The Exterminators

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “In what context?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” his producer said. “Just bring it up.” He gave Winston a slap on the back and sent him out to the set. “Now go get ’em, tiger.”

  Coming out of a stirring introduction that featured golden eagles and F-117 stealth fighters soaring over a hill with three crosses perched on top, Winston Archer shot his cuffs, puffed up, and looked at camera one, saying, “Welcome to the Winston Archer Report, my friends.” He pointed at the lens. “Your source for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but!”

  “Amen, Archer!”

  Turning to camera two, he said, “Well, here we go again.” He cupped a hand behind one ear, cuing the sound of a toilet flushing. “What’s that, you say? That, my friends, is the sound of your tax dollars twirling down the drain that is a special prosecutor.” He rolled his eyes to help convey the absurdity of the situation for those who might otherwise miss the point. “Heaven knows how much this is going to cost us, and for what? Because some kook in the lib-brull press has concocted a crazy story about a patriotic employee of the Department of Defense releasing genetically engineered insects on Hollywood.”

  To the sound of a cuckoo-clock, Archer crossed his eyes and rotated his index finger by the side of his head for a moment before continuing, “And, sure enough, before you can say ‘sagging poll numbers,’ some desperate lib-brull Congressman has demanded an investigation. Can you believe it? This story is so nutty, nobody in Hollywood would have bought it from Oliver Stone.”

  They all laughed and shouted, “Amen, Archer!”

  “It’s just lib-brull business as usual,” he said. “More pseudo-science, like their favorite fairy tale, Evil-lution. I mean, think about it. Tell me where you’ve heard this before. They take something that’s a proven matter of fact, like…Creation, as in Genesis, my friends, and then, after the fact, they make up some ‘science’ to explain it. ‘Oh, it’s evolution,’ they say. And why? Because they want to take religion out of our lives, just like Stalin did in Russia.”

  The audience offered up a long boooooooooo and a sea of down-turned thumbs. Off-camera, the producer put his hands together and looked skyward in mock prayer. Archer saw him and nodded agreement before he continued, “So this week’s fantasy passed off as a ‘scientific’ explanation about ‘transgenic bugs as weapons’ is just more of the same. The atheist lib-brulls simply refuse to accept the fact that it may, indeed, be prophecy coming true.”

  Here the audience broke into sustained and reverent applause while the producer offered two big thumbs up.

  Archer basked in this for a moment before holding hands out to quiet the crowd. He said, “Now think about it. Man can create remarkable bombs and missiles and other fantastic ways to kill and maim and destroy, but they can’t make anything that remotely approaches the complexity of, say, a butterfly’s wing or the eyes of a mosquito. So the idea that this swarm of deadly bugs was made by ‘scientists’ is absurd. No. Worse. It’s blasphemy. Man can’t create anything as sophisticated as these things; only God can.”

  “Amen, Archer!”

  His producer stood by with the broad smile of a proud parent. Nobody understood how to do this better than Winston Archer, he thought. This guy was an artist. He was money in the bank. In Archer we trust.

  “Now since I’m no expert on the subject of Biblical prophecy,” Archer said, “I asked a religious scholar to explain about the deadly swarms in Revelation and in the Book of Joel. He pointed out—and I found this interesting—that the authors of these texts weren’t specialists in modern biological taxonomy. He said the original Aramaic word was probably just a generic reference to insects and the bugs that have descended on Hollywood could be referred to correctly as locusts, in a metaphoric sense. And you don’t need me to tell you the connection between the coming of plagues and the end of times.”

  Winston Archer turned to camera three which pushed in on his sincerity as he said, “There are compelling arguments, my friends, that we have lived through the tribulation and the abomination and that the seventh trumpet is ready to sound. And I’ve got to tell you folks, seeing so many people of faith in the streets of La-La Land celebrating the End Times just warms my heart.”

  As the audience shot to their feet with a standing ovation, Winston pointed at the camera and said, “Praise His name, we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.”

  Chapter Eighty-one

  “Whew!” Katy pinched her nose and said, “Something stinks in here.”

  “Ahhh,” Klaus said. “The sweet scent of pheromone-binding proteins.”

  They were at Professor Lang’s lab at UCLA. Bob was putting one of the transgenic assassins into a glass tube connected to a Kovin box so they could measure sensillum-lymph cavities in the bug’s endoplasmic reticulum. After he sealed the box, Mary gave him a kiss and said, “We’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  “Don’t get caught in the rapture,” Bob said.

  These days you couldn’t go anywhere in Los Angeles without running into the religious fervor that had gripped the public at large. While the massive crowds and rallies were taking place a few miles down Wilshire Boulevard, even as Mary and Katy walked south across the campus, they saw groups of believers handing out pamphlets and huddled in prayer.

  A young man tried to hand a leaflet to Katy. “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m good.” She waved a sheet of paper at him as she sidestepped him. The document consisted of a list of names and a map that Mary had downloaded from the Internet. It was, in a sense, about the end of the world, though not in an Armageddon sort of way. Katy read the list as they walked. “I’ve never heard of any of these people,” she said.

  “You’ve never heard of Marilyn Monroe?”

