“Yeah, they ain’t seeing it like it is,” Junior agreed.
No, not like you, thought the demon contentedly. Not with the bright, clear knowledge I have given to you.
“We got to do something if we want to keep our jobs,” Derry said. “We got to stop the company from breaking the union, and we got to stop them right now.”
“Yeah, but how we gonna do that?” Junior asked, glancing over uncertainly, then gunning the Jeep through a yellow light turning red.
“Oh, there’s ways. There’s ways, buddy.”
Yes, there are lots and lots of ways.
Derry Howe looked over at Junior, smiling. “You know what they say? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Well, I’ve got me a will that won’t quit. I just need me a way. I’m gonna find it, too, and you can take that to the bank! Old Bob and those others can go shove their patience where the sun don’t shine.”
They crossed Avenue G past the tire center, gas station, and west-end grocery and rode farther toward the cornfields. The buildings of the mill were still visible down the cross streets and between the old homes, plant three giving way to plant four, plant five still out ahead, back of the old speedway, the whole of MidCon spread out along the north bank of the Rock River. The demon studied the residences and the people they sped past, his for the taking, his to own, dismissing them almost as quickly as they were considered. This was a breeding ground for him and nothing more. On July fourth, all of it and all of them would pass into the hands of the feeders, and he would be on his way to another place. It was his world, too, but he felt no attachment to it. His work was what drove him, what gave him purpose, and his servitude to the dark, chaotic vision of the Void would allow for nothing else. There were in his life only need and compulsion, those to be satisfied through a venting of his madness, and nothing of his physical surroundings or of the creatures that inhabited them had any meaning for him.
The Jeep passed a junkyard of rusting automobile carcasses piled high behind a chain-link fence bordering a trailer park that looked to be the last stop of transients on their way to homelessness or the grave, and from behind the fence a pair of lean, black-faced Dobermans peered out with savage eyes. Bred to attack anything that intruded, the demon thought. Bred to destroy. He liked that.
His mind drifted in the haze of the midday summer heat, the voices of Derry and Junior a comfortable buzz that did not intrude. He had come to Hopewell afoot, walking out of the swelter of the cornfields and the blacktop roadways with the inexorable certainty of nightfall. He had chosen to appear in that manner, wanting to smell and taste the town, wanting it to give something of itself to him, something it could not give if he arrived by car or bus, if he were to be closed away. He had materialized in the manner of a mirage, given shape and form out of delusion and desperation, given life out of false hope. He had walked into a poor neighborhood on the fringe of the town, into a collection of dilapidated homes patched with tar paper and oilcloth, their painted wooden sides peeling, their shingled roofs cracked and blistered, their yards rutted and littered with ruined toys, discarded appliances, and rusting vehicles. Within the close, airless confines of the homes huddled the leavings of despair and endless disappointment. Children played beneath the shade of the trees, dust-covered, desultory, and joyless. Already they knew what the future would bring. Already their childhood was ending. The demon passed them with a smile.
At the corner of Avenue J and Twelfth Street, at a confluence of crumbling sheds, pastureland, and a few scattered residences, a boy had stood at the edge of the roadway with a massive dog. At well over a hundred pounds, all bristling hair and wicked dark markings, the dog was neither one identifiable breed nor another, but some freakish combination. It stood next to the boy, hooked on one end of a chain, the other end of which the boy held. Its eyes were deep-set and baleful, and its stance suggested a barely restrained fury. It disliked the demon instinctively, as all animals did, but it was frightened of him, too. The boy was in his early teens, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and high-top tennis shoes, all of them worn and stained with dirt. The boy’s stance, like the dog’s, was at once strained and cocky. He was tall and heavyset, and there was no mistaking the bully in him. Most of what he had gotten in life he had acquired through intimidation or theft. When he smiled, as he did now, there was no warmth. “Hey, you,” the boy said.