“Then tell your toy soldiers to lower their guns,” said Thompson. “Remember you’re on live TV. Come on, Mr. Money. Give the order.”
The suit conferred with the non-Mormon again. After a while she nodded, and he gestured at the soldiers. Guns were lowered.
We all stood there, silent except for the sound of Miyoko, still talking in her native tongue.
“And how about Nancy?” asked Chip. “Dr. Nancy Simonoff? We want justice for her. You’re still claiming she drowned in her bathtub? A first-rate swimmer and diver?”
“The woman was an asthmatic,” said the woman. “Her accidental passing is regrettable.”
“Deeply regrettable. Yes, very sad. And also, no comment,” added the suit.
“I demand an autopsy,” said Chip. “By someone other than the locals. Say, for instance, the FBI.”
“We’re not prepared to discuss any of that, other than with her family,” said the suit. He whispered to the woman and gestured to the army again.
“Have they even been notified?” yelled Chip, as the soldiers executed a snappy about-face and began marching away. The suits, then the jeep soldiers hopped into the jeeps. “Release her cell phone! You have no right to it!”
“Neither do we,” pointed out Rick from behind his camera. “Technically.”
“We can talk to her family,” said Gina. “She was an academic, right? Look, there are avenues. I’ll do research. Just lead me to a laptop. Forget these ass clowns. We’ve got them on the run.”
As quickly as it had appeared, the convoy made a wide turn and drove off, foot soldiers bringing up the rear. Marching away, they looked almost foolish.
Miyoko finished her broadcast and signed off; now, she told us, the mermaid footage was running. We’d have to spread the word to other countries, send out our press release to as many places as we could—basically make sure that the mermaid footage went viral. That’d be no problem, Miyoko assured us. It took a lot less than the world’s first mermaid video to generate a viral scenario.
“I’m thinking we should stay somewhere else,” said Chip, as we walked up the beach toward the cabanas. “Another hotel. Another part of the island.”
“No kidding,” said Gina. “Let’s get the hell outta Dodge.”
WE THREW OUR clothes and toiletries into bags and drove down the road, some of us in Rick and Ronnie’s rental car, the rest in Thompson’s “jeep,” which turned out to be a Hummer, a car Gina admired with particularly hard-edged irony. She congratulated Thompson when she saw it, told him owning a Hummer was the most antisocial act a person could commit without breaking the law.
The sticking point was Janeane, who had a little trouble leaving her safe space despite the fact that it really wasn’t safe anymore. In the end Steve gave her a couple of horse tranquilizers and called it good. We practically carried her out.
A lot of the places were booked up, so we landed at a cheap motel in the end—probably just as well, we figured, since it wouldn’t have corporate ties. It wasn’t a chain and it wasn’t directly on the beach, either, though it was within walking distance. We had thin-walled rooms but there were enough for all of us; we needed to maintain our safety-in-numbers policy. (We’d thought of Thompson’s house, but we’d be too easy to find there if the company decided to come after us.) The pool had leaves floating in it, even a toad, and the clerk had to be enticed out of his back room with impatient shouts to check us in. He wasn’t a go-getter.
On the upside, it had WiFi and cable and it wasn’t too far from our previous location. Chip and I crossed the road and walked down to the ocean just after we checked in: we could still make out the dots of the armada.
Someone got the apathetic clerk to unlock the door between the two biggest rooms and we set up shop with our modest tech array and Janeane’s surprisingly large supply of groceries, sadly lacking in meat, dairy and refined sugar. We convened what Chip called a “leadership conference” to decide on our next steps. We’d broadcasted, we’d faced them down for now, evaded capture; but what was our next goal? There’d be a horde, Miyoko’d warned, descending on the island soon; that was the other big risk we’d run. Now that the mermaids were public knowledge, first in Japan, soon virally, there were new challenges.
We’d done what we had to do, but we’d also opened up a world-size can of worms.
“Not everyone who comes will be on our side, either,” piped up Ronnie. “We can depend on that. Half of them will probably just want to pay the price of admission to the Venture of Marvels.”
“More than half,” grumped Thompson.
“We need to call in some people who’ll be on our side, then,” said Chip.
“Like, who?” said Rick. “Animal rights people? Environmentalists?”
“No, people with power,” said Gina. “Shit. First off, we need some celebrity spokespeople. Like Miyoko. But more so. And American.”
“And scientists,” said Rick. “We have to get some of them. You need at least one famous scientist, in a situation like this.”
“At least one major politician,” put in Steve. “And a rich guy, someone famous for being extremely rich. Say a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffett.”
We brainstormed like that, as Miyoko slaved away on social media and did some phone interviews. Gina took a break to watch the footage, which was posted on YouTube; it already had six figures’ worth of hits, mostly from people in Japan, Miyoko said, but people in other countries were starting to catch on. Before long the hits would be in the millions, she told us confidently. Plenty of people thought it was a hoax, pure Hollywood—good, said Miyoko, that was just fine with her, maybe it’d keep some of the riffraff out.
“More likely it’s the riffraff that’ll come,” said Thompson. “Your alien abductees, your Bigfoot believers, your New Age freaks that
