"'We've found you a heart.' The kindly expression on Dr. Manzaneres'
face seemed ludicrous, in light of the fact that his visage was
melting away, exposing the white bone beneath. He boomed on authoritatively,
oblivious to this decomposition. 'It's a perfect twelve of twelve
for HLA-matching, Sue. There's just one thing.'"
"It started when Phil was dying, or,
rather, not dying. The same afternoon Rachel and Phil's sister brought
him home from the hospital, my candy dish sprouted fur. A couple
of days later, it grew six knobby, naked gray-green legs and took
to scurrying around the top of the coffee table, for all the world
like a flat, mutant gerbil. It would scrabble across the table to
one edge, stop, then shoot across to the opposite edge, stop, then
crawl, more deliberately, to the edge again."
"The
Seventh Circle server was down again, and Satan was pissed. Virgil
put the Prince of Darkness on hold. He stood up and peeked over
the wall and into his supervisor's cubicle."
"It
was one of those moans, one of the desperate, forsaken kinds
that shakes the walls and disturbs the dust balls beneath the couch.
One of those long, drawn out waiting-for-the-lightning-strike moans
that really signals nothing but the coming of a really well-planned
whine. "
