He parked his luggage by the door, along with a note for Conchita, who would be in on Monday morning to clean and feed and water the animals. Just in case. Who knew, he might be back by then.
He had a few errands to run, so he was leaving early. But there was one more thing to do. Justine went back to his den and kneeled before his hamster cages.
“Hey, kids,” he said. “Sorry to have to leave you so soon, but I’ve got a job to do. You all know what Daddy does, don’t you? And that’s one of your reasons to be here, to help him, right? So whose turn is it to show your love?”
None of the hamsters volunteered, but several responded to the sound of his voice, wiggling their whiskers and sniffing the air, coming forward to the perimeter of their worlds to peer out at the Great Being who fed them. The cages smelled of fresh Los Angeles Times, rodent urine, and that elusive perfume of life which dangled over all animate beings. Justine filled his nostrils full of the effluvia, and held his hands beneficently out to the creatures before him. “Lo! Behold your maker and your benefactor,” he began to intone. “Your feeder, your father, your god. Bow down and worship me, my children, for I am a jealous god, and will have no other gods before me!”
The hamsters twitched. One yawned and went about his business, chewing on a carrot stick. Another sniffed a female tentatively.
“This morning, I seek a Chosen One,” murmured this muscular Jehovah as he hovered over the hamsters. “A Chosen One, to perform the ritual of Love. Let it be known amongst your number—I need a volunteer!”
For several long minutes, Justine watched as the hamsters went about their business. Then, one young male—Earnest, as he recalled by the dabs of colored paint marking the rodent’s back—got on the wheel and began to exercise.
“Ah!” said Justine, smiling. “The Chosen One.”
He opened up the cage, stopped the wheel with his hand. He reached down and gently grabbed Earnest around the midsection, pulling him out of the cage.
The hamster squealed in protest, squirming and kicking. But when Justine started to stroke the back of his neck, the hamster’s hackles went down, and he became calm under the familiar ministrations of his master.
“Good, very good, Earnest. You are my beloved. Come, and I will show you my bounty.” Gently petting the hamster, Justine carried him through the hallway, through the cool and dark dining room, tastefully decorated in a modern style, into the kitchen, brightly lit in the California sun. Stainless steel gleamed, and newly waxed linoleum glowed, smelling of a gentle pine scent. Though he seldom used it, preferring to eat out, Justine kept his kitchen extremely clean and well-equipped with the latest in can openers and Oster food-processors. His earliest memories of kitchens were wretched—gas fires and garbage and heat and spattering grease. His kitchen was immaculate.
“Here, Earnest, look,” said Justine, opening the door of his refrigerator. “Nice, huh. Food. We can drop the “me, God; you, servant” line now. It’s just you and me, Earnest. Want some lettuce, pal? Let’s get you some lettuce.”
Justine opened the crisper and tore off a leaf of lettuce from the head inside. He closed the door and carried the lettuce and the hamster over to the counter by the sink. He put the lettuce down, and let the hamster go right beside it. The hamster tested the air with a few sniffs, and then settled down to nibble at the green, crunchy leaf.
Justine leaned over, his head propped on his hands, watching his pet. “That’s right. Enjoy, Earnest.” He looked over to the sink for a moment, smiled, then turned his head back. “You see, pal. It’s like this. I need you. I’m about to go on a Code Four ... Yeah, really exciting, huh? And I’m not ready yet. Oh, I worked out, and I packed—but a guy in my position—well, he’s gotta get ready in a different way. He’s gotta get primed. And that’s how you can help me.”
The hamster just chewed and chewed obliviously, happy with his fresh meal.
“That’s right, Earnest. Another few bites. Enjoy, enjoy.”
Justine took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He visualized the man that Two had mentioned, Dr. Everett Scarborough. For three years, Justine’s life had hovered around Scarborough’s. He knew Scarborough, he’d read all his books, he’d seen him lecture many times. He had never actually shook hands with the man, or spoken with him, but nonetheless, Woodrow Justine knew his type. Arrogant, haughty, charming—a member of the invisible ruling social class of this country. Justine hated the man for this, and other reasons.
