Arlo Gorevin lives in Manchester, UK, and is owned by two potentially demonic cats. His work has appeared in Hellhound Magazine, the Cosmos Hundred Word Horror Anthology from Ghost Orchid Press, the 666 Dark Drabbles Anthology from Black Hare Press, and Devolution Magazine. He can also be found in Volumes 2 and 3 of the Welcome To The Splatter Club Anthologies from Blood Bound Books and also the Books of Horror Community Anthology Volume 4. Every time he writes his bio, he imagines it's his obituary.
Read more from Arlo right HERE.
A DAY IN THE DEATH OF A SCYTHE
by
Arlo Gorevin
I kill dead people.
Yeah, yeah, I know how that sounds, but it's basically my job description. Sometimes the dead walk the streets and I'm one of the team tasked with taking them down. We're called the Scythes, which is the dumbest damn name I ever heard but someone chose it centuries ago, and so I guess we're stuck with it.
So, yeah, sometimes the dead intrude upon our world. No-one knows why it happens, only that it does. Think of it this way. There's two realities, running parallel with one another, and one of them is our world, full of the unending tedium of traffic jams and taxes, sitcoms and social media, romance and rainy days, all the wasteful ephemera that devours our moments on Earth.
Now think of that other reality. It's exactly the same, except … well, except that everyone is dead. There's a you over there, most likely, and they'll have the same boring job and family that you have, the same haircut and taste in music, the same everything, except their heart doesn't beat. You age, and they age too, but whereas you lose your hair and your back starts to ache, their flesh grows more rotten on their bones, and the flies – the dead flies, no less - start to lay eggs in the fruit-soft meat.
And if that was all there was, an analogue dimension where we all had our own DoppelZombie, that'd be fine. But both realities are balanced on an interdimensional axis, and from time to time, the balance shifts, and one of them tumbles over to our side. Fair exchange is no robbery, of course, so the human version of the DoppleZombie flips over into Dead Town.
That shift, that tipping of balance can happen anywhere, and at any time, shoving some hapless walking corpse into our world.
We call it the Graveyard Shift.
You've probably never heard of it until now, but I'm sure you've seen news reports of missing persons. Most of them are what you'd expect, the abducted and the murdered and the ones with enough sense to chuck it in the fuck it bucket and fall off the grid, but there's a growing number that have been something for the Scythes to take care of. A human vanishes over to the other side, we clean up the DoppelZombie, job done.
You can't end their life, as such, so our standard method is to incapacitate, to blow out the kneecaps and shoulder joints. You have to remember, these aren’t the ravenous living dead of movies and books. They're libraians and janitors and accountants. They're in shock and they don't put up much of a fight, even as we're dragging their bodies to the acid baths.
I never really thought about what happened to the unlucky human that slips sideways into hell. I always presumed there was a zombie version of the Scythes that put them down. I guess I'm going to find out.
About ten minutes ago, the shift happened to me.
I woke up in what looked like my own bedroom, the same black sheets and grey walls, the same pale rectangle where once I'd hung a photograph of my ex. The butt of my gun jutted from the shoulder holster that hung on the chair at my desk.
Everything was the same, except the smell. Whereas my place smelled of Chinese food and my cat and the perfume I couldn't bring myself to throw away, the room I was in now reeked of death.
The sheets I rose from were damp, sticky, as if my DoppelZombie seeped in his sleep. I guessed that he'd be as repulsed by my dry bedding as I was by his dank cotton. I guessed that, like me, he probably crossed to the window overlooking the street, and that his unstitched innards lurched when he saw normal, living humans on the pavement below. For my part, I saw a girl engrossed on her phone, beetles crawling over the peeling dome of her scalp, and two children with withered faces and exposed bones, waiting to cross the road and checking in both directions with white, sunken eyes. Two or three cars went by, and I knew it wouldn't be long before one of them stopped.
I didn't dare open the window. This was the land of decay, a necropolis with around eight billion thriving occupants, and even through the wood and the glass I could feel the stench soaking me, worming its way into my pores.
My gun in its holster was a siren song that I fought to ignore. I'd seen the reports and knew that an unhappy difference between our world and this was that there was no suicide. All that happened was that you, for example, would blow your brains out and still have to go into work.
So I waited, and at last I saw a car draw up outside my building. I recognised the figures that disembarked, after a fashion. They were the counterparts to my own team of Scythes, the DoppelZombies of the men and women that other me would be seeing clamber from the vehicle, guns already drawn.
There was Tariq, his beard infested with pale, scurrying insects. Marsha, dressed as always in jeans and a band t-shirt, her nose and mouth leaking some thick, gangrenous gel. Jason and Hekima, their faces more sinew and skull than flesh.
They'd recognise me too, of course, in spite of my intact form and smooth skin flushed with roaring blood. They'd know me, and know what they had to do.
I could hear them now, on the stairs, though they kept their footsteps light. I could smell them, smell that slaughterhouse cloud that heralded their approach as they converged on my door. In a moment or two they'd kick it open.
I turned to face the door, as certain as the other me would be, back in my world, that there was nowhere left to run.