  “Well, duh. Okay, one.”

  “Dean Martin? Frank Zappa?”

  “Dweezil’s dad?”

  “The original Mother of Invention,” Mary said with a nod. “Let’s see, who else?” She pointed at the list. “Truman Capote, Rodney Dangerfield, Walter Matthau.”

  “Oh, yeah.” A flash of recognition on Katy’s face. “That guy from the grumpy old men movie.”

  They were heading for Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery. The bone yard of the stars, as some called it, was near the UCLA campus, hidden behind a movie theater and lurking in the shadows of a pair of skyscrapers.

  They walked down the broad alley that fed the underground garages of the office towers and led to the cemetery gate. As they got closer, Mary noticed the line of parked cars and the somber crowd dressed in black. She stopped and said, “Sweetie, it looks like there’s a funeral going on.”

  It would turn out to be the service for Ian Grayson, a young star who played one of the gay NASCAR drivers in Pole Position. He had been killed by the bugs a few days earlier at his home in Benedict Canyon.

  As Mary and Katy stood there, a bus with Ohio plates and the words Great Awakening Baptist Church on the side rolled past them, heading for the entrance to the cemetery. The two cops at the gate stopped the bus. One of them approached the driver’s side and pointed, apparently telling him to put it in reverse. That’s when the door opened and the congregation piled out, led by a man with a bullhorn in his hand. The Reverend Peter McDowell was a leather-faced minister of the old school. “Here we go,” he said. “Let them know you by your deeds and your words!”

  The congregants carried American flags and signs with slogans like:

  “Thank God for bugs!”

  “Pray for more dead actors!”

  “God damns the Hollywood agenda!”

  Reverend McDowell pressed the bullhorn to his lips and announced, “We are here to celebrate the death of Ian Grayson,” he said. “Let us give thanks to God for sending another one of them to Hell!”

  This was celebrity funeral number sixty-two for Reveren
d McDowell and the folks from Great Awakening Baptist Church. They had driven from Ohio as soon as they heard what was going on and had made it in time to crash the service for Lawrence Roberts, who was the first actor laid to rest after the bug attacks.

  Katy elbowed Mary. “Who are those guys?”

  Mary hesitated a moment. “Uh, they’re Christians,” she said. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? I thought it was an all-or-none proposition.”

  Behind them, a horn honked. Mary and Katy stepped aside to all another bus to pass. This one had Arizona plates and the words Emerging Church of Jesus on the side. When the bus stopped, the doors opened, and the congregants piled out like a military unit, carrying more signs:

  “Love thy Neighbor! Leviticus 19:18”

  “He that loveth not, knoweth not God—for God is love. John 4:8”

  “Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. Psalm 34:14”

  The Reverend Lew Hopkins, the pastor of the Emerging Church of Jesus, raised his own bullhorn, aiming it at the Great Awakening Baptists. “Stop the hate!” He said. “These rancid, fraudulent Christians defile the name of the Lord and do not speak the true word of God!”

  “Okay,” Katy said. “Who are these guys?”

  “Uh, they’re Christians too,” Mary said. “Just a different…brand.”

  The words of the Reverend Hopkins seemed to get under the skin of the folks from Ohio, especially the Reverend McDowell, who pointed a crooked finger at the Arizona Baptists and shouted, “There is but one true path. We have come to cause this evil nation to know its abomination! The foolish shall not stand in thy sight, thou hatest all workers of iniquity,” he said, quoting Psalm 5:5.

  Katy nudged Mary and said, “Are they all crazy?”

  Mary was tempted to say they were just crazy about Jesus, but instead, she said, “Let’s just say they hold their beliefs very strongly.”

  The two groups of Baptists approached each other like lynch mobs, stabbing their signs toward the heavens with each furious step they took. Soon they were face to face, like soldiers in a Civil War battle line fighting—for the time being—with words instead of weapons.

  A young woman from Tucson with a baby on her hip quoted Corinthians 13:13. “These three remain: Faith, hope and love,” she said. “But the greatest of these is love.”

  This sentiment seemed to enrage a man from the Great Awakening congregation. He leaned into the woman’s face with rancid fury on his breath and countered with Jeremiah 6:15. He screamed, “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush!”

  Here, the rest of the Great Awakening Baptists joined in, shouting in unison, “Therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord!”

  As one, the Baptists from Arizona shouted back: “Love they neighbor as thyself!”

  “You will burn in Hell for eternity!”

  It was unclear who cast the first stone that day, but cast it was. And there was precious little turning of the other cheek after the fists began to fly. They tore the signs off their axe handles and wielded them like the clubs of avenging angels. It was eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth, and there was a great deal of faith-based skull-bashing. As the situation began to deteriorate, a cop called for backup. “And send some paramedics too,” he said. By the time the riot squad arrived, television crews from six news organizations had peeled off from the larger gatherings in Beverly Hills to cover the action at the cemetery.

  Mary tugged on Katy’s arm, saying, “Honey, I think we should cut and run.”

