Part 1 || 9 | Ryder

A Tale of a Rebel Reaper III

Friday just turned into Saturday at midnight, in which the bellies of low clouds hung illuminated over the city lights of Markham, Nevada. Yet secluded from the city glow in dim bedrooms, many late-night middle school users typed into internet conspiracy and paranormal forums and texted each other on their smartphones, churning up more rumors about the Rebel Reaper stealing across their household rooftops in search of the next victim amongst them. After the last comatose case on the previous weekend, they occupied themselves with who the next victim might be this week, daring each other to glance past their blinds, or their curtains, or the shutters of their bedroom windows to see if the Reaper was there.

But the Rebel Reaper, skipping from rooftop to rooftop, heard their voices and ignored the orange-yellow glow floating through the shingles of their roofs above their bedrooms. The Reaper ghosted those staying awake and those sleepers anticipating her arrival in their floating nightmares about her. She avoided entering their head-spaces, because she’d be typecast into whatever their sick minds would conjure up, from a scythe-wielding psychopath to a girl-defiling dominatrix from the more perverted ones among them.

Minutes passed, and she leaped from rooftop to rooftop across most of the houses in the subdivision, but she paused atop a two-story house with a green glow floating through the shingles. Beneath her feet was a sleeper dreaming of something happy and exciting, and she felt the warmth of this dreamer fluttering through her chest like butterflies, accompanied with concussive shocks in her sleep.

BOOM!

She felt the rumble of an explosion beneath her feet and heard girlish laughter erupting from someone’s dream, so the Rebel Reaper closed her eyes. And in her mind’s eye, she gazed at a happy middle school girl with little twin tails on her head throwing big cherry blossom buds at another girl.

Maybe she was her elder sister.

BOOM!

The Reaper saw another explosion of fluttering cherry blossoms and heard the girl laughing, while the girl’s sister glared at her in a clearing full of daisies.

“Geez, Sakura, how many times do I have to tell you?” the older sister said, crossing her arms over her chest. “This is flower-tag, not blow-me-up!”

“But it’s fun this way,” Sakura said.

“Fun for you!” the sister said. “Wait, wait, WAIT!”

But Sakura didn’t ‘wait’ for her sister at all, just kept manifesting more cherry blossom bombs and tossing them, while her older sister leaped and rolled and leaped and rolled and leaped and rolled (BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!) through the onslaught of fluttering daisies and cherry blossoms and tufts of grass flying through the air.

Now the older sister was breathing hard through shallow breaths with petals and blades of grass sticking to her limp hair and sweaty face and soiled sweatshirt and gym shorts. The older sister got up and brushed the petals and grass off of herself and said, “You suck!”

“And you suck 3,000 cherry bombs!” Sakura said, manifesting more cherry blossom bombs and tossing them like grenades, one after another.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Sakura’s sister was now huffing and puffing, covered in more cherry blossom petals and blades of grass. She then signaled for a time out with her hands, saying, “No fair! I need something to defend myself, you know!”

“Like what?” Sakura said.

So her sister manifested a revolver in her hand and said, “Like this,” and she twirled it like a gunslinger.

Sakura ran up to her, saying, “Oh, can I play with it? Please, please, please, please, please!”

“Tell you what,” Sakura’s sister said. “If you manage a direct hit on me with one of your damn cherry blossom bombs, I’ll let you play with it for tonight.”

“Really?” Sakura said.

“Really, really,” her sister said.

The Rebel Reaper smiled, wanting to join in on the action. She had never played with two dreamers before. Whoever the older sister was, she seemed fun to mess with, and the Reaper hoped she wouldn’t mind an extra playmate tagging along. So the Reaper descended through the rooftop into Sakura’s dream world, where she found herself on the edge of the clearing and watched the antics go on in another series of explosions.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

She appeared right next to Sakura.

“Whoa, wait a minute!” Sakura said, stepping away from her. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“Sorry for dropping in like that,” the Rebel Reaper said and raised her hands up in as non-threatening a manner as she could muster. “I just wanna play along with you.”

“With both of us?” Sakura said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Okay, sure,” Sakura said, but then she faced her elder sister and called out to her. “Momo, there’s another dreamer here!”

Momo looked up from brushing more grass and petals from her clothes and hair, then ran up to the newcomer and waved, saying, “Hey there! What’s your name, sweetie?”

