A Deafening Silence In Heaven - Thomas E. Sniegoski Page 0,34

turned back to Squire, who was sipping his drink and still admiring the key. “Does he have a lot of weapons?”

Squire slowly nodded. “Francis has a real strong appetite for things that can kill.”

And then he smiled broadly, and Mulvehill couldn’t help but think of a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

“If I’m not mistaken, he really likes good scotch, too, and keeps it safe in his weapons cabinet. Weapons and scotch. If it weren’t for Remy’s being almost dead, this would be a fucking awesome day.”

• • •

Simeon had been so busy of late that he hadn’t had the opportunity to watch much television. Reclining upon the king-sized bed, he pointed the remote control to a wall of flat screens and turned them on.

There were twenty monitors in all, and on each was the image of a hospital room, a single bed in the center of the frame.

Simeon had no interest in commercial television, preferring instead his own special brand of reality TV. He’d had cameras secretly installed in hospital intensive care units throughout Las Vegas so that he might observe the struggles of life, and in most cases the inevitable deaths.

It was the deaths that he couldn’t get enough of, living and dying vicariously through each patient. One day he hoped to have such an experience again, to know that peace and euphoria and not have it savagely yanked away with an unwanted return to life.

His eyes scanned the screens. Some were alone, while others had family rallied about them. Simeon did not recognize any of the subjects from the last time he’d observed the ICU; that crop had likely already left this world behind.

There was a flurry of movement on monitor seven, where family gathered about a frail old woman who appeared to be having convulsions. Simeon used the remote to focus the camera on the woman’s face. Her eyes had rolled back to expose the whites, and her teeth were clenched in a skeletal grin. He had seen this countless times before and knew it was only a matter of time before she was gone.

He crawled to the end of the bed, as close to the image as he could get, remembering his own death convulsions as he observed another’s.

“That’s it,” he whispered. He could practically see her life force collecting in the center of her being, preparing to leave the diseased body that had been her prison.

He studied every aspect of her features, the sweat upon her brow and lips, the yellowness of the whites of her eyes, the steady flow of bubbling saliva from the corners of her withered mouth.

She was almost there. . . . Almost . . .

Nurses and doctors rushed in from the left, swarming around the bed, pushing the family members back.

“No!” Simeon bellowed at the screen. She had been so close. He wanted to reach through the screen and grab the doctors, pulling them away so that she might be free.

The bodies were blocking his view as he paced before the screens, his entire focus devoted to the happenings on monitor seven. The doctors and nurses were working furiously, running to and from the room.

They thought that they were saving her, but they were only preventing her from moving on—from escaping her mortal confinement and entering the embrace of the ultimate source in the universe.

The stuff of creation itself.

Things finally seemed to settle down a bit in the room, and as a man with a dark mustache, wearing blue scrubs and a white lab coat, stepped to the side, Simeon saw that the woman had been placed on a ventilator.

Keeping her alive.

Keeping her prisoner in this cruel, cruel world and denying her the glory of Heaven, as the Nazarene and the Almighty had denied him.

He had half a mind to go to that very hospital and pull the plug himself. The woman’s family were crying and hugging each other, thanking the doctors and nurses for all that they had done.

If they only knew what they had just denied their loved one.

Frustrated, he climbed back onto the bed and picked up the remote, turning off all the screens at once. There was no use in trying to relax now; his thoughts had turned to more nefarious things.

He felt a sudden tremble in the ether that usually heralded the return of one of his demonic lackeys to the nest. Throwing open his bedroom doors, he strode out into the sprawling living room in search of information.

“Tell me,” he said, eyes locking onto Beleeze, who had