THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  No matter. Ralph Harrington was his name now. That was the name on the policy and it was to that moniker that he was bound. Hunt searched for a clasp or lock, some way to open the case containing the policies, but there was none, and finally he walked over to the nearest file cabinet, took out a big, thick folder, placed it on the glass, and then brought his fist down as hard as possible in the center of the papers.

  The glass shattered.

  Thank God it wasn’t safety glass, or he might not have been able to break through. He picked up the folder, tossed it on the floor, then carefully picked up the largest pieces of glass and dropped them until he was able to take out the policies.

  Now had come the moment of reckoning.

  If learning the insurance agent’s name had brought him down to Hunt’s level, it had also made him seem more human, and for a brief fraction of a second, Hunt hesitated before doing what he had set out to do. But then he thought of Jorge’s child, thought of Lilly, thought of Eileen, thought of all the other people who had died or suffered as a result of the insurance agent’s actions, and he put down the other policies and held up Ralph Harrington’s.

  He took out the lighter, flicked it on, and, holding the piece of parchment from the top, lit the lower right corner. There was no magic poof, no faint echo of a scream, but the ancient paper caught fire quickly and burned steadily upward, and he held it in his hand until the last moment and then let it fall. It burned for a few more seconds on the floor, then went out, leaving a small triangular corner containing no writing of any kind. He was taking no chances, though, and he picked up that little triangle, set it afire once more and then held it until the small flame touched his fingers and the policy was completely gone.

  Hunt looked toward the door. It had taken him several minutes to break open the case, take out the policies and light Ralph Harrington’s on fire, but Joel was still on watch, and he looked back and nodded, indicating that the coast was clear. Hunt saw relief in his eyes, relief and gratitude.

  He went down the line, burned the other policies.

  No one came to stop him. That was the weird part. No alarms went off as he sequentially set the policies aflame. No sprinklers in the ceiling, alerted by the smoke, turned on to douse the fires. He did not understand it. Back home, the insurance company had seemed attuned to their every movement, yet here he was allowed to just walk right in and start setting fire to the policies that kept each of the insurance agents alive. Was it that all of the attention was directed outward, that there had never been a security breach before or a traitor in their midst and there’d been no need for precautions? Was it that the individual agents kept tabs on their customers and were responsible for monitoring their movements? Or had life insurance granted him a free pass, given him a cloak of invisibility and the license to do whatever the hell he wanted?

  “You bastard!” Joel suddenly screamed.

  Both Hunt and Jorge were on it in a flash. They ran out of the file room after their friend, who was yelling at the top of his lungs and speeding down the corridor toward a figure walking across the intersection of another passage several yards away.

  A very familiar figure.

  Their insurance agent.

  2

  Joel was standing in the doorway of the file room, guarding it, while behind him Hunt and Jorge set fire to the life insurance policies of their insurance agent and his immortal brethren. In his mind, Joel imagined the agent crumpling into dust as his policy burned, like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

  Which was why he was so shocked when he heard the sound of footsteps, looked up the corridor and saw the insurance agent emerging from a side passageway.

  Joel was filled with a rage so immediate and all-consuming that he didn’t know what he was doing until after he’d already done it. “You bastard!” he screamed, and took off after the agent, who ignored him completely and continued walking from a passageway on the right to one on the left. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” he yelled.

  If only he had taken the knife Manuel had given Hunt. He’d stab that fucker right through the heart.

  But shouldn’t he be dead already?

  He should, but he wasn’t. In fact the insurance agent looked none the worse for wear, indeed looked as strong and healthy as he ever had. But how was that possible? He was no longer immortal if he did not have a policy to protect him.

  The man had been alive for hundreds of years, and once his immortality was revoked, he should have reverted to his natural state. Yet he hadn’t.

  Because he still had his copy of the policy.

  That had to be it. The original policy was gone, but as long as written proof existed, as long as the agent himself possessed the words stating that he was guaranteed to live forever, the coverage stood.

  Joel turned the corner—

  —and was tackled by Jorge.

  Ahead, the agent kept walking, not looking back, oblivious.

  “What are you doing?” Joel spluttered, scrambling to his feet. “That’s him.”

  “Yes,” Hunt said, grabbing his arm. “And we don’t want you getting yourself and all of us killed before we finish what we came to do.”

  “That’s what we came to do.” He heard the desperation in his own voice, the rage, the fear, and he took a deep breath, forced himself to stop, calm down, look at this rationally rather than emotionally.

  Further down the hallway, the agent entered an office.

  “Okay,” he said, whispering once again. “What do we do?”

  Jorge looked at Hunt, both obviously at a loss. Hunt sighed. “Well, now that you’ve found him…”

  “You burned his policy,” Joel said, keeping his voice down. “But he’s still alive. Want to know why? Because he has a copy of it. As long as those words are written down, as long as a copy of that policy is extant, it’s still in force, it still applies. We need to burn that copy, too.”

  “You’re right.” Hunt thought for a moment. “But where would it be? Where would he keep it? In his office back in Arizona? At his house? Here somewhere?”