“It’s Ryder,” the Reaper said, her heart thumping at the prospect of making two friends in one night, and extended her hand to her newfound playmates.

Both girls shook it.

“Were you playing tag?” Ryder said.

“More like ‘blow-me-up,’” Momo said, “but since you’re new, let’s make it a little easier, shall we?”

Ryder nodded. “Sure.”

Momo then turned to her little sister and said, “What about you, you little troublemaker? You’re not gonna use your cherry blossom bombs on her, right?”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Sakura said. “I promise I won’t.”

“Good,” Momo said and zapped her sister twice with her gun, encasing her inside a giant peach blossom up to her armpits with another peach blossom around her head.

“‘At ‘as ‘at ‘or?” (What was that for?) the muffled Sakura said through the thick enclosures of Momo’s peach blossoms, struggling to push the petals aside from her body. “‘Od, ‘ou ‘uck!” (God, you suck!)

“Sakura,” Momo said, “this is just between me and Ryder, so butt out, okay?”

Sakura said, “‘At are ‘ou—” (What are you—)

Momo zapped her once again, blowing her sister out of the dream world in a burst of fluttering peach blossoms, and said, “There! Now we can start,” and she turned to Ryder. “Ryder, are you gonna go with me?”

Ryder eyed the gun, then stared at Momo as she backed away from her, saying, “Go where?”

“To Sakura’s bedroom,” Momo said, dissipating her gun from her hand. “My sister and seventeen others are waiting for you.”

“Wait,” Ryder said, “who are the others?”

“You’ll know when you see them,” Momo said. “There’s something I need to show you when you see them. It’s important.”

“What’s so important?” Ryder said.

“I’ll show you,” Momo said, “and you’ll know,” and she extended her hand to Ryder as the clearing of daisies now faded to nothing, replaced with the neon glow of a hologram screening across the former dreamscape. “Come on.”

Ryder nodded and took Momo’s hand in her own, wondering what this older sister wanted to show her. Then she paused at the misgivings Momo was giving off that made Ryder squirm in her stomach as the darkness lingered around them both.

“It’s nothing weird, is it?” she said.

“What do you mean?” Momo said.

“Like,” Ryder said, “nothing perverted or—”

“No, no, no,” Momo said. “It’s nothing like that, I promise, but it’s important you see this.”

So Ryder nodded again and followed the big sister through the hologram, hand in hand, then heard the snap of fingers and found herself at the foot of basement stairs.

“We’re in the basement?”

“Yeah,” Momo said, leading the newcomer up the staircase beneath the soffit of another set of stairs above their heads, “but Sakura’s in her bedroom upstairs.”

“You want me to see her?”

“Yeah,” Momo said.

So Ryder followed in silence beside Momo towards the top of the stairs, then down the hall towards the stair rail, rounding it, and ascended another set of stairs up to the second floor. When they reached the second floor hallway, Ryder saw two bedrooms next to each other with their doors open. And on entering the bedroom to the right, she found Sakura fast asleep beneath the sheets of her twin mattress. When she followed Momo to Sakura’s bedside, she saw the girl breathing with her mouth closed, her expression peaceful yet pale, so she placed her hand over Sakura’s forehead.

“Do you notice anything?” Momo said.

“She’s cold,” she said. “Is she asleep?”

“No, she’s not,” Momo said. “She’s in a coma.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “If she was in a coma, then she wouldn’t appear in the dream back—”

“If you don’t believe me,” Momo said, “then try waking her.”

Ryder just stared at Momo for a moment, then shook Sakura’s shoulders on the bed and said, “Hey, wake up.”

Yet Sakura never stirred awake.

So Ryder shook the girl’s shoulders again, rougher this time, and said, “Hey, wake up! Wake up!” When Sakura remained asleep, she felt a sinking feeling in her stomach before looking up at Momo’s stern face and saying, “What’s going on?”

Momo walked over and closed the door, then turned around and said, “You tell me.”

“Why’d you shut the door?” Ryder said, looking at Momo and then back at the sleeper that refused to wake up. “What are you trying to show me?”

“You really don’t know?” Momo said.

Ryder shook her head and said, “What’s going on?”

At this, Momo snapped her fingers, and the walls of Sakura’s bedroom disappeared, revealing seventeen other sleepers in hospital beds in three rows of six beds each, with Sakura’s bed forming the sixth bed on the last row.

