A week later I couldn’t find my keys, and I knew it was starting. It’s a simple enough thing, to lose your keys, but I recognized the signs, and I knew that the sand was slipping away from the hourglass. Short-term memories went first, but even the long-term memories would disappear if I waited too long. I felt like Merrill sometimes, now and then forgetting even who I was but remembering, out of nowhere, some ancient event or person I hadn’t thought of in centuries. I had long ago forgotten my original self—anything I had left was cobbled together from the few memories that remained, an ever-shifting set of touchstones and anchor points that was all I had left of a real identity.
When I found the keys, I pulled my lanyard from the side-table drawer and clipped them to my belt. I made myself a lunch to take to work, sealing it carefully in a plastic container, and when I opened my bag to put it in, I saw another plastic container already sitting there, not thirty minutes old. I put a note on the second lunch, explaining its existence to my future self, and left for work. I said hello to Ted, and he told me his name was Jacob, that Ted had quit two years ago, and I apologized for the slip.
“Of course. I remember.”
I’d chosen this city for its size: big enough to have a steady flow of the dead, but small enough that most of those bodies came from natural causes. I’ve died of heart disease more times than I can count. The death rate in our county is around 10,000 per year, which is just over 27 per day; about half of those are in the city itself, shared between two dozen morgues and mortuaries, which gives mine a new body every five or six days on average. We’d had one the day before, but I’d chosen to wait. I wasn’t bad yet, and the woman had drowned, which is a death I try to avoid when I can. My memory always seemed to erode faster toward the end, though, and I would need to drink the very next mind that came through.
I ran through my maintenance checks on all three hearses, finding solace in the comfortable routine of reading lists and checking boxes. It was simple, the same routine every time. There was nothing to remember, so I had nothing to forget. When I finished, I sat in the office doing Sudoku, folding the little paper book in half and licking the tip of my pencil like an old man. Logic problems and strategy games are supposed to be good for memory retention, exercising your brain like a muscle, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any benefit from it. I don’t even know if the standard rules apply to my neurochemistry. I’d been doing Sudoku for so many years, I doubt it would exercise my brain at all anymore, regardless; it was an action as rote as the checklist on the hearses. When the phone rang I sighed in relief, took careful notes on where to pick up the new body, and left.
Another drunk, homeless this time. They found his body next to an overpass, fifty feet or so from the nest of blankets that was probably his home. It was several degrees below freezing, and his body bore no signs of attack, so they ruled it another accidental death by exposure.
His memory told another story.
His name was Frank McClellan, and he grew up in California; we walked on the beaches as a child, barefoot and tan, but we had never liked our father and the memories of our screaming arguments burned like coals inside my skull. We’d left home at sixteen, traveling here and there around the country, reconnecting with our sister for a few years in our twenties before drifting away again. Eventually we’d fallen into drugs and prostitution, though we’d always been proud that we’d stayed away from theft and robbery. I felt his pride, and his loneliness, and the bone-aching chill that seemed to haunt him even in the summer, and then last night I watched a man approach us—his face nearly buried in a thick, black scarf—and gesture to the shadows with a wad of dollar bills. We followed him, knowing exactly what was wanted in the wordless transaction, and there in the darkness he killed us.
The killer was one of the Gifted.