The Reaper's Timeline

By Montgomery Heath

When people die, their fate is not always that of Heaven or Hell. Some of them must become Reapers. And those Reapers have the ability to travel time in order to perform their duties as a Reaper. But, some of them are willing to abandon their duties in order to seek out the end of time. Our band of four Reapers journey into the future for this very reason. Along their way, they discuss how time travel works, religious concepts and life and death. They share their personal stories of their own demise along with that of those they harvest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Montgomery Heath
• Release date: Feb 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224399079

Book preview

THE

REAPER’S

TIMELINE

Chapter 1

In The Beginning

(After The End)

Hi, my name is Alex . Alex Cobain. I’m a... I was a history teacher at Madison High in McKinney, Texas. No, I didn’t get fired! I didn’t even quit. As a matter of fact, I love teaching... loved... I loved teaching history.  Sure, most of the kids seemed bored by it at the time. But, I know that the importance of it all eventually sinks in as time passes by. I don’t teach history anymore. Because, well... unfortunately, I died! So, I guess this story could be considered my automortography!

Anyway, what happened was, I woke up on the morning of March 4, 1975, my beautiful wife had breakfast and coffee ready for me. I sort of gobbled it down though, I was running a bit behind schedule. I grabbed my rain coat and rushed out of the door. Just as I was headed down the steps, I realized that I forgot to grab my car keys. I spun around to head back inside and at that moment my foot slipped out from under me and I came crashing down. My left knee slammed down hard on the steps, as well did my hands trying to brake the fall. I struggled to pick myself up off of the wet pavement and get back inside the house to get my keys. I guess I should have mentioned...I’m not in the greatest shape in the world. Too much time sitting behind a desk, I suppose! Anyway, I scraped my knee up pretty good and tore a small hole in my pants. But, I was already running late and I had to get going. My wife inquired about all of the commotion. I simply told her that I would explain it all to her later that evening, but I never got the chance.

I climbed inside my green Oldsmobile Cutlass, started the engine and headed off to work. The school was only about ten minutes from the house. But when I was just about five minutes away, I pulled up to a red light and stopped. When the light turned green, I started through the intersection. Just then, one of those delivery, box trucks, ran the red light. I could see the grill of the truck getting closer and closer through my peripheral vision. And then it slammed into the passenger side of my car!

My vehicle was thrown up onto the sidewalk and up against a street light. Everything went silent and I was trying to contemplate what had just happened. A few seconds later, a man opened the passenger door of my car. Honestly, I don’t know how he ever got that door opened considering how hard that truck hit me. The driver’s door was jammed up against a light pole. The pole was bent and leaning out over the top of the car. The man asked me if I was able to crawl across the seat and out through that passenger door.

At first, I just looked at him and said, Are you sure I’m not dead?.

He then replied, I don’t know how you survived that, but you don’t look dead to me!.

So I gathered my wits about me and crawled across the front seat of the car and out of the passenger door. The man grabbed hold of my forearm as I exited the vehicle and helped me to stand upright. I told him that I felt dizzy and needed to sit down. So he helped me sit down on the pavement, with my back up against the side of the car.

My next thought was that I could hear the sirens of the emergency vehicles on the way to the scene of the accident. Then guess what happened next. The glass light fixture from that damaged street light came loose, plummeted downward and slammed me square in the head. Breaking my neck and killing me instantly. Do you believe that? After all I had been through that morning, that’s what did me in.

That’s when I met him. Not the guy who helped me out of the car, not the emergency personnel, but him. Leopold...the Grim Reaper! Just after the glass hit me in the head and broke my neck, my head was hanging low as my body continued to be slumped up against the side of the car. I then saw someone’s hand reach out and touch my arm. I slowly rose my head up to see who it was. The first thing I noticed was this person was wearing a dark, long sleeve, zip up sweater and it had the words ‘Just Do It!’ embroidered on the front. As I raised my gaze up a bit further, I saw that his head and much of his face was covered by the sweaters hood. I could see the lower part of his face. It was long and slender and he had a dark thin goatee that was several inches long. This was the supposedly fictitious Grim Reaper character we had always heard of. Except that there was nothing fictitious about him.

