Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

stick and then I take the little half a cow back to the tobacco shop and the little guy puts it back behind the counter.

Sometimes you don’t have to pay a man or threaten him or anything at all he is just right there in life’s window waiting for you to come and stand underneath, and when you know that, he can see that you know it, and then you are together in a kind of conspiracy forever that is deeper than friendship because it is about souls.

And usually it is what happens when a bad person or someone who is just flat out an asshole relies on the best person he knows to do something secret and important for him and little by little that good person who is his friend gets a sense of who he is friends with and then one day very quietly after a long long time, all he wants to do is punch that fucker in the head until you can see bone because good people are not weak people or even necessarily nice people they are just slower to get to where the rest of us are all the damn time and that is as good as souls get in this world.

I do not believe in those but even so I know this is true.

I know because Caporal-Chef Aaron—after all this time and coffee and not talking—just gave me Eiger’s fail-safe code key and he knows that means Eiger is likely going to die. This is Eiger’s super-secret system for designating an alternate if he is compromised. His death beeper in his watch or his pacemaker or whatever the shit it is sends a message to this little guy and the guy walks the memory stick to a lawyer’s office and they put it into the system and authorize the new person and then and only then does anyone outside of Eiger and the little guy know who that is.

And this is the moment at which I kind of could just shut this all down because from now on the only thing between me and Eiger’s bank is Eiger’s heartbeat and if Volodya was here—

Well. He’s not.

They say that in the end everyone dies alone but in pure mathematical terms I am bound to say I doubt that will be true in this case.

—

I go back to the pig farm and tell Charlie that Bruno is dead.

Charlie says “Oh.”

I tell her to take a moment to appreciate the hugeness of the universe and all the many suns and the wide expanse of the mountains and the sky and the deep earth beneath us and she says yuh-huh she has done that.

I ask if she wants to kill a bunch of people and she says she is wondering what Giant Egg would do.

I tell her Giant Egg would appear and cause everyone to reassess their life choices.

Charlie says no that is Giant Egg and she is talking about the negative energy Giant Egg from the dimension of purest evil and I say I’m pretty sure that negative energy Giant Egg would do exactly the same thing because that is Giant Egg and she says yes that is quite true and then she says that she is not Giant Egg and she would very much like to murderize the shit out of a lot of bad guys now and I say that is fine and she says okay.

Lucille takes off his knife suit and sits there in his appalling undies and Charlie cries onto his chest hair until it is matted with snot and really I do not know what to say about that.

Rex makes comfort food. The comfort food is bad. It turns out Rex is great at eating and terrible at cooking and bad comfort food is not comforting at all.

Saul takes the bad food away and comes back with crispbreads and cheese. They are Swiss so they are amazing. Everyone eats rotted bovine lactation and compressed wheat.

Doc does not speak at all but I can feel her eyes the whole damn time and I look back and I tell her yes. On the HOMER board all the things in her page have little green ticks next to them except the security guy who has to be fresh. I go to the board and look at my page. I feel like a dick looking at Banjo Telemark’s joke page while Charlie is weeping but there are jokes and there are jokes and this one has a great punchline. There are many many words on my page and little drawings and some helpful remarks from my people, which are not hugely helpful, and someone has drawn a forest of trees with male genitalia instead of fruit but even so it is possible to see that Banjo Telemark has bought or rented—

Two large bulldozers

Colored smoke (red green yellow blue brown)

Many tons of recyclable traditional copper cowbells (heavily oxidized)

Many tons of recyclable aluminum auto paneling from expensive consumer vehicles

Professional-grade pyrotechnics to a value of one hundred thousand francs (assorted pinks and purples, some gold scatter)

Ten 3,000-watt equivalent searchlights with generator systems for exciting nighttime displays

A concert sound system of epic loudness I do not even know how many zoinks or wallabies it emits and I do not care it is too loud.

And most of these have been delivered to the Kircheisen Festung although Hans Eiger has been in particular very grouchy about the heavier items which he says cannot be transported using his precious itty-bitty cable car they are too heavy so they are waiting on the valley floor while Inge Desirée runs around yelling. I am sure everyone is having a great old time indeed.

Rex now is sitting alongside Charlie and Lucille, and he is saying something that makes her laugh through the snot.

Good for Rex he is a good human.

I go to Doc and tell her she will not like what happens next and she takes me into our room and pointedly has sex with me and