150K, Every Day | J.D. and Melanie
One of the first things J.D. had learned on the job was, as the plaque on his boss’s office wall assured him, approximately 150,000 people died every day, if you rounded down.
150,000. There were countries that didn’t have that many people in them.
He’d died at the ripe old age of 25, in 1997, somewhere in England. He’d been on the run, like he had been his whole life. Mom was dead - Veronica was gone - and there was nothing left for him in Sherwood. So he ran. He’d been in a bar in Manchester when he picked a fight with the wrong person, and... that was all she wrote.
Except it wasn’t, because something peculiar had happened. A man in a black cloak approached him as everyone around them froze in time and place. J.D. rose to his feet - but his body remained on the floor, arm twisted in a way arms should never be twisted, blood surrounding him, skin broken and bruised. Other than the cloak and the scythe he had (both of which, J.D. found out later, were purely for aesthetic purposes), the man didn’t look very menacing. He looked downright pleasant, actually.
“Name?” he asked politely, revealing a clipboard.
“...Jason Dean,” J.D. said, utterly confused, but still having a hunch of what was happening.
“Dean, Dean, Dean Dean Dean Dean... oh. Dear.” He looked up, an apologetic look on his face. “It appears you won’t be moving on after all.”
“On?”
“You’re actually supposed to stay here for awhile. Come with me, we need to get your robes fitted.”
And so J.D. had become a Reaper, stuck in the in-between. There were thousands of Reapers, but J.D. was in the External Influences Division (accidents, homicides, and suicides), in their American location, so he only worked with about 500 others. Not that he knew all of them. No one knew everyone. There were 500 of them.
J.D. had to reap about 10 souls per day, depending on whether or not there was some disaster that caused a rush. Today, there wasn’t. This was his eighth soul of the day. Amiably, unseen by anyone, he leaned against a wall, waiting for it to happen.
When he’d left the office, the large clock above their cubicles told him it was 2015.
And his schedule told him he’d be collecting this particular soul in exactly ten minutes.