Reaping Glory

Acrid powder covered the inside membranes of his throat and nose. He breathed in the raw smoke and exhaled giblets from his lungs, long held within him and not to be replenished. The figures before him were haphazardly but steadily painting the floor, slumped down in their work. He did not mind them as he went, tears filming over his eyes stinging like soft napalm.

The carpet showed his footprints as he moved aside the splintered remains of the door. The Reaping was in full swing, the stars choked out by smoke, the discordant chorus of screams and gunfire echoing block by block. Most of the buildings were still standing – it was necessary, of course, that they be left for generations to come. This great carnage would be a cleansing, a purification, a reset back to a better time. Everyone had been very patient for a very long time, but in the end they had accepted that a sustainable life, a tolerable life, was not possible with so many people.

He checked himself internally. “People” was not the right word, and had not been for some time. The things he eliminated did not meet the criteria; Indeed, his entire purpose was to create room and time for people. Thankfully his mentors had had time to spread the word – to correct the mass messaging and warn them of the limited time to rise. Thankfully he had been wise and prudent enough to listen, though the others around him had remained stubborn and thus proven their animal nature.

Animal nature was evident in most of the things he exterminated. He could look at a cluster and see how they had scurried over each other like rats trying to escape a fire. One, pinned to the wall, looked remarkably like a spider with its limbs bent at that angle. And this other, almost out the window, was so bloated that it might have been a manatee. He could find all sorts of animals.

Even animals dressing up as people. Even animals hiding behind human concepts like mercy and genetics and crime.

No crime was greater than killing truth itself, though, and that is what these had done – what the entire neighborhood had done, in fact. It was marked in crimson red on his map. He left the complex only a little worse than he found it, taking only some necessary cans. It was vital to leave most of it alone, for the people that would eventually live here. The Glory was coming, and he would stand hand-in-hand with his brothers and his sisters, those who had been wise and prudent enough to see the world as it was, and worthy to look on a new world with new eyes.

He was a river, flowing to that place and to that time, started from a meagre source and now in a roaring push against the old world. He had not been diverted and so he could not be diverted, by bullet or lie. “Artists” had been their pseudonym. Elephants with their paintbrushes, cynical and craven, twisting their words to create ambiguity and appeal to other animals. They and the rest were being brushed away, replaced by the truth. Their language had even been repurposed, set aright as a fallen candlestick from a mantle.

Another of his kind passed on the opposite side of the street. He nodded as he shuffled, dimly ignoring the notion that he did not trust himself to speak. It had been some time, and the mask interfered. Nor was his hearing unmarred by the price of his vocation. There was a ringing in him when he was not in the thick of it, and as a result he stayed in the thick of it regularly. Anything that had been done once could be done again.

—

“Stand clear for the closing doors.”

In those days great worms had tunneled beneath the Earth to allow the people and animals to get from place to place. Each was supposed to arrive at a set time, but none did. Prior there had been more of them but now one was meant to wait until movement came from the tunnel and hope that they could be flung a little closer to their destination. The subway cars were always too little for too many, but more could not be gotten since the ones who entered the caverns below the city did not pay to do so. The noxious air was made to pacify and unsettle.

The jumpers did not help matters. The young man preferred to enter the front car, as it was far enough away that there was usually standing room there, and he never failed to note the rusty brown splotches where the side met the undercarriage. The station announcement continued to recite that neighborhoods in the northeast and southeast were red zones. He steeled himself as the cars full of people passed, waiting to get through.

—

His fingers twitched in the stiff glove, jumping the rest of him awake. He came heavily off the side of the building, his right side sore from the concrete. He limped along on his sleeping leg, not realizing even that he had dozed. Often it was that those in his line of work went too far and needed more rest than they allowed for. It was good that he had slept upright; It showed that he had no need to hide, which would have instantly drawn suspicion. Still, though, there were better places to sleep. Indoors was out of the questions – either an area had been marked clean, in which case it was waiting for its permanent inhabitants, or it had not been, and to sleep indoors during the Reaping was to risk being marked as an animal. A zealous tide sweeps all boats to sea, after all.

Outdoors was better. He drifted toward trees when they were around, and he had been lucky with the fires. Even surrounded by concrete, his skin was sheltered. It was always possible that another of his kind would inadvertently sweep him along, but he had been around too many explosions and breathed in too much gunsmoke to particularly mind. He slept and worked and ate only occasionally.

