Reaper Read online

  “Very well,” the Reaper stood, raising himself above Blink. “What do I need to do, then?”

  “You’re taking this no-family thing really well; I’d like you to know that,” Blink said.

  Reaper looked away and closed his hands into fists as if to block out his emotions. “If this mission you speak of will protect my family, then I will do whatever it takes. Anything at all, if it keeps them safe, even if it means I will never see them again.”

  “You want your family. The Specter wants to reunite you with them. Why have you not left this man?” Death pleaded in panic. “Why do you not listen to me?”

  “I need you to go south to Abydos,” Blink said.

  “I do not know where that is.”

  “Just follow the Nile River. Abydos is on the west bank. When you get there, I’ll be waiting; that will be how you know you’re in the right place,” Blink said. “You’ll want to start right away.”

  “You aren’t accompanying me?” the Reaper asked.

  “No. I’ll already be there.” Blink said. “For now, I need you to leave so I can take my stuff home.”

  The Reaper left the tent with Death behind him.

  “Still think he wants to kill us?” Reaper asked Death.

  “There is more than one way to die,” Death said. “What happens if you die inside from the lack of loved ones? Will you even want to be the hero then?”

  “I guess there is only one way to find out,” Reaper stated with determination, and began to walk toward the Nile.

  The Reaper had trouble keeping track of the days as he walked. Each one seemed the same: an endless onslaught of Death telling the Reaper that he was a fool for going along with Blink’s words. The Reaper found it harder and harder to ignore him; it was as if Death’s voice was speaking to every desire that the Reaper had—his longing for food and rest even though he no longer required it; his desperation to see his wife and child.

  Death fed the Reaper with thoughts and images of everything he wanted. It was all the Reaper could do not to fall for these tricks. Each day, Death’s grip on the Reaper’s mind felt like it was getting stronger. In only a few days, the Reaper had no choice but to focus on the stinging blisters on the bottoms of his feet. The pain was the only thing keeping him grounded and in full control. Reaper made his way to Abydos with a trail of blood behind him.

  On the outskirts of the city, Reaper was met by Blink dressed in exactly the same way as he was back in Memphis, except he had a satchel with him. There was something different about his physical appearance, too: his muscle tone on his arms, chest, and abs were more solid and well-defined, though not much bigger. He also had the smallest amount of dark brown hair on his chin.

  “Reaper! Reaper!” Blink called out.

  “W—” Reaper got out.

  “Water, no problem,” Blink said. “I just can’t give you any right here, in case anybody who shouldn’t see does.”

  “No, not water. Why?” Reaper asked.

  “Why what?” Blink replied.

  “Why did I have to walk here?” Reaper asked in a less friendly tone.

  “Well, I mean…” Blink paused. “You could have taken a horse or a chariot, I suppose.”

  “Hurr!” the Reaper grumbled. He reached forward and took Blink by the throat. “What was the point? Why am I here?” He lifted Blink off the ground.

  “Wait, please,” Blink said.

  “Death thinks I should rip your head off,” Reaper said with a scowl.

  “Death?” Blink asked. “Reaper, please.”

  The Reaper set Blink back down.

  “You’re Death?”

  “He is.” Reaper pointed to his left.

  “There is nobody there, Reaper,” Blink said.

  “Why do you keep calling me Reaper? I have a name,” Reaper snapped.

  “Yeah.” Blink coughed. “And from now on, that name is Reaper. You need to understand something. You will be a hero. I’ve seen the future timelines where you have succeeded. I need you to trust me. Most of all, we need to get Death out of your head.”

  “I agree,” the Reaper said.

  “I disagree. Why does no one care what I think about all this?” Death asked.

  “After this mission, I’ll go home and check up on how to get Death out of your head,” Blink said. The Reaper nodded with a bleak expression. “Sweet. So, from the information I have, we need to go a little over forty-eight kilometers west of here. Are you tired or anything?”

  “I am well enough,” the Reaper said.

  “No, you are not,” Death said. “You need to rest and eat.”

  “I will live,” the Reaper said.