He gently raised up his free hand up into the air and pealed the hood back away from his head. Half way expecting to see a skull beneath that hood, I was surprised at what I didn’t see. I didn’t see a skull with missing eyes or any gross or disfigured creature that one might expect to see from this historic character. He had hazel eyes, fairly long, straight, dark hair and he appeared to be about thirty years old or so. He did have a noticeably unique tattoo on the left side of his neck. It was five playing cards, a poker hand. If you guessed that it was eights and aces, you are correct. When the tattoo caught my eye, my first thought was, ‘I wonder if he regrets having had that tattoo placed on his body.’ After all, that poker hand is known by many to be the ‘dead man’s hand’. And I’m fairly sure that this guy was dead. Not that he actually appeared dead by any standards, but if I was right and this was the Grim Reaper, then I’m pretty sure that he was not of the living. But I was only half right.

He slowly began to rise up. All the while he maintained a mild grip on my arm until I was standing erect. I spun my head back around to see what I hoped that I wouldn’t see. My motionless, dead body slumped up against my Oldsmobile Cutlass, which would soon be bound for the wrecking yard. I then looked up toward the over hanging light fixture which had dislodged its thick, heavy glass cover bound for its lethal blow to my cranium. From there, I turned my gaze back to Leopold. He looked me in the eyes, twisted his head a bit to one side, raised his eyebrows and gave a sort of crooked smile, all while shrugging his shoulders. That was his way of saying, ‘Yep! Your dead’ without speaking a word. He then began to slowly back away from the scene of the accident, while gently pulling me in the same direction.

I said, WAIT!, I can’t be dead, my wife, my family, my students. I CAN’T be dead!. But, I was! And it didn’t matter what I wanted to believe. A fact is a fact and the fact is that it was all over for me. But I was wrong about that too!

Leopold walked me toward the nearest street corner as I blasted him with a million questions. Other than finally introducing himself to me, the only thing he would say was that I would understand everything in due time. He repeated this statement with every question that I asked. I would find out later that even Leopold didn’t realize how true those words were to become.

A half filled city bus pulled up and to my surprise Leopold climbed up into the bus still dragging me behind him. He led me to two empty seats and we sat down. At the same time I was asking all of those questions, I was thinking, ‘What a totally bizarre day this has been and I’m pretty sure that it’s only going to get even weirder’.

Can’t we just fly to wherever were going? You know, snap your fingers, blink your eyes or something like that., I asked.

He just simply said, That’s not how it works. At least in that case, he was correct!

We took the bus to the other side of town. We even had to transfer to another bus half way there. We pulled up in front of a fairly large, two-story building. There was nothing very impressive about the building. There was no insignia of any kind hinting as to what was inside. It gave you the impression that it was a government owned building. White cement walls, four round marble pillars at the entry way and very little else in the way of aesthetics. We stepped down off of the bus, headed up the sidewalk and then began to climb a flight of stairs which led to the glass doors of the building straight ahead. There was a security guard inside the building who unlocked one of the doors as we drew closer. He opened the door, said hello to Leopold and then he welcomed me inside. Before we had barely cleared the entry way, the guard locked the door behind us. That gave me an eerie feeling, like they didn’t intend to let me leave here.

Leopold walked me over to the receptionist’s desk and told me that the receptionist would take good care of me. He handed her some kind of card and then wished me good luck and exited out of the lobby through one of the many office doors that were in view. The receptionist handed me a clip board with a stack of papers that she wanted me to fill out. I immediately reached for my driver’s license and realized that my wallet was still it my car. It was pretty obvious that I was never going to see any of that stuff again. I slowly spun around, looking for a place to sit down. I noticed several people that looked as bad as the way I felt. A couple of them were crying and the rest of them had that look of disbelief stamped on their faces. I knew right then that we were all there for the same reason. I sat down, grumbled a bit about having to fill out all of that paperwork and then sighed a big sigh. I imagine that most of that paperwork was to simply keep my mind off of what had happened earlier that day. I then put pen to paper and began to right. I barely got a few blanks filled in when the pen she gave me stopped righting. It was out of ink!

I said in a low, but clear voice, I can’t believe this, how can a pen run out of ink here in Heaven? That’s when the receptionist and a few others in the lobby began to laugh.

She said, Heaven!, this isn’t Heaven honey. This is just the processing area where all of your data is collected before moving on to the next step.

