Trent Jamieson - Death most definite

I peer through the window. It's no longer dark. There are more people I know in there with clipboards, on mobile phones, a few are working in front of laptops. But when I say people, I mean they were people once. They're not anymore.

I've known this for some time but to see Morrigan actually working with the Stirrers still makes me shiver. Of course it makes sense. Stirrers, after all, are pure Pomps, even if they're otherworldly Pomps. It sure beats training new staff. We've been economically rationalized. Imperially screwed, as Don would have put it, a step up from royally fucked.

And here's the thing: his replacements haven't kept up their end of the bargain. We Pomps are not only easing the passage of the soul into the afterlife, we're also fighting an invasion, and Morrigan's not only sold us out, but he's sold out the whole continent.

Morrigan's pure eighties' Brisbane, never too frightened to tear down the old for the new. And I can see him getting ready to push this idea internationally as a more efficient facilitation of the pomping process. Morrigan's always been an early adopter, and the other regions' Ankous keep an eye on what he does, and, generally, take it up quickly.

I wonder how many other Schisms he's set up. These could be tripping through the world, Schism after Schism, Regional Apocalypse after Regional Apocalypse. It may explain why not a single RM has answered my calls. No region's that parochial, and the various RMs are, in most cases, happy to step in when a takeover is liable to occur.

This time it's as though the rest of the world is holding its breath, waiting to see how this plays out. Well, they don't have to wait too long, damn them all to Hell. The landscape of death and life has changed for good. I know that, but I'm after some payback.

The door before me no longer emotes any of that odd sense of knowingness. It's just a door. There's no hunger there, or maybe my own hungers are matching it, somehow canceling it out. Maybe I just don't care anymore.

I pull out my pistol, release the safety-yeah, I'm learning-and then insert Mr. D's key in the lock.

The door opens. I step through it.

The first Stirrer I see is Mom. She's standing there by the front desk. I grab her with one bloody hand and the Stirrer evacuates her flesh. Her eyes widen and her body drops with a soft sigh. I've no time to lay it down gently. Though it hurts me deeply, I let it fall.

There are so many Stirrers in here. They're a dull scratching behind my eyes, an infection of all my senses. My only hope is that Mr. D's peculiar key is doing what he promised and dulling my presence to them.

I sprint down the hallway past a half dozen Stirrers. There's one at the desk, my Aunt Gloria, Tim's mother. That almost stops me in my tracks, but only for a moment. I hope Tim's somewhere ahead of me, and that he's unharmed. If he isn't, I've failed her.

Aunt Gloria's body doesn't notice me until I've leaped over the tabletop and grabbed her arm with my bloody fingers. It's another hurtful but final stall. Aunt Gloria's body slides from her chair.

The elevator door opens. It's empty. Stirrers are coming down the hallway after me.

I jab the button for the eighth floor. If Morrigan is anywhere it will be there. The door shuts and up I go.

The elevator door pings open. My cousin Jack sees me and his eyes widen. He comes at me with a ring binder. I dispatch Jack quickly.

"Could you please stop neutralizing my staff?" Morrigan asks. He's standing at his desk, his fingers resting on a glass paperweight of the world. He picks it up and puts it down. My gun is trained on him.

"Don't listen to the bastard," says a familiar voice from a corner of the office.

Tim's alive! I look over at him. He looks a little disheveled but is otherwise all right, even if he is tied down to a chair. I see where Morrigan has marked him with a brace. He's proofed against the Stirrers. That's a relief.

"You OK?"

He nods his head. "Better than expected."

"My staff haven't harmed him," says Morrigan.

"Your staff? These are Stirrers. They don't work for you." I glare at him.

"You're wrong there, Steven. We have an agreement, and it is to our mutual benefit. I don't think you understand how powerful I've become."

"Powerful or not, you can't trust them, surely?"

"It's not about trust," Morrigan says. "They do exactly what I tell them to do. They are under the strictest controls. My controls. You see, there's always a problem when you try to fuse an organic process with a bureaucratic one, Steven. Everything is open to corruption, but nothing more so when there is an ill fit, when two separate processes collide."

"Tell me about it," I say. "People start getting murdered in their beds. Friends turn on friends and family. It's definitely a flawed system. You should just kill everyone, then everything's smooth and simple."

Morrigan ignores me. "But I've managed it. Efficiencies will be improved. The Stirrers are much better than human Pomps. You keep them under enough control and everything works well."

"So what you're saying is that death works best without the living to screw it up?"

Morrigan nods his head. "All those noisy rituals, all those dumb beliefs drawing us away from the truth, and shaping the Underworld until it's a mess. You've been there, Steve. You can't tell me it works."

The truth is I can't, because if it had, I'd still be back there, drawn into the One Tree. "So, it has some problems," I say.

"Problems, Jesus!" Morrigan hisses. "I'm steering us toward uniformity here. My region will be like no other, and then the others will slip into line. There will be new efficiencies."

"You're trying to control Stirrers here. They don't care about your efficiencies."

"Poppycock," Morrigan says. "Total bullshit. You want to know what I did? I dragged Mortmax Industries up by the bootstraps. Turned it from a small family business into a well-oiled machine. I may have been born into pomping, Steven, but I chose this path. I didn't just drift around, expecting everything to fall in my lap.

"Have you ever worked a proper day's work in your life, Steven? Have you ever sat there, planning, setting out the future?"

We both know the answer to that, and there's a small part of me that's blaming him. It's not like he ever encouraged me to apply myself. "But I also never planned on killing everyone, never decided that the way forward was fucking contingent on slaughtering my friends."

Morrigan jabs a finger in my face. "We work for the Orcus! The way forward was always going to involve death. You're not a child, stop acting like one."

I step back. "Yeah, then what about the Stirrers on George Sreet? The Orcus would never allow that. Remember what this job is about?"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Morrigan says, but he doesn't seem as certain as he did. And he's shuddering, the bastard is as worn out by all the pomping as I am. And that shouldn't be happening if the Stirrers were actually helping him and not just waiting to devour Australia.

"I wish I didn't. I've pomped a hundred people today. All you've done is remove the people who held back the Stirrers. But it isn't too late. We can stop this. God knows it'll probably kill us, but we'd be halting a Regional Apocalypse."

Another Stirrer comes near enough for me to touch and I do. It takes the breath from me. Every time I do this, my heart tears in my chest. "You know it's true, Morrigan. We can do this. The Stirrers are older than life itself, and they want this universe for themselves. And you've let them in. You've opened the door wide and I don't even know if we can close it now."

"Steven, the moment I killed Mr. D, I put into motion something that can't be stopped. And I don't want it to."