A Struggle for Life

I’m not scared of death.

Humans avoid speaking of the end of life. To them, it is such a dominating presence that even mentions of it conjure the fear of summoning it. Granted, it’s unfair to compare me to the masses. My life is infinite. My spirit will endlessly search for the next body after exhausting the current one. Call it reincarnation, but that word is too grand for my taste. I prefer the term ‘hopping’; it gives more of a casual and fun vibe, which is precisely how it feels when it happens.

Throughout the times I lived, I had learned two things. The first was how easy it was to lose count of your age. The second was that some people should die earlier than others.

Despite death being the worst thing that can happen to most people, debatably, maybe only behind embarrassment, there are some criminals and psychos. They just couldn’t stop themselves from taking away lives. And I have taken care to clean them from the earthly plane, as if they were stains on my pants.

Bonnie and Clyde. Henry the Eighth. A group of local bandits in rural Thrace back in the Ottoman period. Oh, the last group didn’t even get to be remembered anywhere in history. Often, that was the case if I stopped a threat before it grew out of hand. There was another, more recent example that I was fond of.

An evil was brewing in an isolated hut secluded in a South-Indian mountain range, after the dawn of the nineteenth century. It all started with an alarming outbreak of cholera in the region; I suspected foul play because some details of the deaths were inaccessible to me, which meant magic artifacts could be involved, or it could also be someone I know well. And as the saying goes, it is a small world.

I discovered the presence of the woman thanks to my luck.

The target was a Caucasian woman who wore a dark purple cloak, and inside hid the standard red British military coat. Her disguise must have served her splendidly. She could pretend to be a sketchy character; if that failed, a lost soldier of the ever-daytime empire; and, as a last resort, an innocent, helpless damsel trying to survive in an unknown world.

Don’t be fooled by most of her temporary outer features. She could shed the cloak, the coat, even her vanilla skin and sky-blue eyes. Only one immutable detail was akin to a sign parading her identity, a signal only understood by the four of us. She hid that part of herself under the hood, but when she went back to the private hut, thinking the coast was clear, relaxation guided her to set the truth loose.

Out whipped out her curly hair, the tip of each strand coated with white.

I observed her from a place she couldn’t see, waiting for the right time to strike. The hut was a makeshift laboratory, as advanced as it could get back then. Within her reach always were shelves with glassware storing rare chemicals and dishes nurturing pathogens. That was decades before humans learned about the genuine horror of germs.

The woman, still in a military uniform and with no protective wear, spent the afternoon injecting samples of cholera into rats housed in rows of individual cages at the side, and she also spared a few droplets of the pathogen for herself. That sicko licked her lips afterwards, but in her defense, as another saying goes, it’s just protein.

While she was having fun with her science project, unaware of the lurking threat, night crept by. She wrapped up the experiments for the day and slumped onto the table with a façade of fatigue. In this state, overpowering her would still be a daunting task. I noted the flammable and poisonous liquid in several of the flasks on display, along with the axe strapped under the table.

A breeze slid down the valley of the mountain range, dispersing once it hit the wooden wall of the hut. That diversion was a cue for me to act.

I popped up at the window of the hut, air rifle in hand. Before she could react with her gaze, BAM! The first shot pierced straight into her left cheek. The momentum knocked her backwards until she fell behind the table.

Immediately afterwards, I pushed the loading bar and cocked the hammer; while doing that, I hopped through the opening into the hut, shifting my position for a better angle to shoot from.

The shot wasn’t lethal. I could tell from the moving shadows pitched onto the grimy walls by the sparse lanterns. Oh. I missed her brainstem.

I glided to the side, barrel aiming at the table, ready to shoot whenever the woman would enter my sight. One cautious step after another, the space behind the table inched into view, and…

The woman lunged from her hiding spot straight at me, axe firmly in hand. The bullet hole in her cheek had already healed, as if it had never existed. Even with this sudden development, I was unperturbed, sticking to my action plan.

