As Ed searched through his cell phone finding the phone number of Penny Flynn, he cursed himself. He knew very well that at this minute she was having a crusade on the East Coast and probably in the middle of yet another fraudulent "faith healing" session. The only way to get her to stop the massacre would be for her to admit she was totally wrong about everything. Her flamboyant lifestyle. Her "Three Trinities" heresy. Her suspect financial auditing. And the fact she was an adulterer. It would mean the end of her career, but she couldn't have her cake and eat it anymore; anymore than Ed could either.
Meanwhile, James asked Heather if he could speak to her outside and in private.
"What's up?" asked his sister, once the twins were at the back of the council house.
"You remember last week, I told you about that really hot teaching assistant who seduced me in my dreams?" said James.
"Yeah, so what?" asked Heather.
"She's been in my dreams every night since then. And the sex has just kept getting hotter and hotter. And her breasts bigger and bigger - up to a DDD cup. But she lied to me. Tracy - that's her name - lied to me. She said she was on the Pill. She wasn't. And I never used a condom. So sooner or later I was going to knock her up, and three nights ago I did. I found out in my dreams Wednesday night, and Tracy promptly told me she was going to have an abortion. As you can imagine, I freaked out. Long story short, I pleaded with her for nearly eight hours to keep the baby. That was my one and only dream that night. It lasted the whole night, and when I woke up I was in tears. I thought I had failed, sis!"
"It's your baby, Jim, but you don't have a say in the matter. It's her body - whether we like it or not."
"It is my seed, and that's the entire point!" said James. "I finally told her, in desperation, we didn't have to get married. We could just like common-law, or not even together. But I was willing to stick up for my child, and I would take care of her and her baby. If Tracy did not and signed away her parental rights, I would raise the child by myself."
"And?" Heather leaned forward.
"Last night, when the dream resumed," said James, "Tracy said she was keeping the baby. It was a girl. Tracy became born again during the twenty-four hours that had passed, and she wanted to name our daughter Faith in that vein. She didn't want to marry me, just yet, but she did want us to move in together, permanently. I then woke up, praising God. God then spoke to me. He said because I saved Faith, He ... He now wants me to follow in Mom and Dad's footsteps. Sis, I'm going to be a minister!"
Heather hugged her brother.
"Congratulations!" Suddenly, she started to cry.
"What's wrong, Heather?"
"I guess that means I won't be called, then?" From her very first Bible lesson at the age of two, she wanted to be a minister. She was crushed.
"Not as a minister, sis. God wants you to serve Him in a different way. He wants you to be a doctor. You'll get into West Point and train in the Army Medical Corps. You'll do your twenty, working in battlefields and healing the wounds of friendlies and the enemy. When you retire from the public service, you'll work for the rest of your life for Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders. You'll heal the poor and needy in the Third World, wherever they're needed. That's your special Work. Remember, God does the healing ... He just needs humans to do the work for Him. And you'll be one of them."
Heather thought for a minute.
"I can do that!" she finally said. "Thank you, God. My answer is yes!"
The siblings hugged. They walked back inside, holding hands and leaning on each other while praying to God to lead them on the straight paths of their callings.
Ed, after more than twenty minutes of dialing, sighed and sent a text message to Penny demanding a response as soon as possible. Her executive assistant immediately returned the text.
"Mr Sanderson, you know that Pastor Flynn is not to be disturbed during healing time," she said.
"Healing, schmealing!" typed Ed. "'You can't please everyone so you got to please yourself.'"
This phrase, a line from a Ricky Nelson song, was understood to be a coded message to be used only in case of an extreme emergency.
"Okay, Ed. She'll call you back in ten minutes," the assistant said firmly. "That's when she'll be ready."
The ten minutes felt like an hour to the group. Finally, Penny called Ed. Ed put the call on speaker phone.
"Edward?" said Penny.
"What is your obsession with Congress, Penny?" asked Ed, skipping the pleasantries.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't fuck with me! Enlightened Dawn." The code name for the dirty bomb operation.
"How the fuck do you know about that?" Penny was fuming.
"I've known about it for months," said Ed. "I didn't know until tonight that you were involved. Why are you?"
"Too many Members of Congress tolerate gays. It's time to clean out the trash and put in people who will give those people what they deserve. Death by fire!"
"Ah yes," said Ed sarcastically, nodding his head. "Your prediction in 1995 on national television that gays and lesbians would be consumed by fire - I recall you got a huge round of applause from your compliant studio audience. Where are we twenty years on? They're here. They're still here,
bitch.
"As a matter of fact, I am calling you from a room with a number of people. Including two lesbian couples. One couple are ministers who got married this week, and the other are two women, one American and one French, who tied the knot tonight. No amount of prayers from you can change that. Do I like it? No. But I'm not going to kill anyone over it. And neither are you."
"Just watch me," said Penny.
"You even think about going through with it," said Ed, "and I'll tell the world you're carrying my babies. Actually ..."
Hope gave a thumbs up.
"It's too late for that. The Reverend Felicity Foster Hunter just tweeted that fact on her feed. Game, set, match."
"How did she ..."
"You think she doesn't have her sources? That Hope doesn't? Penny ... what do you owe Harry and Prudence, that you've agreed to take part in something that is so evil?"
Penny ignored the question. Instead she decided to quote from Shakespeare. "'The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.'"
Maighread and Rhiannon didn't have to read between the lines. Julius Caesar, the opening lines from Mark Antony's funeral oration for the title character. They were horrified at what Penny was driving at.
