Rabid Transit: A Tim Reaper Story

The Beginning

"I just don't see why Charlotte can't manage this," I grumbled as I climbed out of Detective Sargent Carol Sparks' shiny new Ford Explorer Police Interceptor. It still had new car smell and less than ten thousand on the odometer. But, you know, probably not for much longer.

That's how it works when Tim Reaper is on the case. Quick backstory, I'm a former Grim Reaper. That's right. We're real. I've been around human beings for about a century and I think I'm in my thirteenth or fourteenth host now. I'm like that time travelling shape shifter except he or she morphs into an entirely new body when the current one is damaged beyond repair. Me? I borrow the bodies of the very recently deceased.

There is nothing glamorous about me or what I do to pay the bills. I drive a beat to shit Ford Tempo from the last production year, 1994. I do odd jobs for money and oftentimes nice things get blasted, burned, rolled, and crumpled into cubes while I'm working. Rugged bad-ass things like the shiny new 375 horsepower Ford Explorer Police Interceptor? Well, you get the picture.

Sparks checked in on her radio and then stepped out of the SUV with what appeared to be a two-foot-long mace cleverly disguised as a flashlight in her right hand. She closed the door and turned to face me with the most serious 'you can't really be serious' look on her face.

"She's eight, Reaper." Sparks said with a hint of sharpness in her voice. "She's a little girl."

"Um, hello ... she's God?" I replied channeling my best 1980's valley girl. "She can blink galaxies into existence. She sees and knows everything and all."

"And she's also a child. She experiences the world as a child, and it doesn't bloody matter that He or It or whatever you want to call the supreme being's powers live inside her now. It's hard enough being a kid these days and our Charlotte is the Living God."

Sparks was pretty much bang on. The kid was a living vessel for a portion of His grace and power. Yep, God partitioned Himself due to a heavenly uprising and inserted a good chunk of Holy superpowers into the child – maybe someday I'll understand precisely why.

She came into my happy little world the night Sparks asked me to meet at the scene of a bloody murder: the poor kid's mother had been butchered. The killer, a boyfriend with no prior history of violence, unfortunately made skin-on-skin contact with Charlotte and that's when the killing began. He went full metal psycho and killed the kid's mother. Then Charlotte disappeared his ass from existence. Poof ... gone. Thanks for coming out.

Moral of the story: when you're a storage battery for a Divine Being, mere mortals shouldn't touch you, or they will lose their shit and become homicidal maniacs.

And while I was exploring the crime scene with Sparks, a social worker demon thing killed two cops and then went after Charlotte. Sparks and I killed the monster and we ran after that. Everything came to a head on Devil's Island. God (aka The Man with the Big White Beard™) wound up getting his sorry ass killed because my ex-hooker now deceased and then promoted to angel girlfriend ran a Holy spear into his gullet.

All His Holy power flew into the kid and she became God.

Oh, and She talks to me with two versions of herself. One in the here and now, and one from the future when she's all grown up.

There.

You're all caught up now. Charlotte is with me. I'm her guardian or mentor or Jedi Master or messed up Jiminy Cricket. Something along those lines.

Basically, my life is complicated.

I heaved a sigh and shrugged.

"Yes, you're right. I get it."