The End of the Whole Mess: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought it was a little more than lame humor; he was pretty sure the poor guy was suffering first-stage Alzheimer's Disease. His only deputy was his nephew. Bobby told me the nephew looked quite a lot like Junior Samples on the old Hee-Haw show.
    'Put those two guys in a Pennsylvania town similar to La Plata in every way but the geographical,' Bobby said, 'and they would have been out on their asses fifteen years ago. But in La Plata, they're gonna go on until they die ... which they'll probably do in their sleep.'
    'What did you do?' I asked. 'How did you proceed?'
    'Well, for the first week or so after we got our statistical shit together, we just sort of sat around and stared at each other,' Bobby said.
    'I mean, we were prepared for something, but nothing quite like this. Even Waco doesn't prepare you for La Plata.' Bobby shifted restlessly and cracked his knuckles.
    'Jesus, I hate it when you do that,' I said.
    He smiled. 'Sorry, Bow-Wow. Anyway, we started geological tests, then microscopic analysis of the water. I didn't expect a hell of a lot; everyone in the area has got a well, usually a deep one, and they get their water tested regularly to make sure they're not drinking borax, or something. If there had been something obvious, it would have turned up a long time ago. So we went on to submicroscopy, and that was when we started to turn up some pretty weird stuff.'
    'What kind of weird stuff?'
    'Breaks in chains of atoms, subdynamic electrical fluctuations, and some sort of unidentified protein. Water ain't really H2O, you know - not when you add in the sulfides, irons, God knows what else happens to be in the aquifer of a given region. And La Plata water - you'd have to give it a string of letters like the ones after a professor emeritus's name.' His eyes gleamed. 'But the protein was the most interesting thing, Bow-Wow. So far as we know, it's only found in one other place: the human brain.'
    Uh-oh.
    It just arrived, between one swallow and the next: the throat-dryness. Not much at yet, but enough for me to break away and get a glass of ice-water. I've got maybe forty minutes left. And oh Jesus, there's so much I want to tell! About the wasps' nests they found file://C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\DOUGIE\Stephen King\Stephen King - ... 7/22/2006
    The End of the Whole Mess
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    with wasps that wouldn't sting, about the fender-bender Bobby and one of his assistants saw where the two drivers, both male, both drunk, and both about twenty-four (sociological bull moose, in other words), got out, shook hands, and exchanged insurance information amicably before going into the nearest bar for another drink. Bobby talked for hours - more hours than I have. But the upshot was simple: the stuff in the mayonnaise jar.
    'We've got our own still in La Plata now,' he said. 'This is the stuff we're brewing, Howie; pacifist white lightning. The aquifer under that area of Texas is deep but amazingly large; it's like this incredible Lake Victoria driven into the porous sediment which overlays the Moho. The water is potent, but we've been able to make the stuff I squirted on the wasps even more potent. We've got damn near six thousand gallons now, in these big steel tanks. By the end of the year, we'll have fourteen thousand. By next June we'll have thirty thousand. But it's not enough. We need more, we need it faster ... and then we need to transport it.'
    'Transport it where?' I asked him.
    'Borneo, to start with.'
    I thought I'd either lost my mind or misheard him. I really did.
    'Look , Bow-Wow ... sorry. Howie.' He was scrumming through his tote-bag again. He brought out a number of aerial photographs and handed them over to me. 'You see?' he asked as I looked through them. 'You see how fucking perfect it is? It's as if God Himself suddenly busted through our business-as-usual transmissions with something like "And now we bring you a special bulletin! This is your last chance, assholes! And now we return