I Am the Grim Reaper of Anomalies

The pillar had stopped being cover a minute ago and become the only thing holding him up.

He had both hands on the knife. Rust from guard to tip, a dozen notches that mattered and more that didn't, the grip gone slick enough that he kept resetting his thumb on it. Blood had dried stiff down the left side of his jacket, and the cold in the wound underneath had nothing to do with weather.

Above him, the building had lost its upper floors sometime in the first year and leaned out over the avenue with the sky showing through it. There was nothing up there. He had checked.

Thirty feet out, the air had a seam in it.

He had watched it open. No sound, no warning. It stood upright in the middle of the avenue now, a black slot as wide as he was tall and widening, and black water was beading up through the broken pavement around its base and running off downhill.

The things came out of it, and none of them kept a shape. One stretched tall and thin, folded into the outline of a man, then into something that had never been a man. Every time the outline slipped, they were closer.

He had already tried the knife on one of them. The edge went in and met nothing, no give, no gristle, no bone, and came back with the rust scraped off in a bright stripe, wet with something that stank of old meat. The cold had started in his forearm before he finished pulling the blade out, and it had not stopped.

It was climbing. The cut under his jacket had gone black at the edges. The cold worked up past his wrist toward the elbow, along the bone, slow enough to watch.

He got the knife up to his waist and had to stop there. The arm would not take it any higher.

He tried the alley mouth anyway. Two steps off the pillar, and a shape peeled itself off the wall in front of him, patient, already there. He came back and put his shoulder into the concrete.

Four years of this, and nothing he had ever pulled off a dead man had done more than annoy them.

No one left to call. The last of them had gone down half a year back, on the wrong side of a wall, close enough that he heard it and thirty feet short of getting there. What he remembered was the weight, and how much heavier a body got before you could put it down.

The knife did nothing. He had proved that twice.

Nothing in the avenue was not already theirs.

They came in from both sides. The cold reached his sternum before anything touched him. The first touch was at his neck, low on the throat, a flat wet weight, patient. Then it hooked, and something under his sternum began to come up, the way a nail comes up out of a board.

What came up with it was not his own life. It was the wall, the thirty feet, and what he owed on them.

Then something cold and mechanical arrived in his head, in a voice that was not a voice.

[ Vital signs failing. Soul resonance: one hundred percent. Undertaker system: activating. ]

[ Binding confirmed. Host: Elias Vance. ]

Heat went through him all at once, and the cold let go of his arm. The wound under his jacket pulled closed. He got his knees under him and his hand back around the knife.

[ Host: Elias Vance. Undertaker, unsworn. ]

[ Task: lay the thing in front of you to rest. 0/1 ]

[ Reward: starter allotment. Credit: 100 ]

He read it twice. There was no explanation under it, no promise of anything but a task and a number. Whatever the word meant, it meant work.

He did not ask what it was. Nothing in four years had come free. He would find out what this cost when he could stand.

He stood.

On the spine of the blade, a line had been cut through the rust. Clean, straight, and not from anything he had put the knife into.

The palm of his hand had gone numb against the handle. Cold moved up the inside of his wrist, along a line where he had no wound.

The seam was still open. The things were still coming through it, and the nearest of them had stepped clear of the water.

He set his feet and drove the knife into the nearest of them.

Gold ran up the edge ahead of the steel.

The knife went in and met nothing.

He had put his shoulder behind it and both hands on the grip and everything he had, and it went through the shape the way the last one had: no give, no gristle, no bone. Four years had taught him where a body resisted and where it opened. This one opened everywhere.

Then the gold did what the steel couldn't. It stayed in the cut.

A line of it stood in the black where the edge had passed, thin and bright. The black folded over it, slid off it, folded over it again, and the line held.

Since the heat had gone through him, his eyes had been doing more than they used to. He could see how the thing was built now, and how it was built was this: nothing in it held still. Arms came out and went back in. A tall outline folded down into a low one with too many joints, and the outline kept slipping. The whole mass turned over on itself and kept turning.

