The Devil Eats Here (Multi-Author Short Story Collection) Read Free Page A

But don't worry -- by the early Twenty-first Century, Napoleon's empire has long since collapsed in on itself. It will be nothing but history for you. Here is where your alternate self lives."
    Smit pointed to a nation gathered around the Great Lakes, between New England and Louisiana, labeled "Acadia." The capital city read: DIESKAU, although it was located where Detroit should have been.
    Smit cheerily outlined the history of Acadia. Like most of the nations in North America, it had achieved independence in the 1830s, trading an imperial dictatorship from abroad for a homegrown "presidential" dictatorship. Because of ethnic tensions, Acadia's fitful bouts of democracy had been pockmarked ever since with military coups and civil wars. Acadia had, in some ways, fared better than other North American nations. Take French Mexico, with 159 coups in 170 years since independence, or California, which, after thirty years of fascist rule followed by forty years of Communism, had no economy or industrial infrastructure worth mentioning.
    In recent years, Acadia, like many of its neighbors, had been engaged in bouts of vicious ethnic cleansing, as the Anglophones and Francophones took advantage of their turns in power to exterminate one another. The country funded its forty-years-and-going civil war with a brisk cocaine trade.
    To Dean, it sounded like Eastern Europe's 20th Century piled on top of South America's 19th. "This is the best of all possible worlds? Weren't there any with nuclear winters available?"
    Smit smiled slyly. "Remember! What matters isn't if the world makes most people happy, only if it makes you happy!"
    With a subtle gesture, Smit indicated the papers on the desk between them. Crisp black on white, legal documents, with yellow sticky arrows indicating everywhere Dean needed to sign.
    The docs describing the proposed journey through the Multiverse were more than twenty pages long; when lawyers met physicists, they birthed a many-headed hydra of nearly incomprehensible techno-babble and legalese. During a previous meeting, which had involved Smit, Dean, the company lawyer and Dean’s lawyer, Smit had explained the contract clause by clause. Clause 21, for instance, said that Dean would not be able to travel to the alternate dimension in his own body. His quantum consciousness, as the scientists had defined it, would inhabit the body of the Dean who already existed in the alternate reality. Since that world would be the best of worlds for any existing Dean in the Multiverse, Dean would find himself stronger, healthier and maybe even better looking than he was now. But that was just the beginning, Smit had assured him. Every aspect of his life would be the best it could be.
    Dean had a sudden vision of himself as supreme dictator of one of the states on that alternate earth, with palaces, cars, women, and the power of life and death over his subjects. He signed the papers. The only sounds in the office were the ripple of the pages as he turned them, and the scratch of his pen on every line marked with a sticky yellow arrow labeled SIGN HERE.
    When he finished, the enormity of what he had done washed over him. He felt almost giddy.
    “You’re going to love your new life,” Smit said.
    "Damn straight. As long as I’m happy, screw the rest. Let’s do it."
    *
    Dean felt nothing during the transfer itself, but a hollow roar echoed his ears. Cold, gritty wind blasted him. He found himself next to naked and the temperature next to freezing. He gawked at his surroundings. Barbed wire. Thin, half dressed men. Sky blown with ash and smoke. For some reason he was holding a heavy rock. What the hell...?
    Dean stepped out of line with the shuffling men. They, too, carried large rocks. The stink of their unwashed bodies affronted him, even more so when he realized he stank as badly as the rest. He dropped his to the ground, fighting nausea, forcing himself to stand tall.
    Pain snapped across his back. He cried out and