“Do you remember these girls?” Momo said.

Ryder did; she froze on the spot and stared at all the girls she couldn’t find in their homes after she went to their houses the following week for the past seventeen weeks, almost four months. Just three months ago, she began hearing rumors about a rogue reaper spirit visiting middle school girls in their sleep on Friday nights from the houses of other middle school girls, and little more than a month ago, she started hearing rumors about several ‘proxies’ (their term) inviting her into their dreams, which she did a few times and avoided soon afterwards. Some of the girls she visited were messed-up in the head, but most of them were normal, at least as normal as she had left them before they woke up.

But none of them seemed to be asleep for some reason, so Ryder said, “Yeah, but they weren’t like this when I met them. Do you know what happened to them?”

Momo shook her head and said, “Just what I’ve been saying. They’re all in a comatose state, including my sister over there,” she added, pointing to Sakura in her bed. “Now do you understand what’s going on?”

But Ryder shook her head, saying, “No!”

“Do you know what you’ve done to all of them?”

“No, no, no!” Ryder said, reeling over the implication of her visits. “I never meant any harm, I swear!”

“I’m not talking about your intentions, okay?” Momo said and approached her with open hands, but Ryder stepped away. “I’m just talking about your actions. Were you even aware of what was going on when you visited these girls?”

“It’s not like that!” Ryder said as she backed away from Momo on tenuous feet, regretting her decision to enter the dreamscape of this sister duo, rueing the moment she even stepped foot atop the roof of this blasted two-story house. “Please, just let me get out of here, and you’ll never see me again.”

“I can’t do that,” Momo said.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Ryder said. “Just let me—”

“Ryder, just listen to me,” Momo said, approaching on the balls of her feet like a cat stalking after a mouse, it seemed, and making Ryder back away on trembling knees. “Please don’t make this worse for yourself. I just need you to come with me, and we can work this out, you and me.”

“No,” she said, backing away. “You’re just gonna abandon me like everyone else!”

“I promise you, I won’t,” Momo said, getting closer and closer. “I just need you to calm down and—”

But that’s when Ryder sprinted between the beds away from Momo’s voice calling for her stop, away from the rumors spreading around about her ignominious epithet as this scythe-wielding psychopath, away from those crazy ‘proxies’ inviting her into their dreamscapes with their leering eyes, away from yet more examples of her cursed life popping up like flies attracted to the stench of death on her wherever she went. Yet through the holographic darkness of her surroundings, she hadn’t a clue where she was and figured she was still inside Momo’s dreamscape. So she figured she might as well keep running and kept on running into the darkness, praying that this was enough to keep herself away from her own demons—

And fearing it wasn’t.

A Tale of a Natural Disaster I

Minutes elapsed into half an hour, in which she kept running to escape Momo’s voice in her head telling her to stop, but Ryder wouldn’t listen. She just kept running through the darkness like she’d been doing since that godless Friday night when she turned 13 years old and experienced a change in her life that she was still coming to grips with. In short, she’d been ‘ghosted’ (her term) out of her life, her presence sealed off from her family who reported her missing and put up missing-persons flyers of her from that day forward, but nobody seemed to know where she went. Even when she lingered for a month in her immediate neighborhood, trying to get their attention, she couldn’t contact her parents, or her older brother.

So she ventured out into this strange new world, where other girls her age seemed to acknowledge her in their dreams on Friday nights, including her old school friends. At first, it was just happenstance, but the more often it happened, the more she realized that something about Friday night had manifested her powers, so she contacted her friends to find answers. And one by one, she reconnected with her school friends, who promised to tell her family about her when they woke up, but none of their promises panned out. And when she visited their houses the next day, she found them missing from their bedrooms; and when she visited her old school, checking the classrooms where her friends were, she found them missing from their seats during class.

So she visited the houses of her friends’ friends and contacted them in their dreams, asking them to contact her family and her friends, which they said they would. But like before, none of their promises panned out, and when she checked the next day during the weekends and when she checked in their classrooms during the weekdays, she found them all missing. And that was just the start.

