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Phury clapped him on the shoulder with satisfaction, like he’d plugged a hole. I’ll tell her to meet you in the library after First Meal.
    John looked down at what he was wearing. He wasn’t sure the jeans routine was fancy enough, but his closet was only stuffed with more of the same.
    Maybe it was a good thing he and his boys were malling it. And too bad they hadn’t gone already.
     
    Chapter Three
    The tradition in the Lessening Society was that once you were inducted, you were known only by the first letter of your last name.
    Mr. D should have been known as Mr. R. R as in Roberts. Thing was, the identity he’d been using when he’d been recruited had been Delancy. So Mr. D he had become, and he’d been known by that for the last thirty years.
    Weren’t no nevermind, though. Names never did matter none.
    Mr. D downshifted as he headed into a turn on Route 22, but going into third didn’t help him pull through the curve much. The Ford Focus had getup like a ninety-year-old. Kinda smelt like mothballs and flaky skin, too.
    Caldwell, New York’s farm alley was a stretch of about fifty miles of cornfields and cow pastures and while he putt-putt -putted through it, he found himself thinking about pitchforks. He’d killed his first person with one. Back in Texas when he was fourteen. His cousin, Big Tommy.
    Mr. D had been right proud of himself for getting away with that murder. Being small and appearing defenseless had been the ticket. Good ol’ Big Tommy had been a rough-neck, with ham hands and a mean streak, so when Mr. D had run screaming to his mama with a beat-in face, everyone had believed his cuz had been in a killing rage and deserved what he’d got. Hah. Mr. D had tracked Big Tommy into the barn and riled him up but good for to get himself the fat lip and black eye necessary to argue self-defense. Then he’d taken the pitchfork he’d propped up against a stall beforehand and gotten to work.
    He’d just wanted to know what it felt like to kill a human. The cats and the possums and the raccoons he’d trapped and tortured had been okay, but they weren’t no human.
    The deed was harder to do than he’d thought. In the movies, pitchforks just went right into people like a spoon to soup, but that was a lie. The tines of the thing had got tangled in Big Tommy’s ribs so bad to where Mr. D had had to brace his foot on his cousin’s hip to get the leverage to yank the fork out. Second thrust had gone into the stomach, but got jammed again. Probably in the spine. More with the foot bracing. By the time Big Tommy stopped baying like a wounded pig, Mr. D was puffing the sweet, hay-dust air of the barn like there was too little of it to go around.
    But it hadn’t been no total bust. Mr. D had really liked the changing expressions on his cousin’s face. First there had been anger, the stuff that got Mr. D hit. Then disbelief. Then horror and terror at the end. As Big Tommy had coughed up blood and gasped, his eyes had peeled with righteous fear, the kind your mama always wanted you to have for the Lord. Mr. D, the runt of the family, the little guy, had felt seven feet tall.
    It had been his first taste of power and he’d wanted it again, but the police had come and there been a lot of talk in town and he’d forced himself to be good. A couple of years passed before he did something like that again. Working at a meat-processing plant had done right by his knife skills, and when he was ready, he’d used the Big Tommy kind of setup again: bar fight with a bulldozer of a man. He’d madded up the bastard, then lured him over to a dark corner. A screwdriver, and not the kind you drank, did the job.
    Things had been more complicated than with Big Tommy. Once Mr. D had started in on the bulldozer guy, he hadn’t been able to stop. And it was harder to pull self-defense out your pocket when the body done been stabbed seven times, dragged out behind a car, and dismembered like a machine that were