Someone had the good sense to bring Mitchell extra oxygen tanks for his spacesuit so he didn’t suffocate in the middle of the crowd.
By nightfall, the whole world was trained on the events that were going on in downtown Atlanta. A group of CDC scientists who happened to be at the convention as cosplayers were able to make their way over to Mitchell’s court and sit down and talk to him. They’d seen the Great Wall documents and were appalled. They talked to Mitchell about a strategy to get him to safety.
The Naked Man in the Forest walked through the crowd. He was wearing the Otherself’s clothing. Of course, in that crowd, he might have blended in more easily if he had worn nothing at all like he did in the forest clearing.
In his backpack were the 12 eggs he’d been ordered to bring to the dark man in the middle of the crowd. He couldn’t understand at first why the Earth Mother had chosen this thorn of a man to have the eggs. Did she mean for him to break open the eggs in front of him? Was he just supposed to give them to him?
Breaking them all open at once didn’t make any sense. Just one was enough to kill everyone he could see and bring pestilence to this continent. Twelve was overkill. They were meant to be spread apart. Each one with its own plague.
Was the dark man chosen because he was a secret survivor? Was he chosen because his ordeal was just a trial? The Naked Man in the Forest paused when he thought that the dark man was chosen because he had bested him. Was that it? Had he failed so much in the eyes of the Earth Mother she’d chosen his enemy as her new lover?
His stomach was in knots. He didn’t want to give the eggs to the man. He wanted to prove himself. He wanted the Earth Mother for himself.
He couldn’t fight her. He had to try to follow her orders. He moved toward the dark man in the center. A hand reached out and stopped him.
“Who are you?” asked a man dressed in white plastic armor.
The Naked Man in the Forest hesitated. He couldn’t say the name of the Otherself. He was a wanted man now. He tried to walk around the man. Three more people in armor gathered around him.
“What’s in the bag?” asked one of them in a muffled voice.
A gloved hand reached toward the bag. Toward the eggs.
He swatted it away. “Gifts … gifts for Mitchell.”
Two of the armor-wearing people looked at each other.
“Let’s see the gifts.”
The Naked Man in the Forest pulled away. He had been told to only give them to the man. He couldn’t let them see the eggs.
More people gathered around. He gave them a nervous look. There was no way he was going to get to him. He tried. But he failed.
He pulled back from the people in the plastic armor. His eyes darted from left to right as people looked at his bag. He threaded through the crowd of costumed people and ran away. He’d tried. The Earth Mother would have to know he was sincere.
This had been a test, he decided. The Earth Mother wanted to know if he was willing to follow her orders. He had. He was sure she would be proud.
At midnight, the crowd was still growing. A CNN news crew had been allowed through and Mitchell told them everything even including the train wreck and the body he thought was in the trunk of the car. Another news team corroborated the story when they found a man had been pulled from the train wreckage with bogus Department of Transportation identification.
As dawn approached, Mitchell had done what he had set out to do. The word was out. He’d told his side of the story, and for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he was able to be in the middle of the crowd and not feel intense rage. In fact, he felt the opposite. Everywhere he looked he saw a sympathetic face.
A new deal was brokered and Mitchell left his spot where he’d been sitting for almost 24 hours and walked toward an ambulance waiting to take him into isolation over at the CDC a few miles away. People high-fived him and touched him on the shoulder as he made his way through the crowd that had answered his plea.
Mitchell got into the ambulance and sat next to two of the scientists he’d spoken to earlier. They’d changed out of their fantasy costumes and donned spacesuits like his. One of them mentioned a possible treatment they could give to Mitchell that might change his body’s pheromonal trigger. Another said they might be able to rapidly develop an anti-anti-Mitch virus that would allow medical workers and other people to be around him without spacesuits and not try to rip his face off. Mitchell made a comment about being able to look forward to not having to post ads on Craigslist for women who were into gasmask sex and then fell asleep for the short ride to his new home.
59
The vice president offered a letter of resignation the next day. On the orders of the president, the FBI raided the offices of Athena Biomedical. When a team in hazmat suits searched the labs, they found the unconscious body of Nick Arturous near an open refrigerator. The back of his skull had been cracked with a fire extinguisher.
Miraculously, he survived. When he was finally coherent enough to talk, they asked him if he knew the whereabouts of Dr. Baylor and what was in the 12 vials that were missing from the refrigerator.
He requested a lawyer before he would say anything about the vials. All he would say was that it was Baylor who had hit him with the fire extinguisher when he came for the vials. That and that Baylor was inexplicably naked when he walked into the lab and his balls and dick were covered in red welts.
Steinmetz had gone missing, as well.
Epilogue
The Naked Man in the Forest looked at the face of the Earth Mother on the oak. He hadn’t needed to touch a blotter for her to appear.
He placed the twelve vials proudly in front of her. She smiled down on him.
“What now, Earth Mother?”
Soon, my son, we will bring light to this world once and for all. We’ll bring the 12 plagues to the four corners of the earth and end man’s reign. Then it shall just be you and me in the garden. Helicopters flew by overhead looking for him. It would be in vain. He had the Earth Mother to look out for him.
The dark man had been a setback. Like Great Wall, he had been a test. Because of it, he knew that the contents of the eggs would reach far and wide when they were cracked open. Each one would bring a different pestilence onto man.
He packed the vials back into the backpack and walked deeper into the forest. Earth Mother told him that there were friends waiting, friends who would help him in their cause. Friends of the earth who knew that man’s time must come to an end.
Author’s note
As a social media experiment, I thought it would be fun to make this book available in draft form to anyone who wanted to edit or make notes. Here are the Twitter handles of the people who helped out:
@JustinRYoung
@dandirks
@lachbur
@RKMagic
@rc6750
@themadgician
@giggleloop
@magicofdru
@sinimagic
@getkasha
@msnovtues
@neshCOMPLEX
@AdamD_Marcus
@dpowensj
And if you’re curious about what Mitch is up to, you can follow him at @MadMitchFM
Sincerely,
Andrew Mayne
@AndrewMayne