Gina Grant: Scythe Does Matter

Kali opened her mouth to defend me, but I cut her off. “No, it’s okay, Kali. Rod’s right. I have been just killing time. But I’ve put that slacker attitude behind me now and I’m looking to make the best of the time I have here. I may not be willing to commit for centuries but are you?” I paused. Suddenly the rest of the hallway must have become very interesting to the boys. They looked anywhere but at Kali and me.

I figured as much. These guys were only interested in earning enough points to get themselves a decent reassignment, just like everybody else. Back on the Mortal Coil, it usually comes down to money. Here in Hell, it’s the Karma Kredit points. More assured of my footing, I carried on. I might not actually own the moral high ground, here, but at least I was renting it. “I’m sorry your friend didn’t make the cut. But I don’t think the timing is right to pin it on me. I only decided today to start Reaper training. So if your friend was already flunking out . . .” I let the sentence hang. Let them do the math.

Rod opened his mouth and closed it again. Horace looked a little lost and dangerously close to thinking on his own.

Just then the three blondes clunk-clunked up the hall from the washroom, their makeup a little heavier, bleached hair artfully tousled. “Whassup?” asked Crystal/Amber/Tiffany. I hadn’t yet learned to tell them apart.

“We’re trying to get straight with Ms. Staying Alive, ” Rod answered. “I was just explaining to her how we don’t like her kind around here. You’re either dead”—he hitched one thumb over his muscular shoulder—“or you’re gone.”

“Oh, it’s okay, Rod. She’s got dual citizenship,” one of them, I think Crystal, supplied helpfully. “She’s not wandering around up there having a great life.” She pointed at the hallway ceiling, then lowered her voice and whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “She has coma toes.” Behind her the other two blondes nodded. Everyone looked at my feet.

“Coma toes?” Even Rod and Horace looked confused.

The spokes-blonde shook her overlong bangs from her eyes, looking just a little bit exasperated with our apparent ignorance. “You know, coma toes. It’s the medical term for when your feet are asleep. It’s when you have one foot in the grave, like Kirsty here and are waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Actually, it was my jaw that dropped. Never had I heard anyone mix so many metaphors in one simple and totally inaccurate sentence. It was almost poetry. And not like the stuff Dante writes.

Rod turned to me, shaking a finger in my direction like I was a misbehaving child. “You may think you’re some god’s gift to the underworld, but I’m here to tell you you’re not. It’s not all about you, you know.”

Everyone stared at me, no doubt wondering how I was going to respond. Progressing from taken aback to skeggin’ furious, I opened my mouth to let him have it just as the guy from the front row poked his head out into the hallway and called us back in. Apparently he didn’t take breaks.

I snapped my mouth shut, unwilling to make enemies on my first day. “He’s not worth it,” Kali told me, laying a hand on my shoulder. I nodded my agreement, pushed my anger down inside me and allowed her to guide me back to my seat.

The rest of the afternoon progressed in much the same manner as the earlier part. I fumed for the first few minutes, so angry at Rod I could hardly concentrate, but eventually the importance of my mission coupled with the interesting nature of the lecture overcame my fury and I paid attention. It was a good thing I did, because we covered a lot of important ground.

We learned that most souls find their own way to Hell when their bodies die. A large portion of our job would be to chase down those souls that either couldn’t or wouldn’t make their way to Hell on their own. This included people who didn’t want to leave their situation, either because they loved it or hated it too much to put it behind them, as well as people who were too stupid to even realize they were dead. If a soul was in really deep denial, it might put up quite a struggle.

Occasionally somebody like my ex-boss Conrad, who’d made a Deal with the Devil and then didn’t want to go when his time was up, would make a run for it. That’s when Reapers took on the role of bounty hunter. We’d have to hunt down the soul, nail it with our scythes and drag it back to Hell. You might earn a Karma Kredit bonus point for snagging a runner. But it wasn’t often a newbie Reaper was given those kinds of assignments; circumstances had to be exceptional. Sergeant Schotz, in his role as head of the Reaper Corps, preferred a Reaper with some really meaningful field experience under his or her belt.

Professor Schotz droned on. Dante occasionally interrupted to clarify something or point out that one of my classmates had a question.

It wasn’t long before my mind wandered back to my own personal experience. Dante had been sent that day in the men’s room to collect Conrad’s soul and transport it back to Hell. Since I now knew they only sent Reapers when they expected a runner, how had they known that Conrad would try to back out of his Deal? Did they conduct a prophet-and-loss analysis before assigning missions so the Reapers knew exactly what to expect? How had they not seen my wrongful reapage? Were the seers ever wrong? Should you not believe everything you’re foretold?

And thanks to me—or at least Conrad’s manipulation and me falling for it—Dante had been busted back to teacher’s aide. The demotion, temporary or not, must really rankle, especially if it came with a cut in the ol’ points paycheck. And now he was supporting me, as well. He refused all my offers to spend any of my twenty-eight little points. I hoped he hadn’t been fined on top of it. I felt guilty about my part in his demotion. Even if it hadn’t been my time to die, I’d still been the one to leap in front of the scythe, defending that skegging bastard, Conrad. And then I got mad all over and had to rein my temper back in again.

Sometimes dull, sometimes fascinating and almost always obscure, at least the course material wasn’t hard. It was a lot of memory work and common sense, just like any course. Although I could see a lot more practical applications for what I was learning in Reaper Academy than in some of the courses I’d been forced to take in high school. Like physics, for instance. Who needed to study that? You either live somewhere where your feet stick to the ground consistently or you don’t.

I spent the next couple of weeks scrambling to catch up, getting to know my classmates better, liking Kali more and liking the quarterback and his geeky sycophant less.

The teacher’s pet at the front of the room turned out to be okay, if a little intense. His name was M’Kimbi and he’d had an extremely hard life in an African nation with a very short life expectancy. Don’t ask me which nation. I was a little hazy on my geography and it seemed rude to say, “So, M’Kimbi. I’ve never heard of your country, but I’m sure it’s very nice.”

After the difficult time he’d had during his most recent go-around on the Coil, M’Kimbi wasn’t too eager to return so he wasn’t taking any chances that he might get a similar incarnation next time. Interestingly, it was his people’s religion that was, of all the religions on Earth, the closest to what actually happens when you die. M’Kimbi took great pride in that fact, exhibited mostly by turning around from his front-row seat and smiling a huge, pearly smile at the rest of us every time he got a particularly difficult answer right. Especially if someone else had gotten it wrong first. It was only mildly annoying. And besides, he kept the best notes, which he was willing to share, so we forgave him. It was hard to fault someone for being enthusiastic, but we tried.