Chapter 9

White House, Washington, DC

“Mr. President, I have the latest report from DOD (Dept. of Defense) on the North Korea situation. I am delighted to report good news for a change. The satellite scanning of the area by deep penetrating radar of where the dimension transportation machine was located shows that the cavern has been collapsed. Furthermore, a very close analysis of the scans made by several passes shows that there is nothing left in the former cavern that even resembles a full machine.

“In other words, the Hell Bomb did exactly what it was designed to do.

“As for the government hierarchy responsible for the machine, it has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. All of their major buildings, including the residences of those people responsible are now nothing but a pile of rubble. It is unfortunate, but the entire families were wiped out.

“State Dept. reports that we have received a number of highly scathing protests from the usual governments, such as Sweden and Iran, about our barbaric and unjustified attack on a peaceful country. The comments from China and most other countries were more what you would expect: public denouncements and private thank yous. State says that we can relax on this. It should all blow over in a few months after South Korea has had a chance to stabilize the situation.”

“Very good! Be sure that everyone involved has a note of commendation and thanks over my signature placed in their personnel file. Everybody did a good job on this, and I want a permanent record kept on it. Also, set up a public announcement spot for me on all TV channels for this evening. I think that no more than 10 minutes should be sufficient. Such a momentous accomplishment should be publicly acknowledged. Let the other Party stew over their claims that my administration is lax in protecting America and American interests.”

Lookout Ridge, GA

Wow, the President’s TV announcement last night really hit the spot! It is a relief to know that the demons’ attack on us will eventually peter out as soon as we can kill the last one. That shouldn’t take much longer now that the word on how to doctor bullets to be instantly fatal to demons has reached such wide distribution. Anybody in the US who has not seen the details on TV or in the newspapers and news magazines has been living under a rock.

On top of the other good news, Dad has been fielding bids for us to make a movie of how we discovered the bullet treatment. Not only that, but he has been approached about writing a book on the subject, and there have been several serious contacts about a TV series. If all of these offers pan out, we should be independently wealthy pretty damned soon!

We don’t know yet if we would be playing ourselves in the TV series, but Sue is certainly pretty enough to make it in any TV series. I would certainly take the job because it looks like a lot of fun. I don’t know about Mom and Dad as actors, we’ll just have to wait on that.

In the meantime, we are still employed by Lookout Ridge as special police officers. The demon threat is a long way from over from out point of view. Of course, the eradication of demons will take longer if it turns out that they can reproduce in this dimension. I don’t know that anyone has given that any thought. Hell, we have been too busy just trying to stay alive to worry about that detail.