“How many are you going to glean?” he asked Scythe Volta, but Volta just shook his head and pointed to his ear. Too loud to hear Rowan over the chopper blades, which made the scythes’ robes flail like flags in a storm as they crossed the lawn.
Rowan did some calculations. Scythes were charged with five gleanings per week, and to the best of his knowledge, these four hadn’t taken a life in the three months that Rowan had been there. That meant they could glean about two hundred fifty today and still be within their quota. This wasn’t going to be a gleaning, it was going to be a massacre.
Rowan hesitated, falling back as the others got in. Volta noticed.
“IS THERE A PROBLEM?” Volta shouted over the deafening chop of the blades.
But even if Rowan could make himself heard, he would never be understood. This is what Goddard and his disciples did. It was how they operated. This was business as usual. Could this ever be that way for him? He thought to his latest training sessions. The ones with living targets. The feeling he had when he had rendered all but one deadish, revulsion fighting a primal sense of victory. He felt that now as he stood at the entrance to the helicopter. With each step deeper into Goddard’s world, it became harder and harder to retreat.
All four scythes were looking at him now. They were ready to go on their mission. The only thing holding them back was Rowan.
I am not one of them, he told himself. I will not be gleaning. I will only be there to observe.
He willed himself to step up into the helicopter, pulled the door closed, and they rose skyward.
“Never been up in one of these, have you?” Volta asked, misreading Rowan’s apprehension.
“No, never.”
“It’s the only way to travel,” Scythe Rand said.
“We are angels of death,” said Scythe Goddard. “It is only fitting that we swoop in from the heavens.”
They flew south, over Fulcrum City, to the suburbs beyond. All the way Rowan silently hoped the helicopter would crash—but realized what a pointless exercise that would be. Because even if it did, they’d all be revived by the weekend.
? ? ?
A helicopter landed on the main building’s rooftop heliport. It was unexpected, unannounced—which never happened. The Thunderhead piloted just about everything airborne, and even if it was an off-grid chopper, someone onboard would always announce their approach and request clearance.
This thing just dropped from the sky and onto the roof.
The closest security guard bounded up the stairs from the sixth floor and onto the roof, in time to see the scythes stepping out. Four of them—blue, green, yellow, and orange—and a boy with an apprentice armband.
The guard stood there slackjawed, unsure what to do. He thought to call this in to the main office, but realized that doing so might get him gleaned.
The female scythe, in green with witchy dark hair and a PanAsian leaning to her, approached him, grinning.
“Knock, knock,” she said.
He was too stunned to respond.
“I said, knock, knock.”
“Wh . . . who’s there?” he finally responded.
She reached into her robe, producing the most awful looking knife the man had ever seen, but her arm was grabbed by the scythe in blue before she could use it.
“Don’t waste it on him, Ayn,” he said to her.
The scythe in green put her knife away and shrugged. “Guess you’ll miss the punchline.” Then she stormed past him with the others, and down the stairs into the building.
He caught the gaze of the apprentice, who lagged a few yards behind the others.
“What should I do?” he asked the boy.
“Get out,” the boy told him. “And don’t look back.”
So the guard did what he was told. He crossed to the far stairwell, bounded all the way down, burst out of the emergency exit, and didn’t stop running until he was too far away to hear the screams.
? ? ?
“We’ll start up here on the sixth floor and work our way down,” Goddard told the others. They came out of the stairwell to see a woman waiting for the elevator. She gasped and froze.
“Boo!” said Scythe Chomsky. The woman flinched, dropping the folders she carried. Rowan knew that any of the scythes, on a whim, could have taken her out. She must have known that too, because she braced for it.
“How high is your security clearance?” Goddard asked her.
“Level one,” she told him.
“Is that good?”
She nodded, and he took her security badge. “Thank you,” he said. “You get to live.”
And he moved toward a locked door, swiping the card to gain entrance.
Rowan found himself getting lightheaded, and realized he was beginning to hyperventilate.
“I should wait here,” he told them. “I can’t glean, I should wait here.”
“No way,” said Chomsky. “You come with us.”
“But . . . but what use will I be? I’ll just be in the way.”
Then Scythe Rand kicked in the glass of an emergency case, pulled out a fire hatchet, and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Break stuff.”
“Why?”
She winked at him. “Because you can.”
? ? ?
The employees in suite 601—which took up the entire north half of the floor, had no warning. Scythe Goddard and his scythes strode to the center of activity.
“Attention!” he announced in full theatrical voice. “Attention, all! ?You have been selected for gleaning today. You are commanded to step forward and meet your demise.”
Murmurs, gasps, and cries of shock. No one stepped forward. No one ever did. Goddard nodded to Chomsky, Volta, and Rand, and the four advanced through the maze of cubicles and offices, leaving nothing living in their wake.
“I am your completion!” intoned Goddard. “I am your deliverance! I am your portal to the mysteries beyond this life!”
Blades and bullets and flames. The office was catching fire. Alarms began to blare, sprinklers gushed forth icy water from the ceiling. The doomed were caught between fire and water, and the deadly sights of four master hunters. No one stood a chance.
“I am your final word! Your omega! Your bringer of peace and rest. Embrace me!”
No one embraced him. Mostly people cowered and pleaded for mercy, but the only mercy shown was the speed at which they were dispatched.
“Yesterday you were gods. Today you are mortal. Your death is my gift to you. Accept it with grace and humility.”
So focused were the scythes that none of them noticed Rowan slipping out behind them and crossing to suite 602, where he pounded on the glass door until someone came and Rowan could warn him what was coming.
“Take the back stairs,” he told the man. “Get as many out as you can. Don’t ask questions—just go!” If the man had any doubts, they were chased away by the sounds of desperation and despair coming from just across the hall.
A few minutes later, when Goddard, Volta, and Chomsky were done with suite 601, they crossed the hall to find suite 602 empty, save for Rowan, swinging his fire hatchet at computers and desks and everything in his path, doing exactly as he was told to do.
? ? ?
The scythes moved faster than the flames—faster than the flow of workers trying to escape. Volta and Chomsky blocked two of the three stairwells. Rand made her way to the main entrance and stood like a goalie, taking out anyone trying to escape through the front doors. Goddard spouted his ritualistic litany as he moved through the panicked mob, switching his weapons as it suited him, and Rowan swung his hatchet at anything that would shatter, then secretly directed whoever he could toward the one unguarded stairwell.
It was over in less than fifteen minutes. The building was in flames, the helicopter was now hovering above, and the scythes strode out of the front entrance, like the four horsemen of the post-mortal apocalypse.
Rowan brought up the rear, dragging his hatchet on the marble, until he dropped it with a clatter.
Before them were half a dozen fire trucks and ambu-drones, and behind that hordes of survivors. Some ran when they saw the scythes come out, but just as many stayed, their fascination overcoming their terror.