“Your scientific knowledge, Jim, is impressive. You’re right that prions can be consumed intact, in food. Based on that, all kinds of things are possible. Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s could be caused by mad cow prions in infected ground beef, and chronic wasting prions in infected venison could have made you sick. It absolutely could be that the Lyme disease spirochetes in you have opened the door to horizontal transfer. Your scientific acumen… Jim, these are marvelous deductions. Breakthroughs, really.”

Golly grunted and passed gas. The dog moved away and the editor held his breath as a mighty bubble broke the creek surface and dissipated into tree limbs and moth-worm shrouds. Fanta now approached the crux, the insanity, the make-believe science behind Golly’s idea that he could replace his infected animal prions, his bad betas, by consuming clean new alpha prions, from humans.

“As I said, Jim, I know that white truck. I offered Derp Hubbard twice what it was worth. He didn’t bite. He wanted to be buried in that truck. That just tells you what a no-good bum he was, a nobody. A lower human.”

Golly raised his naked eyebrows.

Fanta asked, “So you ate Derp Hubbard?”

“He was trespassing.”

“And others?”

Fanta waited, feeling the dog’s breath on his ear. He tried to guess the time. From where he sat, the sun had just slipped behind the limestone bluff carved from ancient ocean bottom by the tiny creek. Time? Eons.

“Faith finds people,” Golly said.

From lower human to higher human.

“You used plant roots to bind their alpha prions,” Fanta continued, “which you then ate as vegetables? And those alphas are pushing back against your infected betas? I have to say, Jim, that is brilliant. But now you’re out of time and desperate to speed things up. You need to accelerate your therapy. You need an alpha-prion bomb. Here I wander in, but I’m too old, too sick. Do I have that right?”

Jim Golly swirled creek water with his swollen hands, making it cycle in front of him. He showed his purpled teeth. Then he lifted his hands and made two peace signs, followed by a heart.

“He’ll do nicely,” Fanta agreed.

He had to stop this.

“But don’t you want to hear about an even faster way? How you can bring the world to you?”

CHAPTER 28

With aching arms from hours of labor, Sammy Lamb of God tosses two wet canvas buckets off the sod roof. He remembers that when he works hard, the voice mostly leaves him alone. He remembers hoeing an endless row of beans in the field beyond the window that he broke.