The more she repeated this pattern throughout the foregoing months (Friday after Friday, weekend after weekend, weekdays after weekdays), the more she started hearing rumors at school about this so-called Rebel Reaper, and the more she began to connect the dots. Something about Ryder caused all of this to happen, and she began to be more selective, more deliberate, and more desperate to find help from the dwindling pool of girls her age who wouldn’t fear her, or desire her, till she had found herself in her current situation, running through someone else’s dream after entering.

Time passed, and she grew tired of running, bowling over and resting her hands on her knees, then looked up at a voice calling to her from the darkness.

So Ryder said, “Why do you keep following me?”

“Ryder, I’m not here to hurt you,” Momo said, manifesting before her out of a flutter of peach blossoms. “I’m here to help you, I promise.”

But Ryder backed away, afraid to even touch her, and said, “Everyone said they would, but they couldn’t.”

“Trust me,” Momo said, coming forward.

“Stay away from me!”

Momo stopped.

“Just stay away from me,” Ryder said. “I don’t want it to happen to you, too.”

For a few moments, Momo stood there, a full five feet away from Ryder, and said, “Please, don’t be afraid.”

Yet Ryder kept backing away from her as tears trailed her cheeks, so she wiped them away—

Before she fell backwards into a falling dream, falling amidst her screams echoing through the darkness around her. And in her descent down an endless infinity, as her screams faded into the static echoes above her, she experienced visions flashing through her mind’s eye as if she was about to die. First, there were flashes of her first glimpses into the smiling face of her exhausted mother, then learning to stand up on pudgy legs before falling on her bottom again, then taking her first tenuous steps with the help of her older brother, then her first day of elementary school and her first friendships, then her first day of middle school and her first crush, then her thirteenth birthday on that Friday when the bullies called her several four-letter and five-letter words at school, and then that bleak Friday night just before it all came to an end on Saturday morning when . . .

Ryder woke up in the very bed and bedroom where it all began, and with her was Momo sitting by her bedside.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” Momo said.

Ryder sat up, saying, “What are you doing here?”

“It took me a while to access your memories,” Momo said, “but here we are,” and Momo turned her head when Ryder’s older brother called Ryder’s parents screaming something about his little sister in her bedroom.

‘WHAT?’ both parents said in unison.

Then running footsteps rushed down the hallway, and then big brother and mother and father came into the bedroom, yet even when Ryder said, “Mom, Dad, Bro! I’m here!”

And Ryder jumped from the bed and ran towards them, only for her three loved ones to pass through her as if she was just a hologram. Ryder turned around and saw the trio gathering around another copy of herself lying in the bed, trying to shake that copy from her sleep, trying to call out to her in strained voices as if she were . . .

The father ran towards the phone on the bedstead, calling 911 and saying, ’Hello? Hello, this is an emergency! . . . It’s my daughter, Ryder [blank], and she’s—’

There was a bleep through the audio of Ryder’s memory when he said her family name, and that’s when Ryder wondered why she couldn’t remember her own surname whenever she contacted her friends or her friends’ friends over the last few months of her wandering through this strange new world.

‘—not breathing at all!’

All the while, Ryder’s mother kept shaking Ryder’s body on the bed, begging her to open her eyes and come back to her, calling her name over and over, till her yells became high-pitched screams. Now her older brother, standing mute beside Ryder’s body on the bed, reached out and grabbed Ryder’s cold hands within his own and started crying. And then, as the father informed the dispatcher of their residential address over the line, Ryder began to connect the dots.

“No,” Ryder said.

“I’m sorry, Ryder,” Momo said.

“No, no, no!” Ryder said. “This can’t be happening!”

“You died, Ryder,” Momo said, coming over to the girl that was becoming a crying puddle of tears, and hugged her. “Your family didn’t issue a missing-persons report for you. Your family issued your obituary.”

And for a time, Ryder kept crying in Momo’s embrace, wetting Momo’s shirt with her tears as the memories of that fatal interim between Friday night and Saturday morning finally surfaced through her thoughts. After getting humiliated in the bathroom by her so-called friends, she took pills before going to sleep and overdosed herself into oblivion, in which she lost her memories of the bullying and mistook her enemies as her friends when she had asked them to let her parents know that she was alive. Whatever hatred she harbored for her bullies, whatever turmoil she had suppressed and hid from her family, she had transmuted into a weapon that was her very presence in the lives of the living. And when she thought about the epithet they had given her, Ryder now understood what they really meant.

