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Most of the time, Mason enjoyed hanging out at Der Waffle Haus with his fellow Reapers.There was a lot to be said for good food, a cozy atmosphere, and people who understood the demands of your screwed-up job.
But sometimes, he needed company that was less, well, demanding. And in those instances, sampling the merchandise from Hannes was perfect.
Hannes was a chatty dealer, who didn’t mind in the least if the customers hung around his flat to smoke a joint and talk rot for an hour or so. Mason had bought from him enough times that by now he recognised most of the recurring faces, though he wasn’t always so sure of the names.
Like this one kid. Scrawny, high school age, with a German sounding name like Karl or Kurt or something similar. The kind of name that would work well if he ever got a job at Der Waffle Haus.
Not that he seemed to need a job – by some comments Hannes had made, the lad was richer than a Rockefeller, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. Well into the habit already, but still wet behind the ears in some ways, listening wide-eyed to Hannes’ rambles.
“Pot’s safe as houses,” Hannes said, “but with harder stuff, you’ve got to be careful. You have to know what you’re dealing with. It’s why I never do cocaine anymore. People add all sort of shit to it. Even if you think you know your dealer, you think he’s an honest man - before you know it he’s hard on cash and bam! There’s laundry detergent in your cocaine, and you shouldn’t snort that shit. That will mess you up. You just can’t trust people.” He shook his head mournfully. “Which is too bad, because freebasing high quality cocaine, whoo! That’s the best high in the world.”
Mason took a deep drag of his joint. “The best high in the world,” he declared, “is trepanation. You take a drill, put it to your head, drill just a tiny little hole... but it leaves the mind wide open.”
They both stared at him.
“Drill a hole in your head!?” the K kid said.
“Sounds like a surefire way to end up dead,” said Hannes.
Mason chuckled weakly. “Yeah. Sounds like.”
There was a pounding on the door, and all three of them hurriedly put out their joints, looking for a place to hide them.
“Mason!” George’s voice came through the door, harder than the steel it was made of. “Mason, ETD is in half an hour and we’ve got to be there on time! If you don’t hurry, you’re going to mess up the mission!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” Mason shouted. He put the rest of the weed he’d bought in his pocket, and stood up, giving Hannes an apologetic shrug. “Thanks, man. Have to run. See you soon, yeah?”
Hannes raised his hand in a lazy salute.
The K kid had gone pale around the gills.
“Shit, the mission,” he said. “I gotta go too. Sorry. Bye!”
And so both of them left at the same time, the K kid running off like his life depended on it.
George watched him go, frowning. “Jesus. He looks my sister Reggie’s age. Is he even old enough for a place like this?”
“Is anyone?” Mason asked. He fished his wrinkled post-it note out from his back pocket. “Come on, then. Central Station it is. Let’s find out who’s slated to die.”
Seeing a person in an entirely new context could make them hard to recognize. For instance, if you’d been smoking weed with some kid twenty minutes ago, and the next time you saw them they were wearing spandex and a domino mask, with some juvenile superhero team trying to take down a giant robot with laser guns, you probably wouldn’t recognize them.
Mason could tell that there was something familiar about the boy who stumbled in long after the others, out of breath, but it was only when the black girl turned around and snapped, “What the hell, Klaus?” that the penny dropped.
“Oh, shit!” he breathed, and hastily double-checked his note. B.H. Turning to George, he asked, “What are the initials on yours?”
“A.F.”
“Okay, good. Good.” Of course, it could still be a nickname. He stood up, ignoring the gunfire and the fluorescent lights crashing to the floor, and made his way over to the boy. “Hey, kid.”
Klaus’s mouth went slack, and his eyes widened behind the mask. “What are you doing here?”
“Klaus, that’s your full name, yeah?” Mason asked. “Not short for anything?”
“No. Sit back down, you’re going to get shot!”
“Good,” Mason said, focusing on the task at hand. “What about her name?”
“What? Allison.”
That meant she could be George’s mission. Not so good. “Last name?”
“Hargreeves. We’re all Hargreeves.”
A laser blast fired off in their direction, and Klaus pushed Mason aside so it wouldn’t hit him. Which in turn meant that he was in direct range of the next one. Mason hurried to pull Klaus down to the floor alongside him. Sure, the kid wasn’t dying today, but getting shot with lasers was no fun either way.
Hargreeves meant the girl was off George’s hook – but one of the other boys could still be on Mason’s.
