122809.fb2 Feeding Frenzy - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 54

Feeding Frenzy - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 54

From the bathroom, Jane Goodwoman snapped, "I'm not your damn mother!"

"My mother had nicer tits," mumbled Ned Clancy, deciding not to wear underwear since he wouldn't be in town much longer. His second pair was pretty gamey already.

The sacrifices he made to keep the family name from being tarnished. No wonder Jimbo and Robbo died so young.

Chapter 21

CDC pathologist Dale Parsons awoke with the dawn. It had been a busy night. He had supervised the removal of the bodies from the Snapper wing of the People Against Protein Assassins.

With the local coroner dead, there was no one to do it on an official basis. It had to be done and Parsons had shouldered the burden because no one else wanted to touch it.

At the Harvester wing, the survivors were too distraught over the death of their leader, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, to care. They refused to abandon their encampment.

"Only Snappers catch HELP," they repeated.

"What about Eagles? He's dead too."

"Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles will never die. When we breathe the good clean air, we inhale his protective spirit."

There was no reasoning with these dimwits, Dale Parsons had concluded. He had left them there. There was paperwork still to be done.

The only good thing was the press had gotten bored with Nirvana West and had gone to town for the night.

Now with the red sun peeping over the ponderosa pines, Dale Parsons set out to ask the Harvesters some questions.

He found instead only silence.

The Harvesters had passed the night in their tepees and wigwams and somewhere in the night, they had died there.

Parsons hurried from tent to tent, examining the bodies.

"Damn! What hit these people?"

At one tent he came upon a woman with some life still in her.

"Can you hear me, miss?"

The woman could manage only subvocal murmurings. Parsons knelt and lifted her eyelids. The whites of her eyes were a distinctive blue. Not the light blue of osteoporosis, but a livid blue.

The woman's pupils relaxed first, then the rest of her, and the air coming out of her lungs came slow and final.

Parsons straightened and finished his rounds.

There was no question. Every Harvester was dead. It was not HELP. They had not seemed ill the day before. In fact, they had been carrying on something awful when he had last seen them.

When he brought the word to the arriving news media, there was a mad rush for the Harvester encampment.

"Hey!" he called after them. "We don't know what killed them! It may be dangerous to go into the death zone."

"It was HELP, right?"

"I don't think so," Parsons said.

"Then maybe the ozone hole cracked wide open."

A number of photographers pointed their cameras skyward to catch the gaping hole they imagined was up there.

"I see it! It's pink!" one shouted.

Parsons said, "That's the sun coming up. You couldn't see the hole if there was one. Ozone is invisible."

"Just in case," a TV news producer said, "record every square inch of that sky."

Disgusted, Dale Parsons trudged back to his tent.

He came upon a food service truck, where two young men in white were spooning mayonnaise into great steel pots. He noticed that with every spoonful, they were sprinkling in tiny brown things that could only be thunderbugs.

"What are you making?" he called.

"Lobster salad," said one.

"For the press," added the other. They both wore guilty expressions.

"Since when are bugs part of lobster salad?"

"There's no bugs in here. Only shredded lobster."

"Guess I was mistaken," said Parsons, going on. "Something's sure fishy in Nirvana West," he told himself.

Returning to his tent, he discovered the flap was open. He had closed it. Rushing in, he was relieved to find all his equipment present and intact. He wouldn't have put it past those sneaks from the National Institutes for Health to have liberated his centrifuge.

Then he noticed the rosewood box on his workbench. There was a note attached to it. It read:

"ENCLOSED YOU WILL FIND THE SECRET OF HELP. TELL THE WORLD."

He opened the box. Inside, he was surprised to see a red ant. He grunted, looked closer.

For an ant, it was pretty strange-looking. And as he watched, it lifted its grotesque, many-segmented body up on its rear legs. Two eyespots at the end of its head seemed to glare at him.

Then Parsons noticed the thing had lifted itself up on four rear legs, and was waving four more in the air threateningly.

"An eight-legged ant?"

He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the picture was the same. It was not a hallucination caused by lack of sleep.

Then Parsons noticed the other set of black eyes dotting the second segment. He counted six eyes. Two great big ones and at least four smaller satellite eyes.

"If you aren't a spider, I'm an embalmer," he muttered, reaching for a pair of tweezers to hold the thing still while he got it under a lens.