The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (66 page)

“
Pretend you’ve just called
me up. I think Precious is dead, eaten by dogs. But you don’t
mention it. You just say, in your boyish way, ‘Hi!’”

“
That’s ridiculous. You
can’t be serious.”

“
I am serious. Do
it.”

“
No. I’d feel dumb—silly.
Just silly.”

“
Do it.”

Finally I sighed, and
said, feeling of course like an absolute idiot, “Hi, Lucinda, this
is dumb old Shell—”

“
Oh, Shell. Heavens above,
it’s Shellshellshell! Oh, I’m covered with goosebumps.”

“
Shit.”

“
Don’t say
that.”

“
Didn’t mean to, just
slipped out. You got me so bugged—”

“
Shell...” The voice was
softer, more velvety; a whispery sound triggering memories of
certain knee-weakening moments after we’d met. “...I really am
covered with goosebumps.”

“
Yeah, sure. Well, go see a
doctor.”

“
I really am. You wouldn’t
believe where I’ve got goosebumps, hon.”

Hon? Yeah, there was
something about that honeyed voice, all right. Hon, huh? After a
bit I said:

“
Mmm...maybe I
would.”

CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO

Spring was showing off
again, filling the world with wonder. Eyes were brighter, hearts
lighter, hormones hornier, people moved more briskly through the
clotted streets and, once in a while, smiled at
strangers.

That early-Sunday-morning
siren-announced invasion of Omega by the law, subsequent arrests of
Hank and Dane and me, swift removal in ambulance of Wintersong and
Belking, followed by our interrogation and provisional release in
the late afternoon was six months in the past. It was the end of
April now. For a week the days had been unseasonably warm but
comfortably so, cooled by sweet, spring breezes, and once in a
while it seemed to me the world was wrapped in glory. But only once
in a while. Because that “wrapping” wasn’t glory, it was the
thousand mingled shades of smog’s pollution-brown and
petroleum-gray mixed with the unappetizing hues of impacted
colons.

I could almost believe
what more and more ordinary citizens were saying these days: that
earth was dying. At least, I wasn’t inclined to disbelieve them,
especially not this morning. I’d been having curious, disjointed
dreams which, unfortunately, I remembered on awakening. And last
night one of the most disturbing of them had returned for a second
time, which was twice too often, and it was still darkening the
edges of my thoughts like an old bruise.

In the dream, it seemed I
was just “somewhere” watching—in some kind of “space” that was,
apparently, space—for I could see the beautiful tiny round ball of
earth floating in velvet blueness, moving closer, becoming larger,
until I was viewing rich brown soil and abundant greenery,
sparkling jade-and-emerald seas, silvery lakes and streams. But
then I realized earth’s skin, its billion-year crust, was
everywhere ravished grossly marked by pustulent scabs and sores
like bubbling sarcomas, not fixed in place but moving,
growing.

Slowly, so slowly it was
difficult to know it was happening, I became aware of bright
crystal air dimming, earth darkening, serpentine rivers moving more
and more sluggishly while the seas they fed thickened, and I knew
earth’s bloodstream was choking and slowing and saw Alph, the
sacred river, black and still as a frozen vein, and other things I
blocked even from memory within a dream.

Earth’s antlike
parasites—two-armed, two-legged, erect, hyperactive—swarmed upon
the skin of their host: some raced along curving lines that ended
at their beginnings while others marched in ragged waves like
billions of cells metastasizing; some clumped in amorphous groups
producing toxins and garbage and wastes which they disposed of in
the planet’s blood; and some, a few, a special army of
specially-privileged soldier-priest parasites—by their own
inviolable definition wiser than others, wiser than
earth—deliberately and mechanically pumped endless streams of
rainbow-colored poisons deep into the billions of bodies of their
peers and simultaneously, into the single great and holy body of
their host.

I watched them idly,
watched streams and rivers stilled, and gray seas fermenting;
watched centuries of living forests felled and toppling like
splinters then on fire, flaming, the breath of earth burning;
watched waves of greenery caressing earth’s crust turning brown,
then ashen-black, shriveling. My final view was of the tiny ball at
last embraced by death, covered with disintegrating corpses, itself
alive but dying, still spinning wondrously, and beautiful
still....