“What about the rest of them?” he asked, nodding towards the teenagers gathering around the robot.
“What’s wrong with you!? We don’t have time for introductions!”
“Humour me.”
Klaus sighed. “Luther, Diego, and Ben. Happy?”
His voice had softened at the name Ben, and Mason watched the clearly terrified boy standing between his two burlier brothers, fists clenched as he prepared himself to do... something.
Well, shit.
“Sorry,” Mason said, patting Klaus on the shoulder as he stood up.
The one called Luther pounded away at the robot with his fists, which left actual dents in the metal, but soon he was thrown across the room. Diego threw random items, each and every one hitting its target, but without much effect. Allison shouted orders to the bystanders, who were evacuating in a much more orderly fashion than could be expected. And Ben...
“That’s new,” Mason murmured, wondering if there had been something off about that joint he’d smoked.
Well, either way, the job had to be done. He ducked under a tentacle, evaded another laser beam, and brushed his hand against young Ben’s neck as he passed by.
There was a cold, electrical shock as he took the soul, unlike anything he’d ever felt before.
“Fuck!” he hissed, holding his injured hand as he stared at the scene taking place in front of him. The pain subsided after a minute or so, leaving a faint tingling behind.
Even more tentacles were coming out of the boy now, wrapping themselves around the robot and crunching its limbs to pieces. A head with long, dripping jaws shot forth and bit off the giant metal head.
Ben screamed, a long, drawn-out wail of agony. Further down the hall, there was another scream, though that one was cut off almost as soon as it began.
The beasts were tearing the robot apart with slow, deliberate motions like they were revelling in the act. And that wasn’t the only thing being torn apart. After forty years of Reaper work, Mason had seen pretty much everything, but even so, he winced as the hole in Ben’s body widened and cracked, flesh and bone yielding in its way.
Robot and boy both fell to the floor as the monsters grew and spread, filling out the room. Even pressed to the wall, Mason could feel the air draft from the flailing tentacles.
And then, like dust being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, they vanished, leaving behind a pile of metal junk, and a tattered little corpse.
“Jesus,” said the soul now standing beside Mason. “There have never been so many before.”
“That’s quite a party trick you had there,” Mason said. “Too bad about the ending. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Wait.” Ben stepped closer to his body, or what was left of it. “That’s me?”
“Afraid so. Least you had the good sense not to let your soul hang onto those wounds, like some do. Would make it pretty hard to move around.”
The other kids were running up to them now, screaming Ben’s name, so Mason withdrew a little. It was never a good idea to intrude on grieving friends.
The girl, Allison, was re-entering the room, dragging the limp body of some bloke in a funky-looking helmet. His head under the helmet was badly burned and still smoking. That’d be A.F. then. Seemed he’d been the one to control the robot, in which case Mason wasn’t the slightest bit sorry for him.
Ben was another matter. He stood beside the mourners, looking bewildered, and when Mason waved at him again, he slowly came over.
“What do I do?” Ben asked. “I can’t be dead! How do I...?
“Sooner or later, some kind of afterlife shows up,” Mason said. “You’ll know it when you see it. When that happens, you just walk towards it, and you’re all settled.”
“But what about my family? I need to get back to them! I need to....”
“Look at that body,” Mason said, with experienced patience. “It’s done. You wouldn’t want to go back inside, would you?”
“But I can’t just leave. I....” He turned back towards the others. “Klaus? Klaus!”
“He can’t hear you,” Mason started to say, but Klaus was actually looking up, wild eyes focusing straight on Ben, and then turning to Mason.
“You!” Klaus roared, lunging at Mason. He was surprisingly strong for his size. “You killed him! You killed my brother!”
“I did not!” Mason protested.
“He really didn’t,” Ben said, trying to tug at Klaus’s sleeve, though of course that failed.
“I saw you! You touched him, before it happened, you....” Klaus’s voice cracked.
“What are you talking about?” the boy called Luther asked, sitting on the floor next to Ben’s body, tears streaming down his face. “It was the beasts. We all saw what happened.”
“I don’t need you telling me what’s what! You pushed him into it! You’re always pushing, pushing all of us!”
“Oh, Jesus,” Mason muttered. He grabbed Klaus’s arm and pulled him out onto one of the platforms. Ben came along, spectral hands in his pockets and a troubled expression on his face, but much calmer than his brother. “Listen to me. I didn’t kill anyone. I took the soul from his body before he died, that’s all.”
