Oz woke with the sun. He showered and dressed without thinking. He didn’t want to. Thinking would only take away his nerve. Today, he required autopilot.
One perk to the reaper gig, Oz supposed, was that you would always end up where you were supposed to be. He walked slowly, hands in his pockets, with little concern paid to the direction in which his steps took him. His thoughts wandered, more than once to Cora. He’d been an asshole to her, again. She tried to help, but what she didn’t understand was that there was no helping him out of this. Her kind words and gentle encouragement could do nothing to soften the blow of each new death, mounting on the one before until they were a fucking goliath of destruction.
Still, he thought, he ought to apologize or something.
Oz passed a florist. Maybe he could find a way to get her something. He frowned. No, he needed to push her out of his mind before even the thought of her talked him out of his plans.
There was only one cemetery in the area. Circle Oaks spanned several acres with a towering oak tree planted every hundred feet along the border. Oz stood at the wrought-iron gate, staring through the bars, at nothing in particular. He knew that he’d been buried in there. It was only a feeling, but it was a strong one. From the moment he woke up, he was sure that he needed to see his grave. Now, he didn’t know that he wanted to.
A bulky Lincoln parked along the curb closest to the gate, and a woman—early seventies at least—rocked and lurched her frail body out of the passenger side. Another woman with a younger version of the same face stayed in the drivers’ side.
“I’ll only be a minute,” the older woman said and brandished a bouquet of yellow roses from the dashboard.
“Take your time, Mom.”
Once standing, the woman was surprisingly agile. She shuffled up to the gate and pushed it open. Oz knew he could get inside on his own because, let’s face it, he would always be able to get into anywhere that Death hung out, but he followed her, wanting to pretend for a moment that they’d intended to walk in together, like friends.
They crossed the winding concrete path that branched into several networks of paths. He didn’t remember it from his grandfather’s funeral so he figured it must be new. Probably an attempt to keep foot traffic off the grass and lower the cost of upkeep. The old woman continued onto a right fork until she stopped at a simple, marble tombstone. The sun glinted off the face. Carved into it:
Here Rests Marvin Canes
Beloved Father, Husband, and Grandfather
February 8, 1941—May 15, 2011
“About damn time.”
The woman grazed the last line and chuckled gently.
“The cheek,” she murmured.
Bracing herself on the top of the stone, she eased herself into a graceful sitting position, legs tucked neatly to the side. She stood the roses on their stems against the stone. She sighed deeply and tears streaked her powdery, wrinkled cheeks.
It felt wrong to continue to watch her grieve, so Oz moved on. At the bottom of a hill, a little ways down the same path he’d taken with Mrs. Canes, a stone cross stood out among the other grave-markers. There was nothing remarkable about it—it was plain, no taller than the others around it, but as the hairs on the back of his neck and forearms raised, he knew it was his.
He didn’t move closer to it, but stared at it without blinking. The grass was neatly trimmed around the base of the cross, but moss had crept up the sides. There were no flowers, not even dead ones that’d been there a while, no ribbons... no sign that anyone had visited him in a long, long time. Oz had never felt so alone as he did at that moment.
Beneath the perfectly green lawn, Oz imagined his body—his real body—yellowing and cracking, his skin melting off his skeleton. He shuddered violently.
He creeped forward, careful to avoid a six-by-four foot area directly in front of the cross. He didn’t think that walking directly over his grave would do anything, but he wouldn’t chance it. From the side, he inclined his head forward and read what had been carved in the center of the cross:
Oswald Mitchell
Son and Friend
December 19, 1954—April 2, 1986
“Miles to go before I sleep.”
Miles to go before I sleep. Oz had no doubt that Mark had been behind that line. The Frost poem had been a favorite of Oz’s to recite, unprompted, and at the most obnoxious times. When Oz had fallen in love with a poem or phrase or quote, he incorporated it into every conversation, relevant or not, because Oz was a know-it-all. Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening had been his most recent obsession at the end of his life.
Grief dug into his chest.
His best friend was dead. Oz thought of Jamie and the helplessness he’d seen on the boy’s face at Mark’s funeral. He let that happen with a single paragraph. What about his own parents? Had their fates been emotionlessly punched onto a page by him? Would he have to be there to collect them when it all finally played out?
No. It wasn’t right. Something had to change.
* * *
Oz left the cemetery with an indifference to everything except change: the how and the when of it. Mrs. Canes and her daughter were gone and an SUV had taken its space. Oz planted himself on the curb. Once he’d gathered his thoughts, he would go see Jamie. They needed to talk.
