The Results Column

Oh, He was in a proper good mood, today, he really was, as he walked down the scorched-earth sidewalk under the yellow sky, shovel slung over his shoulder. The color of dandelions, that sky. His pet rat used to eat them from where they grew under the I-405 overpass.

Sniffler was dead now, though, like everything that wasn’t him.

The vulture-shaped hole in the fabric of reality brought forth that ghastly beast five years ago. He looked up at the hole now, at the big thing flapping there by it. He drew a puff from the cigarette in his left hand and flipped The Bird the bird with his other.

He was working on Cancer as a new project for Death. He’d been good with computers, once, and if electricity hadn’t become not a thing anymore, he’d have made a spreadsheet cataloging his various attempts at Eternal Void-entering. Date would’ve been the header of the first column (obviously), followed by Weapon, Methodology, Pain Scale (1-10), and Results—though he’d thought long and hard about whether he should include a Results column, given that, if he had his way, he wouldn’t be around to type up the findings.

Turned out he did need that last column, though, so he decided on a career change. Death, instead of Thinking, though he still did freelance stuff for Thinking every now and then.

Death took more effort, was a really engaging challenge. He’d happily thrown himself into tackling it, with Throwing Myself Off A Cliff being his first project. It’d failed, but most startups did, anyway, the first time around.

For five years, the Eternal Void remained as lost to him as Atlantis had once been—that is, before it had popped up somewhere by Cyprus, before The Bird popped its inhabitants’ heads. That had gotten everyone talking.

Everyone had thought Atlantis would be somewhere over by Bermuda.

Newly employed at Death, He decided he’d keep a notebook, just to get the spreadsheet out of his brain. Something to do. Work to keep busy. It was one of the nice leather-bound ones that would’ve cost twenty bucks back when things cost twenty bucks, and he’d pilfered a Montblanc from some head-popped TV host’s desk when he’d tested out Studio Lights Falling On Top Of Me, because, well. He’d had to start getting creative with it. Stabbing hadn’t worked, or Guns, or Drowning. He’d had a lot of fun spending a month figuring out the logistics of Ferris Wheel Spinning Really Fast on account of the lack of electricity, but the headache hadn’t been all that worth it in the end.

Something about a need for a planetary roll-call, the news heads had said about The Bird, when they still had had their heads. Fate, they’d called it, though He preferred The Bird. Lots of discussion about too many people living on Earth, too many crowds in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Jannah, Valhalla, Gehinnom, Svarga, Diyu, and—the real shocker—on Planet ZMR 0497.

Shocked everyone except for the government, of course, that little reveal. They’d known about it. $4 billion sent to an off-planet bank account annually, it’d all come out, after The Bird flapped down. All that lost money turned the news cameras right off Atlantis. Had a congressional hearing about it and everything, before Congress lost their heads, for real this time. All those taxpayer dollars gone, ka-ching!, to the Zimmers, before going gone gone.

The moniker had become a slur, once everybody got invested in the whole scandal. All-caps hashtags popping off like heads. Marketing managers had a real field day with them.

Wasn’t the working-class aliens’ faults that their government was so corrupt, people had said. Didn’t matter the aliens were all dead already. Had to honor their memory, do what’s right, that was the point. Stop the Inhabitants of the Sovereign Planetary Anarcho-Theocracy of ZMR 0497 hate! the protest signs had read. Sometimes they wouldn’t be able to Sharpie the full righteous name on the poster, and he’d read Stop the ISPA-T of ZMR 0497 h8! instead as they marched by his tent under the freeway.

He’d never used the word in a derogatory way himself, but, he had to admit, “Zimmers” rolled off the tongue far better than “Inhabitants of the Sovereign Planetary Anarcho-Theocracy of ZMR 0497.”

Back when he was working at Thinking, He’d thought really hard about how it all worked, a planetary anarcho-theocratic government (whatever that was) taking Earth money from a…well. Whatever the American government had really been. A democracy, he guessed, since that’s what he’d been commanded to rain down on Iraq, back in the day.

But mostly he’d just thought about flipping off The Bird.

And dying. Always dying.

The Bird took care of all that, anyway, governments and whatnot, in the end. Shoved everything into sentences full of past perfect participles.

There were no more heads to pop, now—at least, not as far as He was concerned. Certainly not in Los Angeles; he’d walked the entirety of the city, every room of its buildings, during his tenure at Thinking. He supposed there could be others hiding somewhere further out, but he didn’t really care. The last one had been yesterday, He told himself. He’d heard a shriek from The Bird, the first in three months, and that had been that.

Hence, his good mood. It must finally be his turn.

He’d taken to calling himself “He,” with a capital letter. Not because He thought he was God—though, for all he knew, he was the only man left in existence that thought maybe, possibly, sometime long ago, there might have been a God. God had abandoned him in Iraq, though, just as He’d abandoned him in daddy dearest’s basement, during a high school toilet-stall swirly, and beside his wife’s sickbed.

