My shifting aura, invisible to most, glides past the makeshift shelters. A small band of children runs about, ducking through the spray-painted walls as they play some kind of game. Their feet are either bare and calloused and coal-black on the soles or protected by tattered shoes with fraying laces. When I pass close to a young girl, she feels my presence and grins. I think back to Before, when my shadow filled humans with fear and dread, and what they called it when I stole someone’s essence: death.
That’s what I was. I suppose I still am, but it’s… different now. Since the Bomb, the enormous release that annihilated most of the life on this planet, I’ve mostly abstained from Taking. Desperate times make us do strange things, I suppose.
I stroll through the well-swept path between the constructions. They’re made of rubble, repurposed pieces of once-tall buildings. Two humans are standing to the side, arguing about something. The slighter one had blue hair when I brought him here, but it’s since grown all the way out and he’s cut it away. I still remember him; I used to see hundreds of thousands of humans a day, if you count the ones I wasn’t Taking, but the unnatural hair colors always intrigued me. I don’t exactly have a physical form myself, but I imagine it would be exciting to dye one’s hair a bright magenta or lime. Anyway, after the Bomb, I’d been working in overdrive, Taking everybody who was gone. Every so often I’d see one of the other “Deaths” (as the humans would call them) and notice that they were equally overwhelmed. We can travel at speeds my humans would marvel at, but when you need to reach billions of crumpled forms whose essences are seeping out of them all at the same time, even hyperspeed isn’t enough. Of course, I didn’t even have the worst time; Beatrice, for example, is in charge of Taking trees, and there are so many more trees than humans.
I was in the middle of a city that had been completely decimated. It was in the beginning of my desperate hunt for life, searching frantically for the same thing I Took from countless bodies strewn on the ground, when I found him. A speck of bright turquoise amidst the debris. Rain was pouring hard from the sky, and the blue-haired human was soaked to his bones. I have no idea how he managed to survive, but I was terrified he was the only one. If all the humans were gone, then I was gone, because my sole purpose for existing was to collect humans’ essences when their physical forms no longer functioned. I cannot touch things, not really—the best I can do is pass through them and sort of vacuum things into me, which is usually how I absorb essence—and so I had no way to grab the blue-haired human and bring him someplace safe. As far as I knew, anyway.
I was panicking, the city’s entire population lying misshapen on the ground, gone from either the Bomb or the deadly poison it had released into the air, and this one resilient human was on his hands and knees, his blue hair sticking to his forehead. I did not want to “touch” him because I was afraid I might accidentally Take him, but he was close to being gone anyway. If I had a heart, it would have been beating a million miles an hour as I shuffled close to him and sank into his body, so we were inhabiting the same space. He shuddered and spazzed, but he was alive. I moved backward slowly, concentrating on keeping him enveloped inside my aura. It’s difficult to describe, but it was almost like I was holding his essence and pulling it along without Taking it. He was dragged along with me, a terrified expression morphing his face into a scream and a sob all at once. I imagine it would be rather frightening to be carted along by an invisible force holding onto your essence. But when you’re Death, panic and fear are nothing new. I gained speed, trying not to go too fast so as not to lose him or hurt him. It was hard work; usually I carry only essence inside me, like a gust of wind lifting a candy wrapper and blowing it about, but when the physical human is still attached to the essence, everything gets much, much heavier, and much, much more difficult to transport for a being who can’t exactly touch.
I finally dropped him in an empty field where there was no rain. Harold, who Takes small flowering plants, had been here already, and the once-green space was barren and withered. The blue-haired human gasped and coughed violently, curling his body into a ball among the husks of vegetation. His dark eyes were frenzied, darting around as though he was trying to see me. He couldn’t; all he could see were stiff yellow-brown weeds, empty receptacles for essence. In the distance were dark lines on the horizon, hollow trunks that had once stood sturdy and straight with vibrant foliage. Beatrice had visited here, too.
