Trigona Necrophaga

Rain rattles against the windowpane and she is six feet deep in the bedding, moving inward and down. Outside the wind shakes the houses and the apartments and through the rain the sound of the freeway has dwindled to almost nothing.

The streets are not truly empty; there is never a time of day or night where something is not moving or just passed, and if the streets are still then a plane is passing overhead, a train is rolling in the distance, a siren is howling in the hills, a bell is ringing in the harbor.

But close enough.

Next to her someone snores quietly, two floors up and three units over someone coughs wetly. She may or not be the only one awake, but she is not alone, never alone, her sisters may never see her nor know her name, but they are bound together through walls and floors and the sound of the rain. The alchemy of the gut, the sour taste of the meat.

Tomorrow has a gravity like the edge of a cliff, drags at her bones like the tide. In the dark hours she staves off sleep, eyes clear and unblinking, legs and arms unresting, heart stuttering in her chest. Bones ache, teeth grind; time cannot be stopped but she tries. She cannot live past sunrise, and every minute clawed out of the night is a minute free of the dread beast of the future.

Hoarders and Wasters

You are patient and unkind as the grey light of a winter’s dawn among the canyons of downtown, anonymous, one more white face beneath a dark cap, bundled in a nylon jacket. No one notes your lack of breath hanging in the early morning air, not with the face mask digging into the waxy flesh of your ears.

You do not hunt merely to survive. True enough, you prefer the mist coiling into a room, and teeth white against bruised lips, a mouth pressed to your chest until it drinks; romance might be dead, but so are you, so. You have at your command all the tricks and tools of the common man, and all the patience and skill of four hundred years. Your hand does not quiver on the trigger, your breathing does not cause the barrel to weave.

He stops for coffee, as ever he has, and you are scant feet behind him when he emerges. The gun kicks in your hand, jams once, twice, but he is already falling. Sheer waste, the blood spreading over the sidewalk, but when meat has turned it must be discarded.

Ahasuerus

He doesn’t worry about the frauds, time always sorts them out, and at this point what’s the rush? He can wait a lifetime to see, and really where is the harm anyway.

It’s the real ones that spook him, even now, because you never know when you’re going to walk around a corner in Addis Ababa and bump into that surly prick, and the thing about that is that after a while you sort of get used to running into folks every few decades or centuries or so. The world’s big, but it’s not that big, and when you’ve got nothing but time you get to where you expect it, that’s all.

So it starts to gnaw at him when he hasn’t seen one of the others in a while, like maybe they’ve gotten off the ride and he’s the only one left on it, like maybe he’s missed last call somehow. He doesn’t sleep much these days; ever watchful, ever ready, ears strained for the soft footfall of a thief in the night.

In that sense it’s a relief when he’s picking his way through the fox-haunted forests where Chernobyl used to be and there he is, getting gnawed on by a lynx, glowering up at the rain. “You’ve looked better,” he tells the Roman, and Longinus has the decency to laugh.

(credit for this version of Longinus as always to Brendan Adkins)

Atmospheric River

It’s pissing down rain like the weather’s got a grudge against the city and Tits is in a foul mood. Too much blood lately, too much gunplay; her nose is numb with the sharp reek of sulfur. You’d think the rain would scrub all that away, but no: every wretched festering smell gets caught in the teeth of the fog and rots there. No joy in life, these days.

Still, it’s not without its uses, this feculent storm. Folks, honest as well as not, mostly stay indoors as much as they can, and the rivers and ditches boil and froth with the water they can’t choke down. A bad time for losing bodies, but a great one for finding them that’s been lost, and so tonight she’s out in this misery with a fishhook and a line trawling for whatever remains of Fjaler the Swede, which scuttlebutt has was ditched in the lake a month back.

Her line snags and she bends double against it, rain drumming on the rubber of her hood. He’s ugly and fishgnawed as you’d expect, when what remains of his face comes floating up under the leaden surface of the water, but still: Tits grins, all teeth and pupils. “Step back out of hell for a second,” she tells the corpse, “I’ve got work for you yet.”

Death in a Time of Strife

There are long periods of time in which no one is killed and no one needs saving, and the Great Detective does indeed savor those moments, but only ever in retrospect. Life is more vibrant, more real, somehow, when the Rule is broken. He can almost feel, like the turning of the seasons, all the various parts of his long and colorful history shivering briefly into synthesis with this more contemplative life. He is never so devoted to the order as when he is flouting its strictures, never so passionately in love with monastic life as when he is breaking curfew to ride through the woods with a lean and lissome deputy sheriff in hopes of saving some poor doomed idiot or other.

But he does cherish the quiet times; the long months of growth and harvest, the placid nights of plainsong, the unmemorable merriment of a feast day, the hushed chill of an icy winter. Even in the midst of civil war, he has found, clung to, a peace everlasting.

His Archnemesis, never one to be outdone, has anticipated him, wormed his way into the abbey before the Great Detective’s calling had even come upon him. But he, too, is made mild by the unchanging hours of the liturgical day, rendered no more venomous than any other toadying subprior trotting along behind a marmoreal and unregarding bore. They snipe at each other in chapter, but what of it? Their swords are sheathed, always sheathed, in the presence of the divine.