The Dead Peasants’ Contract
(A Sequel to The Dead Peasants File)
By L. Craig Harris
Copyright © 2016 L. Craig Harris
ISBN-13: 978-1537789941
ISBN-10: 1537789945
Bible quotes: THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2010 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
To Jodi, David and Savannah
This is a work of fiction. Resemblance to any person or company, living or dead, is coincidental.
Chapter One
Dillon McGee pushed his way through the crowd to get to the platform inside the Morgan Retail store in Springfield, Missouri. He wanted to get closer to watch the lottery drawing and to make sure no worker or visitor tried to hurt anyone.
The atmosphere in the room was electric, like a modern worship service or a rock concert. Music pumped from stacks of speakers on each side of the platform. Lights danced through fog that was spewing from jets at the front of the stage. It smelled a little musty. People gyrated on either side of him. One woman held a rabbit’s foot to her chest and swayed to the music with her eyes closed. A man near her was moving his lips as he prayed with his hands clasped in front of his chin. He was somewhere north of sixty years old.
Dillon hated to work on Sundays, but had drawn the short straw this week, so he got to see the weekly spectacle for himself. He glanced down at his sidearm and adjusted his security guard cap, which covered his short-cropped blonde hair. He had kept it short since the Marines.
A stage had been set up near the store’s café and Morgan used it each Sunday for this lottery drawing. As usual, a large crowd had gathered for the proceedings. Mostly Morgan workers. Mostly aging or retired Morgan workers. Dillon had heard that some of the retired employees had spent their entire savings on this lottery. He couldn’t really blame them.
The tattoo that Morgan had etched on his forehead had been gone for five years now, but he rubbed his head where it used to be and thanked God it was no longer there. Dillon figured everyone in this crowd had signed the new contract: much better pay now, but mandatory retirement at sixty-five and not a penny of pension or insurance afterward, unless you already had it from another company. Morgan didn’t tattoo foreheads anymore, it placed a chip under the skin near the left shoulder blade. It was impossible to remove by yourself, you had to have help. And an alarm went off if you removed it, which cost you a stiff fine, so no one dared. Morgan was rumored to have death panels, no one knew for sure, but Dillon knew the deaths were happening more than ever. If an employee got sick or into financial trouble, he would meet some sudden and untimely end. Workers would randomly disappear or die and everyone knew why. But no one could stop it. The only way out of the contract was winning this lottery, so everyone played it. And the older they got, the more they spent on it. Older workers cost Charles Morgan more money, but he had found ways to cut his losses.
Just then a woman wearing a bikini and high heels, and a man in a three-piece suit walked up the stairs and onto the stage. Dillon rolled his eyes. He knew the man, some guy who worked in administration over at the warehouse. He had never seen the woman before. The man held out his hand and the music died down. A hush fell across the crowd. The woman standing next to Dillon was shaking.
“Go, go, go!” The crowd began to chant, growing louder and louder.
Again the corporate suit held out his hand to quiet them. He waited until the mob quit chanting and gave him its attention. “Welcome to the weekly Morgan lottery drawing,” he said in a loud voice. “Today, one lucky person is going to win a million dollars.” He glanced at his watch. “Who knows, this week it could be someone from this store.”
The crowd cheered.
“No one from Springfield has ever won,” the man standing next to Dillon said.
“Be quiet,” a woman nearby said. “You might jinx us. Someone is going to win from here today – I am!”
A big man standing nearby turned around and frowned at her. He put his finger to his lips. “Shhhhh.”
The man on stage waited until it was quiet again.
“If you’re ready.” He looked at the woman with him on stage. She pushed a red button on the remote she was holding and then stepped out of the way. Video from a projector, suspended from the ceiling, projected dazzling lights onto the screen at the back of the stage. The crowd leaned forward in anticipation. Dillon could feel his heart beating, knowing how important this drawing was to so many in this crowd. He knew time was running out for some of them.
On the screen colors danced and disappeared exposing a series of numbers. The numbers began to twirl and spin to the beat of music from the speakers. It grew louder and louder and built to a crescendo of anticipation. Then one number at a time pushed out from the others and stopped on the screen. People’s eyes grew large as they compared the numbers on the tickets they were holding with those on the screen. One number, then two, then three, until there were six numbers on the screen. The music climaxed with timpani drums then stopped.
The room fell silent. Everyone was looking at the tickets in their hands and then up at the numbers on the screen. The man and woman on stage scanned the crowd for any reaction. Dillon studied the faces of those near him, but saw only disappointment.
“No, no, no.” The man standing near him said quietly, shaking his head.
“It’s rigged!” A woman said. “No one from this store has ever won.”
A face appeared on the screen. It was a pretty woman. She smiled and said, “Congratulations to Ann Garza of Tucson, Arizona, the winner of today’s jackpot.” She smiled. “Everyone else try again next week. You never know, next Sunday could be your lucky day.” She faded from the screen and it went dark except for the words Morgan Retail.