The blue-haired human pinched the dripping fabric of his shirt and pulled it from his chest with a smacking shlucky sound. Drops of liquid stained his face, either tears or raindrops. Most likely both. In that instant, staring at this human who was so full of life, in such contrast to the very ground he laid upon, it occured to me that he looked so lonely. And that’s when I made my decision. He’s not the only one. And if he wasn’t, then I was going to find the others.
I had to keep them alive.
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What a strange resolution for Death to make. But there I was, here I am, making it anyway.
Now I pass the formerly blue-haired human on the main path of this village. I found him companions, more survivors, and brought them all to the field. I convinced Harold, Taker of small plants, to not Take anything unless he absolutely had to, to give weaker plants a little time to see if they’d bounce back, so that the humans would be able to farm and grow things. I persuaded Beatrice, Taker of trees, to go easy as well, so that there would be more oxygen available to breathe. I asked Janet, Taker of little animals like squirrels, to collect the hollow forms as well as the essence and transport them there for the humans to eat. I absorbed countless essences of fallen humans, and then I swallowed chunks of rubble stained with escaped pieces of essence (blood, for example, carries streams of essence in the body and traces of it outside) in my aura to bring to the field. The community grew, and they hiked over to the formerly lively forest to use the shells of trees. The essence-less grass became fertilizer for the soil, and the humans taught themselves how to utilize it. They sent scavengers who helped me search for others who might have miraculously survived on their own for so long. (The air wouldn’t be much of a threat—most of the humans who survived the Bomb and its toxicity have immunity to the poison air, though whether it resulted from rarely-contracted diseases or genetic luck or some other factor remains a mystery. But food sources eventually run out, and humans are naturally comfortable in packs; they don’t do as well alone.) The humans in the village built fires to warm themselves and sat close to one another. Scouts walked for weeks to find old stores and brought back bags of non-perishables and cooking knives and knick-knackery. I carried a young woman from the wreckages of a boat that crashed when the Bomb disrupted the ocean’s regular wave patterns, and another from where she huddled in a grocery store with broken floor tiles and collapsed shelving. The latter wore spikes on her black jacket and carried cans of spray paint with her, which she used to brighten up the budding community. That was really when I began to notice something.
Humanity survives. A Bomb had quite literally shaken the globe, wiping out not only the vast majority of their population, but the vast majority of other species’ as well. But… they are still here. Maybe I originally organized this community, and maybe I still help, but the truth is, it’s impossible to work on collecting billions of essences and be fully devoted to helping survivors. But the humans don’t need my help much anymore; they saw my help, and they used it, and then they took it to the next level. They accepted everything I offered them, and everything they offered each other, and built this beautiful little village with it. Over the thousands of years I’ve been performing this duty, I’ve seen practically everything there is to see about humans. I’ve seen enough to know that humans aren’t always the best at getting along. And yet, so many of them have cooperated in order to create this place, because no matter what they disagree on, they still have one thing in common: they survived. And that holds them together. They know that the survival of their species is hanging by a thread, and that they hold both more string and scissors. And for now, at least, they stay together, supporting one another. People who used to live all over the globe have been congregated to a single place, cultures and languages and cuisines and hairstyles and religions all stuck together in some kind of crazy contraption that somehow functions beyond all logic. Because I’ve learned that that’s what humanity does: it hangs on.
It’s dusk, and the sunlight tosses the sky a million pastel shades. A couple of dark-haired humans are setting up the bonfire for tonight, talking in quiet but cheerful voices as they stack up wood. I linger there in the village, knowing I should be back in yet another ruined city, absorbing still more essence from the seemingly never-ending supply of human casualties of the Bomb. But instead I stay, stealing moments watching the humans in this sector of the village crouching around the flames as one woman with a buzz cut tells a story, a story everyone here knows quite well, a story that most of them have experienced in some form for themselves: the story of how I brought them here. The thing is, in these stories, my name isn’t Death anymore.
Now, these people call me Life.