I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus

(continued from 11: Twentynine-Palms)

So I went for a walk. I was wearing “street clothes” rather than the very biblical robes I had been wearing of late, or the cool, post-modern, scripture-covered bodysuit that I imagined The Nazarene would wear. It was cool inside, but like everyone else I had to exit through the Hotel-Casino-University’s seventeen progressively warmer air locks so that the desiccating, kiln-like heat that makes these places such popular resorts would not flash-cook my cool skin, unprotected by an ablative sheen of sweat, and send me into convulsions, hydrostatic shock, and a fit of lethal embolisms. It was a lovely day outside, without a cloud in the sky and with nothing to block the views except the looming hulk of the seven-hundred story Hotel-Casino-University, whose upper four hundred floors are pressurized and whose top one hundred floors are shielded against the soothing rays of hard radiation sent our way by Mr. Sun.

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(continued from 10: Patient Zero)

Leonard’s sources indicated that the Great Emaciator was making preparations for something big in California. I wasn’t privy to the exact nature of those sources, but Leonard assured me they were reliable. A demolitions supply company in Arizona had apparently sold a large quantity of exotic explosives to a man fitting Abraham Lincoln Johnson’s description, and several thugs, mooks, and gunsels known to be often in his employ had been spotted in the town of Twentynine Palms, gateway to the vast Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base. Leonard thought, and I concurred, that much as in Oklahoma he must be planning an assault on a military facility, perhaps to weaken confidence in the US government prior to supplanting it in some kind of coup.

I traveled by the fastest available airship to Palm Springs, and from there caught a mule train to Twentynine Palms. I was checking into the Twentynine Palms Resort Inn, University, and Casino, thinking about my strategy for reconnoitering the area, when I realized that it was happening again. Why had Leonard Nimoy sent me here? Surely he had access to special ops professionals, paramilitary cadres, and undercover detectives who would be far better equipped to handle this problem. A shortage of loaves and an overabundance of fishes was hardly likely to deter the desperate gunmen that the Great Emaciator had brought to the area, and whatever way in which a mass of high explosives the size of a humpback whale might be used to mess up a military base wasn’t going to be prevented by curing some eye infections and STDs. This was bad.

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(continued from 9: A Freakish Little Blip)

The sunlight swooped through at a lazy, orangey, afternoon angle by the time the rest of my work was finished. There were more ambulances and Fire Department paramedic units than I would have guessed existed in the whole state of Oklahoma, and more police than there were Air Force personnel. No one but me seemed to have a clear idea what had happened, but a team from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta was on the way, and it had been ordered that the area be quarantined, despite the fact that three or four hundred people had already driven away by the time the order came down.

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