Light Has Weight, but Darkness Does Not (Nameless: Season Two) by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

9

Rainer Rudge is here for the end of the world, which he’s known is coming ever since he was fired and the mall went under. Because there are no more jobs to be had anywhere for the likes of him, the death of the mall is not only his own near death, but also a sign that everyone’s days are numbered.

He was somebody once, a member of the mall security team, and he was proud of the job he did. He liked coming to work every day, patrolling the parking lot and strolling the promenades with an eye for suspicious types. He especially enjoyed being assigned to the security bunker in the basement, with its many monitors, each screen able to show what any one of the ninety-seven cameras was capturing, or the screen could quarter and reveal four scenes at the same time. The video was archived for a month, so if there was a shoplifting incident or a purse snatching in the parking lot, he could go back in time and call up the evidence to help find the perpetrator. The bunker had felt like the center of the world, and after the mall went bust, nowhere else in the world seemed in the least bit right.

Another guard, Joe Purcell, couldn’t find a new job, either, and being only fifty-two and on the dole with no prospects hit Joe much harder than it hit Rainer, who was ten years older with fewer expectations. Joe shot himself in the head. Kyle Bulmer was sixty-seven, and when the pension he worked for turned out not to be there, he had to go live with his daughter in Austin. Kyle said that change was another kind of death because her husband, a big shot at the university, knew everything and was determined not merely to educate Kyle but civilize him according to the standards of that crowd. The others on the security team, all three shifts, sort of scattered to the wind, so Rainer didn’t know what happened to them.

Having lost his wife, Pearl, to cancer nine years earlier, with no enlightened children to embarrass and no job to go to, Rainer has a lot of time to consider how much the world is changing. It seems like most everyone has taken up several causes each and spends a lot of time shouting to one another about how virtuous they are without noticing that in spite of all this loud righteousness, just about everything is getting worse—maybe not in spite of it, but because of it. Rainer isn’t the most educated of individuals, having taken no classes after high school, but he’s read a lot of history for the pleasure of it, and he’s sure that when so many people take so much pride in their rectitude, there’s a perilous shortage of humility. Humble people know that no one can know everything, so they are less likely to saddle up and ride off a cliff just because the prideful have agreed their virtue requires everyone to believe that horses can fly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.