The phone was still ringing and he flopped an arm to the night table, knocking the receiver loose. Over the muffled voice he mistook for his wife, he distinctly heard the dial tone hum.
And the phone rang again.
It was then Clancy realized it was not the motel room phone summoning him, and he found his motivation. He rolled over on the horribly lumpy mattress and the muffled voice suddenly broke into clearly audible gasps.
Clancy looked over his pimpled shoulder.
And there on the bed-the bed which his bloated body had completely dominated-lay a spread-eagled woman whose flattened breasts resembled giant pink sunnyside-up fried eggs. Her breathing came in spasmodic gulps.
"I thought I was going to suffocate," she wheezed.
"You're not my wife! Who are you?"
The woman bolted up. "You bastard! Don't you remember?"
"No," admitted Ned Clancy, reaching over to yank off the fuzzy blue ball she wore over her head.
"I still don't recognize you," he muttered.
"I'm Jane Goodwoman, you sexist swine!"
"Oink. Oink. Didn't I pork you once before this?"
"You don't remember!"
"All women look alike to me-above the neck."
Jane Goodwoman grabbed up her clothes and stumbled into the bathroom. She slammed the door after her and Ned Clancy rolled off the bed and onto his jacket, which he had hung up for the night by dropping on the carpet. He fumbled for the cellular phone clipped to the lining.
"Hello?" he undertoned, one eye on the closed bathroom door.
A thin female voice he knew well said, "This is the Eldress, Senator Clancy."
"Keep it low. I'm not alone."
"It is time."
"What is?"
"Clear your brain, fool. If you go to Nirvana West, you will find the Harvesters have departed this mortal vale. Go there. Make a speech. Blame their deaths on Human Environmental Liability Paradox and swear an oath to get to the bottom of it all."
"What about the growing hole in the ozone layer?"
"There is no hole."
Clancy drywashed his bloated face. "You mean the whale was right?"
"Never mind him," the thin voice snapped. "After your speech, fly home."
"Home Cape Cod or home Washington?"
"To Washington. You must ram the HELP bill through the Senate, and increase your prestige."
"Why?"
"That is not for you to know. But go quickly. There is no time to lose."
"You're not my wife, are you?"
"I am not your wife. You would know your wife's voice, would you not?
"Just checking. Sometimes I'm not even sure you're a woman."
"Why do you say that?"
"You got too much balls to be a woman."
"I will take that as a compliment," said the voice of the Eldress. "Your plane is waiting for you at San Francisco International Airport. Everything is in readiness."
"What about, you know who?"
"The whale?"
"Yeah. Him."
"The whale has been beached. His ultimate fate is for the Eldress to decide, not you. You are only a pawn in the great plan."
"Now you remind me of my father-pushing. Always pushing. He never let me have any fun."
"I am not your father, Senator Clancy. And if you do not do as I say, I will release to the media the tape recording of your drunken confession. The girl was only fifteen. Remember?"
"Not clearly," Ned Clancy said honestly.
"She never saw sixteen. She never saw the age of consent. Do you recall the day you confided the indescretion to your father? It broke his heart. After that, he would not eat. You were the last politically viable son he had. After that day, he allowed himself to slowly starve to death."
Senator Ned J. Clancy shuddered uncontrollably.
"My mother will kill me if it all comes out," he croaked.
"Obey, then. Obey the Eldress. I am your truth."
The line went dead and Ned Clancy tried to pull his clothes on in a way that made it clear he didn't quite recognize them.
From one wall of the motel room, the hard sound of a cane rapping against plaster came insistently.
"Coming, Mother!" Ned Clancy called.
From the bathroom, Jane Goodwoman snapped, "I'm not your damn mother!"
"My mother had nicer tits," mumbled Ned Clancy, deciding not to wear underwear since he wouldn't be in town much longer. His second pair was pretty gamey already.
The sacrifices he made to keep the family name from being tarnished. No wonder Jimbo and Robbo died so young.
Chapter 21
CDC pathologist Dale Parsons awoke with the dawn. It had been a busy night. He had supervised the removal of the bodies from the Snapper wing of the People Against Protein Assassins.
With the local coroner dead, there was no one to do it on an official basis. It had to be done and Parsons had shouldered the burden because no one else wanted to touch it.
At the Harvester wing, the survivors were too distraught over the death of their leader, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, to care. They refused to abandon their encampment.
"Only Snappers catch HELP," they repeated.
"What about Eagles? He's dead too."
"Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles will never die. When we breathe the good clean air, we inhale his protective spirit."
There was no reasoning with these dimwits, Dale Parsons had concluded. He had left them there. There was paperwork still to be done.
The only good thing was the press had gotten bored with Nirvana West and had gone to town for the night.
Now with the red sun peeping over the ponderosa pines, Dale Parsons set out to ask the Harvesters some questions.
He found instead only silence.
The Harvesters had passed the night in their tepees and wigwams and somewhere in the night, they had died there.
Parsons hurried from tent to tent, examining the bodies.
"Damn! What hit these people?"
At one tent he came upon a woman with some life still in her.
"Can you hear me, miss?"
The woman could manage only subvocal murmurings. Parsons knelt and lifted her eyelids. The whites of her eyes were a distinctive blue. Not the light blue of osteoporosis, but a livid blue.
The woman's pupils relaxed first, then the rest of her, and the air coming out of her lungs came slow and final.
Parsons straightened and finished his rounds.
There was no question. Every Harvester was dead. It was not HELP. They had not seemed ill the day before. In fact, they had been carrying on something awful when he had last seen them.
When he brought the word to the arriving news media, there was a mad rush for the Harvester encampment.
"Hey!" he called after them. "We don't know what killed them! It may be dangerous to go into the death zone."
"It was HELP, right?"
"I don't think so," Parsons said.
"Then maybe the ozone hole cracked wide open."
A number of photographers pointed their cameras skyward to catch the gaping hole they imagined was up there.
"I see it! It's pink!" one shouted.
Parsons said, "That's the sun coming up. You couldn't see the hole if there was one. Ozone is invisible."
"Just in case," a TV news producer said, "record every square inch of that sky."
Disgusted, Dale Parsons trudged back to his tent.
He came upon a food service truck, where two young men in white were spooning mayonnaise into great steel pots. He noticed that with every spoonful, they were sprinkling in tiny brown things that could only be thunderbugs.
"What are you making?" he called.
"Lobster salad," said one.
"For the press," added the other. They both wore guilty expressions.
"Since when are bugs part of lobster salad?"
"There's no bugs in here. Only shredded lobster."
"Guess I was mistaken," said Parsons, going on. "Something's sure fishy in Nirvana West," he told himself.