Sally & the Discount Reaper

Sally Jennings sat silently with her son in the car after picking him up from the police station where he was just released following another attempted carjacking. Since he was a minor, he was released back into her custody.

Sally sped up, ready to drive off a cliff and finally fulfill her murder-suicide fantasy. However, she decided against it for some reason.

“Call your father and ask if he’ll have you today,” she said to him the second they arrived home.

Her son, Randy, considered protesting but decided against it after seeing the mood she was in.

Sally then proceeded to the bathroom, retrieved a bottle of pills from behind the mirror and a bottle of wine from the cabinet under the sink. She then laid down in the bathtub, swallowed the pills and downed as much of the wine as possible in order to knock herself out.

Almost as if she’d built up an immunity, these vices did nothing for her and her mind began to wander causing her to relive her many past devastations. She remembered how her future plans to go to college and become a doctor were interrupted when she became pregnant with Randy in highschool, disrupting her parent’s plans of being happy empty-nester retirees when she had to raise Randy with them, receiving no support from Randy’s father, and finally, having to put up with Randy’s teenage delinquency. Despite being under forty, she already endured over a lifetime’s worth of arguments, legal battles, financial stresses, and emotional trauma that obscured any vision she could have had for a better tomorrow.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to commit suicide. There were just too many unknowns like would it only be partially completed rendering her brain dead or paralyzed from the neck down? Would Randy become a bigger problem for her parents and exhaust their life-savings thus forcing all three of them into poverty? Would she suffer in hell for all eternity?

Nonetheless, even though those possibilities seemed bleak, the alternative - living - didn’t appeal too much to her either. So, she decided to just go through the motions, do whatever she had to in order to prevent an already bad set of circumstances from becoming worse. Ultimately, in the whole scheme of things, the struggle was only temporary and fortunately for her, it would end one day. She took comfort in knowing that.

“Here’s to not being immortal,” she said as she emptied the last of the wine bottle’s contents down her throat.

The instant she had this moment of clarity, however, a cloud of black smoke began to form in front of her. It twisted, turned, and gradually materialized into a lanky figure in a black robe with two skeletal hands drooping from each sleeve, one of which gripped a long, decrepit scythe. A hood shrouded the figure’s head in which Sally expected to see a skull. She soon discovered she was right when she caught a glimpse of it by shifting her gaze.

The figure raised its free hand and pointed at her with its index finger.

“Sally Mae Jennings, you are…” the robed figure boomed in a terrifyingly low, guttural voice.

“Dead?” she asked, her eyes lighting up for the first time in sixteen years.

“What?” the figure asked, in a normal voice.

“Dead?” Sally repeated. “Am I dead?”

“No, why would you… and how come… how are you taking this so well? Most humans usually void their bowels at the mere sight of me.”

“I am the void, champ.” Sally said, nonchalantly. “So, if I’m not dead, then what am I? And who are you”

The figure sighed. “You’re stranger than the types I normally get. Why does it matter?”

“I don’t know, dude. I guess I’m just curious.”

“Fine. You’ve heard of the Grim Reaper, right? Well, I’m sort of like that but instead of harvesting the souls of the dead, I visit people who’ve given up on life… like you.”

“Okay,” Sally mused. “So, what do you… do?”

“I just told you. I check in on people who’ve given up on life.”

“So, nothing?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it that. I mean, I monitor how you’re doing, notify a more senior Grim Reaper if you commit suicide or, you know, close your case file if you regain that spark of life or something.”

“Not gonna lie,” Sally replied. “That sounds kinda pathetic. Like the real Grim Reaper’s assistant. Why do you do it?”

“Alright, enough with the questions. If you must know, I enjoy my job. I like talking to people, getting to know them, prying into their lives, it’s like reality TV but with much better uncensored, unfiltered content.”

“To each their own. So, what do you want from me?”

“Well, a terrified scream would’ve been nice a minute ago but, yeah… that … that moment’s passed.”

“Okay. So, I suppose you’ve got somewhere else to be?”

“Yeah, but I can be in many places at once. You know, with a lot of cases like yours and such.”

“Cool, well I guess I better…” Sally stumbled in her attempt to exit the bathtub but the alcohol and drugs finally kicked in.

She hit her head and collapsed into the tub.

“That didn’t take long,” the Reaper said as he raised his scythe but before he could swing it, Sally coughed and vomited a little.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he uttered in disbelief. Sally was still very much alive but due for a hangover in a few hours which would, once again, make her wish she wasn’t.