His limp had improved now, the scraping of one boot against the pavement faster and faster. The rattle of his lungs resembled an engine, and he came to a building unmarred but for the wood barring the door. He picked up speed, leaping face-first through a window into a room full of activity. Guns, knives, all were possible, but the work had to be done in the face of a dozen guns. In the face of a million. And it could be, for there were a billion of his kind, stretching like sands out to Heaven. If he did not free the building, then others just like him would, and it would be home to a new race of people. He would stand in the Glory with them.

This time he was able to continue on. Judging from the smoke on the wind and the calls, this neighborhood was nearly ready. His boots carried him along a gray river, the wind slicing the gaps in his suit.

—

His feet crushed the weedgrass along the plains as he ran along. The videogame consumed most of his time lately, and he wondered at it. It was so detailed as to appear almost real when viewed from the right angle, like a matte painting behind a stage. He wondered if the plain had really been so brown, so long ago. Surely the lack of heat and the bountiful rain had kept it a little greener.

The rambling pastures were almost hypnotic as they passed him by. The sun rose and set and rose and set, predictably and harmlessly and without scorching the Earth. He could imagine it, shining on him and his friends, friends who were more like family, a great fire above and a smaller one below at night, with their company and their singing to stave off the cold.

Outside there was the voice of a preacher yelling into a megaphone. He lived on the streetcorner until he tired of it, and left, presumably to yell elsewhere. His speech was less prayer than incantation, a sort of mathematical proof of righteousness lent credence through repetition. Listening to him, he was convinced that Heaven was big enough for God and maybe one other, and then God might need to be squeezed out. But to listen for too long was hazardous to the ears and to the mind. Paying attention to the ideas would cause them to crash around with each other and with any other thoughts present in the brain, until escape or violence or a sort of numb acceptance was chosen as a recourse. If there was a thing he hated that thing, and if there was a thought he hated that thought, and if he could he would scour the entire world until it burned.

—

With a lurching thrust he managed to get the knife in. Brown sludge welled up and lazily poured down the ribbed edges of the can as he slowly tore it open and slurped up the innards. It all tasted the same, so there was nothing more to do but ingest and move on. He found that eating little kept him sharp, and made the reward of the Reaping that much sweeter. Finding the food in the houses, apartments, hospitals, and so on, was a guilty pleasure of his. He strapped the can to himself through the hole he had made, and left the tree that had been his dining table to find a place to deposit it.

The only sounds were footsteps and wheezing. He was not surprised that the animals had gone, so near to the commotion. There were still some, he was sure, but he had not seen any but rats in some time. There weren’t so many types as before. It was the animal kingdom of a child’s playset. The trees did not fruit, or maybe they did and he could not recognize it. He did see fungus, though, everywhere and all around him. He felt it give beneath his feet, and if he turned he would see it spring back up, gills fixing themselves.

Ahead they intertwined between themselves, climbing the trees like a scaffolding. They writhed around him as he walked, finally snapping him back onto the dirt. He staggered up, briefly considering his hatchet before taking out his can and lighter. The wind was heavy, but he shuffled up a tree so that the flame would not hit him.

He landed hard on his shoulder as he fell, the ground rattling him. He was only able to kick feebly, enough to roll himself over away from the inferno. He elbowed the ground to drag him from the smothering heat, the fire igniting the dry leaves and the dry fungus. The little water left in him coated the inside of the suit. The corners of his world were tinted red, and he shook from coughing more than he moved. Heat replaced the air, becoming the medium against which his whole life transpired. Some arcane need inside, awakened by the scent of meat, made him thrash around, inching further away until his grasping hands made contact with a large stalk and he heaved himself up. Then he was running again.

—

The light reflected powerfully off the windows, making it seem like daylight at nine to the many people gathered around the stage. The preacher was standing up straight, looking proudly down and spitting his hatred until the shotgun blew his leg off at the knee. His voice lost no coherence but gained in volume. The throng hummed with pleasure at the sight, buzzing a hymn as the shotgun fired once again, unleashing a crescendo of ecstasy. There was pie in the sky for the preacher, but only lead here on Earth. His carcass was dragged off the stage and another figure was shoved on.

The young man added his voice to the fifth chorus, his spirit resting with the hundreds of others on this street, all one in glorious harmony. This was the new generation, the one that would fix everything. He was the future, and so were all the others joined to him. They would sweep the Earth in a golden wave of light, and leave it gleaming and pure for those who came after. For the first time, humanity would not be beholden to the mistakes of its past. They would cleanse it and create a world where every single day was better than the one before. His voice raised to a screech. He knew in his soul that he had been born to do this.