“Hey, lemme see that bottle a sec.” I waved the cocktail waitress over.
“I’m not supposed to let the patrons pour. I’ll get in trouble.”
“Sweetie, you’re serving free champagne. In a bar. On a train in some ass-backward dreamland called Hawijimi. A train full of billionaires who all happen to be lunatics.” I panned my gaze around the table at the rich weirdos. None of whom had turned out to be a doctor. We’d all conga’d here together. “And you’re dressed like that.” I gestured up and down sassily to indicate her outfit, which was basically a less-modest take on the Princess Leia bikini. “Girl, trouble already got you!”
Cherilynne Gates—yeah, that Cherilynne Gates—laughed like that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. The woman was worth at least five billion and she was drunk. Everyone else at our table laughed along with her, each of them smaller fish playing their own angles. I didn’t give a shit about any of that. I wasn’t interested in hustling her. I just thought she might have a personal physician onboard. Shit, she had to be like ninety.
“Oh just give Mr Dufresne the damn bottle,” Cherilynne croaked, taking a sip from her own, empty flute. She was wearing this big ass American flag bow on top of a blonde bouffant that was definitely a wig. She shot me a wrinkly wink. “I’ll pay for it.”
“It’s free. And you know it’s free. Christ, Cherry-lynne.” I turned from shaking my head at Lady Gates and said to the waitress, “I’m not looking to get you in any trouble, sweetie, I swear. I won’t do anything weird or dangerous.” I tried to arrange my face in the most innocent way possible. I have no idea what it conveyed, she mostly looked confused and worried.
“Fine, but don’t tell Randall. I really need this job.”
“No worries, I don’t even know who that is.”
I took the bottle from the ice bucket she was pushing around on this little cart and thumbed out the cork. It bounced off the ceiling and landed at my feet. Then I handed the bottle off to the guy next to me even as it was starting to foam over. His name might have been Kato.
I bent down to retrieve the cork, and then I lifted up my shirt and held it against the bullet wound to determine if it would fit. Too big; the cork, that is. Blood seeped out as I disturbed the dark little pock of the bullet hole, and Kato or whatever wouldn’t stop gawking. The bubbly had bubblethed all over.
“You gonna pour that?” I asked him in a way that wasn’t really asking. “Or you gonna keep Lady Cherry-lynne waiting all night?” He started filling everyone’s flutes like his life depended on it.
When he got to mine I held it up full and tipped my cap to Cherilynne. Then I downed it in one gulp and went back to performing first aid on myself. I had to stretch the wound out a little bit if I was going to close it with this cork, so I went in with my pinkie finger first, followed by the ring. Just kinda tugging it out around the edges, trying not to tickle the vessel’s tummy too much. After all that fingering, the cork finally fit snugly. I checked the most recent entries in my status log, confident I’d fixed the problem:
>Your Vessel has been affected by [Alcohol Poisoning].
>[Alcohol Poisoning] has been purged by [Kirby, Please. I Need You To Stay Sober].
>Your Vessel has been affected by [Rohypnol].
>[Rohypnol] has been purged by [Kirby, Please. I Need You To Stay Sober].
>[Gut-Shot] has been treated with [Improvised First Aid].
>[Bleed-Out] has been replaced by [Bleeding]. This is a damage-over-time effect which will decelerate the longer it persists. Absent aggravating conditions, [Bleeding] will end in 3 hours 14 minutes and 58 seconds.
>Current Health: 67%
“Oh that’s bad.”
I’d done the thing I always did. I’d stayed at the bar way too long. Longer than I meant to. I couldn’t even get wasted anymore with the purge effect Handsome Alex had woven into this vessel. It wasn’t about that; I just loved the scene.
I started crunching the numbers to figure out how much time I’d wasted. Last I’d checked, I was sitting pretty at 184% of my maximum health. I’d bled out 117% since then – it was a damned good thing I’d cannibalized my last vessel before we got on the train.
That Bleed-Out status had caused me to lose 1.5% of my health every minute. That meant nearly ninety ninety minutes had passed—seventy-eight, to be precise—since I left Handsome Alex to finish implanting Mina Diamond with the Compelling Narrative.
He was going to be pissed.
“Unless….”
“Sir, are you okay?” Princess Leia the cocktail waitress looked worried about my bloody tummy. This shirt was toast. I stripped it off and the champagne cork protruded from my FUPA like a chonky wooden nipple. “Can I get you a doctor?”
“I can’t believe you’re only now asking me that, but no. It’s handled now.” I tapped my temple. “I put a cork in it.”
“Yeah, uh, are you sure that’s sanitary?”
