Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,16

his face as he joined him in peering over the side. “My name is Ian,” he repeated. “What’s yours?”

“Michael.”

“Nice to meet you Michael. Want to go for that drink now?”

4

Michael cut a sullen figure as he sombrely trudged towards the centre of town. He took the route that led from its top to its centre, a twisting road that cut down a steep hill and was boarded by a line of poorly maintained houses and hollowed-out shops and businesses.

He lifted his head to acknowledge the people he passed. A part time prostitute; a full time drug addict. A kid without a future; a mother without a care.

Further down he saw his old friend Del walking towards him. He had his arm snaked over the shoulders of an attractive, intelligent looking woman. They were both smiling, happy with each other’s company, as they strode up the sloping pavement.

He hadn’t seen his old friend for years and in that time he had aged, but he had aged well. He was still a good looking man; his youthful sprite had been replaced with wizened handsomeness. The years had treated him well.

He didn’t live in Brittleside and wasn’t on Michael’s radar. He had moved to a better place to live a better life and he had someone to live that life with.

Michael passed them with a glance and a longing smile, allowing it to linger for longer than he intended. Del gave him a nod in return, a brief and friendly recognition to acknowledge a stranger. He didn’t see the friend he had spent most of his youth with, he didn’t see the spirited young man who had nearly gotten him killed on a number of occasions and yet loved him like a brother, he saw a stranger, a random, insignificant nobody.

When he brushed past Michael the sullen reaper released a drawn-out sigh, allowing the memories that had rapidly reformed at the sight of his old friend to fade into his breath and disperse.

****

The main street that snaked through the centre of Brittleside was a boarded up shadow of its former self, or so Michael had been told many times. It was how he had always known it to be: rundown, empty, grimy and dilapidated. He didn’t doubt that at one time the buildings had been open and the street had thrived with life and activity, but the only difference between now and thirty years ago were an extra board or two.

He checked his timer anxiously. He was late. He was rarely late, but when he was it didn’t usually matter, the dead had nowhere to go, and they couldn’t go anywhere when he wasn’t around to guide them. There was nothing stopping him from going home and leaving a spirit of the recently deceased to wander aimlessly around his own place of death, and it had been known to happen to far more experienced reapers than Michael, but the people at the top, whoever they were, wouldn’t be impressed. He needed to make as many good impressions as he could, otherwise he’d be the one stuck patrolling those streets, left to wonder aimlessly around the spot where he allowed his eternal soul to die the night he agreed to immortality.

He picked up his pace when he saw the entrance to the park. A night-time rain and a light morning shower had sprinkled the grass with tips of dew that spat at the bottom of his jeans as he walked, soaking them by the time he reached his destination.

He saw the body first. The man had been shot a dozen times, his wounds filled with drying blood which had painted the moist grass green underneath his thick figure.

He checked his timer again. On it were the vague details of every death he had to deal with in the coming days, every soul that was about to commit itself to the afterlife. The rest, the semantics of death, came through an intuition that coursed through Michael like a second soul. There were exceptions of course, only on rare occasions could he anticipate murder, where the free will of others was involved, and that rarity faded to an impossibility when the hand of immortals, or non-humans, played a part.

In thirty years he had been to less than fifty murders, and he had only foreseen two of them: a drug deal turned violent and a drunken domestic which had resulted in a beaten wife stabbing her abusive husband. For the others, the timer flashed him a warning