Meg Lerner rolled over and yawned. Seven A. M. and her alarm clock gave her not the voice of Dan, the man she thought she might be falling in love with, but the voice of Marilyn, his morning show sidekick, doing the news. She stretched but didn't get up. She wanted to hear the interview, which always came on at seven. Dan had announced the day before that a representative from Daltech, the big Research Triangle Park electronics firm, was going to be his morning interview. Considering that Daltech was one of the biggest employers left after the post-Hellraising exodus began, Meg was more than a little interested to hear what the man had to say.
But the Daltech rep wasn't there. Instead, Dan started interviewing a devil. He kept the tone light, and Meg thought some of the stuff on both sides turned out pretty funny, but it wasn't what she'd wanted to hear.
That is, it wasn't until Dan suggested doing a Great Devil Makeover and rehabilitating the devil.
That idea interested Meg a lot.
Meg spent a bit of time on the Internet when she wasn't trying to keep her little law practice afloat or trying to figure out where she and Dan stood with each other. And online, she'd been reading some disturbing things. Being a North Carolina native, and one who'd determined to stay come Hell or high water—or just high water, since Hell had already arrived—she'd closely watched the posts in the alt. hellraised newsgroups.
Recently, some of the posts had been getting extreme. Along with the usual wackos, flamers, and kids who were just trying to prod a response out of someone, a dark undercurrent of violence had begun to build. One guy from out west someplace was, in all seriousness, trying to encourage foreign governments to "Do The Decent Thing" and drop a few nukes on North Carolina since Washington didn't have the balls. A lot of outsiders blamed the state for its sudden population of Hellraised, and wanted to impose measures restricting everything from sex to free speech in the state in an attempt to make it pure enough that God would send the Hellraised home. No one seemed to think that North Carolinians were up to handling the problem on their own.
Meg did. She thought that North Carolina, with its historic tenacity and determination, might even manage to make something positive out of its Hellish invasion.
And there was Dan, offering the perfect proposal to a beleaguered state.
Meg sat up in the bed, thoughtful. She listened for a while to the tenor of the calls he was receiving, counting the number of people who just wanted to swear at him and comparing that to the number of people who thought maybe he was onto something.
The response, mostly positive, surprised her. North Carolinians had already discovered they couldn't run the Hellraised off their land. Killing them didn't work—the bodies just reappeared and the killer got stuck with an enormous bill sent straight from Hell for the damages. But as far as Meg knew, no one had ever tried to make the Hellraised into something North Carolina could live with.
Maybe it was time to try.