Ryder was the Rebel Reaper, the reaper of the souls of her enemies and the souls of the bullies of other girls. When she thought about it that way, no wonder all the ‘proxies’ wanted to meet her for liberating them of the same hell that had snuffed out Ryder’s own will to live.

“I’m a monster,” Ryder said under her breath.

“No, you’re not,” Momo said, letting her go and snapping her fingers again, which shattered the scenery of Ryder’s death into a thousand shards. “Not yet.”

Ryder looked at her.

“What do you mean by that?” she said.

“Those seventeen girls you visited,” Momo said, “they’re not dead. They’re just in a coma right now, but you need to help me, so I can help you.”

Ryder just stared, eyes wide at her declaration, and shook her head and said, “You can’t help me,” and she looked away.

“That’s not true,” Momo said. “Look at me!”

Ryder faced her once again before averting her gaze, afraid to look at someone with the answers. But then again, even if Momo held the keys to Ryder’s salvation, she wasn't sure she even deserved it, not after what she did.

“I won’t go to Hell for this, will I?” Ryder said.

“Not if I can help it,” Momo said and held out her hand. “What do you say, Ryder?”

The girl nodded and took her hand.

“Good.” Momo then summoned a door that appeared in a flutter of peach blossoms, placed an omamori charm over it, and said, “Open,” and with a snap of her fingers, the charm flashed and opened the door into Sakura’s bedroom. After that, Momo guided Ryder across the threshold and said, “Okay, since you put my sister in a coma, you need to wake her up,” and she pointed to the sleeper on the bed.

Ryder approached Sakura’s bedside but turned to Momo, saying, “How do I do that?”

“Have you ever watched Sleeping Beauty?”

“The Disney one?” Ryder said.

“Yep,” Momo said.

That’s when Ryder’s face flushed crimson, and the ends of her twin tails curled up like moving claws. She stared back at her, saying, “I don’t swing that way!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Momo said. “Before tonight’s out, you have to pucker up to eighteen girls, starting with my sister. Now pucker up already.”

Ryder just gaped at her, turning deeper shades of red, then looked down at a girl her age and noticed her lips slightly open and inviting, making Ryder sweat. She had yet to share her first real kiss with her middle school crush, whose name she couldn’t recall anymore, and now she was about to jump ship and swim over to the other shore.

“Come on,” Momo said, crossing her arms over her bosom and tapping her foot on the floor. “We don’t have all night, you know.”

“Ugh, fine!” Ryder said, then closed her eyes and plunked her lips over Sakura’s before looking back at Momo again. “There! Are you happy now?”

Momo put her fingers between her brows as if she was massaging an on-coming headache and said, “God, this is gonna be a long night. Ryder, in order for this to work, you’re gonna have to kiss her like you’re about to make love to her.”

Ryder gaped. “You’re kidding.”

Momo sighed but said, “That’s just how it works.”

At her words, Ryder gulped and looked over at Sakura, looked at her lips that were more open now, more inviting and suggestive of further carnal adventures, but she shook her head of such thoughts. This had nothing to do with coming out of the closet, she promised herself, because she was not in the closet to begin with. It was just so she could reverse whatever she did to Sakura and those other girls. As such, Ryder breathed in and exhaled, quieting the insistent drumming of her heart, and shared her first real kiss with another girl, open mouth and icky sensations and all.

Ryder stood back up and noticed an omamori charm with the name, ‘Ryder,’ attached to Sakura’s forehead.

“What is that?” Ryder said.

“A charm,” Momo said.

“But what does it mean?” she said.

“It means,” Momo said as she removed the piece of paper from Sakura’s forehead, “that the coma has been lifted,” and she pocketed it in her shorts. “Follow me.” So Ryder followed her benefactor to the bedroom door, left ajar, where Momo pushed it closed and placed another charm over it and said, “Open.”

And the door opened into a hallway with linoleum flooring and bright lights from a drop-down ceiling, where the antiseptic smell of soaps and cleaners wafted into the room.

Ryder just stood there, cupping her nose and mouth with her hand, and said, “How many girls did you just say?”

“Seventeen more to go,” Momo said.

“Dear God,” she said.

“Stop complaining,” Momo said. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can work this out,” and she crossed the threshold into the hospital where the other girls slept.

And Ryder gulped and followed.

TBC