One place didn't. Low, off to one side, no bigger than his fist. Everything else in the thing was arranged around it and moving to keep it.

So that was where the blade had to go.

The black came off the pavement in cords. One took the pillar out from under the building's shadow, and the concrete came down into the street in pieces the size of a door. He went sideways into the dust, came up on one knee with his eyes stinging, and the next cord went past close enough to move his hair.

The cold woke in his left arm, along the bone, in the line it had used before. On the inside of his right wrist something moved that had no wound under it, and the palm of his hand went farther numb around the grip.

He needed height. A slab of fallen floor leaned against what was left of a wall, and he went up it fast, and the black came up after him.

He came off the top of the slab.

The point of the knife stopped four inches into the mass, and the avenue came apart in a scream.

Nothing had ever stopped the blade. Cloth, meat, plaster, wire, the black things with nothing inside them; in four years the edge had never snagged once. It went through, it came out, and that was all anything had ever done.

The black took his forearm and pulled. His boots skidded on the wet concrete. He got both hands onto the hilt and leaned his weight down through the point.

Something inside the still place broke, and then it was done.

The black came off it in every direction at once and did not fall. It went up, thinning as it went, and where it thinned it went white, and the white came apart into points and the points went out before they reached the tops of the buildings.

At both ends of the avenue, the shapes he had counted and kept an eye on, seven or eight of them, standing in the water and waiting their turn, went up with it. They had not been seven things. They had been one thing with that many hands.

The water went on running somewhere under the pavement. The smell stayed: old meat, wet concrete, and the coat of something long dead.

At the far end of the avenue, the seam had stopped running. The black water around its base had gone still. It had drawn down to a line, and nothing came out of it.

He stood with the knife at his side.

[ Task complete. Credit: 100. ]

[ Skill: Soul Stillness (novice). Burial talismans: five. ]

He read it twice, the way he had read the first one.

Soul Stillness did one thing: it took a thing and held it where it stood, and a thing held could not strike. The talismans were paper, five of them, in the inside pocket of his jacket, dry, folded once. They were for the kind of damage the knife could not reach. Five was a number that only went down.

Then his legs stopped holding him, and he sat down in the open, in the middle of the avenue, in the water.

The knife lay across his knees. The gold had gone out of it; the edge was two colors now, bright where the light had run and rust-dark where it hadn't. In a second-floor window across the street, a sheet of glass held a gray piece of the sky and gave it back. He had been lit up long enough to be seen from either end of the avenue and from any window on it, and he had not had a choice about that. He looked at the window for a while, and then he stopped looking at it.

Both his hands were shaking. The right one shook harder.

He stayed where he was and let it happen. Water came through the seat of his pants and went cold against his legs. Nothing came up the avenue.

When his hands were steady he went through what he had. Water: a plastic bottle a third full. Food: a bag with three flat pieces of something hard in it and crumbs at the bottom, which was one day if he ate once, and less if he had to run. The knife. Five papers. A jacket with blood dried stiff down the left side of it.

He got up and left the ruins.

He went out along the line of the old road, past bones still inside their clothes and cars that had stopped where they stopped and never moved again. Somewhere behind him, in the ruins, something screamed and stopped in the middle, the way those things did.

The light went down while he walked. It had been gray all day; by the end of the hour it was gray with nothing behind it, and he started looking for four walls and a door that still closed instead of looking down the road.

Then he heard it.

Metal on metal, through the buildings off to his left, and a voice over it, human, saying something he couldn't make out. Then a second voice. Then the flat sound of weight hitting the ground.

He stopped in the road with the knife in his hand. He did not want to be off the road after dark. Off the road was where things waited, and those buildings had been dark for an hour and would stay that way until morning, and whatever was happening in there would be over one way or the other before he could get to it.

He turned off the road and went toward the sound.

The noise kept on. Under it, someone was still shouting.