The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole! (1) by Timothy W. Long, Jonathan Moon

not, and if anyone in God’s waiting room knows how to get smells out of stuff, it i s Lorna. She and Dan ran their bed and b reakfast for almost thirty years before he keeled over from a massive coronary after taking up with cocaine at the ripe old age of eighty-one.
    White walls, bright curtains and gray carpet. The whole place looks like a hotel, but that is just fine with Lorna. If it looked old and run down, then she would have no part of it. She was always fond of nice things, and her place to die should be no different.
    Shuffle step because her hips grind bone against bone, and sometimes it feels like chunks of glass have worked their way in there. But she makes do, just as she always has. She strolls past Ernie’s room. Six birds and counting, but no one can count all the bird shit in the little apartment. She knows that the administrator asked him to get rid of the birds because only one is allowed, but the great thing about being old as dirt, or so Lorna has reckoned, is that you can put on a dumb expression, nod sadly and forget that the conversation ever took place. And that is precisely what she is hoping Rose will do. Forget her harsh words from earlier.
    She knocks on her friend’s door and calls out, “Rose? Love? Are you in there?” Her voice still has a good southern twang to it thanks to almost fifty years in Dallas. All those years in the same city and most of them with the same fine man. They had a good life that only got better when they became swingers. Her mother found out and told her she was the most sinful person she had ever known.
    Lorna took that as a compliment.
    “Rose!” She knocks again and the door swings open. But Rose doesn’t answer.
    She walks in and tugs her glasses up from the string that hangs around her neck. The room is a mess, the floor a gritty expanse of spilled sugar. The dark space feels empty, but she knows Rose doesn’t leave at this time of day. She watches sitcom reruns and laughs even though she has seen them over and over.
    Beside an overturned chair, Lorna spots a foot peeking around the corner from the kitchen. She doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that Rose fell out of the chair. And she needs no CSI team to tell her the foot isn’t moving.
    She rounds the corner and peeks at the figure, knowing what she will see, knowing it is her friend, knowing she is barely strong enough to roll Rose over and see about CPR if she has to. If it isn’t too late. If the old bat isn’t stiff. Stiffs are the worst.
    Lorna touches her friend’s foot, but it is ice cold. She gets to her knees and follows the curve of Rose’s body. Knees hook around the hallway, and her torso is on the kitchen floor.
    “Oh Rose, please be all right.”
    The room is so dark. Why didn’t she think to turn on the lights? She feels around, and something warm and sticky welcomes her fingers. She raises them to her face, her foreboding borne out by the sight of blood. She backs up and whacks her bony butt against the edge of the table.
    She doesn’t want to see what the kitchen holds. She has seen terrible things in her many years, from her own son dying after a tractor turned his legs to pulp, to the boy who came back from Vietnam as a poppy freak. Hollow-eyed, drooling, stoned out of his mind. Willing to do anything for his next fix. 
    That son tried to get his life together; he found Jesus, and what a sight he made at church. Strutted around as a dean, talked the talk but did not walk the walk. Died when he got caught in bed with another parishioner’s wife. Technically out of bed, from what she could gather, but in the vicinity of the bed. And in the company of the cuckolded parishioner’s wife, another fella, and numerous cans of whipped cream.
    Lorna wobbles to her feet and turns on the light, which flickers and casts dull shadows on the wall. They dance tauntingly for a few moments before the lights burst to blinding life, then dim slowly to a normal level. Stupid power