  At first, Katy resisted. “Wait,” she said. Something about the confrontation and the passion of those engaged in it made her mind race. Amidst all the violence and chaos and prayer, Katy had the feeling that the answer to a great question was right in front of her, staring her in the face. She wanted to stay until she understood what it was. But when she got her first whiff of tear gas, she said, “Yeah, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter Eighty-two

  Professor Lang said, “Well, for the past eleven years I’ve specialized in the identification and synthesis of pheromones, kairomones and other semiochemicals mediating insect behavior.”

  They cut to Traci for a moment, her head nodding with the standard television reporter’s appearance of concentrated interest, before cutting back to Professor Lang saying, “As soon as I heard about the attacks, I started working on these pheromone-based traps.” He held one up for the camera, a cardboard pup tent the size of a shoe box. “As you see, the trap itself is very simple,” he said. “You’ve probably noticed medfly traps just like this all over Los Angeles. Obviously these are much larger because the transgenic assassins are so big. But the principal is the same. The pheromone lures the insect inside where an inorganic contact pesticide kills them.”

  They cut to a map of central Los Angeles. “These red push pins indicate the location of known bug attacks,” Professor Lang said. “We’ll use this to determine trap locations.”

  They cut to a row of long tables inside the lab, covered with several hundred traps. Traci said, “Professor, how long do you think it will take you to get all these traps out there?”

  “Well, by myself it would take several weeks to do it,” he said with a sly smile. “But that’s why they make graduate students.”

  Cut to Traci standing in the foreground, behind her, a dozen graduate students loaded the traps into trucks from the Department of Evolutionary Biology. Traci said, “Professor Lang and his students hope to have all the traps in place by Tuesday evening. In the meanwhile, they’ve established a transgenic assassin hotline. If you see any of these deadly insects, do not attempt to catch them yourself. Call the number on your screen. 1-800-Bug-Kill. Reporting from the campus at UCLA, I’m Traci Taylor for Eyewitness Action News.”

  Chapter Eighty-three

  “It’s just a little hematoma,” Lauren said, touching the firm purple spot peeking from under the bandages on the side of Leon’s face. “The doctor said your body should reabsorb the blood pretty soon.” What she failed to tell him was that the doctor also said if his body failed to do so, the hematoma would continue to grow, compressing the tissue and preventing oxygen circulation, leading to infection, possible wound separation, and necrosis. “You’re going to be fine,” Lauren said. And she wanted to believe it too. She had fallen in love.

  Leon gave a weak nod and turned his eyes toward the lavish flower arrangement Lauren had brought. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Lauren Bacall sent those.” It wasn’t true, but she thought it would cheer him up. “The doctor started you on some new antibiotics, just to be safe.” She gave him a tender stroke on the arm, then picked up the hospital bed’s control and pushed a button.

  As it lifted him into sitting position, the pain caused Leon to make a noise like air being forced from an old vinyl cushion.

  “There,” she said. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  He tried to shake his head but he couldn’t due to the nerve damage.

  Lauren sounded almost naughty when she said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.” As if she might strip right there and give him a lap dance. Instead, she rolled the over-bed table so it was in front of Leon. “I brought your laptop and your notes so you can work on the script.” She booted the computer, put the legal pad next to it. “I hope you don’t mind, but I looked at your pages, and I’ve got to say…you are totally brilliant. And you were right: This is a story only you could tell.”

  Lauren pulled up a chair and took a set of notes from her purse. “Seriously, this is the edgiest, smartest, most original thriller I’ve read in years. And I love the humor you’ve injected. It was such a surprise, but the contrast really sets off the dramatic action.”

&nb
sp; Leon’s eyebrows huddled in confusion as he tried to remember any humor he might have put in the script, but nothing came to mind.

  “So anyway,” she said. “I wanted to go over some notes we had before you take another whack at it.” She glanced at her notes. “First,” she said. “We absolutely love the killer’s brio and total confidence, but we were thinking—and by we, I mean my development people—does he really have to be a loner? It forces you to use voice-over to get to his thoughts, so we were thinking, what if—just go with me on this—what if he was forced, by whoever hired him, to team up with a girl who was expert in some sexy martial art?” Lauren flipped through her notes. “In fact there’s one scene that got me thinking—and this goes back to the humor angle—if we went with the thing where he and the girl are in, say, Vegas searching for their target, what if something happened where they were forced to get married so they don’t blow their covers? They go to the Elvis wedding chapel, right? And the girl’s mother is there, she’s a total whack job—we were thinking Cloris Leachman, the way she does crazy—anyway, one thing leads to another and our guy ends up handcuffed to his crazy mother-in-law and he does the second act with her attached to his wrist. In Vegas! Don’t you love it?”

  Chapter Eighty-four

  The six o’clock news was on with the sound muted. In the silence, on the sloping green hills of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Reverend McDowell and the folks from Great Awakening Baptist Church were inflicting some more faith-based violence on the mourning family of a recently deceased literary agent.

  Father Paul was propped up on the sofa, facing the television, though it was hard to tell if he was actually watching. Since beginning his fast, he had lost thirty pounds, and he hadn’t shaved since leaving Oregon. With his sunken eyes staring vacantly ahead, his hollow cheeks and his long, scraggly beard, Father Paul looked like a deranged hermit in a priest costume.