“It hurts. Everything hurts.” Her voice breaks.

He closes his eyes against the pain that floods her voice. “I know. I know.”

A sharp gasp. His throat closes in on itself. Only a few more minutes now. How much longer can he do this? He could do it fine before 12. He did it all the time. Now it hurts.

Her hands hover around the knife buried in her stomach. She looks up at him, her eyes swimming with confusion. “Why?”

He clenches his fists. She won’t last too much longer now. Just a minute more. Then he’s free. He pulls the bottle from his pocket and holds it out. He closes his eyes again for just a moment. “Say you love me.”

She shakes her head. “Wh-what?”

“Please. Just say you love me. Then it will all be over.”

She struggles to fight him. She doesn’t want to. They never do. “You…you killed…you’re killing me. You-you stabbed me! I..I don’t love…you.”

But he can see the agony greatening. Crawling up her spine and sinking into her. Ripping her life from its bonds. He strokes the hair back from her forehead. “Just say it. And all of this will go away. The pain will stop.”

He sees her weakening. The pain will be very bad by now. The words drop from her lips, pulled down by her dying breath. “I love…you.”

He catches the words in the bottle. “Good girl.”

He catches a tear also, from her already cooling cheek and slips it into the bottle and corks it. He’ll get the rest later. He straightens and brushes his jacket off. Now she’s gone, the emotion leaves him. It’s too late. He glances down at her once more before he turns and leaves the apartment.

Number 17.

She’s the seventeenth. She won’t be the last.

***
He wanders the streets all that day. He still needs a scream, a laugh, and baby’s cry. These are the six things that keep him alive. A baby’s cry, to show life at its simplest. A scream, to show the unexpected. A laugh, to show the joyful. A tear, to show the sorrowful. A dying breath, to show life at its smallest.

And an ‘I Love You’. To show what binds all of these things together.

He tends to combine the last two. It’s easiest that way.

He finds himself in a café, eventually. A mother with an infant. He sits at the table behind them, and slips the cork from the bottle. Waits. It only takes a short while before the child wakes. It gurgles and fusses. He waits, still. Finally, a cry slips from its lips. Just a tiny whimper. He drapes his arm over the chair next to him, the bottle loose in his fingers. The cry stumbles into the bottle. He corks it.

He gets up from the chair, replaces the bottle in his deep pocket. He returns to the streets. The grime of humanity slides off his polished shoes. He moves through the crowds, invisible. He’s there, but he’s just another faceless person. Nothing noticeable. Nothing eccentric, nothing worth giving a second glance.

One in a crowd.

As he walks, he thinks.

He used to be the strongest of them all. Out of the whole league of the Gatherers, it was he who was the coldest. The most void of emotion. Of guilt. He went about his job, empty. He is a Gatherer of the second kind. A Gatherer who only collects dying breaths of the murdered.

At first, back in the very, very beginning, he had been rather adverse to killing people. He found it disagreed with him. But the longer he gathered, the more he realized how difficult it was to find people actually being murdered. For Gatherers are not magic, they cannot simply be where they need to be to find what needs to be gathered. No. And he began to die. For if a Gatherer does not gather what he is supposed to, he will begin to fade. Without those dying breaths, he’d soon be taking his own.

So he started the killing. Anything to keep himself alive.

He never felt guilt. Until now. Until he met 12.

He never learns their names. It’s part of his secret. It keeps it all impersonal. He meets them. Charms them. Drops his unnoticeable face. Suddenly he is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. They trust him. And so he works his way into their lives. For just one night. And when he is close enough.

He kills them.

But she was different.

He is jerked from his thoughts by a laugh. He shifts directions. A smile plays at his lips. Almost there. He pulls the bottle from his pocket and edges close enough to the laugher for the laugh to dance over the bottle’s brim. He wanders away again.

He didn’t even look at their face. He has no idea if this is a man’s laugh or a woman’s. He glances back, briefly. Too late. He shrugs it off. It doesn’t matter anyway.

His thoughts wander again with his feet. A flash of red catches the corner of his eye. He spins around. A few people stop to glance at him. He drops his head and shuffles along with the crowd, fading into the background once again.

It always comes back to 12. 12 with her flaming hair and dancing eyes.

12 with her tiny feet and the beauty mark right behind her ear.

12 with the bullet in her heart.

It was after 12 that he started to change. He started to regret.

He had to carry on. He had to keep the killing up. Or else he would die. He knew this. But the killing wasn’t easy anymore. He started to feel a twinge. Like he wasn’t hurting the other person, but himself.

It always goes back to 12.

He keeps walking. He still needs a scream. A scream and then he’s free. Until the next time. Until the bottle runs out and he has to fill it again.

He stops in a park. He doesn’t remember the footsteps that brought him here. He’s tired. Weary. It’s a cycle. His life. The collecting, the gathering. And what’s it all for? To keep himself alive.

But what’s it worth? What’s his life worth?

And so he sits on that park bench and thinks and thinks.

Why should his life be worth more than those he killed? To avoid the pain of fading? To save himself? His thoughts chase each other in circles.

Always going back to 12.

12. She was so beautiful. So different. She was soft. She wasn’t hardened, embittered by the world that hurt her.
12 saw the world through different eyes.

He jumps to his feet. He knows what he’ll do. He still needs the scream. A leering grin tugs at one corner of his mouth. He’ll fix it all and still fill his quota. It’s ironic.

He strolls out of the park. Up this street, down another. Searching, searching for the right one. Finally he comes to a stop outside of a hotel. He steps inside. Slides past the woman at the desk. Into the elevator. Up, up.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

He gets out. He pads through the carpeted hallways, finds the door he’s looking for. Up the last few steps. He steps out onto the roof. The stars stare down at him, as if they know what he’s going to do and don’t dare stop him.

He strolls to the edge of the roof, his hands in his pockets. He pulls the little blue bottle out, turns it back and forth. He watches the moonlight glint off the smooth, familiar, glass. The contents of the bottle would keep him alive for twelve more days.

12. Irony tastes bitter in the back of his throat. His whole life falls back down to that one number.

Always 12.

He pulls the cork from the bottle and sets it gently down on the short concrete wall. The glass clinks in protest. He pulls himself up onto the ledge. First one foot, then the other.

He looks down 12 stories. His vision sways a little. He grins.

And steps forward.

A scream rips from his lungs and shoots through the air, falling,deflated, to collapse into the bottle.

The final item.

He could have lived 12 more days.

***
“A man was found outside of the Ellan Hotel on 12th street this morning, dead. It is believed he jumped from the roof of the hotel. Foul play is not suspected. Estimated time of death is midnight last night. At this time the police have no comment other than that suicide is the most likely answer.”

“Found: A small blue bottle, looks exotic. Contains nothing.”