“Arizona!” Someone yelled. “Didn’t they win last week?”
“It’s rigged!” The man next to Dillon pushed past him and lunged toward the steps of the stage.
Dillon grabbed him by the shirt. “Whoa.”
Dillon could feel someone tugging at his clothes as he handled the man. Someone had grabbed his gun. A man that Dillon knew well from the store had taken his .38 and was pointing it toward the man in the suit on the stage. He lifted it straight above his head and fired a shot. Bang! People began to scream and run away. Some were tripping over each other and falling into the floor. Dillon released the first man and faced the man with the gun. “What are you doing Mr. Owens? Are you really going to shoot someone?”
Dillon could feel the event slipping away from him and into chaos. This is exactly what he didn’t want to happen, and exactly what he was being paid to prevent. But he wasn’t thinking about his job at the moment, he was thinking about keeping someone from being shot. “Give me that gun right now.”
Tom Owens, who was in his late sixties and had been forced to retire three years ago, ignored him and continued to point it at the man in the suit on the stage. “Do you think you can just let us starve?” The gun was shaking in his hand and Dillon feared he would pull the trigger even if he really didn’t want to.
Dillon kept his hands up in front of him but moved closer to Tom. “Just give me that gun. You don’t want to do this.”
Tom kept pointing the gun. The man in the suit looked like he had lost all of the blood in his cheeks. He was frozen where he stood on the stage. The woman in the bikini bit her bottom lip as she stared at the gun.
Tom yelled above t
he melee at him. “You tell Morgan to quit killing us!” He swung the gun out to the side as he spoke.
Dillon seized the opportunity and grabbed it while it wasn’t pointed at anyone, wrestling it from his hand. “Don’t ever grab my gun, Tom. You could hurt someone.”
“I’m sorry.” Tom looked down at the floor, dejected. He turned and walked out of the building.
Dillon didn’t try to stop him. He just watched him walk slowly out into the summer morning. Dillon breathed heavily, glad it was over and catching the breath he had been holding.
The man and woman on the stage came down the stairs to the floor. Both looked shaken. Sweat poured from the man’s temples and he wiped it with his sleeves. Dillon escorted them through the crowd. He watched them escape through the warehouse area and then walked back toward the stage.
The crowd continued to disperse. Some sauntered toward the exits, others went back to the cash registers or stations where they were working. An older man was lying in the floor.
“You okay?” Dillon offered him his hand.
The man just nodded. He finally looked up and began to stand to his feet.
“Maybe next week,” Dillon said.
“Maybe.”
“It ain’t gonna happen,” a lady said, shaking her head and looking down at her ticket, and then back at Dillon. “I’ve been trying for years. It just ain’t gonna happen.”
Another man was kneeling at the steps of the stage. It looked like he was praying. A woman brushed past Dillon, weeping.
*****
Christopher Forrest surveyed the Sunday morning crowd as he took the pulpit at East Springfield Fellowship Church, a few miles from the Morgan Retail Center that same morning. Not bad for the middle of June, he thought. Everyone knows church attendance slumps in the summer, but the church was nearly full this morning.
He was confident, looking forward to presenting the sermon he had been working on all week. It was cool and a little dark in the sanctuary. Rachel was in her spot on the second row, fidgeting with her notebook, Bible, and morning bulletin. She was wearing a brightly colored sun dress.
“Thank you for leading us in worship this morning, praise team.” Christopher smiled over at the men and women who were exiting the stage to make way for him. “You guys sounded great this morning.”
He ran his fingers through his salt and pepper hair and set his Bible and notes in front of him. He looked up and saw Jim Lawrence sitting toward the back of the church. It had been five years since Morgan’s men burned down Jim’s house. That was a night he would never forget. He remembered the look on Rachel’s face as he was taken away into the night in the helicopter – the helicopter that later would crash, spilling him out onto the sidewalk in front of Morgan’s headquarters in Denver. “It’s good to see Jim in his spot this morning,” he said. Jim wasn’t able to come to church very often and Christopher liked to point him out whenever he felt like being there.
Christopher looked out at the congregation. “Stand with me this morning as we read our scripture.” He paused a moment to let everyone stand. “We’re going to be in John, chapter three, this morning. I’m reading verses five through eight.” He paused again to let them find it, then began to read. “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you the truth, no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.’”
Christopher looked up at the congregation. “Please be seated.” He waited until everyone was settled. “Einstein said there are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is supernatural, the other is as though everything is supernatural. I absolutely agree. Either we are simply objects of pure chance, and we are all just accidents of nature, or we were created supernaturally. Which is it?” He paused and cocked his head for effect.