  The agent emerged from the office into which he’d walked, chuckling. He didn’t have his briefcase, Joel noticed. He hadn’t had it since he’d first been spotted. Something about that nagged at him. To his knowledge, the man was never without his briefcase.

  The agent’s clothes were different, too—more casual.

  He was off duty.

  If Joel had been a cartoon character, a lightbulb would have gone off above his head. He had no idea how their agent had gotten here, although supernatural transportation seemed far more likely than conventional air travel, but he was suddenly certain that this was where the insurance salesman spent his nights. This was his home. He lived in The Insurance Group’s headquarters.

  All of the agents did.

  So if they could find out where his room was…

  “Follow him,” Joel whispered. “He lives here somewhere. That’s where his policy will be.”

  Hunt nodded, understanding instantly—the advantage of playing to a smart crowd—and the three of them continued up the corridor, remaining a discreet distance behind the agent, hoping he would not turn around and spot them.

  The office into which the agent had walked looked like some sort of locker room, Joel noticed in a quick glance as they passed by. He saw a long stone bench in the center of the narrow chamber, and the walls on both sides consisted of twin rows of open alcoves. The agent had been chuckling when he walked out, but there did not appear to be anyone else inside the room.

  The corridor jogged to the right then curved to the left, and they lost the insurance salesman for a few moments, afraid to pick up the pace, not wanting to close the distance between them despite the twists and turns of the passageway. Then the corridor ended. At a closed door.

  Painted on the solid wood, like the moniker stenciled on the dressing room door of an old-time movie star, were two letters: R.H.

  “Ralph Harrington,” Hunt said. �
�That’s him.”

  “So what do we do?” Jorge asked nervously.

  Both he and Joel turned to Hunt.

  “Go inside,” Hunt said.

  3

  They had no guarantee that the insurance agent was not directly behind the door ready to spring at them, but time was passing quickly and they could not afford to wait around and dilly-dally, as his mother always said. Hunt put his ear to the wood, listened for a moment, heard nothing, then tried the knob. It was not locked and turned easily.

  They were in an apartment, a grottolike room lit by a single black candle atop a wrought-iron stand. There was a rusted metal sink in one corner and in the center a filthy Mattress on the floor that they could smell from here. Hunt saw no stove, no microwave, no refrigerator.

  Maybe he didn’t eat.

  At one end of the room was a black display case pushed against the rock wall, filled with what Hunt could only assume were trophies: the skulls of wild animals, the skeletons of cacti. Dead things from the Tucson neighborhood. He thought of that room with the bin of skulls and the flayed mule, and though it had made no sense to him at the time, he understood now what it signified.

  Parchment.

  It was The Insurance Group’s tanning room, where they made the parchment for their most important policies.

  He looked at the display case in front of them now and thought that it was not unlikely that the insurance agent was doing the same thing here on a smaller scale. For relaxation after hours.

  He saw no sign of the agent himself, but to the right of the display case was a narrow wooden door that made him think of the door to a privy or outhouse. He was almost certain that the agent was in there, and as if to confirm his assumption, a strange creaking noise came from behind the door.

  The three of them huddled quickly. “Look for a file cabinet,” Hunt whispered. “Or a desk. Someplace where he might hide his papers.”

  The room was way too dark for them to split up, so Joel grabbed the candle from its stand and they walked the room, moving from right to left. They saw an old Victrola, pulleys from a schooner ship’s riggings, a sword and bayonet leaning against a full-length mirror, but no place that looked likely to hide important documents.

  Then a light was suddenly switched on and the room changed.

  It was no longer a dirty grotto filled with relics of the past but a modern, well-ordered living space twice that size. Where the Victrola had been was a giant plasma TV, in place of the black display case was a walk-in closet filled with clean, tailored suits from different American eras. The filthy mattress had been replaced by a white contemporary couch facing the television, and where the closed privy door had been was a wide arched opening leading into a bedroom with blond wood furniture. Another open doorway on the opposite wall led to a kitchen filled with stainless steel appliances.

  And to their right beneath a framed Chagall print, was a computer desk and filing cabinet.

  Hunt dashed over and quickly rifled through the desk drawers. Pens… paper… rubber bands and paper clips… diskettes…

  From somewhere inside the bedroom came the sound of a flushing toilet. The agent had finished going to the bathroom, his lights had turned on, and he was coming out. Hunt felt like a child waiting for a monster to arrive, and he sped over to the file cabinet and opened it.

  It was filled with manila folders, all carefully labeled with the name of the insurance policy they held.

  He’d found it!

  The flushing sounded closer, louder, as, within the bedroom, the door to the bathroom opened. The agent was on his way.

  A… B… C… D…

  Footsteps and the humming of a tuneless song.

  G… H… I… J… K…

  … L!

  Life insurance!

  Hunt grabbed the folder, yanking it out, and Joel and Jorge blocked him from view as he pulled out the lighter and tried to get the pages on fire. There was a brief scary second where it looked like it wouldn’t catch, but this was a lighter not a match, the flame was constant, and the folder could not withstand the power of the heat.

