Free The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl Page B

the patterned tiled floor, and, finally, the small blue rowboat. He turned back to Charlie, who stood patiently next to the door. “Thanks, Charlie. Hopefully we’ll run into each other again someday, somewhere,” the spirit said.
    Before Charlie could help himself, he said, “Yeah. I hope so, too.”
    With that, his assignment strode with confidence through the white light. As Jack crossed the threshold, the light began to dimand, as if by some hidden automatic motor, the door began to swing closed.
    A pang of jealousy briefly flowed through Charlie as the radiance slowly disappeared, the outline of the door with it. He stood alone in the hospital room for a few moments longer, his gaze stuck on the blue rowboat.
    Eventually Charlie turned his attention to the clipboard in his hand. Near the top of the page, in the upper right corner, was a small check box with a label. It read:
    Assignment successfully ferried
    Charlie watched as a large check appeared in it, just like it had thousands and thousands of times before. Then, he headed home.

CHARLIE
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MARTYRDOM

    W e’re talking six easy cases in a row, Dirkley. What are the odds on that? I haven’t had six easy cases in the past hundred years, let alone the same day. Has anyone been outside recently to check if the world is ending? I think it might be.”
    Charlie sat perched on the end of Dirkley’s desk as his navigator finished the form with a small flourish. Jack Sanders had been the hardest of the bunch so far, and even that was easy by Charlie’s standards.
    â€œMaybe it’s your lucky day,” Dirkley replied. The navigator moved the microphone on his headset from its stowed position above his brow back in front of his mouth. “Navigator to tower, Ferryman has successfully returned, over.” After he spoke, he looked over at Charlie—“I’m going to put her on speaker”—which he then followed with a series of button presses on the desk.
    There was a momentary pause before Melissa’s voice came over the air. “Copy that, Navigator, request status of transfer, over.”
    Dirkley leaned back in his chair as he spoke. “Transfer of subject complete, over.”
    A small whoop came over the radio. “Nicely done, guys! I thought Ethel might have tripped you up a little bit there.”
    Charlie snorted at that, mostly because he considered it a bald-faced lie. “I don’t believe you for a second,” he said dryly into the speaker. “That was one of the easiest cases I’ve had in decades. No, centuries. Actually, no, wait—ever.”
    Even to a Ferryman with Charlie’s experience, the Institute’s operation was almost completely a mystery. He didn’t know how its death-prediction system worked—not that he particularly cared, really, but the best answer anyone had ever given him on the topic was the three-word response of It’s magic, dumbass —but he knew assignments were sorted first by estimated time of death (more commonly abbreviated as the ETD), and then by a difficulty ranking. Assignments were divvied up based on their ranking, with the lower-level teams choosing their cases first, thereby allowing the harder cases to filter to the top. An aspiring team could choose something slightly above their designated grade level (which was how they moved up in rank) at the discretion of their manager. How the Institute knew what cases were going to be tough, he couldn’t say, but Charlie was aware that only easier assignments came with some information attached—names of people, places, that sort of thing. If Melissa knew his most recent assignment’s name was Ethel, then she’d probably gotten it from the assignment notes. If that was true, Ethel should have been too low a case for Charlie’s grade level. The only reason Charlie usually had names to work with was because Dirkley was so damn good at figuring them