Death walked down the wide sunlit corridor, his feet clicking on the shiny vinyl floor.  Tick-tick, tick-tick.   Heel-toe, heel-toe.  The bony cadence sounding like a clock, slicing eternity into manageable segments.  He was happy.  Hospitals always made him happy, and he was often in one.  The old and worn-out.  The young and reckless.  The unlucky and the poor.  Busy, busy, busy.

He liked the smell.  The smell of antiseptic and starch, of rubber hoses and strange gasses, pungent ointments and exotic liquids.  The smell of humans desperately fighting him off by killing everything else.  Their vain sacrifices of virus and bacterium.  Take them, they seemed to cry.  Leave us. 

As if.

He wiped his finger along a pristine window ledge, and felt the demise of millions of microscopic lives.  They tried, but they were just so bad at it.  They polished and wiped with life-destroying chemicals, but they always missed some.  Not like him.  He was a professional.

He started to place the end of his scythe on the floor like a walking stick.  No, more like the swagger stick, the sceptre of some king.  Tick-tick, tick-tick tack.  Tick-tick, tick-tick tack.  The scythe set up a counterpoint to his feet.  Past Accident and Emergency.  Not today.  Past Geriatric.  Later, later.

He gave a little skip as he turned right into Maternity.  Through the swing doors and past the ward full of spent mothers and life-hungry babies.  Past the nurses’ station where tired midwives girded their loins over cups of tea and dreamt of something stronger.

Through the wall of the delivery room, where the mother gave one more agonized scream and forced the infant out in a gush of blood and pain and hope.  Time turned into syrup, doctor and nurses slowed, the second hand on the wall clock juddered and stopped.

The mother turned towards him, sweat caking her hair to her face.  Then she turned to the blood-covered baby, with its eyes closed and its lips blue.  She turned slowly, dream-like back to him, shaking her head, whispering, pleading, “No, no.”
Death moved towards the centre of the bed, his eyes fixed on the still child, his scythe at the ready.

Her face distorted into an inhuman expression from before civilisation.  “No!” she cried in anguish.  “Me!  Take me!”

Death paused.  “You?”  He looked down at the infant, then back at the tearful, sobbing mother.  He saw the fear in her eyes, not the fear of her own death, but the fear of her child’s.  He could see the certainty in her eyes that life would be unbearable without her baby.  “Yes.  I am here to take you.”  He saw the ambivalence on her face.  The fear and relief.  The emotion.  It was all the same to him.

He slowly swung the blade, precisely severing the soul of the still-born child from its body, hearing the scream from the mother, carrying the movement up, smoothly silencing her with it as well.

He sauntered back past the nurses’ station with the cheerful lightfootedness of someone who had done a difficult job, but done it well.  He started to catch the heel of his foot on the vinyl floor as he swung it forward.  Click tick-tick, click tap tick-tick.  He had, he thought to himself, happy feet.

As he turned towards Geriatrics he gave a little soft-shoe shuffle.