That had been at four
o’clock this morning. At least, that was when I’d awakened,
shivering. And I had a hunch my whole day was ruined. It didn’t
help that, after coffee and three bites of my lumpy-mush breakfast,
I read the morning newspaper and watched ten minutes of news on
This Is Your World which, even on good days, was pretty
depressing.

I’d gotten into the habit,
during the last month or so of checking the obits for Hank’s
name—I’ll get to that in a minute—but, once again, there was no
Hernandez, Henry, M.D. And, once again, I sighed involuntarily,
with gentle but sweet relief.

IFAI was continuing to
spread, incidence increasing and mortality rising, according to all
the experts. Hank and I had hoped, even expected, that the
admissions we’d gotten from Dr. Wintersong—and especially the
revelations from his “head” on our homemade half-hour
videotape—might be enough to completely derail the speedily rolling
IFAI juggernaut, if only temporarily. But we hadn’t even slowed it
down much. . The FDA had given final approval for Phase III testing
of the IFAI vaccine, or widespread experimentation on willing
victims—only it was not the Wintersong vaccine.

It was the
Starr-Danweather vaccine—perfected by two physicians/medical
researchers and their infectious disease team at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering in New York. The Starr-Danweather monkey-kidney
soup was apparently identical in composition, safety, and
effectiveness with the discarded Wintersong vaccine, since the FDA
had merely substituted the one for the other and kept rolling
along.

The problem with the
Wintersong vaccine was—Wintersong. He could no longer supervise
preparation and testing of his lifesaving invention, since he could
no longer supervise anything. Since the end of last October, he’d
been in the Hobart M. Belking Hospital in Beverly Hills, in
Intensive Care. Belking seemed to have a piece of nearly everything
connected with death.

Wintersong never moved any
part of his body except his eyes, and mouth, and lips when he
spoke—though, as time went on, he spoke less and less. I understand
he hadn’t said anything at all for a month now.

William M. Wintersong
didn’t believe anything was left of him except his head, and
nobody, not even the finest specialists, could convince him
otherwise. He simply knew he didn’t possess a body any more. Hank
and I had convinced him—even more authoritatively than those fine
doctors who promise almost cheerfully to give you three more
months—that he was a disembodied head, no more, and he had believed
it to be true. Believed it then, believed it still.

The prestigious patient
was hooked up to several machines, which weren’t in use all the
time, but only when he started to conk out again. Mainly, he kept
getting weaker because he wouldn’t eat much, just enough to supply
his head with nutrients. Which was only a bite or two—of
dietitian-selected hospital junkfood, at that—once or twice a day.
So he was being fed most of the time intravenously, other machines
shocking his heart or cleansing his blood or doing high-tech
lifesaving things whenever necessary. Probably he would soon be
hooked up all the time, so the doctors could keep it alive for a
hundred years, if they wanted to.

I went to the Hobart B.
Hospital once and looked in on Wintersong. Briefly. We didn’t talk.
I remember thinking that, considering how absolutely ruined the old
boy looked, pretty quick doctors would be able to dig people up
from graveyards and, if they were reasonably well preserved, keep
them alive in the Intensive Care Morgue, and on Medicare
indefinitely. Yeah, William M. Wintersong, M.D., former high-priest
of the cure-IFAI scam, was a ghastly sight, ugly, repulsive. He
didn’t do much of anything while I was there, except, occasionally,
drool on his chin.

You might wonder: Did I,
considering everything, experience nagging guilt about my part in
producing whatever it was William M. Wintersong had become? Did I
feel a twinge or two of sorrow, of sympathy, feel at least a little
regret?

No. Not considering
everything.

Nor did I feel sorry for
Hobart Belking, since there was no need to. Nothing whatever had
happened to that sonofabitch, or if anything had I didn’t know
about it. I did know he’d been detained by the Sheriff—as were Hank
and Dane and I—but by the time we were released in the afternoon,
Belking had been gone since mid-morning.