"You really don't care that innocent people could, will be killed?" said Ed. "You're just doing it for the fun of it. You're just driven by ambition. But for what reason? You don't care?"
"You think this would be a first? No, it'd roll off my back, just like when a Mafia kills someone," replied Penny. "When you've killed as many people as I have, Ed, you start to lose count. Like my former assistant. The sibling of the gospel singer. The damn bitch was my lover, and a diabetic. You know how easy it is to make an insulin overdose look like an accident? Different places, different times. Insulin, same for all of them. After Sunny Von Bulow coroners don't even want to touch that as a cause of death. I've even killed a reporter who was too hot on my trial. Easy peasey. Some of them I slept with. Including more women. Some I didn't bed, but I knew their medicine cabinet. I can name them all for you. Let's see ..."
The comments were unsolicited. And Penny named her victims in chronological order with dates. Thirty of them.
Do you have this on tape, signed Ruthie to the chief, whose brother was deaf.
Yeah, came the reply. Jennifer pointed to an overhead microphone which recorded proceedings in the chamber. A light in the back said "On the Air."
Hope had to suppress herself from laughing. For Penny still had no idea who else was really listening on the other end.
"All those deaths happened in California," noted Ed. "You're looking at the death penalty. You'll make the Black Widow look like an angel. And trust me, it'll be the gas chamber, not lethal injection."
"You're not going to say a single word, or else," replied Penny.
"Or else what? I'm turning myself in for the rapes. I'm not getting immunity. I have nothing to gain from testifying against you, other than having the death penalty waived."
"They don't have - "
"I took part in the killing of Patrick's babies, remember? I kicked as hard as Harry did, if not more so. And, let me remind you, you took part in it too!"
At this, Patrick and Hope both wanted to scream in outrage. Tammy's tears were pouring out. But they held back, waiting for the trap to be sprung.
"There's something going on, here, Penny. What do you know that I don't?" Ed continued.
"Pru and Harry both have Stage Four cancer. They don't want treatment. They say they're going to be damned if they die in a death chamber. So they're going out in a blaze of glory," Penny replied. "One of the dead zones covers the LA Jail where they're being held. As soon as they were taken into custody again ... that was the code to launch the operation. Speaking of which, how did you bail out? Rape times four, child molestation times two? Must have a really good lawyer."
"And five million of bail money ... all of it dirty money. My money, but sullied nonetheless."
"And you couldn't go through with it because ..." Penny cackled.
"I can't live with what I did to the women. All of them. And they're still alive. I hate myself for what I did to them, especially the three little girls. But I can't take a human life. Another one, that is. I thought I could, but I can't!"
"So what you want me to do about it? I don't know the destruct code. Once the bomb is set, it's set. You know that. And the deterrent isn't 1-2-3-4."
"Do you know what it could be?"
"Nope, loser. Now I've got some more suckers to con with fake healings. I'll keep in touch. Maybe." Penny hung up.
"Jimminy!" screamed Ed. "I can't believe she's going through with it! And she didn't even give me a real reason. She wants to kill the gays, and yet she goes both ways too?"
"I just tweeted that, too," said Felicity, eagerly keeping up pace. "Not the killing part - just that Penny is bisexual."
"She'll never tell us, so we have to figure it out ourselves," said Heather.
"Oh, and how do we do that, sis? It's something only Harry and Prudence would know," replied Jim.
"Or, something Patrick and I know - well, one of us," said Hope.
She kissed her wife for good luck. She then grabbed her brother by both arms, and dragged him into a smaller room adjacent to the council chamber.
Once the door was closed, Hope said, "Patrick, I know this is hard for you, but when Mom raped you, did she use anything from the Bible to justify what she did?"
"No, but she taunted me over and over again with a song ..."
Patrick sobbed uncontrollably. He couldn't bring himself to say it. Finally, he grabbed a notepad and wrote it down.
I'm my own grandpa.
The song, originally written in 1947 and which became a number one tune, was about a young man who married a much older widow. His father, in the meantime, fell in love with the widow's adult daughter and then married her. Both couples had children. Since the widow was a widow, both marriages were perfectly legal. Since the man's stepdaughter was also his stepmother, when his nephew / stepbrother was born, his wife became his stepmother's mother, and therefore he became his own step-grandfather.
"That's it!" said Hope. "The only way for the human race to survive in these dead-zones would be to allow incestuous marriages. Mom didn't care about having her way with you. If she had done the right thing and carried to term, the children would have been both your children and siblings, and you too would have been their father and grandfather."
"But why that song?" asked Patrick.
Hope thought about it some more.
"She now has remorse for what she did. But the only way to cleanse the sin is to take out innocent people. Only innocent blood can cleanse a sin this big. But she used 'I'm my own grandpa' in case she chickened out."
"Sis ... you think she and Dad have changed their minds?"
"Fat chance, bro. But let's see if it works."
The siblings stepped outside and called the FBI. The devices were located. They were quickly disarmed.
The phone rang again.
"Got cold feet after all, Penny?" said Ed coldly. "It's too late, anyway. The bluff has been called and the plot has been nullified. Screw your worthless dirty bombs. And get ready for life in Supermax."
"Ed, this is Pastor Flynn's executive assistant. You're not going to believe this. She just walked right back on stage, taped dynamite around herself, and lit the fuse. All she kept saying was, 'Let it be with Caesar, in Jesus' name.' And she blew herself up! Along with about fifty worshipers! And wounded hundreds!"