power now. Make the world right. Restore hope in them all."

He laid his hand on me at that moment, and the black drained from his hair into mine. The bomb fell on the hospital then, and all inside perished to its blow. These were the last souls he was able to take with him before he died. The hospital collapsed. The radiation burned the world. The fires spread, and the turned found their way across the destroyed soil. But he did not die to the blast. His body stayed perfectly still, and his last breath echoed in the small room, which stood completely whole even under the bomb. He was gone with the world, and I sat there watching him, my hair, once blonde, now pitch black in the light from the fires around us.

I learned that night that my mentor, my master was the Grim Reaper, and he put a terrible burden on my back. I had to replace him. I had to keep humanity alive. I left that room and never looked back. I heard it crumble behind me.

I still wonder why people can see me. Was it because I was human before the powers came, or is it because the land he made was closed off forever when the world died. I am not sure. I doubt I will ever be. The final parts of my hair return to blonde.

* * *

It has been hours since I've left my room. The dark of it warms me, and the little silence I have saves me from the time I had to deal with people. I blame that on the master. He never let me outside. Damn that grouchy old man. The silence though puts me at rest.

A knock at the door reminds me of it, and I groan pulling myself from the dark recesses of my mattress. Humanity never can leave me alone. I open the door with a heave to see River standing in the frame.

"Yes?" my voice sounds heavy from misuse.

"Oh, hey R. Umm.. well there's a man that's turning that you kind of forgot about."

"Right, right. I'm coming, I'm coming."

"So... umm..." River looks down my body, stopping at my legs. "Do you always not wear pants when you answer the door?"

I huff and turn around, heading back to my bed. I grab a pillow, fluffing it a bit. It is still warm from where my head lied. With a sharp turn, I throw it and hear a satisfying smack at it hits River's face. A grumble comes from him as I pull back on my pants and head to the door.

"Happy?" I mutter. River looks down again, a small smirk heating his lips.

"No, not really..." His words fall off with the deadpan look lining my face.

"Right, right.. this way. You can't ever just have a little fun can you?"

"No. no, I cannot." I get a bark of a laugh out of him as we head on our way, out the door and to the man chained up at the center of camp. I guess its time to show the resues what I can do... once again.