Chapter 2
Mary-Beth Duke
Cause of Death: Struck by Vehicle
It was the third case Nora had sorted after joining S.C.Y.T.H.E.
, and she’d thought Mary-Beth’s death was an easy enough one to avoid.
The octogenarian had been on her way home from a farmers’ market when one of her freshly acquired peaches tumbled from the top of her bag onto the road.
Mary-Beth chased after it, and within seconds both were asphalt cobbler.
Nora was still under a probationary period, with her supervisor, the ever-disinterested Janice, sitting beside her at the already-cramped desk.
It wasn’t until Nora sorted the file into the “Natural Causes” pile that Janice perked up enough to tut at the new hire.
Mary-Beth’s case, she explained, belonged in “Accidental Deaths.” But to Nora, there was nothing accidental about it.
You cross the road without looking both ways and then both ways again, well, you experience the natural consequences.
Everyone knew that. Someone would have to be pretty careless to ignore the cause and effect in a situation like this. Someone like Charlie.
* * *
“You need to get in the car. Right now.”
By 8:20 a.m. Nora had crossed town at a safe but rapid pace, trudged through the heaps of rusting, tetanus-encrusted car parts on the lawn, and summoned Charlie to the peeling front door of the little clapboard house he shared with four roommates who seemed less than pleased to be woken up before noon.
Charlie, for his part, wore a crooked smile beneath a layer of grogginess.
His yellow-blond hair, brassy from years of bleach and various dyes, leapt from his head in no less than six different directions.
He ran a hand through his red-tinged goatee, currently accompanied by specks of morning stubble on his cheeks.
His white T-shirt was stretched out of shape, and his flannel pajama pants had holes in unfortunate places.
He smelled of weed and pepperoni pizza. And he was all Nora had left.
“Uh?” Charlie mustered at last.
“You. Car. Now,” Nora tried again, her relief at seeing him alive wrestling with her annoyance at his general existence.
It wasn’t just his death she needed to protect him from; by going against company protocol, she would very shortly need to protect him from an inevitable pursuit by S.C.Y.T.H.E. as well.
“So weird to actually see you here. Is this, like, a birthday thing?”
“No, Charlie,” Nora said. “This is not like a birthday thing. This is like a life-or-death thing. This is like a ‘you’re going to get hit by a car at eleven fifteen a.m. and die’ thing. Just. Please. I don’t have time to explain it right now, I just need you to trust me.”
Charlie let out a laugh that would have been a snort from anyone else. “This morning, huh? Nor, you need to cool it with the ‘everyone’s going to die all the time’ schtick, man. Or at least wait until the birds are up.”
He turned to shut the door, then added, “Oh, right. Happy birthday, butthead,” before he disappeared behind chipped sea-foam paint.
Nora stood on the porch for a moment, hands balled so tightly into fists that her fingernails left little half-moons in her palms. She could feel two and a half decades’ worth of sibling rage crawling through her like those little green army men Charlie used to play with at Bubbie’s, the ones he’d throw at her while she was drawing to get her attention.
Their plastic faces were always poised for battle. But so were her crayons.
Nora unclenched and dug a package of vitamin lozenges from the purse on her shoulder.
She loosened one and hurled it at Charlie’s window to the left of the front door, at the top of the house, the blinds shut.
She threw another and another, their taps growing louder with her increasing force.
Finally the blinds separated and Charlie poked an eye out.
Nora threw another lozenge for good measure.
Charlie reappeared at the door a moment later.
“Dude.”
“Charlie.” Nora forced her frustration down, just like she always did with Charlie, and went for a different tactic.
It was tricky. S.C.Y.T.H.E. policy meant she couldn’t share the nature of her job with anyone.
But then, S.C.Y.T.H.E. policy also strictly forbade employees from taking any documents off the premises, much less preventing an upcoming death, so one more breach wouldn’t make a difference at this point.
Besides, she was running out of time. The day shift started at nine a.m., and when none of the Collections Agents had cases on their desks, someone would visit her office and alert her boss, who would inevitably cross-reference the files on her desk with the master spreadsheet, only to find the pile one case short.
From there it was only a matter of time until S.C.Y.T.H.E.
tracked her down. She was breaking not only the most critical company rules but the very laws of life and death.
It wouldn’t be easy to get away with. Her head spun at the gravity of the situation.
“Charlie, I need you to listen to me. My job…I…” I work for a company of modern-day grim reapers, and according to Death itself, you’re slated to die today, was what Nora wanted to say.
