A dead body is lonely company. Stinks, too. Bremmer shifted in the grave, feeling the freshly shoveled dirt settle in over his very much not dead body.
Some people never learn, he thought. They try to kill you again and again, then get confused when you’re still alive after the tenth time.
Bremmer tried to sigh but swallowed a mouthful of grimy dirt instead. He thought an earthworm might have made it in there, too, but with the plethora of things he’d consumed intentionally and not in his long life, it didn’t make much of a difference.
He would have to wait down here until nightfall—until the ground was stiff and cold—and escape under cover of darkness if he wanted to avoid being mistaken for a zombie again. So, he settled in, distancing himself as far as possible from the rotting corpse of his most recent cohort, and found a position that may be described by some creatures as comfortable.
And he waited. For what was Bremmer’s life but waiting? Waiting for rivals to die of old age, waiting for a recession to end, waiting for the collapse of a kingdom and the rotting of their prison so he could finally leave and see the sun again.
Hours into his rest, he felt the phantom pang of hunger echo in his gut. Despite it being over a millennium since he had needed to eat, that tiresome desire still reared its ugly head every now and again. Bremmer salivated, remembering that delicious pastry he had eaten in France a few hundred years ago. Maybe that’s where he should go next and get a little taste of what the country of romance had to offer nowadays.
He had given them enough years to ripen into something new. Maybe they weren’t in a revolution right now, and Bremmer could actually get his hands on a delicacy without having hundreds of tiny bullet holes poked in his clothes.
Maybe, he thought. Or maybe they’ll just be trying to kill each other again. Humans: so obsessed with life and death that they can’t see that life is only worth living if you stop worrying over the lengthening of it.
Finally, the ground cooled enough that Bremmer knew the sun was no longer shining. He’d give it a few more hours before poking his head out of the ground. Make sure all the angry mobs chanting “witchcraft!” were dispersed, all back in their shacks without a thought for broken ground.
When he clawed his way to the surface and left the body behind, he was greeted by the brisk night air of a moonless night. Bremmer shimmied out of the ground, dewy grass disturbed by his scrabbling hands. He had never been more grateful for the apathy of men to pack dirt when it comes to digging holes.
Bremmer turned back to his cohort’s grave and slowly set to putting it all back in order: first with dirt, then with grass, aligning each stalk to look as though it hadn’t been disturbed by an ageless, deathless creature of the night.
When he had finished, Bremmer stood, dusted the dirt off, and looked about the cemetery. Then he took a bullet to the chest.
Bremmer was immortal, yes, but he was not immune to the punching force of a .38 caliber rifle. It threw him violently to the ground, disturbing his careful work and causing a phantom ache in his chest. Bremmer coughed and looked down.
Was that…blood pooling on his chest? He clawed at his clothes, tearing them open, to find a gaping hole where his ribs should be. There were even a few poking out.
Laughing cackled through the night air. “Really?” came a voice. “That was it, all along? Bismuth-tipped bullets is all it took?”
Bremmer looked up in horror, and from the shadows came a figure he had dreaded seeing for some time: Joseph Frell. The man had a nasty grin on his face that stretched all the way to his ears. He cocked the large dark rifle in his hands a second time before standing over Bremmer’s collapsed body.
The man scowled at the wound in Bremmer’s chest. How come Bremmer wasn’t feeling anything? Wasn’t death supposed to be painful? Joseph shook his head. “My father, and my father’s father, and whatever generation came before him have been searching for this answer for their entire lives. And I found it!”
Bremmer didn’t hear the rest of his spiel. What was one more villain, one more crazy person with it out for him? Except, this one had worked. He was…dying. He choked on his own blood. His…blood.
What was it that he was thinking earlier?
Bremmer remembered the taste of that pastry again and wished he really could have gone to France one more time. Hell, wished he could have done a lot of things. What had he been doing all this time? Why hadn’t he cared?
Most people were given 80 years. Bremmer was given several thousand. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t want to go. He couldn’t go, not like this! The eager darkness closed around him, pulling him down, down, deeper than he had ever been.
I don’t want to die, thought Bremmer.
Yet some things come whether you’re ready for them or not.
There’s another story I wrote in my writing group! This prompt was one I thought up:
Your
story must begin with the line, “A dead body is lonely company,” and
end with, “Yet some things come whether you’re ready for them or not.”
The rest of the group produced really excellent writing from this one. If you want to check out one of the other writers, you can find him over at isaacphilips.com! He posts short stories, commentary, and even has one of his books self-published through Amazon! I would particularly recommend his “Tales from the Deep” series, and keep an eye out for when, Lord-willing, he publishes his next book Heart of Ice!
Check out the teaser for his book here!
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