Or maybe that had been his will to live that had abandoned him. He couldn’t tell the difference, not then or now. He’d always kind of wanted to die. That longing for the Eternal Void had always been present, but, well, he’d just never had the energy to pursue Death as a full-time job until now, what with the monotonous on-site one at the Illegal Drugs office under the freeway, before The Bird.

No, the capital letter of his new name just felt right, considering his name was the last one hobbling around. Might as well make it human-forward. He wondered if there was a Zimmer—sorry, Inhabitant of the Sovereign Planetary Anarcho-Theocracy of ZMR 0497—that renamed itself in the same way. If there was, like him, a random soul The Bird had left wanting absolutely nothing but death, too, out there beyond the yellow sky.

He flipped off The Bird again as he walked out onto Venice Beach, then started digging.

Cancer was a long-term Death activity. Today’s short-term project was Suffocating Myself With Sand. It was going to suck, but the sand was cold, at least, and maybe it would soothe the stings from yesterday’s failure at Swarm Of Hornets.

He didn’t know why he couldn’t die. Plenty of people had entered Guns into their own little Weapon columns once they got bored of Atlantis and ZMR 0497 and focused their attention on The Bird in earnest. Or maybe it was because the electricity finally shut off, and despite all their various other desires and reasons to stay alive, brain bullets just seemed a better end than The Bird. Regardless, they hadn’t needed a Results column.

He’d tried taking the longer route after seeing all that success with head stuff, but Cutting Off My Head only resulted in him waking up with it reattached the following morning. He’d tried again after eating some canned tuna for breakfast (the Starvation deliverable was another one of those long-term ones he hadn’t started on yet—he’d grown rather fond of canned tuna), but decided to only record the first attempt in his notebook. The thought of writing down “Tuna sludge leaked out of my severed throat hole onto the floor” in the Results column had made him queasy.

The Bird had taken to following him around, though, always flapping somewhere nearby—and in spite of all the bird-flipping, he considered that to be a good omen. Maybe it hadn’t forgotten about him.

Still was going to suffocate himself with sand, though.

He was right—the chill felt absolutely fantastic on those stings as he covered his face with armfuls of the stuff, getting comfortable in his little grave.

“What are you doing?”

Well, hell, that voice really ruined things. He was just getting used to the feeling of dirt in his throat.

He coughed and spluttered as he dug himself out.

“Are you a zombie?”

Sand filled his eyes, and he blinked to clear them, turning around to face the voice. A boy. Couldn’t be older than eleven or twelve. “What?”

The Thinking job had a great workplace culture—Death had an even better one—and as such he hadn’t seen the point of starting a new job over at Talking during the past five years. His voice was raw, unrecognizable, in his ears.

“I said—”

“Where the ever-loving hell did you come from, kid?”

His good mood turned to great at seeing another human still on this sorry side of the Eternal Void. Meant that he must be hallucinating; that the Preferred Side must be close, for once. He hadn’t hallucinated yet—except during Overdose On Shrooms. But that hadn’t been this pleasant-feeling, and you can’t really die from that, anyway. He’d just been bored.

“I’m from Fresno. Fresno’s gone now, though.”

He crawled the rest of the way out of his grave, shooting a bewildered look at the boy.

“Oh, you mean just now? The Pier, I guess.”

He replied by coughing.

“Do you need some water, or something? All that sand in your mouth can’t taste great.” The boy dug around in his little backpack and shoved a water bottle toward him.

He staggered over to the kid, and the boy yielded a step back. He probably looked like a zombie. Was technically one, he guessed, but not the type they’d made movies about, before.

Those types always had more success with Guns. Empty Results columns.

He snatched the bottle from the kid and rinsed his mouth out, then chugged it.

“Why were you eating sand, anyway? Or, burying yourself in it, I guess.”

“Trying to die.”

“Oh. I tried that, once, after Mom and Dad got screeched. Was all I wanted. Woke right back up, though. Don’t know how. Didn’t try it again. I don’t like to think about it too much.”

“'Screeched?'”

“Fate got ‘em.”

“Oh.”

He dumped the rest of the bottle on his upturned face and eyes before throwing the empty plastic onto the beach.

“Don’t litter!”

He gave an open-mouthed floundering look at the kid, spun toward The Bird, and pointed at it with both arms, open palms thrust toward it. Flipped it off a little, too, on principle.

“I know, but Mom said litter’s why Fate killed everybody. Said it’s a Thunderbird, and Thunderbirds didn’t like all the pollution. Thunderbirds are supposed to bring rain, though, and we haven’t had any of that in a while, so maybe she was wrong.”

“Haven’t tried litter yet. Could be the right one, I suppose. You never know. Got anymore trash?” He ignored the kid’s confused look and grabbed his notebook out the sand. He readied his pen to write Littering under Weapon, but realized the weapon would technically be The Bird, and somehow writing “Litter, like, a whole lot” under Methodology with The Bird under Weapon felt a bit too insane, even for him.