  “That’s the spirit,” Blink said. “I will go out that way with you this time. The best part of this is that I’m not an idiot, and I have secured a chariot and a horse to pull it.”

  The Reaper just hung his head low and said nothing. For a moment, things were rather awkward. “Well, let’s get a move on it, then.”

  Blink took the Reaper into the city and found the place where Blink had left the chariot. It barely had room for both of them. After roughly thirty miles of desert wasteland, Blink stopped the chariot. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a compass and a map that had coordinates written on it in red pen. The Reaper stood over by the chariot while Blink stomped around.

  “There should be a door somewhere around here,” Blink said.

  “A door to where?” the Reaper asked.

  “It’s a… uh…” Blink was rambling. “He’s, like… uh…” Finally, one stomp sounded more like rock than sand. “That’s it!”

  “He has not answered,” Death said. Blink got down on his knees and began swiping away sand from the stone door.

  “What is down there?” the Reaper asked, aggravated.

  “Whoa, calm down,” Blink said. “Do you mind helping me open this door?”

  “I want to know first.” The Reaper was getting increasingly irritated.

  “Fine! Just relax,” Blink said. “Down there should be the mummified remains of an Egyptian sorcerer who long ago convinced people that he was a god. He had abilities that led to the people of Egypt calling him the god of chaos, among other things. He goes by the name of Set.”

  “If he’s already dead, why are we going down there?” the Reaper asked.

  “In the year 1967, a team of archaeologists uncovered this hidden tomb. When Set’s sarcophagus was opened, he woke up and killed them all. He then surfaced and destroyed three cities along the Nile before he was finally stopped by a team of heroes. Three of those heroes died and we’re going to need them later,” Blink explained. “We’re going down there to save them. Change the past, protect the future, remember?” He gestured to the rectangular stone door on the ground. The Reaper bent down, taking it on one end, and Blink took it on the other side. Blink strained with every muscle, panting as he tried to move the heavy stone. When Reaper helped him with the other end, the door gave way with one effortless lift of his hand, as though it were light as paper.

  Blink set up a cable for them to lower down into the tomb. Blink went first, and Reaper followed close after him. Once they got to the bottom, Blink revealed an L.E.D. rod that illuminated much of the tomb. Reaper glared at the bright bulb. Death shared in Reaper’s distaste.

  “What is that?” the Reaper asked.

  “It’s just an ordinary lantern” Blink said. “Today it’s awesome and powerful.”

  They came to the end of the open corridor that they had lowered themselves into. There was a narrow hall that a single person could barely fit through. Blink led, as he had the glow sticks, though he would have preferred that the Reaper go first, being the more powerful of the two. In the next room, at the end of the hall, there were four rows of ten columns that lead to a wide set of stairs. Blink sweat with an array of mixed emotions. He was excited but unsure of what would happen. At the top of the stairs was an altar. The altar had a statue at each of its four corners. The statues were aroun
d ten feet tall and solid gold with eyes of red jasper. In the center of the statues, atop the altar, there was a sarcophagus—the sarcophagus of the not-so-immortal Set. Blink put his hands on the side of the cover to the sarcophagus, then looked over to the Reaper, who came up and did the same.

  “On three,” Blink said. “And be ready with that scythe.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” the Reaper asked.

  “Kill the bad guy,” Blink said, and pushed on the sarcophagus cover. More out of reflex than anything else, Reaper did the same, and the cover flew to the other side of the chamber. Set was not only mummified, but had also been dipped in gold. Blink and the Reaper looked at each other, seeing this to be a strange way of preserving the dead. “That wasn’t in my research,” Blink muttered.

  “Could he be alive in that?” the Reaper asked.

  “I guess it’s possible,” Blink said.

  “Is it?” The Reaper was surprised to hear this.

  “Trust me, in time you won’t find anything to be impossible.” Blink dug into his satchel and took out a pocket knife and a small hammer. He stuck the blade of the knife on the forehead of the gold-covered man and started chipping away. “This is stupid. I get the effort required to fight, but why do I have to work just to get the bad guy free?” He looked up at the Reaper. “Hey, you’re really strong.”

