Hey everyone. Wow, has it seriously been that long since an update. Woops. Sorry guys, my bad. Lucky for you guys I caught a cold and ended up skipping class because of it. With nothing else to do today, I decided to write. On another note: Thank you all for your wonderful reviews! Your kind words keep a girl going!

Lawyers: Our client does not own Scrubs or Dead Like Me, nor is she gaining any profit by writing this story. Don't sue her.

Chapter Seven

Perry's POV

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My fingers tapped the steering wheel irritably as I headed over to Newbie's house. I got my usual call this morning about what reaps we had to take care of today, but on top of that, he told me he needed a ride to the hospital. Apparently both the tires on his wimpy little scooter were flat and he pointed out that since we both had to go to the hospital for reaps, it would only make sense to carpool. On top of that, he still wasn't talking to his friends, so asking them for a ride was out. Why he didn't just go out and buy a real car with his leftover life insurance money from Dan was beyond me.

"Why can't you just call a cab?" I had asked him over the phone.

"I'd like to avoid the public as much as possible at this point," he had said. "I have a feeling that the cab driver of any cab I get in would try their hand at playing 'vigilante' and turn me into the police."

"Why the hell would they do that?"

"Haven't you been watching the news," he'd said, sounding surprised. "I've been exposed as a reaper. They have footage of me healing from a gunshot wound. They don't have my name yet, but people will recognize my face and it'll only be a matter of time before I end up on the wanted list. No way in hell I'm registering..."

He ended the call pretty quickly after that and before I knew it, I had hopped into my car and was on my way over to pick him up. I guess I decided to throw him a bone or something by giving him a ride over to the hospital. It was one thing to have your secret life expose to a bunch of moronic co-workers, to be exposed to the whole world though? Plus, he sounded kind of strange over the phone, stranger than usual; not that I'm concerned or anything. The kid can take care of himself.

As I turned onto his street and pulled up in front of his house, I swore. Spray painted in giant red letters on the front of Charlotte's house, his nice, new house, was the word 'reaper.'

"I'm betting his scooter getting two flat tires has something to do with this too," I muttered to myself as I locked up my car and made my way up to the front door.

The mutt went off like an alarm when I tested the doorknob to find that it was locked. Pulling out a spare key that I'm almost one-hundred percent sure Newbie has no idea about, I unlocked the door and slipped inside. Or at least I tried. As soon as I put one foot inside the door, I was nearly pushed to the ground as Danny, the huge beast that he is, leapt up at me with a ferocious snarl that I may have feared back when I was alive and would need stitches for a bite like his. Now though, I was more annoyed than anything, and I wasn't even given a chance to react because as soon as the dog saw that it was me, he turned tail and ran for cover.

"Yeah, that's right," I snapped as I watched him hide under the kitchen table. "Try that again and I'll turn you into sausage."

"Are you picking on my dog, Perry?" Newbie asked, walking down the hallway to meet me.

"He started it," I said, defending myself.

"Be that as it may, you are older and smarter than him, and should therefore know better," Newbie pointed out. "Besides, I think Danny has the right to be a little on edge right now after having to deal with vandals attacking our house this morning. We're lucky they didn't break a window."

"Yeah, that was something you forgot to mention when you called me this morning," I said, crossing my arms irritably. Calling the police wasn't really the greatest idea now that the kid had been pushed into the reaper radar, but I would have gladly come over to kick some ass.

"What good would it have done?" Newbie said with a small shrug. "The spray paint was already there, and if you came over, you'd probably be accused of being a reaper too. When I decide to repaint my house, I'll give you a call."

"Newbie, if you just sit back and let them do this, it's only going to get worse," I said, and as if to further prove my point, the sound of many small somethings hitting the front of the house reached my ears. A quick glance at one of the living room windows showed me that it was raw eggs.