Instead she said, “Yes, actually, this is a birthday thing. Happy birthday. We’re going away for a while. Starting right now.”
Charlie examined his sister for a long moment. They hadn’t seen each other in roughly six months, spoke rarely and had even less to say. Nora braced for a very warranted refusal, or at least some mild scrutiny, but instead Charlie’s inspection face softened into an oversized smile.
“Cool.”
“Wait, what?”
“Like a road trip or something?”
“Uh, sure,” said Nora, still catching up to the situation. “Yeah, like that. So let’s go.”
Charlie shrugged. “Sweet, let me just pack a few things. And there’s room for Jessica too, right?”
“Jessica?”
“Yeah, you’ll love her, she’s hilarious.”
Before Nora could reply, Charlie had shut the door again.
“Charlie,” Nora called through the door, banging a fist against it despite the risk of infectious slivers.
This was ridiculous. They needed to be on the road right now to avoid both S.C.Y.T.H.E.
and whatever car was going to hit Charlie, and now he was not only taking his time packing for a road trip but also apparently planning to bring his fling of the day along.
She knocked again. “Charlie! Charlie! Charl—”
The door opened again and Charlie emerged, still in his pajamas, an unzipped, half-full duffel bag over one shoulder, a cage containing a large gray parrot in his hands.
Nora blanched. “What the hell is that?”
“This is Jessica,” Charlie said, with a look that said “duh.”
“You can’t bring a—” Nora caught herself. “Right. Great. Can we go please?”
“You’re not even going to say hi to her?”
“Charlie, we don’t have time for this.”
“Nor, it’s, like, dawn, what could you possibly be in such a rush for? Come on, you’re an aunt now, won’t you at least—”
“Hi,” Nora said tightly, bending down to the cage from a safe distance. “Hi, Jessica. Nice to meet you.” Then back to Charlie, “Let’s go now, please.”
Charlie closed his eyes contemplatively and held a finger up to Nora—whether to tell her to wait or shut up she couldn’t tell.
“Fucking hell, Char—”
Charlie shoved his held-up finger directly into Nora’s face. Nora had to swallow down the urge to bite it.
After a beat, a high-pitched squawk emerged from the cage. “Hi. Hi. Fucking hell.”
Charlie burst out into his snort-laugh.
“It talks.” Nora blinked at the bird. “Perfect. Okay, can we go now?”
Charlie shrugged, but before he could open his mouth, Nora had hooked an arm under his and was hauling him and Jessica towards the car, the open road, and safety.
“So why the kidnapping?” Charlie turned in the passenger seat to face his sister as they crossed through town towards the highway.
Nora kept her eyes on the road. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how the last time we celebrated a birthday together we had an Elmo cake and you cried because I ate the piece with the balloons on it. So what’s up? Like, actually up.”
Nora let her eyes slip momentarily to her brother. Then to the clock on her dashboard. It was just after nine; only two hours before Charlie Bird was meant to die.
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“Charlie.”
“Nora. C’mon. What, you on the run from the law or something?”
A swarm of black-clad S.C.Y.T.H.E. operatives filled Nora’s mind’s eye, their glistening onyx SUVs practically materializing in the rearview mirror.
She blinked hard to chase them away. Because S.C.Y.T.H.E.
operated outside the laws of society, the company had its own enforcement team ready to crack down on anyone in the organization who played too fast and loose with the laws of mortality.
They were rarely used, but there were rumors of some kind of soul-abduction scheme that got dismantled at a S.C.Y.T.H.E.
office in a different state last year. And if those rumors were anything to go by, Nora dreaded being their next target.
“Well…” she said in spite of herself.
Charlie bounced in his seat. “No fuckin’ way, dude.”
“No fuckin’ way,” Jessica added from the back seat.
Nora exhaled through her nose. Her hands were clenched so hard on the steering wheel that they were cold from the lessening circulation and sweating from nerves all at once.
“Nor?” Charlie prodded.
“Okay,” said Nora. “Okay. Look. If I tell you what’s going on, I need you to promise—promise me, Charlie, like, actually promise—that you’re just going to shut up and nod along and not ask any questions. And just…believe me. Okay?”
“This is bad, huh?”
“Charlie. Promise me.”
Charlie sat back in his seat for a moment, contemplating. Finally he swiped his right hand under his left armpit and offered it to Nora. “ ’Kay. Promise.”
