In the beginning was the word.
And suddenly the insurance agent looked tired. All of the anger drained out of him, all of the rage and hate, and he stood there, slumping, looking down at the floor. He lost his height, lost his bulk, was once again the ordinary average man who had initially come knocking at their door.
And he started to fade.
His home faded with him, the shower stall disappearing, the sink growing fainter, the doorway to the bedroom dissolving into air. They hadn’t moved, but they were back in the original grotto, and the television became the Victrola and the Victrola became a skin drum and then the drum disappeared from view and became nothing. Even the dark volcanic rocks lightened in color, and then they were standing in an empty sandstone cave.
Only the insurance agent was still visible. But just slightly, and his form had changed as well. He no longer looked human but older and odder, of a kind with those beings shuffling through the hallways, working in the offices, but different somehow, young rather than old, the way they must have looked before time and work had worn them down.
He remained in the same position, though, slumped, unmoving, staring down at the floor, and then in the blink of an eye, he too was gone.
In his place was a crumbling rock on which were chiseled several unidentifiable characters.
His original policy.
Hunt picked up the rock and threw it as hard as he could against the wall, where it shattered into pieces.
“Let’s get back to work,” he said.
4
Hunt expected the passageways of the insurance company to be teeming with angry agents, to be a swarming chaotic beehive filled with insurance salesmen after their hides, but not even the loss of one of their own seemed able to derail the glacial forward motion of the occasional creatures who shambled through the corridors and worked in the offices.
“We need to destroy all the files,” he said. He took a deep breath, gathered his courage. “And the president or CEO or whatever it was I saw in that room behind the red door.”
“Behind that red door?” Joel frowned. “I thought you said there was nothing there.”
“I lied.”
Jorge nodded. “Then let’s do it.”
Joel smiled slightly, feeling either more confident or more satisfied after their dispatch of the insurance agent. “All for one.”
They returned to the file room and started opening up file cabinets, throwing the papers in the center of the floor. If they spent all day and night here, they would not be able to empty out every one of the filing cabinets, so the three of them worked quickly for the next ten or fifteen minutes, tossing out the contents of hundreds of the most recent files, as much as they thought necessary to start a big bonfire. They arranged the papers so that they made thick trails to the individual cabinets and then used the lighter to set fire to the edges of several documents. Quite a lot of papers had been dumped out, and they caught easily, the flames spreading.
A conflagration arose between the two lines of wooden cabinets at the thickest part of the paper pile, and before they left, Hunt tipped over the two closest ones, hoping they would catch and fuel the fire. He thought he smelled flesh as well as paper burning, but he left quickly, not wanting to be sure.
“Let’s find that red door,” he said.
It took them several minutes to retrace their steps and find the corridor that housed the heart of The Insurance Group, but rather than think of what they were going to do when they got there or how they were going to escape from the company, he found himself coming up with better rally lines, things he should have said instead of “Let’s find that red door.” Let’s find the CEO and cancel his policy.
Then they were there.
Hunt knew he would balk if he waited, if he thought about it. If he gave himself too much time to dwell on the indescribable horror he had seen behind that door, he would back out, so he simply pulled open the door, got down on his knees and crawled in, Joel and Jorge hot on his heels.
The room was different.
Way different.
In place of the banquet hall-sized chamber with its low-walled pit was an enormous space whose dimensions were immeasurable. It sloped downward away from them, and for as far as the eye could see were row after row of burly stoop-shouldered men in dark coats and identical hats.
In the dim distance was an orangish reddish glow that seemed to be vaguely round in shape. The gates of hell, he thought, and though he wasn’t even remotely religious, the idea remained with him and he believed it utterly. This was where the army of ghosts, demons, provocateurs—whatever they were—came from, and he wondered what else lived in the horrible heat of that diabolic glow.
Hell, he thought, was not a cave filled with fire and brimstone—it was an insurance office.
“What do we do now?” Jorge asked, and Hunt heard not only fear but awe in his friend’s voice.
He had no idea. Taking on that elemental monster in the pit would have been bad enough, but the three of them with their kitchen cutlery taking on legions of ghostly thugs and fighting their way into that glowing maw behind them was clearly an impossibility. Their best bet was to go back the way they’d come, get out of here and be thankful they’d accomplished as much as they had. Even if they couldn’t stop the power at the heart of The Insurance Group, they had put its agents out of commission and hopefully destroyed most of its filed policies. It would take a long time for the company to regroup, possibly longer than their life spans, and they could let someone else at a later time worry about finishing the job they’d started.
No.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Back outside.” He ushered Joel and Jorge through the small door into the corridor, then crept out himself. He slammed the door shut, men waited a moment and opened it again. As he’d hoped, that endless chamber with its hulking army and their hellish source was gone, and in its place was the empty room with the mural and the walled pit and the twisting writhing monster.