  The Reaper took the knife and hammer from Blink. With one good strike, the knife plunged in and the gold cracked. Reaper pulled the knife out, and air was sucked into the gold shell. “Back up. I’m not sure what’s about to happen.” Blink and Reaper took a few steps back.

  The gold began to melt. The eyes glowed red, and the area around them began to melt.

  The sound of tearing linen echoed around the chamber as two rotting hands burrowed through the cloth and gripped long, bony fingers on either side of the sarcophagus. Set’s disintegrating head and neck rose from the depths of his coffin, and his gaping hole of a mouth intoned something they couldn’t understand, something that sounded low and ancient.

  “Why did we wake him up?” Reaper muttered to Blink, who seemed unable to form words in response.

  Then Set’s eyes snapped to the flashlight in Blink’s hand. His mouth hardened into a harsh line, and a hiss erupted from its deaths.

  “No, it’s not dangerous! See?” Blink said, and offered it forward. But all Set saw was a man holding a strange weapon to attack him with.

  “How long has he been in there?” Reaper asked Blink.

  “Maybe a few hundred years or more,” Blink said. Set made some kind of odd gurgling sound when he heard the unfamiliar language. He stepped out of the sarcophagus, and gold dripped from his feet. He spoke something unintelligible at the Reaper and Blink. By his tone and his gestures to the sarcophagus, he was less than happy.

  Reaper approached Set, who felt threatened. As before his untimely departure from the land of the living no one had approached him without permission. Set shouted something in a long dead and forgotten language. He lifted his hands up toward Reaper. The Reaper was sent through the air, slamming into the wall. Blink got into a fighting stance, but when Set turned his gaze to Blink, he teleported away. The Reaper rushed back up the stairs at Set, who disappeared in a cloud of beetles. Reaper dove at Set as he vanished, and he fell through the swarm, hitting the cold stone ground. Set reappeared at the entrance to the chamber. He looked over his shoulder at the Reaper and Blink, then spoke something that sounded cocky. With a smile, Set turned and walked through the narrow hall.

  “We cannot let him escape,” Blink said with a massive surge of fear and urgency.

  “What will it take to stop him?” the Reaper asked.

  “Your scythe in his skull might have a good effect,” Blink said. The Reaper took out the scythe and was about to go after Set when the walls began to shake. Rocks shook, and a sandstorm filled the room.

  “How is he doing this?” the Reaper shouted.

  “He’s a sorcerer—he can pretty much do whatever he wants!” Blink shouted in response. The furthest wall in the room cracked, and the sandstorm slowly died down. There was a huge thud on the other side of the wall. “We need to leave. Where did Set go?” Suddenly, with all the force of a grenade being thrown through it, the wall exploded in a blast of crumbling stone and the dust of disintegrated bones. When the smoke cleared enough for Blink’s eyes to stop watering and his throat to stop coughing, his legs almost buckled beneath him. Towering over him, tall as an elephant, was a gargantuan black and blue scarab. “Run!”

  Reaper did not have to be told twice. Blink teleported to the bottom of the stairs and waved for Reaper to run faster. Just as the Reaper reached the base of the stairs, Blink started down the narrow hall. In the next room over, Set had been waiting for them. Set went to close in on Blink, but Blink teleported to the other side of the room once he saw the incoming attack. The Reaper, on the other hand, ran headlong into the gold staff. Reaper fell on his back, and Set stabbed him through the heart with the staff. The giant scarab started breaking down the walls of the narrow hall, Set’s head rotated toward Blink, and something that sounded like a question—Probably ‘Are you ready to die?’ Blink thought miserably to himself—poured from his mouth as he pointed one skeletal finger.

  “Get up, Reaper,” Death said. “You can do better than this—remember how you killed Asterion?”

  “You may want to turn around,” Blink said to Set, pointing at the Reaper. Set turned and saw Reaper pull the staff out of his chest. Set looked confused, and Reaper threw the staff like a spear at Set. In return, Set destroyed the staff before it could even touch him. Reaper and Set ran at one another.

  “Reaper, if you kill Set, the scarab should go away!”

