Chapter 37
Garrett's Grocery was a small store on a quiet street and there was absolutely no reason for anyone to die in it.
Greg assessed this as they walked through the automatic doors — which startled him, but only a little bit — and into the fluorescent interior.
The floors were clean. The ceiling tiles were intact.
The shelves were organized in neat rows, stocked with products arranged by category, which Greg appreciated on a level that had nothing to do with his current crisis.
Music played from speakers he couldn't see. Something soft and inoffensive.
A young man in a green apron was stacking boxes of cookies near the entrance. An older woman was comparing two cans of soup. A man in a baseball cap was reading the back of a cereal box.
None of these people were going to kill Dustin.
Probably.
Greg scanned the ceiling once more. No loose panels. No water damage. He checked the floor. It was dry, recently mopped if the faint chemical smell was any indication, but not currently wet. The shelving units were industrial steel, bolted in rows. Heavy. Full.
He looked at the shelving units again.
“Greg.” Dustin was holding Cathy's list and looking at him. “You coming?”
“Yes.” Greg pulled his gaze away from the ceiling. “I'm right behind you.”
Dustin grabbed a basket with his good hand and started down the first aisle. Greg followed, two steps behind, and tried to look like a person who was shopping and not a person who was conducting a threat assessment of a grocery store.
The clock on the wall above the deli counter read 2:49.
Eight minutes until the window opened.
Greg's hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets. He'd left his clipboard in the car because taking it inside with him would have felt like bringing the weapon to a crime scene.
Meanwhile Dustin moved through the store without care. He found the bread, checked the date, put it in the basket. Then he went on to grab eggs.
Greg lingered. He checked every aisle they passed through, and he noted the positions of other shoppers. The soup woman had moved to dairy, the baseball cap man was still reading cereal boxes, the young employee was now mopping the produce section.
The mop left a wet trail on the linoleum.
Greg stared at it.
Could it be that simple?
A wet floor?
A fall—ironically not from a cliff?
Greg didn't know what form the collection would take. The clipboard didn't specify cause of death, only the time and place.
“Pasta,” Dustin muttered, consulting the list. He turned down another aisle.
Greg started to follow, then stopped.
There was a soft popping sound.
He turned.
Valerie.
She was standing at the end of aisle three. Her expression was calm and her posture was composed and she looked exactly like what she was: a reaper here to do a job.
She also looked sad.
“Val,” Greg said.
“Hi.” She licked her lips. “Morrith sent me.”
Greg's stomach dropped.
“I know,” Valerie said gently. “I know this is hard.”
“You're here for Dustin.”
“I'm here to do a collection.” She paused. “You know standard procedure.”
“This isn't standard procedure. This is retribution.”
“Grigoreth…”
“The system didn't recalculate. It's retaliating.”
“What matters is what the file says.” Valerie's voice was steady. “And I know what you think it means. But the window is opening and the assignment is real and I'm here because Morrith doesn't trust you to…” She stopped herself.
“To do my job,” Greg finished.
“To let this happen.”
The canned goods aisle stretched between them. Somewhere in the store, Greg could hear the distant squeak of cart wheels, the thud of something being restocked.
“Val,” he said. “You can't.”
“I must. It's my assignment.”
“He's not supposed to die today.”
“According to the file, he is.”
“The file is wrong.”
Valerie looked at him, and her expression shifted into something that hurt worse than anger.
Pity. “Greg, listen to me. I know what happened to you. I know you got attached. I know this feels like the end of the world.” She took a breath.
“But this is what we do. You know that better than anyone.
You used to believe in this more than any reaper I've ever met.”
“I know.”
“Death gives life meaning. Without endings, nothing matters. Those are your words. I've heard you recite them to yourself.”
“Those words don't matter now.”
“Why? What changed?”
Greg's throat was tight. He did not have time to be standing here arguing with Valerie. “Everything,” he pressed. “Everything changed.”
Valerie's features hardened. “If you interfere with this collection, you're done. Not suspended. Not reassigned. Done.” She held his gaze. “You could dissolve. Do you understand that?”
“I do.” Greg's gaze darted to the side. What was Dustin doing now?
“Then let me do my job!” Valerie demanded, dragging his attention back to her. “Walk away. Let this be what it's supposed to be. It's part of life, Greg. Losing the people you love. People do it every day and they survive and they go on. That's what makes them brave. You let go, and you go on.”
