Chapter Twenty Four

Each man’s death is fated from the beginning of time. - Frank Yerby

Chapter Twenty Four

Hephaistos woke to an incredibly annoying beeping sound. It was not a sound he recognized. His alarm clock, which he never set to wake him, had an actual bell in it. He didn’t own any devices, that he could recall, which beeped. Well, the microwave beeped. The microwave, however, was not nearly this annoying.

The sound seemed to be coming from the chest of drawers, where he’d left a mechanical stopwatch and a cheap ballpoint pen before going to sleep. Hep got out of bed and went to investigate.

Sitting next to the pen and stopwatch were a clipboard with a stack of checklists, and a cellphone. The cellphone’s screen was flashing frantically, and the phone continued beeping at him. Hep picked the phone up and pushed one of the buttons to see if it would make the beeping stop.

It did. The screen displayed a name (Marcus Jangleplatz), an address (22 Mozartstrasse, Berlin) and a time (three minutes from now).

“Oh, shit,” Hep said. He grabbed the stopwatch, pen and clipboard, and stuffed the phone into the pocket of his pajama pants. He vanished from his room.

#

Marcus Jangleplatz’s death was supposed to occur as he napped, when he would be overcome by carbon monoxide from a fault with the pilot light in his stove. This, however, was not to work out as planned.

Hep’s had figured that with the duties of Death, he would be able to travel by thought without the world-ending headaches. He was entirely incorrect.

There was a loud crash as Hep stumbled over Marcus’s coffee table and fell to the floor. “Son of a bitch, that hurts!”

Marcus awoke to find a stranger in what looked like pajama pants and an Iron Maiden t-shirt laying on his floor groaning. He decided that sometimes the better part of valor is running like Hell when a strangely dressed man you don’t know is stumbling around your apartment.

“Oh my head,” Hep moaned, then “Aw, shit, where did he go?”

Hep looked at the checklist, and saw that Marcus was supposed to die in one minute and thirty seconds, while napping on the couch. He heard a door slam on the street below, and went to the window in time to see Marcus running away from the apartment.

“I guess he’s not going to die while sleeping, then,” Hep said. He thought for a moment, and tried to decide what to do. He couldn’t chase Marcus; running and Hephaistos had never been compatible. He couldn’t really wait around for him to come back. Chances were he’d be back with friends, or a police officer, and it might be difficult to explain how he was there to collect Marcus’s soul, and that if Marcus would just come along with him, everything would be great.

And now he was stuck in Berlin.

The phone in his pocket beeped again. He took it out and saw that he was due in Oklahoma in a minute and a half.

“Well, shit,” Hep said, and vanished again. He reappeared on a farm in Oklahoma where one Jay Pearson was to have a tragic accident involving a John Deere combine harvester and a drunken cousin. Hep’s headache was, if anything, worse than the previous one.

Hep’s appearance in the field was enough to distract Jay from what he’d been doing. This turned out to be a good thing for Jay, because with his attention no longer on the job at hand, he was able to easily avoid the combine which his cousin had driven just a little too close to him.

“Hey, fucknut! Watch where you’re driving that thing!” Jay shouted at his cousin. His cousin shrugged and gave him a thumbs up.

“I’ll shove that thumb up your ass once you’re out of that tractor,” Jay said under his breath, then turned to look at Hep. “Hey, buddy, where the hell did you come from? I should have seen you coming ten minutes ago.”

He gestured at the wide open acres of land around them.

“Are you dead already?” Hep asked Jay.

“What are you talking about? Nobody’s died for, what, a year now? Are you lost and crazy?”

Hep looked around. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly deadly in the vicinity, and he was reasonably sure that he was not supposed to directly cause someone’s death. He was just supposed to be there to make sure they met their fate and then he would bring their souls to The Gate.

Jay was looking at him, expecting an answer of some sort. Hep looked back at him, and took a breath to speak.

“Aw, fuck it. Have a nice day,” he said, and vanished again.

Jay decided that maybe he needed to get out of the sun for a while. He waved down his cousin and hitched a ride back to the house on the combine.

Hep arrived back in his bed room with what must have been the single worst headache he’d ever experienced. He gasped for air and felt as though his eyes were trying to burst free from their confinement. There was a tiny ringing sound somewhere deep inside his head, getting louder and pulsing with his heartbeat. The invisible clamp squeezing his temples tightened and Hep took several lurching steps and fell on to his bed, where he stayed for the next hour.

During that time, the phone beeped at him constantly. At one point, he grabbed it and threw it at the wall with all of his might, hoping to destroy it. Instead, the phone punched a hole in the drywall, then came flying back and landed on the nightstand next to him.

“Oh, man,” Hep said.

Once his headache had subsided, he picked up the phone and began to fiddle with it. He found a menu option which said “notification settings.” He selected it, and discovered he could set the phone to alert him far in advance of the next death. He set it to warn him 6 hours beforehand.

After that, Hep decided that he was going to have to just make a difference locally to start with. Global change was going to be out of his reach, since it seemed he only took over Death’s responsibilities, with none of her gifts. Death was able to arrive silently at the scene and wait unnoticed in the shadows until the moment of death arrived. Hep, unfortunately, was not able to arrive silently, or unobtrusively. He stood out. Everywhere.

The phone beeped at him. In six hours, some lady in Prague was supposed to die.

“Well, I guess it’s going to be her lucky day today,” Hep said, and went to see about making some breakfast.

He got the last of the bacon out of the fridge and turned on the stove. The skillet he used for making bacon was in the drying rack next to the sink, so he grabbed that and put it on the stove. Then while the skillet was heating up, he set about making coffee.

The phone beeped at him. Some guy in Denmark was fated to be crushed by a falling pallet of bricks. Looks like he’s going to miraculously survive, Hep thought.

He put the bacon on and listened to it sizzle. The phone beeped again. Good grief, how does Death ever get anything done? Hep wondered. According to the phone a man in Canada was going to be attacked by a moose and killed.

Hep put the phone back in his pocket and got the english muffins out of the fridge. He put them in the toaster and turned the bacon as he waited for them to pop up.

The phone beeped again. Hep looked at it. Alaska. He put the phone back in his pocket.

The bacon was done, and he took it off the skillet and set it on a paper towel to soak up the extra grease. His english muffins popped up in the toaster, so he took them out, buttered them, then put them on a plate with the bacon. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took his coffee and plate to the table.

The phone beeped again. This one was in London, England.

The bacon was done perfectly, even if Hep was judging his own work. In his distraction, however, he’d made the coffee disgustingly weak. He took a bite of the english muffin, and chewed.

The phone started beeping at him. This time, however, the death was in Gallup, New Mexico. Hep did a little mental math and realized that he could get there in time, fairly easily, by motorcycle if he left as soon as possible.

He crunched the rest of his bacon, and then went to see if Scroat was interested in riding out to Gallup with him.

Scroat was extremely annoyed to have been woken before dawn. However, when Hep explained they would be riding out to Gallup, his mood changed considerably.

“Hell yeah, I’m ready to go. Give me a minute to piss and we can leave right now,” Scroat said.

Five minutes later the bikes were running and Hep and Scroat were on their way to Gallup, New Mexico to stand aside and watch a man die.