When the cortege arrived at the jellyhead cemetery, the excavation was ready, rimmed with green velvet and artificial grass, seeming to invite Franklin’s body, which could be seen atop a motor that streamed black bunting from the rear. There were hundreds in attendance, free people and jellyheads alike.
Udo’s motor had been parked for weeks. Moldenke feared it wouldn’t start. He checked the level of heavy water in the tank and located the key in a small magnetic box hidden under the well of the fifth wheel. Salmonella rushed in when he unlocked the front door. There were spider webs in all the ceiling and door-frame corners and mice rustling in a kitchen drawer. Salmonella struck a match, lit a lantern, and the cockroaches scattered.
Moldenke sat in the driver’s seat, set the finder for Point Blast, and goosed the starter. The first several attempts failed to warm the water enough to send it flowing through the system. Until that happened, the motor could not be driven.
“It isn’t going to start,” Moldenke said.
“Pump that little red rod in and out a few times. That’s what my father used to do. He told me it was the hot rod.”
Moldenke located the red-handled rod and engaged it over and over until it was warm to the touch without success. “I’m about to give up,” he said.
Salmonella stomped her foot on the wooden floor. “Keep trying. It takes a while.”
Moldenke did keep trying and in a few minutes he could hear water gushing through the main tube.
“Goody, goody,” Salmonella cheered. “I’m going to dust out my nook and go to sleep. Wake me when we get to the Point.”
“All right.”
Moldenke geared up the motor and drove down Arden Boulevard, mostly past darkened buildings. Even Saposcat’s and the public privy were closed. Almost everyone had been reprieved and was leaving. Yet when he turned onto Old Reactor Road he could see the lights of the Quarter burning brightly. No one was leaving the gates. They knew that all those empty buildings on the west side would soon fill with new arrivals and customers would return. Now that Bunkerville was liberated, the dispossessed would be coming to Altobello in droves. The older Quarter dwellers had probably seen the cycle repeat more than once in their lifetimes and had come to accept it as the way things went. It was something to be counted on if not understood, like the tides.
A reporter for the City Moon had a choice encounter with Mayor Grendon only twenty-four hours ago. The reporter was lunching at a Saposcat’s when the perennial candidate came in to eat. It was near freezing outside. A pre-snow sleet crusted the Deli window. The reporter was determined to find a story and intruded at Grendon’s table. “Will you make a statement, sir?”
“Of course I will. Stay here and eat with me. The snow is a bluff. In an hour the sun will shine.”
The reporter took out her pad and pencil and said she was a journalist.
Grendon said, “Tell them I am long gone but not forgotten. I will run strong come the election. Tell them I have a plan. In the future I see underwater vessels as big as street cars, fish-like in shape, using lateral undulation as propulsion. This form of sub surface transportation will carry thousands at once — Bunkerville to Altobello, Altobello to Bunkerville — with every passenger as happy as a pig. And very inexpensively. Tell them all that.”
“A beautiful idea, sir.”
“Sublime would be a better word. The sublime always trumps the beautiful.”
“What do you see in Bunkerville’s future?”
“I can say this: that there will be no more rain. We’ll be in a sunspot minimum that will last for twenty years. We will tell the people that grasshoppers store water in their abdomens and that eight or more of them should be eaten every day. It won’t be long before we will require one hour of screaming as a daily practice.”
Grendon went on to reveal plans to starve himself unless elected. He will be dead by Saturday, the fourteenth day of the fast unless he is elected the day before, in which case he will take food. He’ll go this Friday to City Park, rent a pedal boat, and pedal his way to the middle. There he may or may not succumb to starvation, depending on the election results.
“What about housing, sir? Is Bunkerville prepared for the expected jellyhead immigrations?”
“This is what I can say about housing: as jellyheads progressed, they acquired cattle and roamed about searching for pasturage. Then they built a cave of skins to live in. When they learned how to fashion crude bronze tools they began cutting down trees and building homes that resembled log caves. When ice descended from the arctic, driving jelly-heads southward where there were no caves, primitive jellies built crude mud huts.”
“Thank you so much, sir. Good luck in the election.”
“As I’ve said before, if I’m not elected, my suicide will follow. Ask Zanzetti if he’s willing to do the same?”
While Salmonella slept in her nook, Moldenke fought to stay awake. The motor cruised monotonously down the Byway. There were other motors speeding to the Point. Happy riders waved from their windows. “We’re going home! We’re going home!”
Moldenke felt excited by the prospect of returning to Bunkerville. With his late friend Ozzie exploded and gone from the house, he and Salmonella would assess the situation with the artisanal jellies and see if they could work with them to put the place in order. With attorneys and clerks out of business, the maintenance funds could never be recovered. After the liberation, the currency would be worthless.
Pulling onto Wharf Road at Point Blast, Moldenke saw flood lights moving along the black hull of a freighter, the Pipistrelle. Passengers were boarding. He turned back toward Salmonella’s nook. “Wake up, girl. We’re almost there.”
There were dozens of motors arriving, the drivers jockeying for places to abandon them.
Salmonella hurriedly shucked her nightgown and got into traveling clothes.
Moldenke had only begun to look for a good place when the motor ran out of heavy water and rolled to a stop in a cloud of steam.
“It looks like the end of the line,” Moldenke said. “Goodbye, Altobello.”
Salmonella felt a small touch of sadness at leaving her birthplace.
It was an almost normal Friday night in Bunkerville, two days before the liberation, when radio-poisoned mud fish began to rain down. Anyone outdoors in much of the city was caught in the downpour. Dead fish piled up in gutters and sidewalks quickly. Walking or running was a slippery venture. Pedestrians, in their haste to get out of the shower, stepped on mud fish. Many fell in the process and sustained injuries in addition to a dose of radio poisoning that came with the fish.
There have been other falling-fish events reported from time to time over many decades in Altobello, Bunkerville, and elsewhere. Because the Altobello-Bunkerville fish falls occurred just before the liberation, those prone to superstition thought of them as forewarnings of the momentous changes to come. Many a Bunkervillian shared the belief.
“These fish had to travel from the Old Reactor pond in Altobello,” Scientist Zanzetti said. “Something, and we don’t know what, sucked them up into the air then carried them hundreds of miles to here. This has been a deadly rain and we expect many will die within months, especially the old and the young.”
The affected areas of the city are depopulated and a cleanup is thought to be in progress. Among those poisoned that night was perennial mayoralty candidate, Felix Grendon, who had gone to see Misti Gaynor and Enfield Peters in the comedy hit, Eventually, Why Not Now? Hundreds of glowing mud fish fell on him as he emerged from the theater.