The Business by confusedalarms . (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📖

If anyone had seen the young man that night, standing there, lurking in the shadows in his long dark cloak, hat and pointed shoes, they would've run like hell, for there weren't many sights in this world as terrifying as the one just described. But nobody did, and after a while the young man leaned against the wall, clearly waiting for something. God knows how much time passed, and his position never changed. He just stood there, left foot propped up against the wall, right foot on the ground. By the time anything interesting happened it must've been 5 a.m. It was obvious that dawn was imminent, and even now the first, extremely early workers were walking or driving to their miserable jobs. The young man smiled to himself. Fools

, he thought. Ignorant fools.

Didn't they see there was no point in what they called 'following the righteous path'? They're always talking about getting into heaven, but if they actually thought about it they would see that the whole concept of heaven, even of God himself, was a load of ridiculous bullshit. All that mattered was how much you did with your life. There is no heaven after life, only hell. Plain and simple. Then a sound awoke the young man from his reverie. It was the sound of high-heeled shoes, and it was getting louder. This was what he had been waiting for. The sole reason why he had been standing there all night, with nothing but his anti-establishment thoughts for company. This was important. VERY important. She turned a corner into the alley, her dark hair glistening in the summer sunrise, her exceptioinal beauty adding to the strangeness of the scene. Women this beautiful rarely came to alleys like this, unless, of course, they were freshly caught whores, kept prisoner in the back rooms of a nude bar, used by filthy and possibly old men for money they would never recieve. Not important,

he told himself. This, right here, right now, could change you life so FOCUS, FOCUS, god damn you!

As she walked, he noticed that her eyes were a deep blue, in contrast to what you'd expect when you saw the dark hair and skin of her. But when she came really close you could see that this strange feature of her only added to her exotic, latin-american-like appearance.

'Hello', he said. 'I've been waiting for you.'
'I know,' she said, with an inviting look on her face. There weren't many people who could magic that look onto their face when they saw him, but the woman had been in the business for years, that much was clear.
'Let's walk,' she said, and they walked.

'So how are we going to handle this?' he said. 'I've been thinking and I think it's best we talk to Victor before we go taking this thing higher up. You know the bosses don't like wasting their time.'
'Of course I do, I know it even better than you do. I've seen the bosses. They work day and night to keep things controlled, and if there's anything they hate it's when some smalltime helper like you comes bringing them useless labour. So I agree, it's best we run this through Victor, and work it out a little more before we present the bosses with it.'
'So we have an agreement then?'
'I suppose so, yes.'

She smiled, and he could see that her tongue wasn't normal. Not normal at all. She had the tongue and fangs of a snake. Not that he was taken by surprise. All women let into the business had to undergo that transformation. He'd had to too, but since he was a man it had been different for him. Instead of being given the tongue and senses of a snake he'd been given the face of a snake, which also meant that he had the ability to swallow things twice his size easily . Not the tongue, just the face. That of couse meant that he had to wear a hat overday that rendered his face invisible. Below the hat you could see a pair of yellow eyes with narrow black slits for pupils. Of course women couldn't be transformed the way men were. In the business women were used to take out opponents by luring them into their bed with promises of sex, and then to bite them in the neck so they would die a fast but painful death. He supposed it wasn't an easy life. What if you came to fall in love with one of the men you had been assigned to kill? But it looked like such a thing had never happened to this woman. Her confident stride showed that she was fully aware of what dangers she held for those opponents. Because in the end everything in the world revolves around sex. In the end, things always began because for example someone had seen another man eating his wife's pussy, or the other way around. The person who this had happened to would then come to us and ask us to take out their husband or wife, which we did, but not for free. The one who had asked for our service had to pay a price, of course. This price wasn't just money, but part of it was. $3500 was the standard price, which went up according to the difficulty of the assassination, and could go up to $10000. Obviously they needed the money to keep the business going. The other part was a service, which was always different, but always took great daring and skill. Most of the time (say 7 out of 10) they died doing it, but that was meant to happen. You see, the people in the business were servants of the devil, and the devil was always happy with another soul or two to serve him. And since the person who had to do the task had payed to have someone killed, in other words sinned, badly, they would always end up in hell. You always ended up in hell anyway. The ones who did complete the task set for them were then let into the business, so if you look at it properly, once you went to one of the men like him and asked for your husband/wife killed you were lost. There was no God, there was only the devil.

'Shall we go and meet Victor right now?' he asked.
'Not right now,' she said,'I've got a job tonight. I must prepare.'
'All right then.' They parted company.

Everyone in the business had been cheated on (how else would they have ended up in it?), so the women all had a warped view on sex (relationship-bound sex only, one-night-stands are fine), thinking of it as something that causes trouble, and not as the great thing it actually is. The women saw it more as a profession, something of a duty they had to fulfill to please (or not to anger) the bosses. And the men? Well, they saw it as a nice thing on the side, but certainly not as something deeply emotional and lifechanging. They just screwed the occasional hooker when they felt like it. The young man walked on through the streets of Las Vegas, and watched as Sin City slowly woke up. Hotels and bars opened their doors, the everyday workforce walking, biking or driving to their jobs, usually a large cup of Starbucks in their hands. He smiled. Luckily he didn't need coffee. He hated that bitter stuff. But seeing as he had been 'transformed' he no longer needed coffee. He didn't even need to sleep. You can't imagine how much you can do in those night hours. You have all the time in the world to watch porn, TV, hell, even go screw some hooker he had scared in a back alley by showing his face. It was 8 extra hours everyday. Normal people waste so much time of their precious lives sleeping, it's just sad. He walked on, turned a corner into a dingy back alley, walked up a flight of narrow metal stairs and entered his apartment.

Dawn came and found the young man sitting in his easy chair reading a book. The book was Pet Sematary by Stephen King. He had started it that night and had now almost finished the 400-page novel. He had read for 7 hours and he was a fast reader. He had read this book maybe 5 times and it was one of his favourites. He liked horror novels, and who better to go to than Stephen King, at least his earlier work. His library was filled with such masterpieces as Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, Cujo, Christine & Misery

. It was 6 am on wednesday the 30th of July 1997, and today was perhaps the most important day of his life in the business. First they would meet Victor, who would hopefully help them deal with this shit. If he didn't they would have to go to the bosses and hopefully they would come out of their 'offices' alive. He got up and went to the bathroom. Sitting down to take a shit he noticed it was more liquid than solid (Eating take-away Chinese food at 3am didn't go well with your stomach), and he didn't like it. He got up, wiped his ass, flushed, washed his hands, brushed his teeth, applied deodorant, in other words performed the ordinary morning rituals of a man living alone. When he was done he went back into the room and to his chair. As he did so he noticed the computer standing on the other side of the room. The computer he nearly only used for...well, for the needs of every man. He felt it. Felt the urge. But it's just morning, for fuck's sake!

Well who cares? Well reasoned.

He walked to the computer, which was still on stand-by, and he awoke it from its night's sleep. How convenient, it was still on his favourite site from last night. He satisfied his needs and cleaned up the results, then left his apartment at 6.30 am and noticed for the first time that it was raining. Not a nice warm summer's rain, like you'd expect on the 30th of July, but a cold rain. It could just as easily have been February, the month when diseased people often suddenly give in to their disease for no reason. nobody knew why but February somehow got you down. Like it got me down all those years ago

, he thought. Oh great. Am I really going to stroll down my stupid memory lane?

He guessed he would. He knew it well. There were some horrifying sights there in that old lane.