The Overtaker
Mario Milosevic
Published by Green Snake Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright (c) 2011 by Mario Milosevic
Cover image copyright (c) by Emlyn Addison | morguefile.com
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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The Overtaker
Mario Milosevic
TERMINUS, MY TOWN, lies on a wide river between two towering walls of rock, defining what locals call, simply, the gorge. If you have a certain way of thinking, and some of my fellow citizens do, it’s easy to think of this gorge as a trap. The cliffs can seem overwhelming and oppressive. The air, caught between the walls, sometimes gets so chalky with haze you feel like you can hardly breathe.
My name is Lance. I deal with dead people. Or rather, their essences. On this day that I want to tell you about, I found a strange essence and so did someone else in town.
I was out on the streets with my net. I found a tree that needed attention and swished my net through its branches. I use a nylon mesh on the end of a good long pole, maybe eight or nine feet. It allows me to reach up into the taller branches.
Before you ask, yes, I get some looks from people in town. But most of them are used to me by now since I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. I’m one of the town eccentrics. Weird enough that people aren’t entirely sure of me, but not quite weird enough to not be aware of my effect on folks. It’s the perfect balance for a carefree life.
I was near the dock, where nice trim trees grow along a path that goes for miles, hugging the river. This particular tree often snags essences and I heard one. Kind of a low rumbling sound. Different than what I was used to. Usually the essences sound like sighs. Sad sighs. So I stuck my net in its branches and swished it around some until I was pretty sure I snagged it.
I quickly pulled the net down to my level, going hand over hand along the pole until I was right there with the essence. I put my ear to it. Stuck it right into the hoop.
What I heard I never heard before. Usually, when I get an essence in my net, it sounds like a song. Gloomy, tragic. The kind of song someone might sing if their son or daughter had gone missing for several months. That kind of song. But what I heard this time was like the sound of someone who just found out the doctor was wrong and he wasn’t going to die. Someone who won a big prize in the lottery. It was a happy sound. Strange.
But even though it was strange, I still did what I usually did. I moved away from the tree to some open ground and opened the mesh to the air and let the essence go up. It went, like they all do. Right up past the rock walls and out of the gorge. Up and up.
I was glad to let it go but I scratched my head and tried to think who would be happy about dying.
I couldn’t come up with anyone, so I thought I would go to Mr. Hoffman’s place. He’s the undertaker, the other guy in town who deals with dead people. He puts them in the ground or burns them up. In the hospital, when your family member dies, they give you Mr. Hoffman’s card. The police hand out his cards, too, to the families of accident and murder victims. Not that we have a lot of murder victims in our town, but they do happen, like anywhere. Humans are a tribal species, after all. Petty disputes are always there and they can escalate. So Mr. Hoffman makes sure all the local officials have a good supply of his cards.
I don’t have a card. Families usually don’t know about me, what I do. I’m the overtaker. See, when someone dies, there’s this thing that happens. Their essence, what you might call their soul, it escapes into the air and floats around. People think their essence goes all the way up to heaven.
Not always.
Mostly because heaven’s a long way up and there’s lots of traps right down here. For one thing, most people die indoors, so the essence has to climb up out of the body. It usually has to go through some clothes and if you die in bed then there’s sheets and blankets and such. All of that is work. It tires out the souls, you know?
Then it hits the ceiling and has to crawl through all that plaster and insulation. Then there’s wood and roof shingles if it’s a house, steel and brick if it’s a hospital. Plain old steel if they die in their car. None of this is easy. It takes a lot of work and energy. And then, when it’s finally free and outdoors, it’s still not done. All disoriented and tired from plowing through the building, it usually dives for something it knows.
Don’t ask me why, but most essences, they gravitate to the trees where they get tangled up in the branches and the leaves or the needles and that’s where they get bogged down pretty good and then it all just gets to be too much and they stop.