Danny, heartened by this latest attack on his territory, began barking like some sort of vicious monster. Ignoring Newbie's quiet protests to just leave it, I turned back to the front door while saying, "Let me show you how a real man deals with these assholes."

Determined, I grabbed the doorknob and swung open the front door, ready to give whoever was out there a piece of my mind. Danny was one step ahead of me though, several steps in fact and was already halfway across the lawn before I could even open my mouth to yell. Sometimes I forget that the so-called 'mutt' was actually a full-grown German shepherd, a breed commonly used as police dogs for a reason. Snarling like something out of hell, Danny made quick work of chasing the three teenaged boys out of the yard.

I waited until he was just within biting range of said teenagers before whistling sharply and shouting, "Danny, come!"

The over-grown fluff ball stopped in an instance and came bounding back across the yard to me, his tail wagging proudly the whole way. Those obedience classes really paid off. I couldn't even get interns to listen to me that quickly. Stepping aside to let Danny through, I closed the door behind us with a smirk.

"They'll think twice before they try that again," I said.

"They wouldn't need to think twice about trying to get Danny put down if he actually bit one of those boys," Newbie pointed out angrily. "Are you proud of yourself for putting my dog in danger?"

"Hey, I didn't plan for him to get by me," I said defensively.

"Yeah, but you opened the door after I specifically told you to leave it alone!" he snapped.

"Well he didn't bite anyone, so don't go getting your panties in a bunch, Clarissa, because everything's fine!" I snapped back.

"Maybe things seem fine to you, but did you ever consider the fact that Danny's a target now because he's my dog and they're trying to get to me?" Newbie said.

He brings up a good point, but I can't exactly undo opening the front door and I'm not about to admit out loud that I was wrong, so I stuck with stubbornness.

"I think Danny can take care of himself," I said. "Now grab your stuff and let's go before I change my mind about driving you anywhere."

"Fine," he growled.

And we were off.

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3rd person POV

It had been over a day since that man died falling off of a ladder and Carla still couldn't completely wrap her mind around the whole grim reaper thing (of course, a day wasn't really a long time, but it sure felt like it had been a long time since she had last seen JD. Plenty of time to be stuck with her thoughts on this subject). It wasn't even the fact that JD was one of these grim reapers that she was having trouble processing, it was the whole grim reaper thing itself. Even after seeing proof that such a thing could exist, she still couldn't just accept that a supernatural creature like a grim reaper was real.

'There I go, calling Bambi a 'creature.' This is just the sort of reaction he's probably worried about,' she thought before shaking her head in frustration. She had to take care of the 'grim reaper's exist' problem first before she could deal with the side detail that JD was one of them.

If grim reapers were real, and if she could accept that they were real, then what over sort of supernatural beings (not creatures) existed out there? Vampires and werewolves? How about angels and demons? She wasn't a religious person (and she could only imagine how Turk was taking this. They hadn't talked about it when they both ended up back home the previous night and when they went to work in the morning, they parted ways without a word as soon as they reached the hospital), but if grim reapers were real, then it would only be logical that spirits or ghosts were real, and of course those spirits would need a place to go, maybe not heaven or hell, but an afterlife of some sort.

Carla didn't know what to think and it was driving her crazy because she was usually the one with the answers, the one who had good advice to offer for any situation. Aside from Turk, it wasn't like she had anyone she could go to and talk about this. Anyone she talked to about grim reapers possibly being real would think that she had that reaper sickness; a sickness that she had doubts about from the very beginning and now doubted that it was real even more than she doubted grim reapers were real. Now she could understand how JD must have felt, being suspended from his job with everyone believing he had some sort of sickness that made him want to kill people (to put it bluntly).

Carla fiddled with the chart in her hands, staring down at the still form in the hospital bed before her. It was an elderly man who surprisingly enough did not die of the plague. Apparently he had been cleaning his gutters and had fallen off of the roof. He had died earlier that morning, a couple hours after her shift had started. Everyone who had tried to revive him had long since left the room, but Carla could not get herself to leave. She had wasted away the rest of her shift standing in this room, staring down the elderly man's body and wondering about grim reapers and spirits and if this man's grim reaper had come and collected his soul already or if he was still waiting in his body (and just how ridiculous did that last thought sound?)

