Warfield Scenes with Katherine Warfield, the "Pig Woman."

Katherine Warfield watched TV from her hospital bed. She hadn't come out of anesthesia when the news from Japan had broken. It was a spectacular story, just the sort of thing she would have loved doing in her days with Hot News. But it didn't look like she'd be in front of a camera very soon. This had been the third operation.

The word around the news community was that she had cancer. They were keeping silent, for the most part--she had earned that much respect. Or pity.

It wasn't cancer. What it was, none of her doctors knew. All they did know was that the tissue in her nose kept growing--not malignant, but changed somehow. And now she had something else, a growth in a very personal area. Again, not malignant, but odd, like nothing anyone had seen. What was causing these growths? Some kind of retrovirus? Whatever it was, it didn't show up on any of the hundreds of tests she had undergone.

She had chosen a private Swiss clinic this time to minimize the chance word would get out about her predicament. She could see the headlines at supermarket checkout lines across the world: "Trash-TV-Queen Grows Tail!"

It wasn't fair! The White House takeover looked to be the transformer of her career--and then the growth had accellerated. She couldn't go in front of a camera; she couldn't even show up at a press conference as a print reporter, because there would be cameras there and they would be turned on her. She could soldier on as a print reporter, relying on stringers, perhaps getting a column like old Jack Crawford. But she'd never shine as a writer; it was too impersonal.

Radio? She still had her voice. But could she make the conversion? The really big radio personalities in talk radio were either sex merchants, right-wingers, or praise-the-lord types. The biggest mainstream radio news voice feeds were all done by video reporters or were synthesized. No room for her there.

The only English language news channel she could pick up was suddenly filled up with Babs, the old horror who had given her the big interview after the White House incident. <Won't she ever die?> despaired Katherine Warfield. The woman had had so many facelifts, the wags had it, that the dimple on her chin used to be her belly button. But she still had a face that she could show on camera. Kate Warfield couldn't stand to look at that face a second longer, and channel-surfed away.

She found a French-language channel that seemed to be giving the news. Soon it switched into coverage of the angel sightings, going back to the famous Jean Sauvage video, with old interviews . . . cuts to the equally famous blimp shot of the boat blowing up, and the line of young black gunman looking like they stepped out of a bad rap video . . . not really much that showed the angels clearly.

Angels . . . the man in the boat was one of the Jones brothers, and that had to have been Minako Jones with him in the boat. There were reports of angels at Marvell Jones' assassination, but no pictures . . . Minako Jones was at the White House, and there were angels there, two, some fairly good pictures and lots of stories . . . and now this brew-up over one of Minako Jones' friends, and once again, angel sightings . . .

"Angels? Or demons?" Kate Warfield hadn't been paying that much attention to the words, but she could catch some English under the French narration/translation and began to focus more. <It's the NGN,> Warfield realized. It was the New Gospel Network, Johnny Lee Swainson's money machine. The scene went back to a still from the Sauvage video, cropped and enarged to show the faces. Then it zoomed in on the jewelry they were wearing--skulls. The diminutive angels were festooned with gleaming silvery skulls, staring with eyes of ruby or azure. Then the third eye was shown on the smaller one, and it morphed into the sinister lidless eye of Sauron--from Tolkien. Johnny Lee had been condemning Tolkien as a font of revived paganism for quite awhile now.

Now the narration was getting into the familiar theme of signs of the end times, no doubt leading up to a desperate plea for more money so that souls can be saved while there is still time. It wasn't Swainford himself speaking, so he could distance himself from this if he wished.

A woman was doing the narration. Swainson used a lot of women. That is, he employed them; never a hint of sexual scandal around him, though a couple of lesser big names in the NGC had been caught with their pants down over the years since he had taken over. Warfield had taken several looks at him over the years; he was a big target and bringing him down would have been a sure ticket into the world of legitimate journalism. But he didn't have the clay feet of a Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggert. No hookers, no mistresses she could ever find, no boyfriends. Probably he was hiding a lot of his income and holdings, but who really saw great sin in evading taxes? Certainly no one saw a great story in it.

People would have to keep her on to the end of her contract, but they did have clauses protecting them a little, so she couldn't draw a full salary. She wasn't broke yet, but there would be no more medical coverage unless she could somehow prove her condition was life-threatening. It was time to think about what to do next. A column? Maybe she could get one out of one of the Chicago papers; she had a few friends in Chicago, or at least a few people she could call in favors from. Or . . .

Or maybe she should think about giving Johnny Lee Swainson a call. He didn't hire NGC people exclusively; he liked to present enough variety to make his operations look more mainstream, more likely to appeal to skeptics than a steady diet of Bible-thumping. <Hell, maybe being "born again" wouldn't be a bad career move . . .>

The program moved on, now relying mostly on sketches, reenactments, and even some animation, though not from any of the many magic girl/angel amime--they were all copyrighted and fiercely protected by battalions of attorneys. It was really wonderfully done for what it was; Swainford had found some first-rate people to do this one. One thing Katherine did know about Jimmy Lee Swainford was that he took great care with what went on NGN. The Reverend Jimmy Lee had a palate perfectly attuned to popular tastes. He aimed low enough to catch the white working class that were his bedrock supporters, broad enough to take in ethnics and even many people of color, and high enough to educate a bit and appeal to the middlebrows, high enough so that the highbrows could not dismiss him out of hand.

The program moved very far back, to England nearly twenty years ago and the Sailor-V videos. Something about them disturbed Katherine Warfield . . . she couldn't put her finger on it, but something bothered her now. Warfield wished she could record this program . . . she actually waited until the end to find out how to order a copy. <Something to talk about when I meet Swainford . . .> she thought. That might make the 49.99 an excellent investment . . .