Rabid Transit: A Tim Reaper Story

Some things best left unsaid ...

It fell on us.

A sense of dread. A primal amalgam of violent imagery. Death in all its forms. Vignettes of pain and suffering flashing before my eyes.

"This goes away, right?" Sparks said in a weak voice. "It's all too much."

I nodded. "Probably not until we deal with the entity that calls the space between subway cars its home."

The detective shook her head and straightened her back. "Be nice if I could see what the hell I was supposed to fight."

She was right.

To the observer, it might well have looked like a white man and a black woman punching and kicking at the air in some hellish display of performance art. but in that space between the cars a monstrous entity was throwing everything it had at us.

A gallery of attackers appeared before my eyes, each one a life I'd taken over the past hundred years. I punched and kicked, connecting with seemingly superhuman strength as bodies disappeared into dust each time my fists made contact. Behind me, Sparks grappled with her own demons, but we couldn't keep going like this forever.

"It's going to wear us down!" I snarled as my fist plowed into a pock-marked face wearing a shit eating grin.

"Tell me how to kill it, Reaper!"

"Damned if I know—wait!"

It came to me. The answer. Poof! Right into my head.

Because Charlotte said that we'd know what to do. I didn't even have to think about it. What I did next felt like pure instinct.

I reached into the pocket of my trousers and pulled out a penny. I flipped it over my shoulder and the moment it left my hand, the small copper disc became a fiery current of power. Sparks and I crouched down as we watched a flaming streak of light zig and zag, cutting through the living shadow with blinding speed. It made Swiss cheese of the darkness and when it was finished, the flaming disc transformed back into a shining copper penny and landed at my feet.

I picked it up and stuffed it back into my pocket.

Sparks stood before me, her jaw hanging open.

I threw her a wry smile. "Okay, before you say anything, I had no idea the penny was going to do that. I just knew I had to toss it."

The living shadow was gone. Destroyed by Holy power in the form of a penny that flew around like a psychotic flaming drone.

Sparks cocked an eyebrow. "Direct action from Charlotte. Twice now. But I can't think the residents of this place are terribly pleased about us being here."

I nodded. " We're behind enemy lines and I'm about a thousand percent sure we're not done with the bad shit for the day."

"Right," Sparks said, pulling her Glock from its holster. "And the nightmare creature probably wasn't the rabid thing, right?"

I shrugged. "That was way too easy a kill and we didn't even get our hands dirty, so, I'm going to say no."

"That's what I was thinking as well," she said as she pushed through the doors and into the next subway car. "Onto the next freak show."

I stood next to Sparks and surveyed the scene. Once again, row upon row of silent souls faced forward, each wearing the same horror expression.

"This is like playing Where's Waldo," I grumbled. " Guess we keep on moving forward until we see something that isn't a passive soul on its way to eternal damnation."

It hit me about a second after I'd completed my sentence. A blast of language, the language of my kind. The language of Reapers. It shook the car and filled the air with a presence as hard as granite and loud enough to drop both Sparks and me to our knees.

We both cupped our ears as each syllable blasted the air like artillery rounds. A guttural voice, almost feral. It lashed out with venom-laced words and sounds no human could hope to understand. The floor of the train vibrated with each word from a still unseen entity.

It spoke in a voice so powerful it rolled through my bones.

It accused me of the vilest of sacrilege against the creator.

It accused me of kidnapping God. (Like, how is that even possible?)

It.

Spoke.

Reaper.

I stood up and faced the front of the subway car. There it was. Standing before me wearing a human host, a deceased person reanimated by one of my kind. The body, like the body of Scott Richter, which was where I resided these days, was little more than a hollow shell to contain the ancient essence of my kind. A vessel filled with percussive energy, each one of us as different as the next.

It continued the verbal barrage. Clearly wasn't going to shut up unless I did something. Something I hadn't done in a long, long time.

I drew in a deep breath and opened my mouth.

Then, I let the old words flow through me.