Well, when do I get to go to Heaven?, I said.

You’ll find out about that later on today. After you complete all of that paperwork., she replied.

I got a new pen and began to fill out those dreaded forms. They wanted to know everything about me. They were primarily interested in every possible member of my family tree. Both living and deceased. Especially the deceased. There names, their spouses, children, how and when they died and their relationship to me. They also wanted to know if I had ever had a near death experience. There was even this multi-page psychology test that I had to take. It had stuff like picking out the one picture that didn’t belong in a series of pictures and it had all kinds of bizarre personal questions that messed with my brain. They really didn’t care too much about my driver’s license or social security numbers or any thing along that lines. Which was a good thing, because I didn’t have all of those numbers memorized. All I knew up to that point was that place made the bureaucracy of the United States government seem like a well oiled, highly efficient machine.

Well, after all those papers were filled out as best as I could, I turned them over to the receptionist. I sat back down and waited there for over an hour before they called my name. Alex Cobain, I heard over the intercom. I marched up to the receptionist’s desk and paused to hear what she had to say next.

Are you Alex Cobain?, she asked.

Yes, I replied.

She then told me to head down the hallway directly in front of us. Go all the way down to the last door on the right. She handed me a sealed envelope and told me to give it to the person behind the counter once I was inside that room.

As I walked down that dingy hallway, I had this great urge to open that envelope and see what was inside. It had to be about me. What was going to happen next? More importantly, where were they going to send me next? If I just died earlier this morning, I must have been headed to Heaven, I thought. And then, I thought some more, God I... Uh!, I hope it’s not that other place.

But I did make it all the way to that door, all while resisting the urge to open up that envelope. The placard on the door said ‘Distribution’. I slowly opened the squeaking door to reveal what looked somewhat like a bank lobby. There were small windows, with individuals sitting behind every window. Those must be the bank tellers, I thought. The lobby came complete with the typically long lines of people waiting to be served that you would see at most government buildings. The sign hanging on the wall behind the tellers, above their heads read,

Get in line.

Hand your envelope to the teller.

After I stood in line for about half an hour and was only one person away from the teller, the guy behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked me where everybody was getting their envelopes from. Apparently he had walked passed the receptionist and followed some others straight to this room. Boy, I thought I was having a bad day.

I stepped up to the teller’s window, handed her my envelope and waited for her response. She removed the content’s of the envelope and read, to herself, what it had to say. She seemed as if she was verifying the information on my paperwork with that of another form which she had laying just to her right. She rubber stamped the letter, inserted it back into the envelope and then resealed the envelope. She wrote ‘#4’ on the front of the envelope and then pointed me to door number four. While I had been waiting there in line, I had noticed that the vast majority of the people that were leaving the lobby before me were leaving through door number one. Surely that door must be Heaven, since so many people were leaving through that door. That thought made me worry even more. I had been given door number four. What was that? As I slowly walked toward door number four, I tried to peak into the other three doors as I passed by them. Unfortunately, they were double door entryways and you really couldn’t see inside. Even if you could get a peak while both doors were partially opened, you still couldn’t see what was going on inside. Probably just more paperwork and more lines to stand in.

I opened up the first door to room number four. I started to get this sickening feeling in my gut. I had actually felt that way all day long, but now it was intensifying. I opened the second door and stepped inside. To my surprise, everything looked much more modern than the previous rooms. The walls were equipped with electronic displays and there were small kiosk near the door to check in.

There were only two items to answer at the kiosk. The first one was, ‘Do you have the number four on the outside of your envelope?’ and the second one read, ‘Please enter the sixteen digit number, which you will find on the envelopes seal into the space provided’. Sure enough, I turned the envelope over and there was the sixteen digit number. Once those two items were answered, I was given the response to go to desk number eleven. I stepped away from the kiosk and looked around for desk number eleven.

I saw a rather frail, older gentlemen sitting behind that desk. I walked up to the desk and said, Hello. He responded in kind. There was no chair for me to sit down in. ‘Maybe this won’t take long’, I thought. He asked me for my envelope and promptly opened the seal and removed the contents. He then asked me for my name.

It’s still Alex Cobain, I replied, hoping that it would not anger him.