“Seriously?” Nora gave the hand a glare.
“Well yeah, duh. It’s how we always promised shit.”
“I’m not shaking that. We aren’t gross kids anymore. I mean, are you even wearing deodorant?”
“Oh sure, I’m supposed to have blind faith in you and you don’t even trust me to wear deodorant.”
“Well, are you?”
“No.”
“Charlie.” Something inside of Nora switched on all of a sudden.
The siren marked “Hey, you realize everything is very bad and overwhelming, right?” finally sounded.
Charlie was set to die. Her job was gone.
S.C.Y.T.H.E. would be on her heels at any moment.
And worst of all, her brother was so relentlessly, indescribably annoying.
And it all caught up with her there, in the car, as they sailed past an empty gas station just before the highway turnoff, the smelly hand still in her face.
And so Nora did the only reasonable thing she could do in that moment. She began to cry.
Charlie shifted in his seat. He never could withstand Nora’s tears. “All right, jeez, sorry. Here.” He offered his untainted left hand.
Nora sniffed, blotting her cheeks with the sleeve of her sensible navy blue winter coat. She took the hand and shook it.
“You’re going to die today,” she said as the crying bout eased into a mildly wavering voice and the odd sniffle. “And I know that for a fact. Because it’s what I do.”
She explained her job as best she could, keeping her eyes on the road to avoid any flashes of skepticism in her brother’s scruffy face.
Finally, she reached over Charlie and pulled his file from the glove compartment.
“Here,” she said. “I found this on my desk this morning. And I didn’t… and I couldn’t…here, just read it.”
Charlie flipped the folder open. “Huh. That’s my name.”
“Yeah, ding-dong, exactly. You’re supposed to get hit by a car and die sometime just before eleven fifteen a.m. today. I saw that and I just—”
“No, I’m not,” Charlie interrupted.
“What? Yes, you are.”
“Am not.”
Nora merged onto the highway with clenched teeth. This was infuriating. Charlie was infuriating. They were twenty-six years old—today—and he couldn’t even act half that age. But before Nora could help it, her childhood reflexes kicked in.
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“For fuck’s sake, Charlie—”
“No, I’m serious,” Charlie said. He held up the file and jabbed a finger at the section marked “cause of death.”
Nora could feel the rush of blood leaving her face, likely on its way to a different body with a life that made sense.
Somehow she found herself pulling onto the shoulder despite the fact that 12 percent of all highway deaths occur there.
Something inside her decided driving in her current state posed the bigger risk just then.
The windshield wipers groaned softly as they swatted away a light drizzle.
Nora could barely hear them over the thundering in her ears.
She snatched the file from Charlie’s hands and squinted at it.
“This is impossible.”
Just beneath Charlie’s name and basic information were the words:
Cause of Death: Choking
Time to Collect: 12:00 p.m.
The folder shook in Nora’s hands. She looked over at Charlie, who had conjured a snack-sized bag of Doritos from seemingly nowhere and was just prying it open.
“Want one?”
Nora slapped the bag from his hands. “Charlie,” she shouted. “Did you not just read the file? According to this you’re…you’re going to die by choking now, somehow. You can’t eat those. You can’t eat anything until we figure out what the hell is going on. It was supposed to be a car…”
“But I haven’t eaten breakfast, dude, I’m starving.”
“Are you seriously not hearing me? If you eat anything right now, you could die.”
“Okay, but, like, isn’t that always a risk? Besides, not eating kinda takes the fun out of living.”
“Charlie!”
“Okay, okay, no Doritos. Guess I’ll just waste away.”
Nora glanced at Charlie’s hand—the one she’d shaken. “You don’t believe me.”
“Sure, I believe you,” said Charlie. “I’ve believed weirder. Plus that file thing. Plus, you’re my sister.”
“Then why the hell aren’t you taking this seriously?”
Charlie squared himself to face his sister. He studied her face, his brown eyes shifting back and forth across it as if he was searching for something. When he finally seemed to find it, his own face sobered. “No Doritos,” he said. “No food. For now. Got it. I can do that.”
Nora nodded. “Just until after twelve, all right? If we can get you past the collection time, we should be in the clear.”
“Cool,” said Charlie. “So where are we going?”
Nora turned the car back on and set her eyes towards the road. It was 9:20 a.m. and her absence at S.C.Y.T.H.E. would be known by now. She pulled back into traffic.
“Anywhere but here.”