“No I’m not. Not at all.” I got up from the table, dropping my blood-drenched shirt on the floor. The air-conditioning in the bar was set extra cold and it felt sensational against the bare chest of this fat vessel. “Hey, maybe you can help me with something else. I’m supposed to bring a drink to the mortician; you wouldn''t happen to know which car contains the morgue, would you?”
I could see that before I said anything, this poor girl had never even considered the possibility there’d be a car full of corpses. It was written all over her face.
“Nevermind, I’ll find it.”
I knew that was doubtful.
The train was damned near 600 cars long and they weren’t all arranged in a straight line. Some were stacked into doubledeckers and others were attached side-by-side to create double and even triple-wide suites suitable for passengers like Lady Gates over there.
Speaking of, she wondered where I was going. “It’s early, Sir Kirby. Surely you can stay for one more round?”
“Sorry, Lady, Sir Kirb’s got places to be.” I nodded toward the barman. “But my man over there says they’re serving biscuits and gravy first thing in the a.m.. You in? Say, sevenish?”
She chuckled, wet and lilting like a songbird drowning in a gold-plated toilet. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She shot me that damn wink of hers again.
I left the bar heading in the opposite direction from where I’d entered. The first few cars on this side of the bar were the same as the one Alex and I had been assigned to: plain and small. An aisle ran down the middle and there were cabins on either side, six per car. The sliding doors to each were narrow and all had the same window set into the upper half as ours, but most were covered with bed sheets or newspaper or the like. We hadn’t bothered. Handsome Alex had ways of maintaining our privacy right out in the open, when he wanted to.
After ten or twenty of these slummier cars, I finally hit the money. All of a sudden everything was detailed in what I assumed was rich mahogany and brass. The aisle down the middle widened, was lined with soft rugs underfoot, and to either side there was only ever one cabin at most per car. This was clearly a stretch where they were attached two-and-three wide. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
It felt like it took forever to traverse the luxury cars, but shortly after they ended I came to a locked door. Picking it opened up a new phase of my hunt.
“Eureka,” I whispered as I felt along the wall inside a train car that had such heavy, industrial vibes I felt like I was back in my goth era. It was the type of thing they’d transport oil or acid in or something. But on the other side of this wall I was feeling up, there were dead things. Humans. I could smell them.
A sudden realization struck me. Handsome Alex smelled like coffee because he’d recently been buried in coffee grounds. We’d hidden him in a barrel of grounds once—many, many years back—when we were taking him someplace where we needed to avoid cadaver dogs. I don’t remember where, exactly. A crime scene, I’d guess.
The way these bodies smelled on the other side of that wall – I knew right then he’d woven some canine tissues into this vessel’s sinuses, giving my sense of smell the same range and depth as one of those cadaver dogs we’d dodged together decades ago. And then he’d spent who knows how long buried in coffee so that his natural bouquet of decay wouldn’t overpower me.
“Fucking thoughtful sonofabitch.” I could have cried.
I found a loose panel, pressed it, and the outline of a door appeared. Steam hissed out from the edges and I laughed. This shit was just so fun. Secret doors to secret morgues. You’d have to be even deader inside than I was not to love it.
The door was locked so I got out my kit. This vessel wasn’t as dextrous as the last one and I admit it took me a good twenty minutes to pick the damn thing, but finally the lock tumbled and I slipped inside the morgue.
A pair of operating tables sat in the center of the room. Both held a body, covered by a sheet. The walls were lined with drawers and I could smell that many of them were occupied. My breath puffed out, which was amusing. You forget about stuff like that.
And I must have tripped a silent alarm. The door locked again as soon as it closed behind me and the already too-dim lights cut out. I cursed myself but only for a moment because I couldn’t have risked leaving it propped open, anyway.
“You’ve stepped right in it this time, Kirbster.” I hung my head. “He’ll kill you for sure. And then he’ll bring you back and kill you a second time on principle.”
I un-muted the chat:
Contrite Kirby: Hey bud, you there?
Handsome Alex: What trouble has found you this time?
Contrite Kirby: I knew you’d say that. Well get ready to eat that chat because I’ve gone and found the motherlode, is what I’ve done. I’m just shooting a note to let you know that in ten, maybe fifteen minutes we’ll be sitting on a stack of essences that should last us all tour. How’d it go with Mina?
Handsome Alex: The narrative is complete. We only await your return. Forgive me for assuming you had become entangled in unwanted complications. You have done well in locating the assets.
Contrite Kirby: You’re forgiven.
Handsome Alex: Have you found a doctor to treat your injury?
I had actually forgotten all about it, but now that Alex forced my attention back to the gunshot wound I realized there was an unsettling cold spreading across the vessel’s belly and legs. The fingers tingled with pinpricks, too. I glanced at the last few entries in my log:
>The [Bleeding] effect has come to an end.