“Why would you do that!?”
“So he wouldn’t be in it when that happened!”
“Thank you,” Ben said quietly.
“You’re welcome. I’m a grim reaper. It’s what we do. We don’t kill people, we don’t decide who dies or not, we just take the souls and lead them into the afterlife.”
“No,” Klaus protested. “I know you. I was getting high with you like, half an hour ago. You’re just some British pothead.”
“You were getting high before you got here?” Ben asked, and then his frown shifted from reproachful to puzzled. “Wait. Then how can you....”
Klaus frowned too. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t be able to.”
“Able to what?” Mason asked.
“See him.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!”
“No, I can see ghosts. I can always see ghosts, but not when I’m high. Usually.”
A medium, then. That was just peachy.
At the end of a platform, slowly and silently approaching the station, came a train surrounded by a faint orange glow.
“I think that’s your ride,” Mason told Ben.
Ben looked at the train, stunned, and then back at his brother. Uncertainty crossed his face – but then his jaw set. “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, I’m not going.”
“What the hell else are you going to do? You’re done here.”
“I know. No more superhero business. No more Dad. No more,” he shuddered, “the rest of it. Thank God for that. But I’m not leaving my brother.”
Klaus’s eyes welled up, and he swallowed hard. “I think you’ll have to.”
“No I don’t. You know I don’t. There are ghosts everywhere, you’ve told me so. Aren’t there?” he demanded from Mason.
Mason raised a hand in a helpless gesture. “Sure. It happens. Stubborn bastards who won’t leave even if we offer to help them out with their problems. But it’s a bleak existence. You don’t belong in this world anymore. You won’t even be able to interact with the living....” He hesitated. “Except, I guess you will.”
“Ben, are you sure?” Klaus asked. The tears were spilling down his face now.
“Someone’s got to look out for you.”
Steps were coming towards them from the inside, and Mason squared his shoulders, ready for another argument with whichever member of this loony family was next, but as it turned out, it was only George.
“Well, I’m done,” she said. “Good riddance, too. What an ass. What’s taking so long here?”
“He wants to be a ghost,” Mason said.
George sucked in air between her teeth. “I wouldn’t recommend it, kid.”
Ben crossed his arms. “I’m not leaving my brother here alone!”
George blinked, then gave Klaus a penetrating look and pointed at him. “Living. And yet...?”
“Medium,” Mason explained.
“Ah. Don’t I know you?” She nodded before Klaus had time to answer. “With Mason, earlier. Getting high, right?”
“See what I mean?” Ben asked. “He needs someone!”
“That’s not your job.” But she sounded sympathetic. The old softie George wasn’t buried yet.
“It’s got to be someone’s.”
They stood in silence for a while, and then George shrugged and glanced at Mason. “He’s your mission, not mine.”
“All right,” Mason said with a sigh. “I can’t force you. Go ahead.” Digging into his pocket, he found the little bag of weed and gave it to Klaus. “Sorry about all this, yeah?”
George snatched it away before Klaus’s hand had time to close. “What is wrong with you? You can’t just give weed to kids like it’s candy!”
“I’m seventeen,” Klaus said.
“Oh. Well. That makes it all right, then.” She shoved the bag deeply into her own pocket and rolled her eyes. “Jesus!”
“There’s always Hannes,” Mason said. “Though it’ll be weird as shit, seeing you there. Fucking medium.”
“Fucking reaper,” Klaus said amiably.
Ben reached out, trying in vain to touch his brother’s face in a gesture of comfort.
“Thank you,” he said to George. “Both of you. For letting me stay. Klaus, I think we should get back in there. Comfort the others.”
Klaus laughed through the tears. “I don’t know how the fuck you expect me to do that.”
“Honestly, I don’t either. But I’ve got to try.”
The two boys slowly walked back into the main hall, the train to the afterlife already fading on its track.
Mason and George watched them go.
“Nice blokes,” Mason said.
“I swear to God, Mason, if you ever see that kid buying drugs again, you’d better chase him off, or I’m going to kick your ass so hard.”
“Maybe he needs some drugs!” Mason protested. “His brother just died!”
“Idiot.” George jumped down on the train track and walked over to the other side. “Come on. I’m starving, and there’s a special on BLTs at Der Waffle Haus.”
Mason followed along. From the distance, there was a faint thumping from a train – a real one, this time.
“BLT sounds good,” he said.