**********

She awoke in a daze. It was now dark outside and she grimaced the second the hangover kicked in.

“So much for the loving family…” she said but then noticed her chin, neck and T-shirt coated in vomit.

After a shower and change of clothes, she took some more painkillers for the headache and went downstairs to check on the family. They talked for a while and enjoyed one of those rare instances when the conversation didn’t devolve into a screaming match. Sally’s parents usually blamed her for Randy’s misdeeds but they were oddly forgiving this time, almost as if they noticed her new outlook on life even though she didn’t mention the incident in the bathroom with the Discount Reaper.

********

The rest of the week flew right by. Sally felt better and the world noticed. It finally seemed like things were looking up for her… until she once again found herself waking up in the same bathtub, hungover and covered in vomit.

One shower, change of clothes, and painkiller cocktail later, she left her room and inspected the rest of the two-storey house to see what everyone else was up to; but this time, the place was deserted.

She then ventured outside and found the streets to be equally devoid of life. Several of the houses had their front doors wide open and only a few blocks away, she saw two recently crashed cars left in a state that suggested both drivers fled the scene immediately. There was also blood all over the street.

By now, her headache had passed which allowed her to wonder whether she really was dead this time. However, she was soon proved wrong when she spotted a small group of people at a distance. They were in trouble, about to be attacked by a mob of staggering, grotesquely disfigured, disheveled, blood-covered…

“Zombies,” Sally whispered under her breath. Unlike a normal person, she wasn’t scared; but somewhat curious. Her sense of fear was lost along with any desire she once might have had for living a pleasant life.

A large man motioned for his wife and four kids to stand behind him as he brandished his live chainsaw as a means of warding off the slowly approaching zombies. Of course, this was in vain as they kept approaching nonetheless. Finally, they gave him no choice so he engaged them.

Limbs were amputated and headless necks sprayed blood everywhere like unattended garden hoses. He bisected bodies vertically, horizontally, diagonally and haphazardly. The mother did her best to cover her children’s eyes but they were awestruck and fought to catch a glimpse of the action.

For a moment, the man looked like he was enjoying the experience a little too much. Sally could tell from the murderous rage in his eyes. Eventually, he managed to subdue the small group of undead fiends but he knew there’d be more so he ordered his family to seek shelter.

Sally decided against approaching the family due to the emotional energy it would take to introduce herself or swap pleasantries so she just turned around and went the other way. This turned out not to be the best choice because less than a standard car’s length away was another pack of reanimated corpses.

“Well, if it’s time to go, it’s time to go,” she said as she stood still and prepared to be pulled apart and devoured like a thanksgiving turkey. Much to her surprise, however, they simply stumbled past her.

“Huh,”she said to herself, trying to understand why they rejected her.

“They’re only interested in the living,” a mysterious voice said. The Discount Reaper then appeared in a cloud of black smoke, making a needlessly dramatic entrance.

“What’s that now?” Sally asked.

“You’re dead inside. Remember, you have no desire to live which explains why we first met. You probably emit some pheromone or electric signal or something which makes you super unappetising to those ghouls. Lucky you, I guess.”

“No kidding,” Sally replied. “What about you? Shouldn’t they be harvested or something?”

“You know, I’ve been doing this job for centuries and this is the first time I, as well as the rest of the Reaper Corps, have seen something like this. You humans really did a number on us, I’ll give you that.”

“So, you don’t know if they’re dead or alive?”

“Do you?”

“Dude, I’m not even at the halfway point of the modern human lifespan. You’ve had centuries. How should I know? Couldn’t you just ask them?”

The Reaper laughed, “why don’t you try striking up a conversation with one of them and see how it goes?”

Sally chuckled as well and said “looks like we both need answers. What do you say? Team up?”

“Well, with the concept of death currently up in the air, I don’t really have any orders, so yeah. Why not? Two heads are better than one right?”

“Two heads, one brain. I’ll take those odds,” Sally said as she and the Discount Reaper walked into the sunrise with a horde of zombies casually walking past them.

********

Later that day, the duo stopped to rest after raiding a convenience store.

“So, is finding Randy and your parents going to be a side quest in our mission?” The Reaper asked.

“We can try. They’re probably zombies anyway so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it if I never see them again.” Sally replied.

He wasn’t impressed, “and I thought the zombies were monsters.”