"Oh, Carla, hi!" a familiar voice cheerfully greeted from behind her and Carla turned around to see Molly Clock of all people standing in the doorway.

"Molly," Carla said, a little surprised. "I didn't know you were back."

"Yeah, probably not for long though. I've been traveling around, helping out wherever I can. Every place I've been to has been short handed on help what with this whole grim reaper thing going on," Molly explained.

"Yeah, we keep losing staff members here," Carla said absentmindedly with a frown. It seemed that everything came back to grim reapers these days. She wondered if Molly had heard about JD yet.

"Did you know him?"

"What?" Carla asked, broken out of her thoughts.

"Did you know him?" Molly repeated, gesturing to the body on the bed. "I noticed you seemed kind of upset when you were staring at him earlier."

"No," Carla said. "I didn't know him. He just got me thinking about other things."

"Anything you want to talk about?" Molly asked, the psychiatrist in her taking over.

Carla stared at Molly for a long moment, trying to organize her thoughts and come up with something to say. Finally, she opened her mouth, deciding to go with 'No, I'm fine,' but instead of saying that, the entire story that she had been agonizing about all day spilled out of her mouth; everything about grim reapers and JD, about what JD had shown her just yesterday and how she just couldn't quite get herself to believe it. By the time her brain started working again and it occurred to her that it may not be the best idea to be telling someone about this, the damage had already been done.

'I guess the gossiper in me couldn't resist,' she thought wryly.

Molly stood there silently for a long moment, her eyes wide with surprise, before she seemed to regain her composure and gave Carla a small smile. She walked past Carla and came to stand before the bed of the elderly man. Staring down at the man, Molly asked, "When do you get off of work, Carla?"

"My shift actually ended about an hour ago," Carla said quietly.

Nodding to herself, Molly reached out a hand and patted the elderly man on the shoulder. Turning away from the body on the bed, Molly smiled and said, "Come on, let's go get some coffee or something and we can talk about this more."

Counting it as a positive that Molly didn't shoot her story down and call her crazy, Carla agreed and followed Molly out of the hospital room. As they headed to the hospital's front entrance, Molly called over her shoulder to the Todd as they passed him, "Hey, the Todd! Take care of Mr. Greg Manza in room 1104!"

Carla sighed as the Todd made some obscene response, glad to be clocking out for the day.

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JD's POV

"The next time we have to hide from someone in the morgue, I get to hide in one of the morgue drawers and you can hide under the sheet. Holding my breath for five minutes is not my idea of a good time," Perry said as we led our most recent reaps through the hospital's halls while trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. That whole 'notice-me-not' thing that comes with being a reaper isn't as reliable as it should be when people are nervous, suspicious, and pretty much keeping an eye out for any signs of abnormality (namely, us), so when one of the hospital's staff came into the morgue while Perry and I were searching through the bodies to find our reaps, we didn't want to take any chances and hid in the nearest, most convenient place possible: under a sheet for Perry and in an empty morgue drawer for me.

Maybe convenient isn't the right word.

"Fine by me," I said, holding back a shudder at the memory of being in that tiny, enclosed morgue drawer. It was far too reminiscent of those times I ended up in a coffin after one of Dan's shenanigans. I'd much rather hold my breath for five minutes than experience that again.

We had six reaps total today, which wasn't really a lot but still felt like more than usual. I couldn't be sure if it was because more people were dying of the plague or if we were just getting more reaps because other reapers were going out of commission. Neither explanation sounded appealing. There hadn't been anymore news coverage since yesterday morning of people being taken into custody for being a reaper, but police and other authorities work fast when properly motivated so there wasn't a doubt in my mind that more reapers had been arrested in the past twenty-four hours.

