The Undead

Chapter 1:  Life with the Living

Every day people live their lives without a single thought about death; most don’t have a reason to.  However, every so often we are reminded of our mortality.  In these instances we are forced to question our beliefs.  The question that burns in everyone’s minds is what happens after death.  It is a question we all want answered but none is willing to find out first hand.  Many people turn to religion to answer this question.  While religion may give some comfort to those who believe, the truth is that no one knows what happens after death.  Not even those who have lived through it.

It may sound strange to say that people could live through death but there are those few people who are needed to usher the living into the next life.  These people have died yet they are not dead; they are the undead.  No they’re not zombies or vampires, they are grim reapers.  It is their job to take the soul before a person dies and lead them to the afterlife.  Even though grim reapers have technically died, they know no more about the afterlife than you or I.  They are only allowed to show souls the way to the afterlife, but have never experienced it for themselves.

Grim reapers, the undead, walk among the living.  They have lives just like everyone else.  Most even have jobs.  You might think that taking souls is a full time job itself, but it doesn’t exactly pay, so it’s more like involuntary community service.  There are some perks to being undead, like you can choose whether to be seen or not and you can’t die.  The latter is a bit of a catch twenty-two; most people don’t want to die so immortality sounds like a pretty good idea.  But what happens when you out live everyone you’ve ever known and loved?  This is the downside to being undead.  You can’t have any contact with anyone from your former life.  You don’t even want to know the consequences of such an action.  One cannot choose to be a grim reaper, they are simply selected.  No one knows how or by whom, it just happens.