Good Omens

A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. [Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.]

That was the National World Weekly. They sold four million copies a week, and they needed a War Correspondent like they needed an exclusive interview with the General Secretary of the United Nations. [The interview was done in 1983 and went as follows:

Q: You're the Secretary of the United Nations, then?

A: Si.

Q: Ever sighted Elvis?

So they paid Red Zuigiber a great deal of money to go and find wars, and ignored the bulging, badly typed envelopes she sent them occasionally from around the globe to justify her—generally fairly reasonable—expense claims.

They felt justified in this because, as they saw it, she really wasn't a very good war correspondent although she was undoubtedly the most attractive, which counted for a lot on the National World Weekly. Her war reports were always about a bunch of guys shooting at each other, with no real understanding of the wider political ramifications, and, more importantly, no Human Interest.

Occasionally they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. ("Jesus appeared to nine-year-old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. 'I knew it was Jesus,' said the brave little child, 'because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box."')

Mostly the National World Weekly left her alone, and carefully filed her stories in the rubbish bin.

Murchison, and Van Home, and Anforth didn't care about this. All they knew was that whenever a war broke out, Ms. Zuigiber was there first. Practically before.

"How does she do it?" they would ask each other incredulously. "How the hell does she do it?" And their eyes would meet, and silently say: if she was a car she'd be made by Ferrari, she's the kind of woman you'd expect to see as the beautiful consort to the corrupt generalissimo of a collapsing Third World country, and she hangs around with guys like us. We're the lucky guys, right?

Ms. Zuigiber just smiled and bought another round of drinks for everybody, on the National World Weekly. And watched the fights break out around her. And smiled.

She had been right. Journalism suited her.

Even so, everyone needs a holiday, and Red Zuigiber was on her first in eleven years.

She was on a small Mediterranean island which made its money from the tourist trade, and that in itself was odd. Red looked to be the kind of woman who, if she took a holiday on any island smaller than Australia, would be doing so because she was friends with the man who owned it. And had you told any islander a month before that war was coming, he would have laughed at you and tried to sell you a raffiawork wine holder or a picture of the bay done in seashells; that was then.

This was now.

Now a deep religio-political divide, concerning which of four small mainland countries they weren't actually a part of, had split the country into three factions, destroyed the statue of Santa Maria in the town square, and done for the tourist trade.

Red Zuigiber sat in the bar of the Hotel de Palomar del Sol, drinking what passed for a cocktail. In one corner a tired pianist played, and a waiter in a toupee crooned into a microphone:

"AAAAAAAAAAAonce—pon—a—time—dere—was

LITTLE WHITE BOOOL

AAAAAAAAAAAvery—sad—because—e—was

LITTLE WHITE BOOL…"

A man threw himself through the window, a knife between his teeth, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other.

"I glaim gis oteg id der gaing og der—" he paused. He took the knife out of his mouth and began again. "I claim this hotel in the name of the pro-Turkish Liberation Faction!"

The last two holidaymakers remaining on the island [Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Threlfall, of 9, The Elms, Paignton. They always maintained that one of the nice things about going on holiday was not having to read the newspapers or listen to the news, just getting away from it all really. And due to a tummy bug contracted by Mr. Threlfall, and Mrs. Threlfall rather overdoing it in the sun their first day, this was their first time out of their hotel room for a week and a half.] climbed underneath their table. Red unconcernedly withdrew the maraschino cherry from her drink, put it to her scarlet lips, and sucked it slowly off its stick in a way that made several men in the room break into a cold sweat.