We had just reached the first floor of the hospital, the six naked souls of our reaps trailing behind us (The naked thing was really getting old. I wonder if the morgue would leave the bodies in their hospital gowns if I put in an anonymous request), when my cellphone rang. My heart dropped into my stomach because if it was Carla or Turk, that would mean that they had come to a decision on the whole reaper thing, a decision I may very well not like, and they wanted to talk to me about it. Hoping that it was either Elliot or someone calling the wrong number, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. To my shock, the caller ID read: Mom.

My eyes darting from my phone up to Perry, I said, "It's mom. Can you take care of my reaps for me?"

Well aware that I hadn't been able to get in touch with Barbara since the exposure of reapers on live TV, Perry nodded his consent and lead our reaps away while I answered my cellphone.

"Mom, what's going on?" I asked as I ducked into a supply closet for more privacy. "Why haven't you been answering your phone?"

"Hey Joey," she said, sounding mentally exhausted. "Wish I could call to say I have good news, but, well..." she trailed off, before continuing with a sigh, "Sorry I couldn't contact you before. There was too much of a risk of my calls being traced. Brian discovered a bug at our meeting place shortly before that announcement by our wonderful President and I knew I had to be careful about talking to you after that. Brian's been working overtime since then trying to set up some sort of signal that should block any tracers or bugs or something. I never really did understand any of that techno mumbo-jumbo that you kids are into. Anyway, he just barely set up a secure line for my cellphone before he disappeared."

"Wait, what?" I said, barely keeping up with everything she was saying. She and the rest of my group was being watched? By who? Was I being watched? The thought was extremely unsettling. "Brian's gone?"

"I wouldn't say gone, but yeah, Brian's disappeared to somewhere. His place looked ransacked when I checked. Sure, the kid's a slob, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't smash up all his stuff like that. I haven't been able to get in touch with him since then."

Man, I didn't like the guy, he had always sounded like an irresponsible slacker and I was still bitter over the fact that he replaced Sam, but it wasn't like I wanted anything bad to happen to him.

"Who would be watching us?" I finally asked, my eyes darting around the supply closet as if expecting to spot a hidden camera to be pointed at me.

"I don't know, someone in the government I guess," Barbara said, almost dismissively. "This whole thing seems fishy to me. Even with the footage the government has gathered of us being reapers, doing things like healing or being present during someone's death, there's no way the living could have made the connection that they did, not on their own."

"What are you saying?" I asked quietly.

"I think a reaper is behind all of this," she said. "Pulling strings, putting thoughts into the living's heads. Hell, they probably even had a hand in the whole plague outbreak."

Suddenly I could hear distant shouting over the phone, followed by the sound of a door slamming.

"Listen, Joey," Barbara said, her breathing picking up. "I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to give it to you in a nutshell. Along with Brian disappearing, Bernie's gone too. He left me a note saying that he was hitching the next bright light to the afterlife out of here. I'm not holding it against him though and you shouldn't either. With the way things are heating up, ditching this plane of existence seems like the ideal choice."

There was more shouting, closer now, before it was again cut off by the sound of a door slamming.

"What's going on?" I asked fearfully.

"They're rounding us up, kid," she said in a resigned tone. "They're finding out who the leaders of each ground in each division are and taking us away; cutting the head off of the snake, I guess you could say." sounding more determined, she said, "They're not getting me though. I'm finishing my quota today, Joey, and being promoted. My next reap will be my last. That means that you hold seniority over everyone else in our group. I hate to push this on you all at once, but I need you to step up and take the reins."

"Wait, what?" I squawked. "I don't the first thing about being head reaper."

"You don't give yourself enough credit," Barbara said. "You have a hundred years more experience than the rest of the reapers in this group, you'll do fine. I wish I could say that I have a lot of money to leave behind for you, but unfortunately the government froze pretty much all of my accounts. I was only able to take out enough for Holden to buy two plane tickets for him and my replacement to head out your way. Nevada was the closest we could get on such short notice, so I'm going to need you to drive out there to meet them halfway."

