Human for a Day (9781101552391) by Jennifer (EDT) Martin Harry (EDT); Brozek Greenberg

Death was searching for this final soldier and it would not be denied. A day, no more. The dead might refuse the candle flame but the living could not refuse the dead no matter how much strength they might command. No strength could overcome the strength of death.
    He paused. No strength except the strength of stone.
    He rose and, with a sudden urgency, passed through the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates and set out walking, his boots making a soft shush, shush noise in the fine layer of snow upon the ground.
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    He walked all morning, barely pausing to register the changes in the world. The memories he carried were not the memories of shops and streets and he could not remember how the world had been before them enough to notice any change. No one remarked upon his presence and for a moment he doubted that he was even really there until he paused before a tavern window and peered in at his reflection with a frown.
    He saw a young man, eighteen or nineteen years old, smooth cheeks, hair cut short, but grown out shaggy and uneven beneath his helmet’s rim as if he’d had no time to care for it. Uniform tunic, belt, and trousers wrapped in linen up the calves, boots old but serviceable. Hair, and eyes, and face, and clothes the gray pallor of cold stone and expression: haunted. He shuddered but, as he turned away, he saw the candle flame and, with a new resolve, he set out walking once again.
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    He passed by people, young and old, some healthy and some ill, some carrying the memories of sacrifice and pain but none of them the one he sought and so he passed them by and came at last to a long, low building of gray brick painted white. Not a hospital, although it had the sense of one. The entrance door was locked, but as two women exited, chatting amiably together, he slipped inside a hushed and carpeted anteroom. Old men and women sat in wheelchairs, some talking loudly, some calling for a nurse, but most just staring into space, into the past. An old man sitting in a patch of sunlight, a blanket thrown over what once had been his legs, gestured to him.
    â€œAre you Death?” he demanded when he approached him.
    â€œNo.”
    The old man’s shoulders sagged. “I’m Clem and I’m dying. They don’t think I know it, but I do. I can see it, that light out there. Can you see it? A single light, like a candle maybe?” Clem waved his hand before his face, then dropped it with a sigh. “Can you see it?” he repeated.
    He looked into Clem’s eyes, past the lines of battle, past the fallen, past the blood, and pain, and death, and saw the candle flame and nodded.
    â€œI can see it.”
    â€œI can’t reach it.”
    â€œThat’s because your memories won’t let you go. You’re holding on to them too tightly. Let them go and they’ll let you go.”
    Clem gave a snort. “Easier said than done, boy. I’ve got nothing left but memories. My friends are all dead and my legs ache something awful in the night. They keep me up. They keep me remembering. Yeah, yeah, I know they’re gone,” he snapped. “I lost ‘em in forty-three, but they still ache.” He jerked the blanket up about his stomach.
    â€œSo why are you here?” he demanded. “You didn’t come for me, not in those clothes, you didn’t. You look like a picture of my old dad from the Great War and he died years ago.”
    â€œI’m looking for someone.”
    â€œSomeone?”
    â€œOne of mine.”
    Clem snorted. “You won’t find him. They’re all gone. All of them. Most of mine are gone now, too.”
    â€œI will find him. I have to find him.”
    â€œYou won’t. I told you, they’re all gone. Go look in a cemetery, that’s where they all are now. Bones, just bones.” Clem fell back, panting slightly. “All,” he muttered. “All but me. I’m tired, boy. I’m so damn tired, and I miss my