8. Happy Days Are Here Again

"Well, you must be happy!" the moon-faced woman addressed her companion.

"Hmm." Lucia pulled herself from her focus on the televised numbers to regard her.

"Down by twelve points three weeks ago, and now the vote count shows him leading by ten. A couple of Internet sites have already declared him the winner!" Elizabeth Groesbeck squealed. "I'm going back out to the floor and you should too." And with that she swept from the hotel room, opening the door letting in the sounds of noisy celebration, then closing it to restore the relative quiet.

Must I be happy? Lucia mused. Well she did have that rather satisfied feeling that comes from successfully doing something others said couldn't be done. And election night also signaled the end of her old obligations and the start of some new and possibly more interesting challenges.

It hadn't taken long for her to decide that political office was not for her. The duties and responsibilities were crushingly boring. But that didn't mean she was going to waste years of training and connections. Starting her last summer at university she had been working as a consultant, and now, at twenty-five, she was already near the top of her field, in high demand not only in Padokia, but in neighboring republics as well. It kept her in the thick of the fun part, the campaigning and the election, and away from the dull actual work of governance. She liked to take on the difficult, challenging races; because how else would people know how really good she was? Of the last eight races she'd helped run, she'd won seven, and she didn't really feel too bad about the loss, because honestly, who could have won with a candidate who had four eight-year-old girls chained in his basement? Wait. Now it was eight out of nine!

She chortled. Maybe she was happy? Who knows? It was time to hit the ballroom though. She stood, turned off the television, and adjusted her dress (pastel, not revealing, but flatteringly cut and trimmed in red), checking her hair (straight, long and smooth, the way she had worn it for ten years) and make-up (to add some color to her fair complexion and highlight her lips and eyes) in the mirror on the door. Showtime!

The noise level was impressive, even for a victory celebration. People were thudding up and down the halls carrying balloons and bottles and who knows what. Senator Groesbeck really knew how to throw a party. It looked like half his constituency was here, eating and drinking on the Senator's tab. 'Maybe this is what he was saving those embezzled funds for?' she conspiratorially grinned. No, who better than she, his campaign strategist, to know how tirelessly he toiled for education and healthcare and the elderly and the young and the cute fuzzy little endangered what-evers…and his three mistresses, and most especially his offshore bank account!

When she reached the ballroom proper it was crammed with at least four times the number of people any Fire Marshall would have allowed. So it was a good thing she had paid him off in advance, right? At times like this she really loved being tall. Standing on tiptoe she could see over most of the crowd, and she rapidly scanned the faces. She was looking for her father. He had said he would come, even if he and the Senator didn't see eye to eye on, well…anything.

Politics was for pragmatists, and if Minister VerHoffen was irritated that he (and the country) would be stuck with Groesbeck for six more years courtesy of his own daughter, he hadn't let her know. He had never told her what to do with her life, although she secretly wondered if he didn't think she was wasting her talents on unworthy goals. Luther VerHoffen was such a towering figure. How many girls had grown up seeing their father's picture in the news every week, reading his opinions, hearing his speeches, public and private? She knew that everything he had done, the good and the bad, he had done out of his sense of duty in service to his country.

She didn't see him. Someone was yelling in her ear though. She turned her head to see Senator Groesbeck's pudgy daughter, Elizabeth. "Glad you finally made it! Daddy was looking for you."

For a moment she debated pretending not to hear. It was a credible excuse at the current noise level. What could the Senator want with her now… a photo-op to embarrass her father? She had gotten him reelected, which was certainly more than he deserved. She didn't owe him a thing.

Elizabeth continued, "Chairman Dewalt was with him."

Now she really had to get away. Chairman Dewalt was the Party Chairman…the Opposition Party, her father's longtime nemesis, and political rival for "power behind the throne". Now that she had saved his precious Senator's bacon, Lucia was almost certain he was going to try to secure her services in the upcoming elections for districts that would determine who was Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister's party changed, all the Cabinet Ministers would be replaced. She wasn't ready for political patricide, but she didn't want to decrease her market value by appearing to play favorites. She had scrupulously avoided any party affiliation. She turned to leave.

"Can this be little Lucia?" Big as life, there stood old Dewalt. "Your father must be so proud!" And mean as ever. He was stocky and his hair was white in the center, bordered by dark on either side. This feature, plus his famed tenacity, had earned him the nickname, "The Badger." She privately referred to him with a different nickname, "The Skunk".

"Why 'Uncle' Peter (two could play at this game), aren't you up a little late for a man of your years? You should take things easy and not overexert yourself." He probably wasn't much older than her father, but he was very vain and fancied himself quite the ladies' man, changing wives every five or six years to prove it.

"Actually, I was on my way out, but I couldn't leave without a dance with my Best Girl." He had threaded her arm through his and was drawing her toward the dance floor. It was true that he used to dance with her at all the big Government Balls. She'd thought him quite dashing too…until she was around nine or ten and figured out that he was the man her father had been referring to on those rare times she'd seen him apoplectic over some policy issue. She sighed, 'I guess I'll always be Daddy's Girl.'

They reached the floor and Dewalt turned to her with arms out, ready to dance. Please let it be a Polka or a Jitterbug, or something fast, Lucia prayed. It was a Waltz. Divine retribution for her evil deed in helping to reelect Groesbeck, she supposed. Now he could try to inveigle her into working those elections and she was going to have to find a way to give him some equivocal response.

"Now that Groesbeck is done, what have you got lined up next?" No beating around the bush for The Skunk, ahem, Badger.

"Well I've been thinking of taking some time off and traveling." If enforced hiatus was what it took to get out of this imbroglio, she'd take it; she didn't have any other ideas at the moment.

"You know something that's real hot can cool off quickly if it strays too far away from the heat." He wasn't going to let her go easy.

"Or it can burn out too, if it gets too hot." She had been avoiding looking at him, but on the last word of this retort she looked him right in the eye. She wanted to gauge by his reaction what it was going to take for him to back off, and so she saw exactly when it happened.

On the word "hot", she heard a slight sound from the Chairman, an exhalation of breath, and his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He stopped dancing and stood motionless, but only for a moment. Then he began to fall forward, into her arms. His weight drove her to her knees, and she carried him down, laying him on his side when they reached the floor. The other dancers stopped and moved back warily, as if the man's collapse was a contagious condition. She felt for a pulse at his neck, but there was nothing. Oh Gods, had he really overexerted himself as she had teased, and died? She felt a little queasy. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the glint of something metal in the hair at the back of his head. She gingerly moved his hair aside to reveal eight, no, nine metal balls the size of small marbles, resting on top of slightly narrower cylinders about the width of two fingers high. Almost without thinking, she grabbed one and began to pull on it. It came out of its unfortunate, organic sheath with surprising ease. And on the Chairman's scalp, only a single swelling drop of blood marked where it had entered. The part that had been inside of him was unevenly coated with a thin, red, shiny film. The cylinder had stopped at his skin, and below that, it was as narrow as a very fine nail or a hatpin, and that part was seven or eight centimeters long. Chairman Dewalt had been pithed.