“Does anyone here really believe we happened by chance? When you think of how complex our bodies are – how we can hear and see and feel and communicate – and how all of our organs work together in harmony every day, there is just no way this is all a big accident. Did you know you had more information in each of your cells than an entire encyclopedia?” He grinned. “You remember encyclopedias don’t you?” He let them chuckle at his dated reference. “Your cells have a DNA code that tells your body what to do. It tells the cell what it should be and how it should work. Who do you think wrote that code? Code doesn’t write itself.” He paused. “Did you know that when Darwin wrote his book, back in the middle of the eighteen-hundreds, they didn’t even know about DNA? I wonder what Darwin would have thought about his theory if he had known about the DNA code. Someone intelligent had to write that code.
“Just because we don’t know what happened for millions of years before we got here, doesn’t mean anything could have happened. To me, that would be like giving a chimpanzee a typewriter, all the paper he wanted, and a million years. Would that chimp ever accidently write one sonnet of Shakespeare? Give a million chimpanzees a million typewriters and a million years – would even one of them ever write the entire works of Shakespeare? I don’t think one would even write a complete paragraph. It just doesn’t work that way. But that’s what Evolution says – that if you give enough time, anything can happen. I say it won’t.
“Jesus said the world is supernatural. Paul said in Colossians, chapter one, that Jesus is the creator of the universe. Do we believe this or not? Yes, there is plenty we don’t understand. That’s why Jesus said there is a mystery to it. If you do not believe in the supernatural, how can you believe in your own salvation? Jesus said our new birth is supernatural. I contend that our natural birth is also supernatural. God gives life. God is the creator of life. We live at the intersection of the natural and the supernatural. God sees every day of our lives before we are born according to Psalm 139.”
He paused and looked at his audience to see if they were on board with him on this topic. They seemed to be. “Being born again is a spiritual thing. It’s a mystery and it’s a miracle. This is why it takes faith. We must have faith to please God, and we must have faith to be saved.”
After his sermon he stood at the front. His praise team led in a final, invitational, song. Then he prayed and dismissed the congregation. People made their way to the exits, and some came and found him and thanked him for his sermon. “I needed to hear that, Preacher,” one lady said.
Christopher enjoyed his members coming up and encouraging him. He was used to it. It was a chance for small talk and getting to know his people. He told a couple of people he would be praying for them, based on the prayer requests they had announced during the service.
When the auditorium had mostly cleared, a new couple came up to speak to him. They had only been coming a couple of weeks and he was proud that he had already memorized their names: Wesley and Mary Boyd. They were about his age, mid-fifties, and seemed like a really nice addition to the church.
They were smiling as they approached and he leaned toward them, expecting to hear them thank him for the encouraging sermon. But Wesley stopped smiling just as he stood in front of him. “Pastor, we want to say something about your sermon today.”
“Yes, Wes, of course.”
“We think this is a nice church, and we like you, but we disagree with what you said today.”
That caught Christopher off guard. He thought that he had made a pretty strong case for his points. He felt himself getting defensive, but fought it off. “Well, uh, it’s okay to question our faith, and not see everything exactly the–”
Wesley cut him off in mid-sentence. “Evolution is settled science. Almost every scientist believes in it. I would say all of the best scientists believe in it.”
Now Christopher couldn’t stop being defensive. He clinched and unclenched his fist. “So, you believe you
are just an accident? Is that what you believe?”
Mary spoke. “We believe in God, but we also believe we evolved.”
Christopher was not accustomed to having to defend his stance in his own church. “Well, evolution is a way to explain how life began, and how we got here, without any help from God.”
Wesley moved closer to him, placing his face uncomfortably close to Christopher’s. His demeanor was suddenly more menacing. He pointed to the pulpit. “If you stand up there and tell these people that evolution is a lie, you just force a wedge between the church and science. You’re forcing your young people to choose between what they hear in church and in school. It makes us look like a bunch of back-woods buffoons who are superstitious about everything. That’s not good for the church.”
Christopher could taste Wesley’s breath. He raised his voice. “So, I should just preach that it doesn’t matter what the Bible says. Is that what you’re saying?”
Mary looked like she was angry now. “The church is never going to reach young people if it tells them everything they know to be true is a big lie. That’s just conspiracy. We’ll never reach this new generation if we tell them that the Bible goes against science. We must find a middle-ground or we are going to lose them all.”
Wesley seemed to move in even closer. “Are you saying the world began six thousand years ago? Do you really believe that?”
“I didn’t say that today. I just don’t know. Remember, I said there is a mystery to it. I don’t know if God created everything in six days, but I certainly don’t believe we evolved from slime. That doesn’t make any sense at all and that’s not what the Bible teaches.”
“The Bible says God created everything in six days,” Mary said. “Do you believe that or not?”
“I believe God created us. After that, I don’t know.”
The Dead Peasants' Contract: A Sequel to The Dead Peasants File (The Dead Peasants' Series Book 2) Page 1