On impulse, he closed the door again, waited, then opened it and looked in. This time there was a much smaller room, one commensurate with the diminutive size of the door. Its walls were black, and in the center of its floor, on a stand made of metal that looked older than the earth, was a tablet of stone, what he had always imagined the Ten Commandments looked like. Hunt squirmed through the small opening and stood on his knees, looking at the tablet. He could not read the alien characters chiseled on the stone, but they were powerful indeed because he had a headache just from looking at them, and his skin felt hot and tingly, as though he’d been in the sun too long and gotten burned.
This, he felt certain, was The Insurance Group’s charter.
In the beginning was the word.
There was room for only him in here. Joel and Jorge were still in the corridor, crouched down and staring at his back and Joel asked, “What is it?”
“I think it’s their charter,” he said. “I think it’s what we have to destroy.”
“How?” Jorge asked.
Good question. Manuel’s knife would not do the trick, and neither would the knives they’d taken from the insurance agent’s kitchen. They had seen no hammers or chisels or anything of that nature, nothing they could use to smash the stone.
Grunting with exertion—the damn thing was heavy—Hunt lifted the tablet off its stand and dropped it on the ground. It did not break as he’d hoped. He tried to push it along the ground, but it wouldn’t budge, so using every bit of strength he had left, he picked up the tablet again and, waddling on his knees, ducking his head, shimmied sideways through the doorway.
The second he was out, the red door slammed shut behind him.
Only it was no longer red. It was black.
“Check it out,” Jorge said, pointing. The fear was still in his voice.
Hunt stood, lifted the tablet as high as he could and dropped it. Although the stone landed with a hard thud on the floor of the corridor, it did not break.
But it cracked.
Joel, out of curiosity, was opening the small door, and once again there was that endless room, although this time that reddish orangish glow had grown, and the hordes of burly, hatted men were looking up and at them. Through the doorway, Hunt could see their faces.
And their teeth.
He knew now why Edward was so frightened of their teeth.
“Close the door!” he yelled, and Joel did so.
The corridor was beginning to smell of smoke. Far away, the files were still burning. It was too much to hope that the entire company would burn down—most of it was stone after all, not wood—but if they were lucky, a lot more damage would be done.
“Help me,” Hunt said, struggling to lift the tablet yet again. His arms felt weak, his muscles hurt, but with all of them working together, they lifted the stone easily and were able to hold it above their heads. “On the count of three,” he said. “One… two… three!”
They not only dropped the tablet but were able to apply some extra pressure and push it down, and it was that extra force, Hunt was convinced, which led to the tablet breaking into three irregular-sized pieces. The smell of smoke was stronger. It was getting hard to breathe, and if they waited much longer they would find themselves mired in thick haze, getting lost on their way out to the lobby or suffering from smoke inhalation. But they still picked up the individual pieces of the tablet, throwing them as hard as they could against the floor, against the wall, until those terrible characters were no longer readable. Hunt took the last chunk and heaved it down the corridor away from them.
The charter was gone.
The Insurance Group was no more.
“Come on! Let’s go!”
The smell of smoke was everywhere, and black tendrils were seeping into several passageways, obscuring visibility. Still the corridors were empty for the most part, with those shambling workers periodically passing by, entirely clueless. They couldn’t take a chance that would remain the case, however, and with Hunt in the lead, they ran, passing the maze of offices, dashing past the freakish secretary at the front desk, and making it out to the lobby.
Where Beth and Manuel were descending on the circle they had used to get down here.
“What are you doing?” he yelled at them. “Get out of here!”
The circle reached the bottom, and Beth ran for him. “We have to get out!” he shouted. “The whole place is coming down!”
“We come to help,” Manuel said.
“That guard,” Beth said, throwing her arms around him. “He just sort of… melted. Turned into a steaming hunk of goo. And we came in after you. We thought you might need help.”
He hugged her back instinctively, more grateful than he could say to see her again, but his brain was in overdrive, trying to calculate their chances of survival.
Five other circles were descending from the lobby’s ceiling. On all save one were insurance agents in various stages of decomposition. One, dressed in a gray Chinese business suit was still standing and still alive, but, as Beth had said about the dwarf, he was melting. The right half of his head was dripping onto his shoulder, and his left leg was twitching as though he were doing some sort of spastic dance.
Hunt pointed to the empty circle. “That’s ours,” he said. “Our ticket home.”
Beth looked unsure. “Let’s just go back the way we came.”
Jorge nodded. “It’s safer. We know where it goes, and—”
A chunk of the ceiling fell in, a gigantic hunk of stone as large as a small house that landed several yards behind them and caused the ground to lurch beneath their feet. Smoke belched out of the doorway through which they’d just run, expelled with such force that it ruffled their hair and left soot stains on their faces.
“Let’s get back up quick,” Joel said, coughing. “This place is going fast.”
“Sí!” Manuel shouted, a look of terror on his features.
“Okay.” Hunt led Beth back onto the circle. He looked at the elevating device.
It might hold four of them but not five. “You all get on,” he said. “I’ll take the second trip.”
“No!” Beth cried.
“I’m the only one with life insurance.”