“No. And if you’re wanting to die, it’s not gonna work.”

He stared at the kid and lit another cigarette. “Think it’d work if I got cancer?”

“Nah, not now, since everyone else is gone.”

He eyed the boy sidelong. “You know something I don’t?”

“Radio Jane and I were the last ones—well, except for you, I guess—and she got screeched yesterday. She read a lot of books. Was really upset about not being able to die. It was all she worried about, there for a while. So…she started working on doing something else. She wasn’t very friendly towards me. Kind of crazy, actually. But she had tons of ‘em, all stacked around her house. I don’t think she did much besides read, and be mean.”

Jane must’ve been employed at Thinking, too, then. Should’ve quit before it stopped bringing in revenue, like He did. “What kind of books?”

The boy walked further out, toward the gray water. He followed him, and they sat down by the waves. Stared at The Bird. He offered the cigarette to the kid, because why not. The kid took it, and coughed. “All kinds, but she really liked those ap-loc-lalypse ones. I could never say it right. You know what I mean—all those different stories about the end of the world? It became all she cared about, the why. She wanted to know. Eventually said she’d figured it all out. Seemed kind of happy about solving it, actually. She was about to tell me, but then Fate came. She’s gone now.”

The kid sounded so sad, He slung an arm over his shoulders. “How do you know we’re the last people?”

“Radio Jane spent a whole lot of time trying to find anybody still alive. Even longer finding out who’d died and how they did it. Voice came over a radio one day when I was looking for supplies—one of those battery ones. Said she knew I was out there, that the two of us were the last ones, and to come to San Francisco. I never questioned how she knew. Just went.”

“Why?”

“I wanted a friend, I guess. That’s all I want. Left after she threw a bunch of books at my head, though. Can’t ever seem to find anybody that likes me, not even back in school. But then I saw you, and figured I’d at least talk with somebody else for a bit before Fate got me.”

“Makes sense.” They listened to The Bird flapping for a while, before He said, “Want to try killing me? No one’s been around for me to try Murder out, yet. A friend would do that for me, I think, if we were friends—since you want one, I mean. I don’t think I’d mind being friends, maybe, if you killed me and I woke back up.”

The boy considered for a minute. “I’ve never killed anybody before. Fate seems like the only one that ever really takes care of that—these days, at least.”

He decided not to tell the boy about Iraq, considering he was on the clock right now and could really use an employee for this one. Didn’t want to scare the kid off. “Can’t be that hard.”

“You don’t even have anything for me to kill you with.”

“Got a shovel.”

The boy glanced back at the tool. “It’s not going to work.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“You’ll hang out with me, after?”

He smiled at the boy. Innocent, like he once was. “If there is an ‘after,’ maybe.”

The boy stood and wiped sand off his tattered jeans. “How do you want me to do this?”

He got up, walked back to his grave, and handed the shovel to the kid. “A couple good smacks across the back of my neck would probably do it. Just make sure to swing as hard as you can, and hit me with the edge of the metal bit.”

He laid prone on the sand and shut his eyes, bowing his neck and shoulders upward so the kid could have better access.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Absolutely.”

The pain was a solid 8.5/10, He thought, before he thought nothing at all.

And then he did think, again, but still only on a freelance basis.

The boy was sitting beside him on the beach smoking one of his cigarettes when he woke back up. “Told you it wouldn’t work.”

He grabbed his notebook and recorded the date, Murder Shovel, Find a kid and give him a shovel to murder you with, 8.5, and Still not dead, but at least not alone, in each of the respective columns. “Was worth a shot.”

“What’s that?” The boy pointed toward the notebook.

“My job, I guess.” He handed it to the kid to read.

The boy whistled as he flipped through the entries, and laughed at “Bear got scared and ran off” in the Results column of the Mauled By A Bear row. “You’ve died a lot.”

“Yeah—3,296 times, now. Well, 97, including just now.”

“So, friends?”

He thought about whether he really wanted that. If it was worth it, to have a friend, at the end of all things. If working at Companionship had better benefits than Death. “Sure, I guess. Do you want to go get some food—”

The Bird shrieked, and the boy’s head popped.

The child’s blood dripped down his face, and his heart pounded in terror for the first time in five long years. In heartbreak. Loneliness. And it all made sense, then. How The Bird worked. Why he couldn’t die. Want all you want, but The Bird got the gots.

Fate devoured everything, in the end, and didn’t give anyone adequate time to want something new.

Except him. The last one, wanting a friend. The Bird could be one, He supposed. Was one, now.

Fate flapped over to him, and he flipped it off one last time, for old times’ sake, as he picked up his notebook.

0/0/00, he wrote under Date. Fate, under Weapon. Find something to want more than death, because death’s for The Bird, under Methodology. Agony, under Pain Scale.

The Bird shrieked. The Results column was left blank on that row.