Free Dark Hope (The Devil's Assistant) by H.D. Smith Page A

nowhere. Behind me, a rusty barbed-wire fence stretched into the distance. Beyond that a field of grass so brown and lifeless rolled over small hills and into valleys. Its appearance made me wonder why it hadn’t already returned to dirt.
    Across the road in front of me sat an old weathered farmhouse. The deserted wraparound porch contained a single broken rocking chair—tilting from its missing rocker. The cracked and peeling white clapboard siding was dull and lifeless, leaving no question as to why the yard was little more than dirt and weeds.
    Where the hell was I? I trudged forward. The crunch of gravel under my feet pierced the dead silence. I stopped moving and listened, which was when I understood why everything seemed off. There wasn’t any sound. The trees weren’t rustling , the wind wasn’t whistling, and the birds weren’t singing. To be more accurate, there were no birds to sing. Now, I couldn’t even hear the ice cream truck. Nothing, except for me, seemed alive at all in this place. It couldn’t be real.
    I reached into my bag for my phone. If I was right, it would confirm I was still in Purgatory. Not some abandoned road in the middle of nowhere.
    I groaned. “Not again.”
    The GPS readout was flipping between China, Purgatory, and nothing as if the phone couldn’t decide where it was. My perfect phone was losing it, but that wasn’t my real problem. The battery indicator was flashing yellow. Earlier in the day it was three-quarters full, now it was almost dead. It had a similar problem last Friday, which I’d ignored because a full charge later that night seemed to sort it out. It was obvious now there must be a bigger problem with the battery. I listened for a dial tone, but whatever caused the GPS to go bonkers affected my service.
    I switched the phone off and threw it back into my bag. I wanted to scream. I was trapped with a busted phone in an abandoned world with no obvious way out. Frustrated, I kicked a pebble across the street. It skittered along the asphalt breaking the quiet. I took a deep breath and looked down the road both ways. To the left was an industrial building in the near distance; to the right at least a mile down the road was another farmhouse.
    “Which way?” I muttered, shaking my head.
    My wrist tingled. I checked my watch and barked out a laugh. Of all days. The hands of the watch were spinning around wildly in both directions.
    Exhaling with a long breath, I dropped my hand. The damn thing was nearly perfect. For the past five years, it always had the right time and even morphed itself into a style appropriate for my wardrobe. Jeans and a T-shirt equaled rugged hiking watch; office suit equaled silver bracelet watch. The fact I couldn’t remove it and I hated wearing a watch at all was apparently inconsequential.
    Now the nearly perfect, completely annoying watch didn’t tell time.
    “Awesome,” I screamed. Maybe an overreaction but I wanted to hear...something.
    I headed to the left toward the industrial building. It was closer than the other farmhouse, and the ice cream truck had come from that direction. Maybe the building would lead to something, or someone.
    Ten minutes later, I stood in front of the industrial building ready to scream again. It was an empty shell of brick and concrete. Every other window was busted, and any unpaved areas were overrun with weeds. The lines of the parking lot were so faded they almost didn’t exist.
    The road I’d traveled along continued further into the distance where I saw more buildings clustered together. The steeple of a church loomed nearby. Unless the entire town was deserted, there had to be something there. I started walking.
    When I reached the town, sadly it was no more alive than the farmhouse or the industrial building. I passed three churches, a large cemetery, another manufacturing plant of some sort, and an empty diner called the Liberty Bell. All were intermixed with single-family homes and the occasional