Greg wanted to brush the words off, wanted to brush Valerie off, but he couldn't. The words snagged on something and burrowed into him.
Because Valerie was right. People lost the ones they loved every single day. They buried them and mourned them and eventually, somehow, kept living. He'd watched it happen. He'd documented it. He'd filed the paperwork.
But.
“How would you know?” he asked quietly.
Valerie blinked. “What?”
“How would you know what it's like to lose someone you love? How would either of us know that?”
“We've seen it. We've watched—”
“We've watched. That's all we've ever done.” Greg's voice was shaking but he got the words out clearly.
“They gave us bodies that need to eat and sleep and use the bathroom as if that's enough to make us human enough. But nobody taught us how to love someone. Nobody taught us what it does to you. They gave us a teaspoon of soul and sent us out to collect oceans and told us not to get wet.”
Valerie's lips parted but nothing came out.
“I have watched more people die than I can count,” Greg continued, his whole body feeling hot now in a way he couldn't explain.
“I have watched them say goodbye to each other and I have written down the things they said in a notebook because I thought if I collected enough of the words, I would understand. But I never understood. Not until—”
He stopped.
His heart pounded in his ears.
He hadn't understood until Dustin.
Not until he'd watched a man live instead of die. Not until he'd sat across from him in a diner and watched him eat a cheeseburger. Not until he'd felt the full, terrifying, annihilating weight of caring about someone who could be taken from you.
“You can't ask me to let go,” Greg pleaded.
“Not because I'm too weak to do it, but because you don't know what you're asking. None of us do. We were made to escort people through the door. We were never supposed to understand what it costs the people left standing on the other side.” He took a breath that shuddered on the way in. “And now I understand. And I can't.”
Valerie was quiet.
“Greg,” she said. Not Grigoreth, but the name he'd chosen because it felt more human. “If you do this, I can't protect you.”
“I know.”
“You'll lose everything,” she said, and she said something else, but Greg was no longer listening to her because he heard a different sound.
Metal groaning. A deep, structural sound, the sound of something heavy shifting beyond its tolerance. Then the slide — items moving, toppling, the cascade of weight redistributing along a failing structure.
It came from the next aisle over. The aisle Dustin was in.
Greg didn't think.
He ran straight at the shelves separating him from Dustin and phased through them.
Valerie called his name but he barely heard it over the cold shock of passing through solid matter, through steel and cardboard and glass, and then he was solid again on the other side.
And there was Dustin.
Dustin on the opposite side of a shelf that was already tipping, raining cans and boxes, the shadow of it falling over Dustin like a closing hand.
No!
Greg flung himself at Dustin.
They hit the floor together. Greg landed on top of Dustin and Dustin's arm locked around him and the shelf came down behind them with a sound like the world ending.
The crash was enormous. Metal and glass and canned goods and the thick, wet explosion of things that shattered on impact. A jar of something — pasta sauce, Greg would later realize — burst against the floor two feet from Dustin's head, spattering them both.
Someone screamed.
Dustin breathed hard, staring up at Greg.
“Did you just—” Dustin started.
“Are you hurt?”
“Where did you come from?”
“Are you hurt?”
“I'm covered in marinara, Greg!”
“Okay. Okay.” Greg exhaled. Relief swept through him so intensely it would have knocked him off his feet if he hadn't already been on the floor. His whole body was shaking and he couldn't look away from Dustin.
Dustin's hand found his face. “Are you hurt?”
Greg shook his head.
“Then why are you crying?”
He was crying? He was. He could feel the tears now, hot and involuntary, running down his face and onto Dustin's shirt. He didn't know when they had started.
“The onions you picked up,” he tried. “Don't they make people cry?”
“Not like this.” Dustin's thumb wiped his cheek. It was a rough gesture, quick and graceless, and his hand was trembling too. “You just came through the shelf to tackle me.”
“The shelf was falling.”
“I can see that.” Dustin's gaze moved past Greg to the wreckage — the toppled unit, the scattered products, the spreading pool of pasta sauce. “You knew,” he said quietly.
Greg couldn't deny it.
“You knew something was going to happen here. That's why you've been acting weird all day. That's why you couldn't tell me.” Dustin's voice was low enough that no one else could hear. “You brought me here on purpose.”