As though preparing his mind Samurai-like in Zen meditation, Woodrow Justine focused on his mental image of the popular scientist. “Scarborough!” he whispered.
With one quick motion—with reflexes trained for incredible speed—Justine grabbed the hamster, stepped over to the sink, and stuffed the squirming rodent into the drain, past the rubber guard that stood above the garbage disposal unit. The hamster squeaked shrilly in protest, scrabbling to get out. Justine topped the drain halfway by its rubber plug with his left hand. With his right, he reached over to the electrical switch.
“Yeah!” he said, and he turned the switch on.
The rodent was able to emit one last shriek before the grinding began. The unit gargled and coughed and sputtered on the bones and the fur, but in the end it chewed the thing up as though it were just the latest hunk of garbage pushed into its maw.
A small gout of blood splashed from between the rubber plug and the metal, landing on Justine’s fingers. He reached over and turned off the disposal, then he took a deep breath of the fresh blood-smell that hovered over the sink.
Yes, he was primed now.
Woodrow Justine was ready for his assignment.
He was ready for Dr. Everett Scarborough.
Chapter 6
“You know,” said Jake Camden to the Iowa farmer, “you look to me to be like the most honest man I ever met.” The reporter for the National Intruder took a drag of his Camel and blew out the smoke, without taking the nearly consumed butt from his mouth. He squinted at the hayseed through watery blue eyes and started scribbling something on his long yellow journalist pad, its torn manila flap hanging precariously from the coiled wire at the top. “Yeah, I see an angle. Clyde Whitcomb, honest farmer from the land of Honest Abe Lincoln tells his UFO story of terror!”
“Mister,” said the stolid-faced man in the crew cut, his face wrinkled from the sun. “Lincoln was from Illinois.”
“Oh yeah, too bad!” Camden sucked another lungful of smoke from the cigarette, dropped it onto the ground and stamped it out. He reached for the fence post, grabbed the cup of coffee the farmer’s wife had made for him, and took a bitter gulp, regretting the previous evening’s carousing in the Iowa City college bar, where some students had shown him their superior liver power. But then, if he hadn’t gone to Dirty Harry’s, he wouldn’t have gotten to talk to that nude dancer, Carrie, either; and if he hadn’t talked to Carrie, he wouldn’t have gotten laid last night. Oh, well. Chalk up another night of grist for the journalistic mill. Besides, halfway through sexual congress, (with a condom, natch—the tabloid he worked for had been VD-conscious long before the AIDS crisis) a story had occurred to him: “UFO Exotic Dancers Steal Sperm From Customers.” He intended to investigate that story thoroughly! “So anyway, how tall were these creatures you saw coming out of the landed flying saucer?” His voice was hoarse and rough with hard living, but it had a peculiar, comforting effect on most interviewees. Camden figured they probably subconsciously felt they were jawing with a regular at the local tavern.
The man—a taciturn fellow about fifty years old with broken teeth, wearing grass-stained overalls—stared at Camden quizzically. “Mr. Camden, I just seen some funny lights, and maybe the outline of some kind of air-ship earlier this year. I reported it to the police, and the local paper gotta hold of it.”
Camden nodded as though the farmer had just imparted a fact of the greatest consequence, and jotted a note onto his pad. “And where did you say you actually saw the alien UFO, Mr. Whitcomb?”
> “I was in the south quarter-fields, yonder,” the farmer said, pointing past the sagging barn and a farmhouse badly in need of paint to where the horizon dipped into corn-fringed haze. “Just finishing up laying down some fertilizer. It was after dusk. I hear a buzzing kind of sound, I look up. There’s these lights—red and purple—and they’re streaking along about five hundred yards away. The thing whisks along real quick, then it stops and hovers—and then it zips away, even quicker. Scared the hell outta me—never seen nothin’ like it.”