>Your vessel has been affected by [Sleeping Gas].
>[Sleeping Gas] has been purged by [Kirby, Please. I Need You To Stay Sober].
>Current Health: 23%
“Oh shit.” Way too close for comfort. Also, the sleeping gas must have been completely undetectable. I was lucky that Handsome Alex had evidently anticipated me trying to get high on sleeping gas. Still wasn’t going to thank him for making me immune to whiskey, though. I returned to the chat, but at this point if some security nerd found me in here and so much as breathed on this vessel I’d end up on one of these slabs, so I had to come clean:
Contrite Kirby: Alright look I fucked up. I need a portal.
Handsome Alex: Impossible. I refer to the portal, of course. That you would find some way to sabotage our efforts was nigh inevitable.
Contrite Kirby: Brother, I gotta have it, I’m sorry.
Handsome Alex: We possess supplies to open but a single bone portal during this venture, Kirby, and we will require it for the final maneuver. What trouble are you in?
Contrite Alex: I’m locked inside the morgue. I tripped an alarm, so they’re gonna be here any minute. And I might have let my health fall down to 23%.
Alex didn’t answer again in the chat, but I could feel his rage from here. I could only see anything in the morgue by the eerie green light cast by some random medical monitor, but I hurried to the operating tables in the center of the room and dragged the sheets off both. I put my hands on their cold throats and squeezed gently.
The corpse under my right hand was a nobody. A cook. He liked to paint, but he wasn’t any good at it. Thirty-one years old with entirely average attributes across the board. I harvested him anyway. We were going to need as many bone essences as we could get our hands on now, and humans were practically overflowing with bones.
The other body belonged to Rajah Superbus. He was perfect:
Rajah Superbus. Human. Male.
Age 27 at time of death by overdose.
Notable Attributes:
1) Presence(15-30 essences)
2) Stamina(5-10 essences)
3) Agility(5-10 essences)
Notable Talents:
1) [Singalong]
2) [Swagger]
3) [Stage Dive]
I closed my eyes, and his soul was still warm in there. I drew it up though the palm of my hand and received a stream of notifications:
>Harvest Results. Rajah Superbus.
>>>27 Presence, 10 Stamina, and 10 Agility essences.
>>>206 Bone, 192 Blood, and 127 Tissue essences.
>>>[Singalong], [Swagger], and [Stage Dive] frameworks have been collected.
>Your [Reap] skill has gained a Rank.
>Your [Reap] skill has gained new utility.
“Sweet.” I called up the updated skill description:
[Reap]
Necromancy. Soul Magic.
No Mana Cost
Rank: 3
Description:
[Rank 1]Harvests essences and talents from the soul of a recently-deceased asset.
[Rank 2]Provides pre-harvest analysis of potential assets.
[Rank 3]Allows harvest from multiple simultaneous assets. Physical contact restriction removed.
The timing of this rank-up couldn’t have been better. I needed to harvest every soul in this morgue and I needed to do it ten minutes ago.
Suddenly the door opened up behind me with a hiss. “Get your hands where I can see them!” screamed the security nerd who entered.
“Alright, be cool.” I spread my hands out wide at my sides. I could feel Reap yearning to activate, like the spell had a will of its own now. “Maybe we can work something out.”
“What are you doing in here?” A flashlight lit me up from behind and imposed my shadow on the far wall. Security Dude must have noticed the withered condition of the corpses laying atop the slabs on either side of me, because then he asked, “What in the fuck?”
Over on the wall, the edge of my shadow began to burn with purple flames. It hit me that if this security nerd hadn’t shown up and lit me up, I wouldn’t have had much of a shadow for Handsome Alex to drag me through. The purple flames coalesced into purple bones, thousands of them, forming a frame around the darkness which was no longer my mere shadow. It now had obvious, impossible depth and it didn’t matter if Dude turned the flashlight off now; the portal would remain until I passed through it or died trying.
I activated Reap – or maybe it’d be more accurate to say I unleashed it. It felt like a dozen ravenous eels leapt out of me at every angle. The corpse-filled drawers all slammed open at the same time. Green and purple auroras danced in the air, flowing from their bodies to mine.
Nice touch, I thought. Hopefully every rank up came with similarly upgraded aesthetics.
The security dork saw all this haunted house shit going down and must have pissed his pants. He started screaming and blasting away.
I hit the deck and army-crawled toward the portal as sparks flew off the wall all around it. Motherfucker had a machine gun, I swear. I couldn’t begin to count all the essences and talents flowing into me as I fled.
I prayed I wouldn’t get hit by a ricochet. Even that would probably eject me and losing this vessel now would ruin everything.
And no, I won’t confess to whom or what I prayed.
But goddamn if it didn''t work.