Chris Holm - The Big Reap

She must have known I’d never do it if she had.

You know the worst of it, of watching in mute horror as this madman’s blasphemous existence unfurled before me? It was experiencing the sense of smug self-satisfaction he felt. The entitlement. The bitter, petulant insistence even now that this fate which had befallen me ( him protested the part of me that held on tight to who I was, him not me but him ) was Not My Fault, Not My Doing, Not The Life of Greatness I Deserved. These feelings weren’t my own, you understand, but his , overlaid atop my own revulsion at his every thought and deed.

That’s what I told myself. What I tell myself still, about that and every collection since.

But the fact is, in that moment, experiencing the sum total of your mark’s life’s arc, there’s scarcely a job where you don’t — if only for a single, horrible, illusory second — get the secondhand sense of certitude at your (their/our) incontrovertible rightness . And it’s that moment of every job that steals a little bit of who you are. Because our actions can’t all be justified, and Lord knows those of the folks I take sometimes fail to come within a country mile. But still, to a one, they’re all so goddamned certain . Something about that reaches cold hands into the core of you, into that tight-tied hidden bundle of convictions and true things that make you you , and that you’ve kept so secret and well-protected all these years, and shakes it, hard.

In that moment, you don’t know anything. You can’t know. You can’t believe. Because you know you’re just as likely to be misguided as were they.

After all, why the fuck else would you wind up with a gig as a Collector in the first place?

That head-trip’s a lot to take in on any job. And Adolf Hitler was far from any job. It didn’t leave me rattled, it left me shattered.

Annihilated.

When I finally tore free his soul, it was by accident. I’d simply crumpled to the floor with my hand still wrapped around it, and yanked it out as I fell. The swirling morass and piercing discord that was his soul’s corrupted light and song vanished like someone had flipped a switch.

I shook as if with seizure, so wracked with guilt was I when I was once more myself (or something like it, I thought, draped as I was in a strange woman’s flesh) it felt like a physical affliction. Snot and tears poured uncontrollably from me, from his lover’s face. My mouth was open in silent imitation of a scream; I think I would have wailed aloud had the horrors I’d just experienced not ripped the breath from my lungs.

For a time, I was outside myself — my new self, I corrected, my meat-self, my borrowed self — hovering above my fleshly vessel it seemed, driven half-mad by all I’d seen. I drifted in and out of consciousness for what felt like days, but by the clock must have been minutes. When I finally came around, I found myself guilt-stricken sobbing with my head on the floor, staring across its concrete sheen at the lifeless body of the man I’d been sent to kill.

I found my feet, shambled over to him and kicked him hard across the face. It didn’t help, so I kicked again, harder. That didn’t make me feel any better, either.

From somewhere a thousand miles away, I heard a voice like bourbon layered over honey. “Collector,” it said. “You’ve done well. Now we must bundle up his soul and go.”

Lilith. I ignored her, dropped to my knees and pummeled the lifeless body before me with my fists. They were delicate and ineffectual, and soon swelled with every blow, hurting me far more than it could ever hurt him.

He was gone. Dead. There was nothing more that I could take from him.

But then I heard his wife crying in the back of her own mind, forced to watch as I’d felled her beloved, and shrieking ever louder with each blow I (she/we) landed on his corpse, and I realized that wasn’t true.

I lurched toward the desk. Found the bottle with its amber pills. Dumped a handful into my hand, and tossed them into my mouth, Lilith shouting behind me all the while.

I bit down hard, chewing until my mouth was full of deadly paste that stank of bitter almonds. Then I swallowed it all down.

A stabbing pain in my gut doubled me over. I collapsed onto the surface of the desk, atop its mess of papers. Atop Hitler’s own gun.

By force of will, I made my meat-suit stand. Her vision swam. Her limbs trembled as the poison kicked in, made picking up the Walther hard, ade standing harder still. I fell to my knees, straddling the Third Reich’s dead Führer. Then, Lilith shrieking, I stuffed the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

“Guess I’ll see you both in hell,” I said.

Then I woke up, wracked with the pain of my first death experienced without the gauzy veil of blissfully numbing shock, in a barracks bunk in Guam.

“You mind a little company?”

The sun was full up by the time Lilith arrived. The sand was sun-warmed all around me, and my skin a darkening brown, but still my shivering had not abated. Just like at the flat in Berlin, I hadn’t heard her approach.

She didn’t wait for an answer, which is for the best, because there wasn’t any answer coming. Instead, she plopped down on the sand beside me in a white bikini made, it seemed, from spider-silk and happy thoughts. We sat in silence for a good long while — an hour, maybe more — our shoulders close enough to touch. Her skin was warm against my own. A small kindness, a simple comfort. In that hour, my shaking finally abated.

“Took you long enough to find me,” I said, not tearing my eyes from the horizon.

“No,” she replied, “it didn’t. As your handler, I can locate you at a moment’s notice. I simply thought it might be best to give you a little space.”

“You didn’t tell me. What it would be like. How it would feel.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I suppose I didn’t see the point.”

“You didn’t see the point ?” Hurt; incredulous.

“No, Collector, I did not. The job was yours to do whether you knew what you were in for or not, which means I would have accomplished nothing by warning you but making your task more difficult. I completed your collection, by the way, wrapped the soul and interred it as required. I’ve been assured by my superiors that the Deliverants who take responsibility for the soul once it is buried have deemed my actions acceptable — this time, at least. I suspect they’ll not prove so lenient again, which means next time the task shall fall to you and you alone.”

I considered what she’d said about warning me, considered the ramifications of knowing and not knowing. Decided reluctantly she wasn’t wrong.

“Sam,” I told her.

“What?”

“If we’re to work together, you should really call me Sam.”

“No,” she said, “I shouldn’t. Do you know why? Because I am not your friend. I am not your ally. And I am certainly not your confidante. I am your jailor. Your tormentor. I am one of many architects responsible for constructing your own personal hell, and you would do well to remember it. That is why I choose to call you by your title. To remind us both precisely where we stand. Because I assure you, if you give me half an opportunity, I will use you. Hurt you. Betray your trust. Deceive you. I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal. It’s simply that I cannot help it. It’s in my nature. It’s who I am. It’s what I have become.”

I shook my head. “I refuse to believe that.”

Lilith smiled then, sad and wan. “You’ll come around.”

“But not today,” I said, my hand finding hers, our fingers intertwining. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, but one of basic human kindness, for in that moment — and perhaps only in that moment — her beauty held no sway over me.