He simply smirked and gave a bit of a chuckle. He began to copy some of the data to another piece of paper. He handed me that last piece of paper and a key ring with one single key dangling from that ring.

What’s this?, I asked.

Your room key., he replied.

Before I could begin another question, he cut me off and told me to go to the elevator behind him, then down to the basement. Turn left out of the elevator, go down that hallway until you arrive at the first hallway headed left and I would find my room on the right hand side, room number 32. He also said that I would find everything that I needed there, including an information package that would tell me what I needed to do from there. I glanced at the key and it had the number 32 stamped on its side.

Just as I had done to Leopold, I began to pepper this guy with a round of questions. I also got the same response which I had received from Leopold.

Everything you need to know is in the information packet., he said. He calmly repeated this statement over and over again until I gave up and headed for my room.

I GOT ON THE ELEVATOR, pressed the B button, for basement and waited. There was this old movie poster hanging in the elevator. It was for the movie, ‘A Christmas Carol’. Were they trying to tell me something? Was I nothing more than a ghost? Was I going to have to start haunting peoples lives? I started to wonder, ‘Maybe I should go back out of door number four and go through door number one like everyone else was doing.’ Could I even get away with that? Just then, the elevator door opened up and I proceeded to room number 32.

I inserted the key and opened the door. At least it seemed to be a private room. I didn’t want to have to share a room with someone who was having just as bad of a day as I was. Glancing around, I noticed that the old man was right. The room had just about everything you could need. A full sized kitchen, a bathroom with a shower and a nice large bedroom with a king-sized bed. A bed with a packet of papers laying on it!

I picked up the packet and opened the seal. I poured the papers out on top of the bed. I was super anxious to see what those papers said, but I was even more exhausted than I was anxious. I wanted to take a shower and change clothes and then lie down for a bit before I started reading that information pack.

At that moment, I realized that I was still wearing the same clothes in which I died in. I looked down at the torn out knee in my pants and that instantly made me think of being back home with my wife. That’s when I finally had a moment, completely to myself, to stop and reflect on everything that had happened up to that point.

It seemed like it had been a week since the auto accident, but in reality it had only been less than one full day. My wife was probably just sitting in a chair at home, staring at the floor and somewhat in shock. But I knew that she would be okay, she has a great family support system. They would help her get through the rough times. I sat there, on the edge of the bed, in a bit of shock myself for sometime. I thought about my wife and our friends and families.

I also wondered how my students were taking all of this. Were they sad or would that mean that there’s no homework for history class today. If they never remembered any other thing about history that I had taught them, I bet they will always remember the day that the principal walked into the class room and told the students that their teacher had been killed in a car wreck on the way to school that day.

I finally reset my thoughts back to the moment at hand. I slowly got up and began looking through the room, hoping to find something to wear. I opened up the closet. It had several changes of clothes that looked like they would fit me perfectly. The first article that caught my eye was a dark, zip up sweater. It had a note around the hanger.

It read, ‘I thought you might like this!’, signed, Leopold.

I held it high in the air and read the words on the front of the sweater. It said, ‘Just Do It!’.

That was the only moment during this entire day that made me smile. I took a shower, put on some clean clothes and laid down on the bed. I figured that I would get a little rest and then get up and read that information packet. The next thing I knew, the alarm clock was going off.

I leaped out of bed to shut it off. The papers that I had failed to read were being torn up, under my feet, as I scrambled for the alarm clock. I had kicked them off the bed during the night. Not knowing what I was suppose to be doing, I picked up all the papers and tried to frantically get them back into a nice neat pile. I thumbed through them as fast as I could to glean any information I could on where I was suppose to be and what I was suppose to be doing and with whom?

I went through those papers three times before I saw it, the one that was upside down and backwards. It said to be on the second floor, room number 207 at 7:00 AM. The alarm said that it was 6:45. I grabbed some clothes, shoved the papers back into the envelope and headed back up the elevator to the second floor. ‘Today is the day that I find out what in the world is going on around here’, I thought.

I stepped through the door of room number 207. A middle aged women who was standing up at the front of the room said, Have a seat. Anywhere in the room.

There were already several people in the room when I got there and most of the rest of the room filled up just prior to seven o’clock.

She said, "Well, let’s get started. My name is Rose. I am not only your instructor for today, but I am also the general manager of this regional office.