“Not anymore,” Joel said.
“Just go.”
But the circle would not ascend, and Hunt realized that none of them knew how to make it go up.
Jorge stepped off. “You try it,” he said.
There was a thunderous crack as a section of the far opposite wall collapsed inward.
Nodding, Hunt stepped into Jorge’s place. Nothing happened. There was not even a wobble from the circle beneath his feet.
One of the other circles began to rise with its cargo of rotting bones and flesh.
“It’s broken!” Manuel wailed.
“The other one,” Hunt said, pulling Beth with him. “Even if it’s not ours, it’s got to go somewhere.” He ran over to the empty circle, stepped onto it. Immediately, he felt a thrumming of power vibrate upward through his body. “Come on!” he yelled.
Beth shoved herself next to him, climbing onto his shoes, like a child playing games with her father, and Manuel pressed himself against Hunt’s back. All five of them were just able to fit onto the circle.
And it started to rise.
From somewhere below them came a horrid wrenching scream, a cry so loud that it blasted his eardrums. If he weren’t afraid of losing his balance and falling, he would have plugged his ears, and he found himself thinking of that loathsome twisting monster in the pit, its mouth perpetually open in a silent scream that was no longer silent.
That cry loosed the fury and chaos of everything below, and all of those shambling ancient creatures came pouring into the lobby, hell-bent on destruction. Their circle was too high to be reached, however, and the only thing the employees—
ex-employees
—of the insurance company could do was jump and flail their arms wildly. They were still mute, and that made everything even weirder. Another chunk of ceiling fell, missing their circle by inches, causing him to clutch Beth even more tightly. It landed on a group of those slit-eyed beings with eroded features, who were crushed beneath its weight, their spindly arms jerking wildly before stopping.
The circle went up.
And out.
Water dripped on their heads. They were in The Jail. Hunt recognized it immediately, and he was almost overwhelmed with emotion at the knowledge that they were back home, that they’d fought the insurance company and won, that they’d finally and completely put an end to the horror that had been plaguing their lives for so long. He wanted to weep, but instead he stepped off the circle, which now looked like a manhole cover, and hugged Beth so tightly he could feel her bones. He had no idea how they had entered the insurance company in Chiapas, Mexico, and emerged thousands of miles away in Tucson, but they had and he accepted it—only for some stupid reason the only thing he could think about was the fact that their suitcases were still back at the hotel in Tuxtla Gutierrez.
They pushed past the partially open rusted door and hurried outside. It was midday, the sun high in the sky, and the temperature was warm and refreshingly dry. Desperate to get as far away from the destruction and pandemonium of the insurance company as possible, they ran across the sand toward the sloping, south side of the empty reservoir.
“Dondé estamos?” Manuel asked, and Jorge answered, “Tucson.”
“Gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘multinational corporation,’” Joel said.
It was a lame joke, but they laughed as they ran—laughed far out of proportion to the joke’s value, Beth even wiping tears from her eyes. Humor, even attempted humor, always seemed funnier when you’d just escaped death.
They stopped at the edge of the reservoir before starting up the slope. “Look,” Beth said.
Hunt turned around and saw smoke creeping upward from the small building, clearly visible in the midday sun.
“You did it,” she to
ld him. “You guys did it.”
“Yeah. We burned his policy and all of the other agents’ policies and a whole bunch of files that probably held the company’s most recent paperwork—hopefully including ours.”
“And we smashed their charter all to hell,” Joel said, “which, if all the perverted laws of business under which they’ve been operating still apply, means that they’re finished, done, over and out.”
Beth looked nervously behind them. “We’d better get out of here. Maybe the whole thing’s going to blow.”
It was what they’d all been thinking, and though they were tired and sore, worn out and physically exhausted, adrenaline provided enough stimulation to carry them up the sandy sloping hill. They stopped at the top, but there was no explosion, no implosion, The ground beneath The Jail did not suddenly sink and cave in, and Hunt reminded himself that The Jail was merely a portal, that the insurance company was not really here.
Maybe it wasn’t really in Mexico, either.
Wherever it had been, he thought, it wasn’t anywhere now. Destroying the charter had put an end to the company. Words were what had bound them to their insurance policies, and the erasing of those words was what had brought the company down.
Jorge sat down beneath a palo verde tree. Dropping more than sitting down, actually. He squinted up at Hunt. “So what are we going to do about insurance now?” He grinned. “Go back on the county plan, I guess, huh?”
“I wish we didn’t even need insurance,” Beth said.
“But we do,” Hunt told her. “And that’s the problem. We’ll never be able to escape it.”
He thought of all those names in the insurance manual they’d stolen from the agent’s briefcase. The Insurance Group had many tentacles.
Like an octopus.
Maybe all of the insurance companies on earth were part of the same corporate family, maybe they were all synergistically connected, subsidiaries of the same parent company. Maybe The Insurance Group owned everything, was the ultimate source for every type of insurance all over the world since the beginning of time forever and ever amen.
THE POLICY Page 37