The Living End Read Free Page B

Ellerbee heard two distinct shots before he fell. When he came to, the third man was bending over him.
    “You’re not hurt,” Ellerbee said.
    “Me? No.” The pain was terrific, diffuse, but fiercer than anything he had ever felt. He saw himself covered with blood.
    “Where’s Kroll? The other man, my manager?”
    “Kroll’s all right.”
    “He is?” There, right beside you.” He tried to look. They must have blasted Ellerbee’s throat away, half his spinal column. It was impossible for him to move his head.
    “I can’t see him,” he moaned.
    “Kroll’s fine.” The man cradled Ellerbee’s shoulders and neck and shifted him slightly.
    “There. See?” Kroll’s eyes were shut. Oddly, both were blackened. He had fallen in such a way that he seemed to lie on both his arms, retracted behind him into the small of his back like a yogi. His mouth was open and his tongue floated in blood like meat in soup. A slight man, he seemed strangely bloated, and one shin, exposed to Ellerbee’s vision where the trouser leg was hiked up above his sock, was discolored as thundercloud. The man gently set Ellerbee down again.
    “Call an ambulance,” Ellerbee wheezed through his broken throat.
    “No, no. Kroll’s fine.”
    “He’s not conscious.” It was as if his words were being mashed through the tines of a fork.
    “He’ll be all right. Kroll’s fine.”
    “Then for me. Call one for me.” “It’s too late for you,” the man said.
    “For Christ’s sake, will youl” Ellerbee gasped. “I can’t move. You could have grabbed that hoodlum’s gun when he set it down. All right, you were scared, but some of this is your fault. You didn’t lift a finger. At least call an ambulance.”

    “But you’re dead,” he said gently. “Kroll will recover. You passed away when you said ‘move.”
    “Are you crazy? What are you talking about?”
    “Do you feel pain?”
    “What?”
    “Pain. You don’t feel any, do you?” Ellerbee stared at him. “Do you?”
    He didn’t. His pain was gone.
    “Who are you?” Ellerbee said.
    “I’m an angel of death,” the angel of death said. You’re-”
    “An angel of death.” Somehow he had left his body. He could see it lying next to Kroll’s.
    “I’m dead? But if I’m dead-you mean there’s really an afterlife?”
    “Oh boy,” the angel of death said.
    They went to Heaven.
    Ellerbee couldn’t have said how they got there or how long it took, though he had the impression that time had passed, and distance.
    It was rather like a journey in films-a series of quick cuts, of montage. He was probably dreaming, he thought.
    “It’s what they all think,” the angel of death said, “that they’re dreaming. But that isn’t so.”
    “I could have dreamed you said that,” Ellerbee said, “that you read my mind.”
    “Yes.”
    “I could be dreaming all of it, the holdup, everything.”
    The angel of death looked at him.
    “Hobgoblin… I could…” Ellerbee’s voice-if it was a voice-trailed off.
    “Look,” the angel of death said, “I talk too much. I sound like a cabbie with an out-of-town fare. It’s an occupational hazard.”

    “What?”

    “what? Pride. The proprietary air. Showing off death like a booster. Tbanatopography.
    “If you look to your left you’ll see where… Julius Caesar de dum de dum… Shakespeare da da da…
    And dead ahead our Father Adam heigh ho-‘ The tall buildings and the four-star sights. All that Baedeker reality of plaque place and high history. The Fields of Homer and the Plains of Myth. Where who sis got locked in a star and all the Agriculture of the Periodic Table-the South Forty of the Universe, where Hydrogen first bloomed, where Lithium, Berylium, Zirconium, Niobium. Where - Lead failed and Argon came a cropper. The furrows of gold, Bismuth’s orchards.. .. Still think you’re dreaming?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “The language.”
    “Just so,” the angel of death said.
    “When you were alive you had a