I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus

(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.

I didn’t want to get stuck in the quarantine area, but I was pretty sure that one phone call from Leonard Nimoy could get me out, so I rested. I sat on the warm asphalt under the wing of a gleaming, blue Pitt aerobatic biplane, and considered my own worthlessness.

I had some experience with that, having suffered horrible, crushing neurochemical depression for many years before the gamma-charged dashboard Jesus leapt for my carotid artery in Ohio. I had even, not long before, made the mistake of committing myself to an asylum in the hope of preventing myself from preventing suicide. That whole thing was a real error in judgement on my part stemming from my ignorance of how such places are run. I had had no idea that the standard treatments for depression included hanging upside down from painful ankle-chains for days at a time, being pursued by wolves through a high-security subterranean maze designed for the purpose, and red-hot pokers thrust into the eyes. I had been thinking more of something like Prozac or Zoloft, and perhaps a weekly chat with a good listener. What an innocent fool I was.

The doctors wore long, black robes and necklaces of cat skulls and human index fingers, and they carried razor-sharp sets of pruning shears at all times. At one of these so-called “mental hospitals” the treatment for paranoid delusions entails being eaten and digested by a Komodo dragon, and even the standard prescription for a slight cough is a punishing regime of daily Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Needless to say, none of this had done anything to help with my depression, so I took advantage of the distraction provided by an orderly slipping in the blood of a decapitated schizophrenic and taking a bad fall. As the other orderlies and nurses, brandishing their machetes and cattle prods, rushed to see if he was all right, I crept to the emergency exit at the end of the ward, disconnected the dumb little alarm thingy, and with some difficulty picked the preposterously well-engineered lock, which took me perhaps ten minutes, during which I was in fear of recapture at any moment. My brother could have done it in half the time, I have no doubt.

I only mention the regrettable Asylum of the Damned episode so that I will not seem too self-indulgent for sitting on the runway obsessing over my inadequacies. That’s what I was doing, but I was doing a really good job of it. I may not be a professional in this area, but I’m certainly a gifted amateur.

I was distracted from my industrious self-loathing by a question that popped unbidden into my brain. Perhaps this sort of thing - helpful little ideas and questions from nowhere - is part of my super Jesus powers. It certainly happens more these days than it did when I was a graduate student. The question was this: Why was that first guy wearing a pirate suit? No one else’s clothes had changed to early eighteenth century Caribbean chic. And how did he get that hook on his arm? I felt stupid for not wondering about this an hour ago when I cured him of his piracy. Could his flesh have been transformed into cold steel by a viral or bacterial pathogen? I somehow didn’t think so. No, there was something strange going on with that guy.

I leapt to my feet and raced off to find him, only to discover that I was not the only one to notice that his garb was suspiciously appropriate for the theme of the prom. The MPs were busy controlling crowds and putting people into empty barracks and big, green tents, but the civilian police (if that isn’t an oxymoron) were questioning hook-man. He was surrounded by officers, but I was able to get close enough to catch some of the interrogation. They seemed, from his reaction, to be asking him things they had already asked him several times, but as I had just arrived I appreciated the repetition.

His name was Ernest Formby, and he was an insurance executive from Tulsa (birthplace of Garth Brooks, although the folks in the Yukon area tend to downplay that fact. He didn’t remember much of what had happened, but it was obvious that he had spent much longer in the pirate game than the rest of the people here. He had found time to assemble a decent costume, including a very hard-to-find style of hat. And to put out his eye and amputate his hand. He had vague recollections of pillaging a Stuckey’s and of sinking a city bus. Clearly he had been infected a good while before. I wanted to ask him things the police were not asking, such as where he had travelled recently, whether he eaten any imported fruits or vegetables, and how fast the progress of the infection had been. I wasn’t one of the authorized questioners, as it turned out, so these queries were not made.

He did say something that really caught my attention. He described, in a pretty good amount of detail for someone whose mind was on interdicting shipping and accumulating pieces of eight, his arrival at the air show that morning. It developed that he had been dropped off by a tall man with a van. He couldn’t describe the van very well, because he was alternating between calling it a “gypsy wagon” and a “sturdy longboat,” but he could describe his driver. He had been dropped off by a very tall, thin, hollow-cheeked man dressed all in black and sporting a beard but no mustache. It fit too well with the apparition I had seen at the Goofy Shirt back in town. I didn’t know who that mysterious stranger was, but I suspected he was behind today’s biological warfare attack at the air show. Ernest Formby had been deliberately infected, monitored as his condition worsened and he acquired pirate clothes, prostheses, and a fair amount of nautical knowledge, then picked up and dropped off here to infect the unwitting crowd.

I made my way back to town without even needing a call from Leonard, simply by turning the gate guard’s tuna sandwich into much more tuna than he had been prepared to deal with. I bought a sack of Milk-Bones at the little market in town, but their pharmacy section didn’t carry Voices-Be-Gone. I found the Greyhound bus sleeping behind the post office, and by plying him with the doggy treats managed to make my way back to Leonard Nimoy’s high-security penthouse suite in Chicago by three AM. Leonard was already asleep, but his robotic valet let me in and made up the spare bed for me.

In the morning, over breakfast I described my adventure, and at the mention of the man in black he made me stop and tell him every detail I could remember. There was little I could convey, but Leonard was nodding and saying “Of course. Of course!” to himself. I urged him to tell me what he knew, and he did.

“The black cylinder you saw him carrying in the bar,” he explained, “is a tall stovepipe hat.”

“Like President Lincoln’s?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “but don’t be fooled. This man may resemble the late President from the Log Cabin State, but he is nothing like him. This man is a fiend, possessing strange powers and bent on mass destruction and world domination.”

“But who is he?” I demanded.

“I am convinced,” Leonard replied, that the man you glimpsed, the man responsible for the terror and carnage at yesterday’s air show, is none other than Abraham Lincoln Johnson, The Great Emaciator.” I just stared. I had never heard this name before (except for the “Abraham” and the “Lincoln,” but it chilled me through and through.

“If the Great Emaciator is active again, it lends order and meaning to a wide array of seemingly disparate data I have been collecting. In fact, I think I have a good idea of where his next diabolical plan will unfold. Are you willing to help me stop him? Your life will almost certainly be in the direst peril.”

I nodded vigorously. “Of course,” I told him.

“Good. In that case, young Albert, prepare yourself for a trip to the desert.”

to be continued…