The second shot fired with a sonorous clap that dove into the woman’s right eye. That clearly fell short of her brainstem too. I jerked my body to the side, so her attack would miss my rifle.

That’s right. She wanted to break my weapon, with no intention of harming me directly. Because she couldn’t. As her axe missed the rifle, it passed through my shoulder and arm.

I might still have the advantage, but the scenario wasn’t ideal. She had recognized who I was since my first attack, about thirty precious seconds earlier than I had envisioned.

She was too close to aim at, so I backed off, gracefully sliding away from her. The movement was completed with a reload of my rifle, but I didn’t get to finish this action.

I got carried away a little. Wandered too far away from my anchor, and so the rifle slipped out of my grasp. A chilling clatter followed.

The woman smirked, a glimmer in her blue eyes mocking my blunder. Not only did I lose my weapon, but also, from where the drop happened, she could guess where my anchor was.

She took the opening to burst out of the hut, axe swaying with her dash. I bolted after her; the rifle wouldn’t be much use if she were to kill me. Though my death would be trivial, it would also eject me to a new host that might be situated thousands of miles away.

The woman found the iron coffin in seconds. It was leaning against a tree, comically out of place with the rest of the forest. Maybe I should have put more effort into disguising it as a dead tiger or something.

She raised her axe, poised to strike. At this very moment, her guard wavered slightly. That was all it took for me to yank her axe from her grasp.

Must have been a surprise to her, as she turned around with wide eyes. Her mouth hung open, with sounds about to spill out.

I didn’t give her a chance to speak. The head of the axe tore across her face. That scar was nowhere near fatal. The swipe only maimed her eyes, her nose, and parts of her frontal lobe.

Although, the injury did mess up her motor control; her balance faltered, and she collapsed onto the grass. That was my cue to follow up with more swings, convenient since she couldn’t dodge any of them.

One brutal hack after another, a slimy blob and a repulsive smell leaked out from her fragmented… maybe I should call it a brain-container? Anyway, I kept swinging even though I knew she was dead already, for good measure. It might also be that her death felt slightly repulsive, but mainly, it was for good measure.

“Hey, do you need to be this violent?” A voice sounded behind me.

It belonged to the spirit of the woman, about to lecture me on why killing her was a mistake. Normally, a little whining would be understandable for the recently deceased.

But not for this soul. She would get a new body in around a few months or a few years.

“Don’t you feel ashamed of complaining about violence as the Horseman of Pestilence?” It might seem like a harsh rhetorical question, but I only said it after enduring a few minutes of her complaints.

“You’re no different from one of those brutes who get aroused from disfiguring a woman.” She dared to clap back. I ignored her, and should have done so from the start. These toothless insults weren’t worth addressing. I needed only to sit through her nagging a while longer until her spirit fell into slumber.

“Hey. I’ll have you know that I’m inno…”

I tuned out her voice. She couldn’t take a hint, rambling on and on.

“Death! Someone… someone will punish you! You can’t kill a lady so casually!” She thought that calling my name would drive me to respond, but I kept treating her like she didn’t exist, even when she deployed her convincing tears and soul-wrenching screams.

I had more important things to worry about. Namely, to merge back with my anchor, bury her remains, burn down that dangerous hut, and put out the fire before it could spread. It had been a productive day. And by the time I was done, Pestilence’s soul was long gone.

Reminiscence could sustain my mind for a time. Memories such as this one were pleasant to look back at, but then, as my spirit hopped into another body, the new home prepared for me, I was forced to part with those sweet victories, along with a few darker recollections that weren’t worth my attention. I had to face the outside world again. What’s the saying? You only live each of your bodies once?

Also, regarding Pestilence’s accusation, I was definitely the most cultured woman in that intensely misogynistic period, and in the years that I could remember as the Horseman of Death, there wasn’t a single time when I got even slightly aroused.