Death, Murder, and Zombies

I stopped dead in my tracks. The wrongness hit me. Something was coming. Something bad.

I’d felt this before, this sense that the cosmic order was about to get royally fucked. Tonight it pressed harder than usual, like a migraine building behind my eyes.

I stood on cracked pavement in the worst part of the city, surrounded by condemned buildings and broken glass. The wrongness didn’t come from any one place. It was everywhere. A sour note in a symphony I’d been conducting for millennia.

Something is coming, I thought. These feelings were never wrong. Just annoyingly vague.

A siren wailed in the distance. Ambulance. Someone was dying. I had work to do. I pushed the wrongness to the back of my mind and headed toward my destination: a crack house that had been killing people for the better part of a decade.

The building leaned against its neighbor like a drunk needing support. Graffiti covered every surface in layers. Gang tags, love notes, and curses in four languages competed for space on walls that had once been yellow.

I walked through the front door without opening it. Physical barriers stopped mattering to me long ago. The living locked themselves in. Death walked through walls.

The smell hit me first. Sweet approaching death mixed with burned chemicals and human waste. Somewhere in this building, a soul was getting ready to leave, and I felt the familiar pull of duty.

The first floor was a maze of collapsed walls and improvised rooms. Bodies lay scattered on stained mattresses and bare concrete. Some breathed in shallow gasps. Others had fled into chemical oblivion, their minds escaped to whatever landscapes their drugs provided.

None of these were ready for me yet. I could sense the difference. These souls still clung to their flesh, unwilling to let go despite the poison in their veins. They would die eventually. But not today.

I stood in the hallway. I’d been here long enough for the drug in her arm to do its work. The hunger said it had been too long. The part of me that was still Karl said I should go.

I climbed the stairs. The wood sagged under weight it was never meant to bear. On the second floor the dying was more advanced. Six souls hovered at the threshold, their connections to life growing weaker by the hour.

But the pull I felt came from higher up.

The third floor had been chopped into smaller rooms, each one a private hell where addiction played its final hand. I followed the sensation to a corner room where a young woman lay on a mattress that had seen better decades.

Tina Morrison. Seventeen years old, though her body looked twice that. Born to a mother who sold food stamps for crack and a father whose name appeared on no documents. On the streets since thirteen, trading pieces of herself for escape from a world that never wanted her.

Now the bill was coming due.

I settled beside her, invisible to any living witness. Her breathing had turned irregular, each breath requiring more effort than the last. Her heart fought against the poison she’d shot into her arm. Pure heroin, purer than her tolerance could handle.

This part never got old. Every death was unique, every soul’s departure a singular moment. Some fought to the end, raging against the inevitable. Others welcomed me like an old friend. Most just accepted what they’d always known was coming.

Tina’s eyes fluttered open, pupils pinpoints despite the dim light. For a moment I wondered if she might sense my presence, as a rare few could. But her gaze fixed on something beyond the stained ceiling, maybe seeing the life she might have lived.

Her heart stuttered, paused, then beat once more like an engine running on fumes. Then it stopped.

I waited. Death wasn’t a single moment but a process. The brain would keep trying for several more minutes, firing neurons in chaotic patterns as oxygen ran out.

When the last electrical impulse faded and true death claimed her, I reached into her chest. My hand passed through skin and bone like mist, searching for the essence that had animated this collection of matter for seventeen hard years.

There. Nestled between liver and spine, a sphere of light no bigger than a pearl, pulsing with its own glow. Tina’s soul, ready to continue its journey.

As I extracted her essence, she appeared beside her abandoned body. Not as the ravaged girl who’d just died, but as the bright spirit she’d been beneath all the damage.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, her voice rough despite being freed from her damaged throat.

A friend. I’m here to help you move on.

“Am I dead? Shit, I’m dead, ain’t I?”

Your body is. You’re not. You can never truly die, Tina. You’re more than flesh and bone. Now it’s time to burn bright again.

She looked down at her corpse with relief. “Damn thing hurt so bad.”

I know. But that hurt stays with the body you’re leaving. Where you’re going, there’s no pain.

I opened the small pouch hanging from my belt, woven from space itself, capable of holding infinite souls in comfort. You ready for this?

Tina nodded and let herself be drawn into the pouch, where she would rest until Fate could weave her into a new life, new body, new chances to learn and love.

As I sealed the pouch, the wrongness hit me again, stronger than before. I paused in the doorway and expanded my senses, trying to find the source.

Somewhere in this city, maybe right now, choices were being made that would ripple through time. Someone was planning something that would threaten everything I’d spent eternity maintaining.