Death never takes a holiday. And why should he? Surge pricing is amazing and there’s always a crunch around major events.
Death wasn’t an all-powerful, immortal entity, of course, shuttling around the planet to harvest the 1.87 deaths occurring per second. Death didn’t ride a pale horse, wield a scythe, or extend a bony finger to terminate the existence of each human on earth. Death, today, was Greg, who wielded a four-year-old iPhone with a cracked screen and drove a green 2013 Civic. And Greg was Death today only in a few-mile radius of East Hollywood.
Death was not happy. He’d accepted what should have been an easy pickup, only to be stuck in gridlock on Santa Monica Boulevard, staring into a red sunset glow of hundreds of tail lights extending west to the horizon. It was a traffic fatality pickup – those were the worst. Greg’s Death App score depended entirely on reliability and speed – one didn’t get five star ratings from the passed on – and he got no leeway for congestion, even when the fatality probably was causing it in the first place. And since more and more people were driving Death every week, he frequently found himself losing out to closer or cheaper bidders on jobs.
Death wasn’t a full-time job. Sometimes days would go by without getting a pickup, and Greg, like others, worked multiple other gigs. Of course, it was LA, so he still tried to pick up acting jobs when he could. So when not picking up a soul, Greg picked up laundry, groceries, and rich people’s lunches. Sometimes he got lucky, delivering a gut buster of double-fried pizzarito calzones with pork rinds and then lurking nearby for the inevitable ping. But when he could get a Death gig, it paid better than Doorsplash, Instacard, or any of the others. He just never got repeat business.
Death glanced at his phone as it played a sad little tattoo. Someone else, on a bicycle, had beaten Greg through the traffic and picked up the gig, losing him both the hefty surge fee and several points on his score, enough to drop him down from premium status and take away his chances, for now, of the highly lucrative celebrity deaths. The traffic still wasn’t moving, so Greg logged out of all his apps and closed his eyes to the world.