The sun climbed further into the sky, and when the pinks and purples had burned off, the road and sidewalk steadily filled with people. Oz couldn’t help it; he didn’t see them as people, but as the inevitably dead. He saw their mangled bodies prostrated over the sidewalk, families grieving... Bard’s mop of white hair rose above them.
Oz didn’t look up when the tips of the reaper’s scraped combat boots stopped an inch from his thigh.
“You put your big boy pants on?” Bard scraped his boot against the curb.
“Something like that.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic. Come with me.”
They walked with the sun at their backs, Bard chain-smoking, Oz trying to decide how much it would hurt to burn the earlier images from his eyes. They left the heart of the city and crossed under an overpass, part of a highway still under construction. Veering off the road, they tromped through tall grass and poorly placed bushes until the ground became soggy and gave a little when they stepped on it. When the squawk of seagulls and the rush of water against metal met his hears, Oz realized they were heading to the Port.
The foliage ended at a tall, barbed fence which they followed until it met a stone arch. Underneath it was a steel door, painted the same blue-grey as the arch. There was no knob, only a deadbolt.
“Dead end,” Oz said.
Bard snorted. “This way.”
He led Oz past the arch, to another entrance a few hundred feet from the first. This one had a doorknob, but Bard didn’t try to open it. He waited beside it, with Oz on the other side, until a man in an orange hard hat emerged. Bard stuck his foot between the door and the frame.
“After you, Princess.”
The walls of the hallway were concrete, with thick cables running along the ceiling. It was lit by small, fluorescent lamps haphazardly hooked to the cable every few feet. At the end of the hallway stood another door. This one opened easily and when Oz stepped through, he found himself in a storage area. Plastic wrapped knickknacks, boxes of post cards, and miscellaneous sea creature flotsam were stacked along the walls.
The shop itself was empty, except for Cora, perusing the stuffed dolphins near the register, and a shop employee, a teenage girl with mousy brown hair subdued under an army of clips. She chipped away at her nail polish. Her name tag read, Butterfly.
Oz didn’t have to ask to know that the others were waiting outside. It’d be another big job. Another disaster. How many people this time? They hadn’t even begun and Oz felt drained.
“Hey, Bard,” Cora said. She nodded at Oz.
“How much time d’ya figure?” Bard asked.
Cora replaced the toy Orca she’d been petting. “No idea. There are a couple of ships out there, so right now everyone’s just trying to figure out which one it is.”
Her eyes remained on Oz. “You ok?”
“Sure,” he said without meeting her gaze.
She stared at him a beat longer. “Ok.”
The sleigh bells above the shop door jingled the entrance of another reaper—he looked like he could’ve been a wrestler in his life. Oz recognized him from the airport. He instinctively looked to the girl behind to counter to see if she’d noticed, but of course she hadn’t.
“We found it,” the reaper said, and turned on his heel.
* * *
It was named The Goddess of the Sea and it was a giant. Two smoke stacks towered above a massive deck, bedecked with colorful flags of its Mexican origin and company brand. Passengers gathered around the gang plank, shifting backpacks and shoulder bags. It was easy to pick out the honeymooners, sick in new love, hand in hand wearing matching Hawaiian garb. The great, steel doors opened and several primped and pressed cruise line employees ushered the crowd up the red carpeted ramp.
Bard nudged Oz’s shoulder and they followed the crowd, with a quickly assembling crew of twenty or so reapers falling in line behind them.
“We’re going on the ship?” Oz asked.
“I’ve heard the dinner buffets are decent,” Bard said.
“Over water.”
“But this is a Mexican cruise and spicy food always gave me the runs.”
“Please tell me there’s going to be a plague, or an outbreak, or anything that does not involve the ship sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Would you hurry up!” another reaper shouted. “They’re shutting the doors and everyone else still needs to get inside.”
The reapers shuffled in just as the doors were closed and sealed.
Ushers escorted guests to their various cabins and soon the entryway was empty.
Oz felt the floor hum through his shoes and a groan erupted. The engines roared to life, propelling the ship from the port. Soon, they would be in the Gulf. Oz hoped that after a decade of being dead, he remembered how to swim.
* * *
The reapers set out on their own to explore the ship, agreeing to meet up in the ballroom at dinner. While most of them ventured downward to the recreation rooms and second class passenger cabins, Oz hunted for the elevator that would bring him to the top deck. He knew what was going to happen, and had no idea how Bard and the others planned to escape the chaos when it did. He needed air.
