Image Source: PixBay
"I am not ready yet", said Kadhim to the angel of death "Do you have any idea how it feels to spend six, no, eighteen years, watching your dad slave away at a dead job shinning the shoes of pretentious assholes just to watch his son become a doctor? And I am supposed to what? Just fucking let it end here? On my first day of work as a surgeon. No, this is not how it ends. I refuse for it to end this way"
Kadhim finished telling off the angel of death while sitting on the rocks opposite the river, in front of him, floats his dead body, burned and armless. He moves his sight to his left to see the scene of the Al-Baqir bridge after it had collapsed, plummeting with all the people and cars it carried a few minutes before on the cheap party ferry below. He then looked around to see hundreds of people emerging from all around. Angry souls stared furiously at their lack of reflections on the water.
"I don't understand", a woman behind Kadhim said "I don't even understand what happened"
"I saw some of it", another woman replied "There was a man on top of a building. He fired a rocket launcher at a car on the bridge"
"Whose car?", a man asked.
"Mine", another replied "I had just won the election for Iraq's governor. You all died because of me. I am sorry"
The governor broke on the floor crying.
"That doesn't make any sense", Kadhim said "How could one rocket launcher cause such a bridge to collapse?"
"It was a ripple effect", the governor replied "The rocket blew up two cars. Add to that the bridge was poorly constructed as some in the government were trying to take as much money from the deal as possible. The bridge was bound to fall. The main I ran was to fix it"
"What?!", A woman exploded in anger "Are you fucking telling me that the ferry ride I took to celebrate my daughter's birthday ended with her death because some people wanted to make money!"
"We died because some people were indifferent to our lives", a seemingly devastated man said "And others who simply wanted to kill us"
The angel of death knew he was going to leave empty-handed. No soul had the intention of leaving that day. As the day turned into night rescuers, police, and ambulances started to be all over the place. The souls stood pondering in silence for hours as they watch their dismembered bodies getting retrieved.
The souls' sight slowly started to gravitate toward a man wearing a black cloth. He was quietly and snakingly collecting body parts. Arms, legs, heads, torsos, and everything that once had lived were picked up and thrown into the back of a truck. The angel of death moved slowly toward him.
"What are you doing here, Khalid?", the angel screamed the man "Are you planning to take all the deaths as an opportunity to harvest all these people's souls to fuel yours? That's pretty low even for you"
"You know damn well I can't do that anymore", replied the man, an old man, almost as old as time "That power was taken away from me by agent Kamal years ago. I am not planning to use these souls to fuel my soul. I am planning to use mine as fuel for theirs"
"You can't do that", the angel said with a horrified look.
"Why don't you bring your god and fucking watch me!", the man challenged the angel.
The man continued to slowly collect the body parts. The souls were all surrounding him. The man got into his truck and drove away slowly leading the charge of thousands of people to what looked like a protest of the dead to anyone in it. From the outside, it was just another day following a disaster, and people moving on with their lives. Intentionally throwing away whatever the tragedy has worn off on them, desensitizing themselves as a defense mechanism to continue living.
The truck arrived at its destination. The souls watched as the man started moving their body parts from the back of his truck and into a big empty room. They watched in silence as the man put the last bloody body part into the room.
Kadhim stood and pondered all the body parts piling on top of each other forming a big mountain of possibilities that will never come to be. The leg of a father who will never play ball with his son. The ears of a child who will never hear the reward for his good work at school. And his right arm with the engagement ring attached to his fingers.
"I can see you, you know", the man in black cloth spoke as he grabbed a thick needle and a long thread "I can see you all staring at me"
"What are you doing?", only Kadhim had the guts to ask.
"What does it look like I am doing?", the man replied "I am making a brand new body"
"The angel said you harvest souls", Kadhim "Is that what you will do to us?"
"I used to be able to do that", the man explained "I used souls to fuel my body. I used to be able to do that. This is a brand new experiment"
"You're going to put together a body for your soul to inhabit", Kadhim wondered.
"Very smart conclusion but no" the man replied "I can no longer use my soul to inhabit another body. I can however use it as fuel"
"You used that term couple of times already", Kadhim was frustratingly baffled "what does that even mean?"
"For the longest time, souls had one function; inhabit a body", the man continued sisterly "Until I found a way to use them as fuel for another soul to continue past its due time. I lived for hundreds of years with that method until it was taken away. But now I can use my soul as fuel. I will put hundreds of years of hatred that my soul picked up as fuel for whatever soul inhabits this body eventually"
"How are you going to decide the soul to inhabit the body?", a man in the back asked everyone was afraid to ask as it would expose their greed for a second chance to be alive.
"It's all of you who will decide", the man in black cloth answered "As I put together the body, you will have a chance to decide who of you gets the opportunity of a lifetime, another lifetime"
"How will we find a way to decide?", Kadhim asked.
"Ask yourselves a question", the man explained "What is the one thing that you want, that will be achieved with the body? A body that will have great strength and power"
The man carried on to sew together the body parts as thousands of souls were arguing for their right to inhabit the body. Each states their case while the rest minimize it.
"My father spent my entire life so I could find work to support my family. So I could get married and live on.", Kadhim stated his case "Without me, he won't have as much time"
"You're going to do what exactly then?", a man protested "Go find a job at the local zombie cafe?"
"What can any of us do then?", Kadhim asked loudly "What is the use of whatever freak of a body is being created, powerful as it might be"
It suddenly dawned on Kadhim just as it did with everyone else, the one thing they can do with it. The one they wanted to do all along with it.
As the man in the cloth finished sewing an eleven feet tall body, deformed and sown together in a night that matches the ungodly event transpiring in its darkness. The souls informed the man of their decision.
"We have reached a decision", Kadhim said.
"And what is that?", the man asked.
"It's going to be all of us", Kadhim answered.
"Do have any idea how impractical and contradictory it is to have thousands of souls inhabit one body?!", the man was frustrated.
"You said we should decide based on the one thing we all want", Kadhim explained "We all want the same thing"
"Yeah?", the man was baffled "And what is that?"
"Revenge", Kadhim answered with confidence "Revenge against those who killed us, who killed our family. Revenge against everyone who caused the death of the innocent by their actions"
"Well", the man answered with a wide grin on his face "Good enough for me"
The man stood over the body as blood started to bust through his skin landing on the deformed body. Whispering the sound of an unrecognized language. The souls who found a body party that belonged to them held onto it as the rest were holding into the fragments of whatever memories existed of them in the air as the body absorbed the souls into it as they screamed in agony.
With the man in cloth lying dead on top of it, the body stood and started to head toward the roof, crushing doors, punching holes into the wall, and welding steel as it sought to find the extent of its power. On the roof, it came across the angel of death.
"I was too late", the angel said as looked shocked at the moving body as it left a footprint of blood with each step "What did you do?"
"You should take some rest angel", the body said with a hungry tone "You are about to be very busy, very soon"
The body jumped into the night, leaving behind a terrified angel of death as it feared the horrifying future coming ahead.