Jake Camden sucked on the eraser of his pencil, regarding the silo and the fence that ran off from it. A motley collection of farm animals were strewn along the landscape, a couple cows, a pig behind a fence, some chickens pecking away behind the house, and finally a mangy tan-and-brown mongrel that crouched near its farmer, perspiration dripping from its tongue. The farm had that manure-and-mud, urine-and-hay smell that every American farm had to one degree or another. Camden knew; he’d been to plenty of farms. He was considering a book called Old Macdonald Had a UFO, which would detail farmers’ adventures with extraterrestrials.
“Had any animals die on you recently, Mr. Whitcomb? Die... or maybe... disappear?”
“Well, old Gertie, a milk cow... she passed on in the winter. But that weren’t no surprise.”
Camden jotted down “Gertie—cow—cattle mutilation victim.”
“I see. Now tell me... how have you and the Missus been sleeping since you saw that UFO?”
“Well, Peg, she sleeps like a mule... But me, I’ve got a touch of the lumbago, and I’ve been waking up lately in the middle of the night.”
Camden scribbled, Abduction... Late night awakenings... Screened memories.
“How about dreams, Mr. Whitcomb. You have any unusual dreams lately, like about little men with dark, almond-shaped eyes and fingers with only one knuckle?”
“Well, I don’t rightly remember many of my dreams, Mr.—“
“Camden. Jake Camden, the most famous UFO journalist in the world.” Camden pulled a crumpled pack of Camels out of his rumpled light blue linen jacket, sleeves rolled up Miami-Vice style to expose skinny forearms. “You ever see Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”
“Nope. Can’t say I have. That a movie?”
Jeez. This was going to be a tough nut to crack. He’d hoped to get a full story out of this guy, but he’d be lucky if he could use it as a paragraph in his monthly UFO-Roundup column. What he needed was as an angle, something unique to hang his story on. But what? This bozo was pure-bred Midwestern boring, and about as talkative as a tree stump. Camden supposed he just had to go fishing.
“Ever heard of Moth man, Mr. Whitcomb?”
“Don’t tell me... that’s a comic book, right?”
“How about Men in Black... Any strange-looking guys in black suits roll up here in black Cadillacs, asking you questions about the unidentified flying saucer?”
“Nope.”
Camden plucked a set of cards from his back pocket. His good old prompt cards. If these didn’t work, this was a lost cause and he should have just stayed in bed. “Mr. Whitcomb, I want to thank you for bearing witness to the facts you’ve just related. I’m a dedicated journalist, sworn to dig out the truth in this vital and mysterious field. Can I ask you to just give me your opinion about what you saw... and about flying saucers in general?”
“I told you what I saw. I ain’t got no opinion on it. ‘Cept that it might not have been no alien flying saucer. Shit, I seen some air force and army vehicles around here these last years, and there ain’t no official United States Armed Forces’ base within a couple hundred miles of here.”
Camden was already dealing out the five Alien Identification Cards, marked with drawings of various types of reported extraterrestrials, and was considering sliding in the picture cards of Richard Nixon and Elvis, just in case Whitcomb might choose to fixate on one of those Midwestern cultural icons. “Elvis Moons Farmer in UFO,” might be an okay headline. Or maybe “Richard Nixon’s Flying Saucer on Top Secret Political Junket in Midwest.” But then Whitcomb’s words penetrated, and Camden’s head jerked up and he smiled, taking a quick slap at a huge horsefly that just started to strafe him.
“What did you just say, Mr. Whitcomb?”
“I said, I don’t have no opinion about those lights... “
“No, about there being no official U.S. air base nearby.” Camden stopped a moment, then took out a white handkerchief and gently mopped his forehead. He relaxed. This was the angle. His mistake had being going straight through with the outré stuff. Your average farmer might speak in tongues or handle snakes at his weekly religious meeting; he might see the Beast of Revelations squiggling through every worldwide headline, dragging the date closer to Armageddon. But God forbid you should talk about strange things like extraterrestrial visitations happening in scratch-ass county... Things that might be of The Devil. No, a much more practical subject would doubtless unlock the floodgates.
Camden pursed his lips. “You know, you got a real nice place here, sir. I hear that the U.S. government hasn’t been much help to you farmers in the last few years.”