When Oz was little, his parents brought him to a friend’s house for a summer party. The owners of the house had left the sliding glass door leading to the pool unlocked and Oz had been mesmerized by the floating dragon at the center of it. With the adults all gathered in the kitchen over a bottle of white wine, Oz decided to satisfy his curiosity. He was at the bottom of the pool for a full minute before his parents discovered what’d happened.
Oz would choose almost any other death before drowning—that moment of pure agony before your lungs overpower your brain and take in the water—that one petrifying inhale. Give him a gunshot to the face any day.
He closed his eyes and held his breath until the elevator doors opened inside a small glass enclosure on the deck. The smell of salt water hit him like a wall. Oz kept his distance from the side, but was able to see that they were well on their way into the Gulf. The shoreline was a scribble against the horizon.
A sprinkle of passengers loitered about the deck. While the others unpacked their tacky shirts and flip flops or sought out the bar to christen their vacation, the people on the deck were the restless—the scared—suckered into a stupid cruise because their loved ones thought it would be fun and blah, bullshit, blah.
A triad of middle-school kids, two boys and one girl, stood close to the bow, kicking a soccer ball between them. Most likely sent away to give their parents a break from the incessant “I’m bored” squawking. The game ended when the larger of the boys kicked the ball a little too hard, sending it overboard.
Jesus fuck, there are kids. Please, please let it be an outbreak. Bubonic plague. Flu. Bad tuna. Anything.
He knew no amount of hoping would change their fate. The ship was going to sink, and some of them—Oz had no idea how many—would die. He thought of Jamie and all the things that could happen to him while Oz was stuck on this floating disaster. An accident. Illness.
Dread spread its icy fingers through his body.
* * *
A nasally voice announced over a scratchy speaker system that dinner would be served in the ballroom in exactly one hour. Oz figured he’d better find the others. The elevator was crowded with the few deck stragglers that hadn’t started dressing for dinner, but Oz squeezed in behind the last of them.
“So like I was saying,” a man directly next to Oz said, “My wife’s got this thing for being first. All the fucking time. She bribed the usher to let us onto the ship before everyone else. Even this ship—I wanted to go to the Bahamas, but since Claire heard somewhere that this ship was a prototype that never went out before, she had to be on it. Sometimes I wonder if she’s insane.”
“Sounds like it,” his friend said.
“I did some research on this thing...” and then his voice dipped to a whisper when he realized the others in the elevator were listening. “It passed the benchmark, but just by the hair of the owner’s ass. Something about the size versus the engine power. I don’t know. I’m no engineer. But, I figured they wouldn’t let this thing go out on the water unless they knew it wouldn’t sink. They wouldn’t, right?”
The friend shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Yeah, it’s gotta be safe. Why’d you agree to bring her if you’re so worried?”
“You try arguing with Claire and see where that gets you.”
Oz wasn’t an engineer, either, but he’d seen a lot of movies. When the elevator doors opened, he had an idea but didn’t know where to go to try it out. It wasn’t like they posted signs along the corridors that read, “This way, Oz!” or “Directions for keeping the ship afloat, five hundred feet!”
He walked, bent at the waist, with his ear inclined toward the floor, listening for the groan of the engines to grow louder. Scared of running into one of the other reapers on the elevator, Oz descended the stairs to the lowest reachable level and walked the narrow hallway toward the rear of the ship.
The engine room was protected by a riveted steel door that could only be opened with a key card, passcode combination. Oz waited. Why couldn’t this job come with something useful like super-human strength? Or at least the ability to open a damn door. Soon, the cabins on that level emptied as people piled into the elevator for dinner.
No one went in or out of the engine room. He’d have to figure out another way.
Oz navigated toward the middle deck where he thought he remembered the sign for the ballroom when he heard the urgent whisper of a person who thinks they’re being quiet.
“—really shook him up. Fuckin’ pussy.” A familiar male voice.
“Because seeing someone’s heart ripped out, presumably for the first time, is something a person should accept naturally, like finding out there’s no Santa Claus,” another male voice.
“Fuck off.”
“He’ll comply. They all do.”
“Sometimes.” Was that guilt Oz detected?
“It’ll happen. Happily ever after.”
“Whatever, Cinderella. I’m not buying it. They’ll need to come up here and take care of it themselves.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?”
A beat of silence.
“Fine,” the second voice said, “Can we go eat now?”
Oz didn’t wait to hear the response. He sprinted up the nearest flight of stairs and didn’t stop until he heard the clanging of metal chafing dishes.