  Set and the Reaper collided. Set had some kind of ruby-red magic vapor surrounding his hands. Each blow he landed on the Reaper burned the flesh away, but it healed instantly.

  “Release your rage! Cut his head off!” Death shouted. The Reaper caught Set’s wrist and crushed it in his hand. Set fell back, howling, and the scarab faded away, leaving nothing but crumbling rocks. “Finish it! He would do it to you.”

  The Reaper looked down at the pitiful waste of what had once been a powerful ruler, and something in his heart wavered. If he did as commanded, how was he any better than that monster Death? “I’ll not do this just to appease you,” he said quietly.

  Blink’s mouth was frozen open in shock, his eyes darting between Reaper and Set. “What are you doing? Kill him!”

  “Even your new ally agrees with me,” Death observed.

  Reaper shook his head. “That is what Death wants me to do.”

  Blink pushed both hands through his hair in frustration. “It’s what needs to happen! There’s no other choice, you have to—”

  “I will decide what I do,” Reaper cut him off coldly, and put away his scythe.

  The Reaper moved over to the cable, ready to leave. Blink started over to the Reaper, and Set growled, staring at his wrist. Suddenly, Set’s body began to change. His wrist healed itself, and his body was growing. He ripped out of the clothes he wore and was soon covered from head to toe with sleek black fur. His head changed the most, as his eyes were now on the top of his head and pointed. His mouth and nose changed to look like that of a dog, while his finger and toe nails grew to resemble claws. Reaper was only a few feet off the ground, hoisting one shaking hand over another up the cable while Blink paced impatiently beneath him, when a sharp, piercing yowl spiked through them both. Blink spun and caught a single glimpse of pointed fangs and murderous eyes before the jackal was upon him.

  “Reaper!” Blink shouted. Set threw Blink back, then tackled Reaper off of the cable.

  “What did I say? I said kill him,” Death muttered as Set slashed at Reaper’s face. “Why do you insist on defying me? You are nothing without me; you must know that by now.”

  The Reaper screamed and threw Set off, then jumped up and punched the jackal in a downward strike. Set let out a cry as
he fell. The Reaper ran at the downed Set, who stood and kicked Reaper into a pillar that cracked under the force. Reaper puffed his breaths and snarled a bit as ribs shifted back into place. This seemed odd to Blink, who was at the moment a simple bystander. Could Reaper get worn down? Set tossed his head back and let out a howl. Reaper yelled and the two charge one another. Set went to slam Reaper down, but the Reaper seemed at least as strong as the jackal form. The Reaper pushed Set back, who bent down to grab Reaper. The Reaper was underneath Set, right below his belly. The Reaper punched up into Set’s stomach. With a one thrust he plunged his other hand into the small hole. Set lost his balance and fell, placing Reaper’s hands deeper inside his body. Blink watched as Reaper ripped the jackal in two. Set’s body tore and splattered that entire portion of the room. The Reaper stood with one half of the jackal in each hand, breathing deeply.

  “That is what I want from you more often,” Death said imperiously, but he couldn’t hide the hint of pride in his words.

  “W-what was that?” Blink asked.

  “He is dead,” the Reaper said quickly.

  “You’re soaked in his blood.” Blink turned to his right and promptly threw up.

  “He has never seen a life be ended before,” Death said, almost laughing.

  “Why did you rip him in half?” Blink asked, spitting out some of the stomach acid still in his mouth.

  “I do not know,” the Reaper said. He dropped the two halves and looked at his bloody hands. “I just remembered my fight with a beast, and that I got stronger.”

  “You see now.” Death wagged his bony finger at Reaper. “The power of the dead is yours. You didn’t just take his strength, you took his ferocity.”

  “I do not want it.” Reaper gasped horrified. “Look at my hands.”

  “A masterpiece.”

  “Reaper, shut him down.” Blink commanded, as if he had the authority to. “We should move out.”

  Blink and the Reaper climbed back to the top to find that the chariot was gone. The horses had been frightened by the shaking and had run off.

  “I have good news and bad news,” Blink said. “The bad news is you’ll be going without any company for a little while. Good news is the heat can’t kill you, and neither can starvation.”