As far as I could
determine—and I had more sources of info than most—Belking hadn’t
been charged even with a misdemeanor, and was under no restrictions
whatsoever. His claim, of course, was to the effect that he had
been savagely beaten when he wasn’t looking by murderous madman
Shell Scott, then forcibly abducted by that crazy arsonist and his
co-conspirator, Henry Hernandez, the notorious quack, and
even—horror of horrors—brutally injected, without his permission
and contrary to his desire, with what he called “an unknown drug,”
which was absolutely a gross violation of his constitutional rights
and human dignity, and so on, and on. Do tell.

I, however, was under a
few restrictions, not limited to the necessity for me appearing in
court, to answer Belking’s charges, in a couple more months. I was
prohibited from leaving Los Angeles County without prior approval
of the court; I was forbidden to carry a concealed weapon, which
left me feeling somewhat like a fly among swatters; and my private
investigators’ license, issued by the State of California, had been
at least temporarily suspended by the Board.

I tried to think of the
enforced hiatus as my spring vacation. At least, it was spring—the
always right-on-time vernal equinox that man, through oversight,
had not yet improved upon—and a lovely spring it was. Warming of
earth, life bursting into bloom everywhere you looked, lavish
greenery and rainbow-colored flowers all over. All over outside the
city, that is; no flowers, no grass or greenery, in the
city.

Still, if I hadn’t been so
bugged by the possibility I might get shot without being able to
shoot back, and the other restrictions laid upon me, I might have
thought it the most glorious spring of all my thirty
years.

I really wanted to talk
with Henry Hernandez, but I couldn’t because I didn’t know where
Hank was, or even if that remarkable and abrasive friend of mine
was still alive. I had a gut-chilling hunch he was not...that he
was dead.

I’d not had a single word
from him, or from anyone else about him, since that last Sunday
morning in October. He’d simply vanished.

For a few days, I made
Henry Hernandez a priority “case,” suspended P.I. license or not,
played detective and played it full-time. Result: nothing. I found
no one who knew what had happened to him or his wife, or where he
might be. Not even his close associates and longtime friends at
POCUEH—or, if any of them did know more than they told, they just
weren’t telling. For a while that thought was a comfort; but only
for a while.

POCUEH itself was
thriving, even more active than it normally was—as were a lot of
other health-freedom and patients-rights groups and advocates.
Groups like the National Health Federation, Cancer Control Society,
National Association of Cancer Victors and Friends, PETA, etc.
etc....Citizens for Medical Choice, Dissatisfied Parents Together,
and, many others. Much of that activity was, at least in part, due
to the reception given to, and subsequent anger, shock, and
consternation arising from, widespread viewing of our homemade
videotape of Dr. Wintersong’s bald head, answering first Hank’s
questions, and then my own. But for two long months was seen only
by police and a lot of lawyers, having been held in police custody
as “evidence”—even though the crimes had not yet been clearly
defined, nor even who’d done what to whom and how, and where’s that
at in the Penal Code, Lieutenant?

It required legal action,
and various people pulling invisible strings, but a court order
permitted POCEUH’s lawyers—acting for the missing Henry Hernandez
plus me and Dane Smith—to make one copy of the videotape in order
properly to prepare our defenses.

That one tape somehow
became two, then at least a hundred and maybe even thousands, shown
over and over again during meetings of the mentioned
animal-and-people rights groups plus, undoubtedly a passel of
unmentioned ones.

Moreover, on February 13,
or a few hours before Valentine’s Day, the entire shocking and
possibly even gruesome forty minutes was shown once, only once, on
public television—never even once on the networks, as somebody had
accurately predicted. But, because it was seen nationwide, and
uncut, interspersed only with warnings that “what you are about to
see might traumatize the children,” that one time was sufficient.
It did traumatize some children, plus a considerable number of
adults as well. And many of those adults were at last moved, in
some cases, positively inspired to get off their duffs and take a
variety of actions, none of which variety gladdened the heart of
members of the AMA, the FDA or their kissing cousins.