“You want what?” the leader asked. He looked wildly from one member of the little group to the next.
“You heard us,” one man said. “We want greater democracy and freedom. You’re being a dictator. It has to stop.”
“That’s right,” another piped up. “The older generation says you made yourself the leader fifteen years ago. No one voted on you, and we’ve never had free elections to decide whether to keep you or have someone else as leader.”
“This is because of Egypt, isn’t it?”
Rona trudged home from the bus stop after another long day at the diner. It had been the usual crowd of morons and misfits, plus the handsy guy from Newark who kept grabbing her ass whenever she turned away; she kept turning away, though, afraid of what he might grab if she didn’t.
She walked to the front yard of her home and leaned against a tree. She wanted a smoke, but she had only one cigarette left, and she was saving it for just before she went to bed; she wanted one smoke and two minutes of peace to wrap up the typically dull, frantic, miserable day.
Rona pushed herself away from the tree and walked up the steps. She opened the door and closed and locked it behind her.
“I’m home, E.J.,” she called.
She listened for movement but heard nothing. She walked back toward the kitchen, which was dark
Jeanette saw the body first and breathed a low sigh. Her husband, Will, at the wheel, noticed but kept his eyes on the road. Their sharp-eyed young twins, Jane and Teresa, quickly spotted it too.
“There’s another one!” Jane said.
“Oh, no!” Teresa moaned. “That’s the third one since we left home.”
The car whooshed by the corpse, neatly composed in the shoulder, and yet they all got a good look at it.
“Why does that happen, Daddy?” Teresa asked.
“They don’t seem to understand what cars are. They just run out in front of them.”
“Why don’t they stay at home where they belong?” Jane asked, looking at her mother.
“It’s hard to say, dear. Sometimes they run away from home. Their families can’t or don’t take care of them. Often they just don’t have homes. They’re out looking for food and shelter and they accidentally get killed.”
“That’s terrible,” Teresa declared. “Why doesn’t somebody help them?”
“There are too many, honey,” Will said. “And you could never know where they all were to help them, even if there was enough time and money. It’s sad, but there’s nothing that can be done, really.”
There was a silence in the car for about a mile, filled only by the engine’s whine and the thud of the tires rolling across the broken and pitted highway pavement.
“He was a nice-looking boy,” Jane said. “For a boy, anyway,” she quickly amended.
“The girls we saw first were pretty, too,” Teresa said. “I hope there aren’t any more dead kids on the road today.”
“I hope that too,” Jeanette said. “But that’s just part of life. Here, though, let’s not let it spoil our fun trip. Shall we play a game of Highway Alphabet?”
The girls bounced in their seats and began scouring the landscape for something beginning with an “A.”
Some people swore that the house was haunted. Others scoffed during broad daylight but refused nevertheless to walk within a block of the house after twilight.
“It’s the wind making those noises,” some asserted. “Stray animals.” “Vagrants.” “Maybe some rotten kids foolin’ around to try to scare folks.” “You know, the police really should go in there and see what’s going on.”
Police Chief Vasquez, for his part, declined on the basis that it wasn’t illegal for an old building to make odd noises. He directed people to the zoning commission.
Mel had been dithering for an hour, which annoyed him. He had been so decisive when he was younger.
“God, how my kids will complain,” he told Rufus. “And it probably won’t be long before some helpful neighbor comes over or sends a grumbling kid to do it for me.”
He thought a moment longer. Then he snapped his fingers.
“But I’m going to do this whether anyone approves or not.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Owen Ludlow began, “if you’ve seen this morning’s news, you know the grave problem we face.”
Around the table, heads nodded wearily. A few people looked grimly at the poster for Carpenter Shop Studios’ forthcoming motion picture release, The Tempter’s Snare. It featured a likeness of Jillee, the hottest young star the Christian movie studio had; she was 22 but looked like she was going on seventeen. On one shoulder was a smaller likeness of her as an angel, and on the other shoulder a small image of her as a devil. The art department hadn’t gone out of its way to do anything other than get as many pictures of Jillee as it could on one poster.
But then, that was all that was needed to sell one of her movies.
Owner and publisher Fred Koelpe didn’t see that he had a choice. One more issue of the Amidaville Banner before Christmas and then everyone got an unpaid two weeks off. There wasn’t enough money in the account to buy newsprint and keep the office open, so Koelpe did neither. He didn’t mind putting his small staff on the streets without a paycheck — never mind a Christmas bonus — but he did worry that all too few in the dying town would miss the weekly newspaper.
Koelpe was the first one out the door. He told his office and circulation manager, Sharon, to turn the thermostat down to 45 degrees before she left. Then he got away from the dirty looks and the general lack of understanding.
“Consider it a Christmas miracle I’m not just closing the place permanently,” he barked over his shoulder.
Leonard looked out the window to check on his children’s progress. Leila and her little brother, Leo, were working on a snowman in the front yard. They had made the bottom ball pretty big and had had some difficulty getting the next part of the snowman’s body on top of the base. Now they looked at the head and how high above their reach it needed to go.A moment later, Leonard walked out of the house.
“Need some help with that?”
“Yeah, Daddy. We can’t lift the head high enough,” Leila said.
“Well, I think I can manage that,” Leonard told them, and he knelt down for the snowman’s head. He hoisted it into place and patted some snow to secure it.
Darlan, an agent of Hell on Earth, sighed into his coffee. A good, strong cup of coffee was one of the few things that made up for being trapped in human form to do his infernal majesty’s will.
You couldn’t get any in Hell.
Today, though, even coffee wasn’t perking Darlan up. He was waiting for today’s mark to come along. Another soul to speed on its way to Hell.
Big deal, Darlan thought. The place is overrun with souls as it is, cluttering things up, screaming, pleading, whining — oh, the whining.
Three hundred years earlier, when Darlan was first given the job of infernal shepherd, it was exciting. He always exceeded his quota and liked to take on the tougher jobs. But any job begins to pale after three centuries, and Darlan was doing little more now than putting in his time. Other agents were showing him up, but he didn’t care.
Edward Vicquers was the youngest number three man in the bank’s history. That said, he was in his early fifties and his formerly raven-black hair now held a distinguished streak of gray. He was tall and lean and kept himself physically fit as well as impeccably dressed. Indeed, the suit of clothing he wore he had picked up from his Savile Row tailors only the day before. It was dark and as handsome as the gentleman who wore it.
Mr. Vicquers stepped into the lift to ride up to his office and pushed the button for the twenty-fifth floor.
Just before the doors closed, Emily Chardenne slipped between them.