The Eighth Plague: A Narrative of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll

Chapter 4: Plannings and Lamentations

Once everyone had calmed down, the now weeping Samoan was given a stiff drink and a kiss on the forehead by the Arab, while the Swede was given some smelling salts to wake from a fainting spell he'd had upon seeing the body. Doris Daker, tears in her eyes, mopped up the blood. They weren't trying to cover up the crime by any means (there would be no point, seeing as the police had been shut down due to concerns over the outbreak), it was just that Spade didn't want his apartment getting messy.

Respectfully, Martie, Spade, and the Confederate placed Bumppo in a large plastic garbage bag and, with great sense of ceremony, chucked him from the apartment window as Colonel Van Bach read a makeshift eulogy from a German translation of Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race that he carried around everywhere, as Copacabana played solemnly on Margie's tape player.

Breakfast was made by Major Collins, by sticking the night's leftovers into a blender along with some turpentine and a stick of butter. Once the food had been scarfed down, they all got down to the serious business of planning out how exactly they were going to recapture the Ruritanian space station now that Bumppo, who, being their leader, presumably had some kind of plan, was dead.

Fortunately, they had gone through his pockets before tossing him out the window, and had found all his maps, notes, and novelty pornographic playing cards. While the maps were fine, unfortunately, the notes were all written in some indecipherable stream-of-consciousness idioglossia, and the bimbos on the cards were all real dogs.

Using the paths on the maps, but filling in a few holes with their own solutions, they birthed the following plan:

They would exit the apartment complex and steal a car off the street, then head to the headquarters of Elon Raffles, an old drinking friend of the Major and an aeronautics tycoon, where they would procure a dirigible and sail to the moon. Once at the moon, they would find a portal (clearly labeled in Bumppo's maps) to the Sectoid galaxy, where they would find and recapture the space station.

"Hold on, just who exactly is it that's taken the space station? And what's it even for? Why do you need it back so much?" Spade asked as he realised he was so caught up in the joys and tragedies of the whole thing he'd forgotten to ask very basic questions.

"Space Station Kiengesztel has been stolen by a bioweapons expert known as Gideon Munoz," Margie began to explain, "We need to recapture it before he figures out how to--"

"That's enough, Margie," interrupted Martie, "these are fine questions Mr. Newhouse, and you deserve the answers... among other things. And you will get them, in good time." 

She winked at him.

Spade could feel his blood rising.

"Excuse me for a moment," he said as he stood up from the table, but as he stepped back, he slipped and fell on his ass. Doris Daker screamed, as she, Martie, Margie, Major Collins, Colonel Van Bach, the Samoan, the Confederate, the Arab, the Swede, and the Chinese all saw what he had slipped on, and realised they had forgotten about someone.

Spade looked. He had slipped on a stream of blood emanating from under the table.

Poor Barry "Shaky" Daker-Mukharji-Parker-Almond-Little-Richard-Tennyson lay bloody, twitching, and dead, clutching to a table-leg with blood pouring from his nose, mouth, and ears. The virus had gotten to him.

Martie pulled a flamethrower seemingly out of nowhere and torched the body into ash. Even his mother Doris wept no tears. Everyone was too cried out to feel.

As they all packed to leave, Margie threw the Copacabana cassette on the floor and crushed it underneath her loafer. In its place she put I wish I was a Spaceman into the player, letting it serve as the operatic accompaniment of their departure.

The eleven-person party exited the apartment and made their way up the stairwell of the building and onto the roof. There, they all took plastic garbage bags, held them above their heads, 

and jumped.