"Let's play Ballgame instead," Barney countered.
"Ballgame?"
"Yeah, and tonight's a doubleheader. Get it?"
Barney began to stroke himself too. "Or how about just a good old all-American game of Hide the Salami?"
"Maybe I'm a vegetarian," Clara slyly remarked.
"In that case, honey, I've got a summer squash that'll make your day!"
Jock laughter erupted forth. Both their penises, hard yet again, bounced like springboards. But then Barney interjected:
"Say, I wanted to ask you something. Is it true you date Howard Moley?"
Jesus! Howard again! "Don't be ridiculous. We went out a few times, that's all. It was…an aberration…"
"I heard you were gonna marry him," David added.
"Howard Moley?" Clara lied. "Are you kidding?"
"No, huh? So then what's this?"
He reached over to the nightstand. Howard's latest love letter lay open there.
Shit!
"I noticed all the pretty postage on the envelope. Noticed it right away."
She tried to grab at it. Her breasts bobbed in his face. He kissed the still-moist surface of one of them and held the letter out of reach, laughing. Turning to read.
"Come on! Give me that!"
"Hmmm. Sounds like things are still on to me."
"Give me a break! He's nuts. It's not my fault. The guy…imagines things. He keeps writing me these crazy love letters! Like he's supposed to mean something to me. I haven't answered one of them. Doesn't matter. He just keeps on writing."
David laughed. "So you want him to get the message and he won't. That it?"
"Exactly."
"Got a Polaroid?"
Clara's brow creased. "Yeah. In the closet."
David got up and went to the closet. She admired his muscled backside and then admired the rest of him when he turned around.
"Loaded?"
"I think so."
"So let's send Howard some pix!"
"Hey. Terrific idea!" said Barney.
The smile blossomed on her face. "You guys are geniuses," she said. The mere idea, in fact, filled her more than plenteous bosom with wanton heat. More heat trickled elsewhere.
She took on Barney first while David played close-up lensman. "Say hello to Peter," Barney introduced. "Peter likes to be talked to." The flash popped as her mouth engulfed his penis. "I'll bet you always wanted to be in pictures, huh?" David suggested. Another flash pop as Clara climbed over Barney and put it inside her. And then again as she rode him, his hands squeezing her breasts.
David was using a lot of film but it didn't matter.
There was another pack around there somewhere.
The forest teemed with vibrant color. Insects buzzed the mosquito net. Strange birds whooped and cawed.
The forest didn't care.
Three of them were dead.
Three of the team's five members. Howard and the elderly team leader lay in a field medical station in a grubby thatch-and-mud village called Alta Lidia, consuming IV Ampicillin. Tomorrow they'd be helicoptered to the hospital in Vilhena.
"They're treating us like lepers!" the TL complained, noting that the sullen medics had roped their cots off at the far edge of the station, that they wouldn't come near them without rubber gloves and face masks.
The TL looked like death already in his netted cot. Nevertheless he managed the energy to rail at Howard.
"You goddamn idiot! We were breathing those spores for over a day! You and your rare fucking thallophyte. We're going to die, you asshole! Do you realize that?"
Howard ignored him. It was a whole lot better and perhaps, even more profitable, to lie there thinking about Clara, to let her memory caress him like a sweet breeze from home. He remembered all the sweet things she'd said to him, the times she'd said she loved him, her promises of fidelity, their affectionate way of making love. In Clara he had something to live for — something real and strong. Providence would not allow him to die.
It only remained to try to reassure the white-haired TL. He was obviously suffering.
"Try to relax," Howard said. "Most spore infections are no different from any foreign bacterial invasion. Simple antibiotics will knock them out. We'll be fit as fiddles and back in the States in no time. Guaranteed."
"Goddamn you, you goddamn asshole," the TL sputtered.
And gurgled and died. Coughing up a gossamer mist of fine white spores.
Clara felt kinda bad.
Just because Howard was a dufus, she didn't suppose he deserved this.
Dearest Clara,
The entire Team is dead, save for yours truly. Vermilius Moleyus, it seems, possesses a highly activated replication mechanism, air-dispersible. We all inhaled the spores. I'm at the main hospital now in Alta Lidia, on an impressive array of antibiotics. Thank god the med unit arrived in time. Please don't worry, I'm going to be okay.
Soon I'll be home and in your arms again, Clara.
My love for you is stronger than ever. I can actually feel it growing every day. I close my eyes and see us walking hand in hand. I see us growing old together. There's just no room in me for depression or worry over this. I'm so full of you.
My love always, Howard
She sighed. The poor blind sap. Sick, lonely, holed up in some awful South American hospital — and still thinking she loved him.
Well, her own letter would finally cure that.
It made her feel a bit shitty, knowing he'd receive it bedridden, sick, a thousand miles away. All those pictures. All those positions.
Her most recent pickup stirred beside her on the bed. Young, muscular, and very enduring. Nickname "Cucumber," and for a reason that was more than understandable. His eyes slitted open, his face half buried in the pillows. The monumental turgidity against Clara's thigh reassured her.
"A little more cream for your kitty?" Cucumber inquired.
Clara brazenly spread her legs.
"Meow," she replied.
The doctor's voice sounded muffled behind the baby-blue surgical mask. He was American, one of the last U.N. Assessment Group members, so at least he spoke English. At least Howard could understand the words, however grim.
"I regret to say, Mr. Moley, that the blood tests don't look promising. The spores…"
Howard coughed white dust, his throat aching like a strep infection even as he interrupted.
"I don't get it. The spores are a simple unicellular gamete! Even the weakest antibiotics will kill them."
The doctor's eyes were small and hard above the blue mask. "The blood-born mechanism of these particular spores, Mr. Moley, seems to be functioning identically to that of a lipid-aggregating virus. Once in the bloodstream they encloak themselves with medium- and low-density serum triglycerides, so they're able to protect themselves from all immune-system response and antibiotic therapy. In other words, Mr. Moley…"
Howard waved him off. He didn't need to finish. Already Howard's body had fully broken out in the bright red ridges of the fungal shelf. Some were quite large, the size of coffee saucers cut in half. Because of the tough, fibrous mycelium which had grown through his body like a web of wires, they couldn't be removed. He could feel smaller ones growing in his mouth, in his nostrils, even at the edges of his eyelids.
Yesterday he'd lifted his hospital gown to check his groin. No penis remained visible. Just a sharp red nest of glistening fungal ridges. In other words, he finished for the doctor, I'm going to die. "We'll do everything we can to keep you comfortable," he said. Howard nodded.