  It started to burn.

  It was still burning when the agent walked through the bedroom and out, and it took him a moment to register what was going on. When he did realize who they were and what was happening, he let out an ear-splitting bellow and pushed Joel and Jorge aside as though they were rag dolls.

  Hunt was still holding the burning folder, and he ran from the agent, using pieces of furniture as obstacles, going around the couch, over the coffee table, behind a chair. The policy was almost gone, the flames were starting to hurt his hands, but he dare not let it go, and he ran into the bedroom and then into the bathroom, where he shut and locked the door before climbing into the shower stall.

  The agent threw the bathroom door open.

  But he was too late.

  Hunt dropped the last of the policy just as it was about to burn his finger, and it fell to the tile and sputtered on the shower stall floor, and then it was gone—a small charred scrap disintegrating into tiny ashes. Hunt withdrew Manuel’s knife, keeping his eye on the insurance agent. If he’d expected him to crumble into dust, he was disappointed. Nothing like that happened. There was no seismic shift in air currents, no crackle of unknown energy, no indication at all that anything had changed.

  But it had.

  And they both knew it.

  There was movement from the bedroom behind the agent. Joel and Jorge had made a quick trip to the kitchen, and both had long carving knives in their hands. Joel stabbed outward, face contorted with fury, but the blow glanced off, and Joel found himself flat-assed on the floor. With dawning realization, Hunt understood that while the agent might no longer have immortal insurance, he was no doubt protected by almost every other policy type imaginable. Finding a chink in the armor, a flaw or weakness for which the agent was not covered was going to be next to impossible.

  But it had to be done. And fast. Within the next few seconds.

  He thought quickly, looked behind the agent at Jorge, ready to spring. “No!” he shouted, but he was too late. Jorge jumped the insurance salesman who turned and swatted him away, sending him and his weapon flying. Jorge’s head hit the footpost of the bed with an audible crack.

  “Knock it off, Harrington!” Hunt screamed.

  And the agent’s head jerked toward him, eyes wide with anger and shock.

  That was it!

  His name.

  Names had power. He remembered how the agent had laughed when he’d thought he’d have to sign the immortal policy in blood. Your signature is good enough. That’s all we need.

  That’s all they needed. No blood, no souls. Just names.

  It was what Del had tried to tell him.

  “Ralph Harrington,” Hunt stated clearly.

  The insurance agent no longer looked so formidable. Joel was getting up, shaking himself off, and Jorge was struggling groggily to his feet, but Hunt said, “Stay there. Don’t go near him.”

  “How do you know my name?” the insurance agent demanded.

  “I saw it on your immortal policy. When I burned it.”

  Recognition dawned in the agent’s eyes. “So you did it,” he said and his voice was quiet and unnervingly calm. “Very resourceful.”

  “And I’m canceling all of my policies with The Insurance Group. You guys can go fuck yourselves.”

  “Canceling?” He slammed his fist down on the bathroom sink, cracking the porcelain.

  Hunt backed against the rear wall of the shower stall, knife out.

  “How do you think you’re going to get by without insurance, huh? What’s going to protect you from the horrors of life, from the hell that is existence? Did you ever think of that?” The agent’s face was red and filled with rage. He stepped forward, reached into the shower stall and slapped Hunt across the side of the face. It was agonizing. His eyes watered and it felt as though he’d been smacked with a brick. But the agent made no effort to assault him
further. “That’s the problem with you people! You never think ahead!”

  Hunt tried to ignore the pain and the swelling flesh that was already starting to impede vision in his left eye. “Listen, Harrington.”

  “DON’T CALL ME THAT!”

  The expression on the man’s face was unlike anything Hunt had ever seen, a primal visage that was at once horrifyingly enraged and achingly vulnerable. Hearing his name said aloud hurt him somehow, and though Hunt couldn’t follow the logic of it, didn’t know how it worked or why, he acted upon it quickly.

  “Ralph Harrington!” he shouted, thinking of Rumpelstiltskin. He said it twice more, fast. “Ralph Harrington! Ralph Harrington!”

  He was again disappointed. The agent did not disappear in a puff of smoke or fade away, did not stomp his foot furiously like the dwarf in the fairy tale and fall through the floor. But he did back up, did look stunned, and since he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Hunt kept repeating the name. “Ralph Harrington! Ralph Harrington!”

  Behind the agent, in the bedroom, Joel and Jorge took up the chant: “Ralph Harrington! Ralph Harrington!”

  Hunt tried to think as he shouted, wracked his brain trying to figure out what else he could do. If there were a birth certificate he could burn, perhaps that would put an end to the insurance agent. But maybe there were other policies still extant, insurance coverage that protected him from—

  “THAT’S NOT MY NAME!” the agent screamed crazily, and suddenly Hunt had an idea.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  The language in which the single word was spoken was not like anything any of them had ever heard, a grating noise like speech from the bowels of hell—part metallic rasp, part shrill screech, part squishy slurp. The aural equivalent of the language in which the original policies had been written.