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“I can’t stay. I’m your substitute.”
Silas smiled. A waiter came by with a bread basket-hard rolls, still warm-and relish trays filled with sliced carrots, celery, and radishes, and candied beets, things people now would call old-fashioned.
Modern, to him. Just as modern as always.
The boy squirmed, his jeans squeaking on the leather booth.
“I know,” Silas said. “You’ll be fine.”
“I got-
“A big one, probably,” Silas said. “It’s Christmas Eve. Traffic, right? A shooting in a church? Too many suicides?”
“No,” the boy said, distressed. “Not like that.”
“When’s it scheduled for?” Silas asked. He really wanted his di
“Tonight,” the boy said. “No specific time. See?”
He put a crumpled piece of paper between them, but Silas didn’t pick it up.
“Means you have until midnight,” Silas said. “It’s only seven. You can eat.”
“They said at orientation-
Silas had forgotten; they all got orientation now. The expectations of generations. He’d been thrown into the pool feet first, fumbling his way for six months before someone told him that he could actually ask questions.
“-the longer you wait, the more they suffer.”
Silas glanced at the paper. “If it’s big, it’s a surprise. They won’t suffer. They’ll just finish when you get there. That’s all.”
The boy bit his lip. “How do you know?”
Because he’d had big. He’d had grisly. He’d had disgusting. He’d overseen more deaths than the boy could imagine.
The head waiter arrived, took Silas’s order, and then turned to the boy.
“I don’t got money,” the boy said.
“You have one hundred and twenty dollars,” Silas said. “But I’m buying, so don’t worry.”
The boy opened the menu, saw the prices, and closed it again. He shook his head.
The waiter started to leave when Silas stopped him. “Give him what I’m having. Medium well.”
Since the kid didn’t look like he ate many steaks, he wouldn’t like his rare. Rare was an acquired taste, just like burgundy wine and the cigar that Silas wished he could light up. Not everything in the modern era was an improvement.
“You don’t have to keep paying for me,” the kid said.
Silas waved the waiter away, then leaned back. The back of the booth, made of wood, was rigid against his spine. “After a while in this business,” he said, “money is all you have.”
The kid bit his lower lip. “Look at the paper. Make sure I’m not screwing up. Please.”
But Silas didn’t look.
“You’re supposed to handle all of this on your own,” Silas said gently.
“I know,” the boy said. “I know. But this one, he’s scary. And I don’t think anything I do will make it right.”
After he finished his steak and had his first sip of coffee, about the time he would have lit up his cigar, Silas picked up the paper. The boy had devoured the steak like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He ate all the bread and everything from his relish tray.
He was very, very new.
Silas wondered how someone that young had gotten into the death business, but he was determined not to ask. It would be some variation on his own story. Silas had begged for the life of his wife who should have died in the delivery of their second child. Begged, and begged, and begged, and somehow, in his befogged state, he actually saw the woman whom he then called the Angel of Death.
Now he knew better-none of them were angels, just working stiffs waiting for retirement-but then, she had seemed perfect and terrifying, all at the same time.
He’d asked for his wife, saying he didn’t want to raise his daughters alone.
The angel had tilted her head. “Would you die for her?”
“Of course,” Silas said.
“Leaving her to raise the children alone?” the angel asked.
His breath caught. “Is that my only choice?”
She shrugged, as if she didn’t care. Later, when he reflected, he realized she didn’t know.
“Yes,” he said into her silence. “She would raise better people than I will. She’s good. I’m…not.”
He wasn’t bad, he later realized, just lost, as so many were. His wife had been a God-fearing woman with strict ideas about morality. She had raised two marvelous girls, who became two strong women, mothers of large broods who all went on to do good works.
In that, he hadn’t been wrong.
But his wife hadn’t remarried either, and she had cried for him for the rest of her days.
They had lived in Texas. He had made his bargain, got assigned Nevada, and had to swear never to head east, not while his wife and children lived. His parents saw him, but they couldn’t tell anyone. They thought he ran out on his wife and children, and oddly, they had supported him in it.
Remnants of his family still lived. Great-grandchildren generations removed. He still couldn’t head east, and he no longer wanted to.
Silas touched the paper, and it burned his fingers. A sign, a warning, a remembrance that he wasn’t supposed to work these two days.
Two days out of an entire year.
He slid the paper back to the boy. “I can’t open it. I’m not allowed. You tell me.”
So the boy did.
And Silas, in wonderment that they had sent a rookie into a situation a veteran might not be able to handle, settled his tab, took the boy by the arm, and led him into the night.
Every city has pockets of evil. Vegas had fewer than most, despite the things the television lied about. So many people worked in law enforcement or security, so many others were bonded so that they could work in casinos or high-end jewelry stores or banks that Vegas’ serious crime was lower than most comparable cities of its size.
Silas appreciated that. Most of the time, it meant that the deaths he attended in Vegas were natural or easy or just plain silly. He got a lot of silly deaths in that city. Some he even found time to laugh over.
But not this one.
As they drove from the very edge of town, past the rows and rows of similar houses, past the stink and desperation of complete poverty, he finally asked, “How long’ve you been doing this?”
“Six months,” the boy said softly, as if that were forever.
Silas looked at him, looked at the young face reflecting the Christmas lights that filled the neighborhood, and shook his head. “All substitutes?”
The boy shrugged. “They didn’t have any open routes.”
“What about the guy you replaced?”
“He’d been subbing, waiting to retire. They say you could retire, too, but you show no signs of it. Working too hard, even for a younger man.”
He wasn’t older. He was the same age he had been when his wife struggled with her labor-a breech birth that would be no problem in 2006, but had been deadly if not handled right in 1856. The midwife’s hands hadn’t been clean-not that anyone knew better in those days-and the infection had started even before the baby got turned.
He shuddered, that night alive in him. The night he’d made his bargain.
“I don’t work hard,” he said. “I work less than I did when I started.”
The boy looked at him, surprised. “Why don’t you retire?”
“And do what?” Silas asked. He hadn’t pla
“I du
They could all have families again when they retired. Families and a good, rich life, albeit short. Silas would age when he retired. He would age and have no special powers. He would watch a new wife die in childbirth and not be able to see his former colleague sitting beside the bed. He would watch his children squirm after a car accident, blood on their faces, knowing that they would live poorly if they lived at all, and not be able to find out the future from the death dealer hovering near the scene.