Whitcomb stiffened noticeably. “Help! The bastards! I almost lost this place! My daddy gave it to me, and I almost lost the mortgage! Had to sell a few of my best acres. Listen, Mister, you want a story, you write about what this here administration in Washington’s been doing to us, the backbone of this country.”
“Yeah. I’ll mention it. But tell me—you think these lights you saw... you think maybe they were from some government flying saucer or something?”
“I tell you, that would be a hell of a lot easier for me to believe.”
“Maybe the government is spying on you Iowa farmers, huh? From a secret base in the middle of the state?”
“Could be. Wouldn’t put it past the sons of bitches!”
“And then again, maybe these flying saucers are from outer space—and they’re working for the CIA, checking up on you farmers.”
“Yeah!” Whitcomb’s face was getting red, and his eyes were glowing now with fervor. “You know, come to think of it, Mr. Camden—“
“Jake! Please, just call me Jake.”
“Jake. I guess you’re right. Something damn funny’s goin’ on, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some superstitious agency in Washington, D.C., weren’t behind it.”
“Surreptitious, you mean. Surreptitious agency of the government—like the CIA, or the NSA, or the FBI, or some branch maybe of the military!” Camden cleared his voice and lowered his head in a confidential manner toward the farmer. “Just between you and me, Clyde, this is a secret project I’m working on right now. Did you realize that there’s been a top-secret cover-up project going on with, at the very least, the CIA and the air force ever since a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in the late forties?”
“No!”
“You bet. A regular cosmic Watergate. I have UFO-ologist friends who have been trying to get at the papers concerning that, as well as vital papers through the Freedom of Information Act. And let me tell you, even those papers have been radically censored! Washington is hiding something, and goodness knows, part of that insidious project might be based—in your own backyard!”
Whitcomb blinked and jumped back a full foot, his eyes darting about as though looking for government officials hiding behind his rotting fence posts. “You know,” he said, working his jaw as though literally chewing on his thoughts. “I have heard tell, there’s been some mighty pee-culiar things going on at the old Bennington farm, about thirty miles north of here. I never paid it no mind... Lots of folks round here got nothing better to talk about ‘cept ridiculous gossip. But I been hearing stuff about the Bennington place for about six, seven years now—ever since ol’ Rick Bennington sold the place and moved to Sun City, Arizona.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, lots of activity. Noises. And, like, helicopters! Now what would helicopters be doing in the farming business!”
“How interesting.” Jake jotted down a note in his book. “I’m definitely going to check up on this, Clyde. But right now, I want to get back to you and your UFO. Clyde, like I say, you’re clearly an honest man, so I’m going to have to ask that you don’t tell a living soul what I’m about to tell you.”
Whitcomb’s eyes were big and round, and he fairly oozed perspiration under the growing heat of the sun. The man was rank by now, as a matter of fact, but Jake could take it a little longer. His final hook was just sinking in. “You have my word, Jake,” said the farmer, licking his lips with growing excitement.
“Clyde, you’re just one of a growing number of farmers in the Midwest who’ve had a series of frightening, horrible experiences with UFOs. And after talking to you, I’m starting to believe there’s growing evidence that extraterrestrials are being employed by the United States government to scare farmers off their beloved land!”
The man’s jaw dropped. “No!”
Jake shook his head up and down, pure sincerity burning in his eyes. “And you’re the man who’s going to help me to stop this loathsome practice!” He pulled up the cards, removing the Nixon and Elvis pictures, and mixing in a few other renditions of aliens, some with long necks, some with big noses, some with pointed ears. “You may not realize it, Clyde, but I can just smell it coming off of you... You’ve had direct contact with aliens from a flying saucer! Now, these buggers have great powers with which they can control minds. They do things like make you forget you talked with them... They put up, what we call in this business, screen memories. You think you just went out back to take a dump in the crapper... when actually, what you did was to talk to an ET! Now I want you to look at these official artist renderings of the types of aliens that have been encountered by normal Joes like you over the years. And I want you to tell me which picture strikes a familiar chord in your memory.”
Wide-eyed, the farmer agreed and studied each of the pictures carefully.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 10