Grabbing a pen from one of the shelves in the supply closet, I was quick to write down the information Barbara gave me on the airport and what plane it was that Holden and her replacement would be coming in on. It was all happening so fast and there was so much information to take in all at once, Barbara's promotion, Uncle Bernie leaving, Brian disappearing, the government's strike against reapers, me suddenly being the leader of my group, I could hardly process it all.

Over the phone, I could hear another door slamming, followed by a pounding sound and faint shouting. I had a feeling that Barbara was running out of time and that this phone call was soon going to end, as much as I didn't want it to. I knew that this phone call would be the last time I would talk to Barbara before I myself was promoted and moved on to the afterlife, and I felt like something more needed to be said between us, some sort of profound advice she could give me that would help me be a good leader for my group.

No such words were exchanged though, and the last thing Barbara said to me before she hung up the phone was, "Well, kid, it's been fun. I'll see you in the afterlife."

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Barbara hung up her cellphone with a regretful sigh. She wished she had more time to talk to Joseph and give him a little bit of coaching on what it means to be head reaper, but there just wasn't enough time. Your stereotypical government agents in pressed suits had been pursuing her since she left that morning to take care of her very last reap and had been practically chasing her through the hospital's halls as she tried to locate her reap's room while at the same time explaining the situation to Joseph. Thankfully, she was always able to remain one step ahead of them and was finally able to locate her reap's room and lock herself inside.

Dropping her cellphone on the ground, Barbara smashed it to pieces with her heal. She didn't want anyone using it to try and trace the location of the remaining members of her group. Quickly approaching the hospital bed, Barbara stared down at the young woman breathing through a tube on the bed before her. The post-it read D. L. Park. The hospital's chart read Drew Linda Park, age twenty-three.

As the heart monitors in the room began to shriek, Barbara ran her hand down her replacement's arm, releasing the soul from the body for the last time.

"You're going to be the only girl in a reaping group of guys," Barbara said with an amused smile. "I wish you the best of luck."

The door slammed open behind her and as footsteps flooded into the room, Barbara turned to face her pursuers.

"Better luck next time, boys," she said with a smirk before disappearing in the blink of an eye.

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That's it for this chapter! The OCs in JD's group (Brian, Holden and Drew) won't be showing up for at least a couple chapters if not more (Brian especially), so feel free to give me any suggestions as to what sort of traits or personalities you'd like to see in these characters so that I have a better idea as to what will be cool with you guys. Never fear! This story will always be focused on JD and Perry's personal reaper experience throughout this whole fiasco, but they can't do it all alone and the three OCs, as well as any other OC, have their parts to play in this story.

Also, to try and uncomplicate things for you guys, I will list below the other OCs in this story that will at some point play a part:

Cade Davies: The Australian graveling (courtesy of Perry), that is currently leading a graveling rebellion against the grim reapers and fucking things up at the White House.

Steve Harris: The comatose man whose body Cade is possessing. (I didn't intentionally mean to have two characters named Steve in this story. That was an accident on my part, so to simplify things and make up for that mistake, Steve Harris will for the most part be known as Cade, since it is Cade inhabiting the body.)

Steve McDouglas: (the other Steve. *sighs* Anyway...) A plague division reaper. Kind of JD's rival/enemy. McDouglas is a lab assistant who at one point worked with the plague virus and subsequently saved aside a mutated strain of the plague virus that was even more destructive than the original.

Carl: The head reaper of Steve McDouglas' group; Plague division. (doesn't look like I came up with a last name for Carl. I guess I'll come up with one later if a last name is even necessary at all)

As for Jack Castello, the evil lawyer, he's all done in this story/series, as far as I can tell, and wont be making another appearance.

That's all for now! Review please!