"Honey, I'm all for preserving water, too," Bugget said. "People can do great things just stirrin' some hops and barley in a little cold Rockies springwater."
"We're not saving the water for people," the girl said. "Man treats the freshwater supply as his alone. He cages it up in reservoirs, harnesses its power to create dangerous electricity and drains streams, killing off beautiful, docile, harmless indigenous leeches."
"I agree wit you, little girl," the boxer interjected, his voice surprisingly high and feminine. "The man has done many bad and terrible things. Like prosecute and imprison innocent men who would never had done the lugubrious and ripricious malfeasance that they were unrightly accused of in court of doing by lying bitches who was only asking for it in the first place." He nodded deep understanding.
"Thank you, Mr. Armour."
"You're very welcome, young lady," the boxer said.
"Could you please stop squeezing my thigh now?" the girl asked, wincing.
A distracting shout from the front of the bus kept the boxer from once more becoming a guest of the state prison system.
"Hey, get a load of this!" the driver called.
They had gone from small town to partially wooded farmland. To the right, the trees broke away into a wide field. A dead cow lay just inside a barbedwire fence at the side of the road. A bloated tongue gave them a silent raspberry as they sped past.
"Was that a victim of ecosystem destruction?" the girl from Green Earth asked.
"Maybe," said the boy. "The poor animal could have died of thirst."
"It looked like it was eaten by wild animals," Bobby Bugget pointed out.
"Still," said the girl, "maybe it died of thirst, then was eaten. Maybe we should mention concern for cows, as well as the speckled leech."
"Don't get sidetracked," Jude Weiss warned. "Stay focused. Focus brings in TV crews and national coverage."
"I guess," the girl said. "But that poor cow. It looked like something tore it open and ate all its insides."
Everyone agreed that this was a terrible thing. All but the boxer. He was thinking of the half-chewed COW.
"Gawd, I miss the taste of boxing," he said, wiping back a sniffle. He found comfort by sticking his hand inside the girl's blouse.
Signs along the roadside every half mile took them from downtown Lubec deep into the woods.
The exit to the Lubec Springs bottling plant eventually appeared amid a small patch of landscaped trees. The bus drove onto the strip of tidy asphalt that cut through the thick pine forest.
A dozen yards in they came to a fork in the road. To the left was a gated, deeply rutted dirt path. The lane to the Lubec Springs plant was on the right. Glimpsed through the woods was a silvery stream that tied into the network of springs throughout the Lubec Springs property.
They parked the bus and climbed down to the road. Placards were passed out to the group.
Jude Weiss stepped down, accompanied by the waifish actress and former boxer.
"This is going to be perfect," St. Jude said. "The press should be here in about a half hour."
He tried to check his watch, but it had mysteriously disappeared from his wrist. That sort of thing seemed to happen a lot whenever his young, innocent moviestar client was around. Gold pens and brass bathroom fixtures vanished every time she showed up at his Beverly Hills offices. He made a mental note to check the poor maligned girl's backpack for his missing watch the first chance he got.
"Let's get a move on, people," Weiss warned the crowd. "Spontaneous protests don't just happen on their own."
On the road, Bobby Bugget couldn't find anyone to lug his beer. Hauling the cases himself, Bugget fell in behind the rest as they marched up the paved road to the bottling plant.
The aging singer's legs were nearly buckling by the time they reached the plant. When the low buildings finally appeared, he dropped his cases to the road and popped open a fresh beer.
"Okay, what's the drill?" Bugget panted.
"We wait for the reporters," Jude Weiss said. "No sense starting until they get here."
The TV homemaker was braiding pine needles into a decorative star-shaped ornament, perfect for Christmas or just everyday. "Maybe this is them now," she suggested.
Weiss glanced up.
They had come from around the building. So stealthy were they, none from the bus had heard them approach.
There were eight men in all, fanned out in a line across the parking lot. They moved quickly toward the band of protesters, heads down, chins parallel to the ground.
"Do you work here?" Jude Weiss demanded. The men didn't answer. They continued to come. Faster now.
"Because if you do work here, I'd appreciate it if you hold off on any counterprotests until Rough Print and Newsfotainment Now! show up."
Jude Weiss heard something that sounded like a growl. For an instant he thought it was one of his clients. The boxer had a tendency to make animal sounds like that at mealtime or around the occasional unlucky female. Weiss was turning for the boxer, expecting the worst, when a strange thing happened.
The men running toward them from the bottling plant started flying.
It all happened so fast. One moment they were running across the parking lot; the next they had launched themselves in the air. Jude Weiss saw one flash toward him. The sun disappeared in the shadow of the lunging man.
Jude Weiss felt a sudden pressure on his chest. And then he didn't feel anything at all because one needed an intact spinal cord to carry nerve impulses to a functioning brain. The force of the attack against St. Jude Weiss had cracked the Hollywood superagent's spine and knocked his head clean off his shoulders.
As Weiss's head rolled, panic gripped the crowd. Men and women dropped protest signs and ran into the woods. More growls rose from others who had been lying in wait.
Screams filled the Maine woods.
Throats split, stomachs surrendered pulsing contents. Blood splattered like spring rain to the cold parking lot.
The boxer tried to take a swing. He was cuffed unconscious by a man half his size.
Bobby Bugget couldn't believe his eyes. When the attack began, the singer had been guarding his beer near some bushes. His booze was forgotten. The urge to flee registered in Bugger's beer-soaked brain.
He turned to run...
... and promptly flopped over his last full case of beer.
Sprawled on the ground, he heard a low growl behind him. Slowly, heart pounding, he rolled over onto his back.
Some of the Green Earth membership were being devoured. Two of the attackers had separated from the rest. They were coming toward Bugget.
"The press is on its way," Bugget screamed.