The Big Reap Read Online Free

that.
    Thunder struck once more, shaking the building so hard, my teeth rattled.
    â€œWe should move,” she said, crossing the room to the empty window frame and peering skyward. “They’re getting closer.”
    â€œWho?” I asked, following.
    She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. As I approached the window, I saw outside a ravaged city – streets cratered, buildings crumbling, tattered Nazi banners fluttering red and white and black from every flagpole and cockeyed lamppost – and above it, the slate sky was dotted here and there with fighter planes. Each wore a single star on its tail, and another on its fuselage. I recognized them from the newsreels that ran back home as Soviet Hunchbacks. As I watched, the nearest of them opened its belly and loosed a payload of bombs that once more shook the earth beneath my feet. Smoke billowed from where they landed some blocks away, and once the sound of their impact died down, I heard a woman’s anguished cry.
    â€œWelcome to Berlin,” Lilith said.
    Berlin. The thought – not to mention Lilith’s sudden closeness as we stood, touching, by the window – was exhilarating. Sam Thornton, bounced from recruitment station after recruitment station thanks to a bum knee and a lunger wife, dropped behind enemy lines on a mission to collect damned souls. I felt like a soldier. Like a superhero.
    Maybe this undead thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.
    â€œSo,” I said, smiling for the first time since I awoke from the sleep of death, “you said something about an assignment?”
    â€œI did, at that,” Lilith replied, skipping gaily toward the door. “Now follow me.”
    â€œWhere are we going?”
    â€œFear not, Collector, I suspect you’ll find the task to your liking.”
    â€œC’mon, spill it. What’s the job?”
    Lilith beamed, all dimples and pearly whites.
    â€œYou and I are off to kill the Führer.”

 
    1.
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    Even before the Welshman drew down on me, I was pretty sure I was in trouble.
    I’d spent the morning minding my own business, paying my respects to a dead friend. A friend I thought I’d long since lost – over a girl, because that’s too often how these things go. We had the kind of falling-out that feels like it’ll last forever, and in the case of folks like me and Danny, I suppose it could have. Only it didn’t last forever. We patched things up just in time for me to lose the boy for good.
    Least he didn’t die for nothing. Hell, technically, he didn’t die at all, or at least, not recently. The sack of meat and bone that was Danny’s mortal vessel was three decades in the ground before I ever met the guy. Danny, like me, is a Collector. Was , I should say, since he ain’t much of anything anymore.
    That girl I mentioned? She – another Collector by the name of Ana – took Danny for one hell of a ride, which culminated in the destruction of his immortal soul. Sucks, huh? Only Danny got the last laugh. If her batshit scheme had gone to plan, she would have broken her bonds of servitude to hell, but at vulgar cost. Last time any of my kind pulled that sort of juju, it triggered the Deluge – you know, Noah and a big-ass boat – and damn near wiped humankind off the map. This time woulda done the same, had Danny not stepped in. So I guess you could say the poor bastard died, or whatever the hell you call it when the dying guy’s already dead, saving the world. If that ain’t worth a few moments of quiet graveside reflection, I don’t know what is.
    So that’s precisely what I did. Went to Danny’s mortal grave – a humble, weather-beaten headstone already draped with moss in a quiet, half-forgotten corner of a quiet, half-forgotten cemetery deep in the Kent countryside this fallen hero’s only monument – and said my piece. I didn’t figure the universe would