Dry Ice (2 page)

Though steeped comfortably in their timeworn culture, the small, poor populations of Wakhi farmers and Kyrgyz livestock herders had welcomed the exploratory trekkers from Flint AgroChemical when they had arrived several years earlier. The Western strangers, rather rare in that part of the world, had shared grand tales of increased crop yields, paid-for infrastructure, and generators that worked.

While battles raged to the south, the farmers in the safe, pristine Wakhan uplands gladly entered the twenty-first century, courtesy of Flint. For its part, the company was doing little more than getting its foot in the door in a country that, once the war was over, would be hungry for stability, prosperity, and independence from foreign nations. The desperately short summers and excruciatingly cold winters of this high, remote, unforgiving valley made it the perfect test bed for Flint’s latest line of genetically modified crops. If the project was successful, as Flint intended it to be, the company would redefine the world’s understanding of the term “arable land.” Along the way, Flint would ingratiate itself with national and local Afghan leaders and the new American president. The newly elected leader was a dove amid the Pentagon’s coterie of war hawks; to the astonished disbelief of her military commanders, Commander-in-Chief Helena Hernandez wanted peace, rather than her administration, to reign in Afghanistan.

As if its executives had known ahead of time about the dramatic upheaval that would take place in the American political landscape, Flint had spent several years quietly making inroads with the Afghan agricultural ministry in Kabul. It poured money into the small, gasping, rural northeastern economies like it was water from heaven. The firm built infrastructure, literally and figuratively cementing its relationships with regional powerbrokers. The new occupant of the White House had been pleased and vocal about it—and the Pentagon stonily silent—as together they watched a single corporation do what an economic and military powerhouse could not.

Winter in the Wakhan Corridor had been unremarkable that year. As always, the wind was a constant. Bitterly, skin-searingly cold, it wailed mercilessly outside the isolated, cave-like huts that, until last year, had been reliant on yak dung for illumination and warmth. Those days of primitive existence were over; families that had been subsistence farmers for centuries now had enough heat, enough light, and enough food to satisfy their needs. Children spent their days in a newly built school instead of working in the fields, and adults could turn a spigot to get water instead of depending on snowmelt to quench their thirst and irrigate their crops.

Though it was the middle of March, there was no expectation of an early spring. Warmth was always slow to arrive in this land nestled tightly between the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain ranges, but the scraped-raw beauty of the place made up for the winter’s length. The night sky was strewn with stars, with no clouds to obscure their luminescence. Razor-sharp silhouettes of the mountains edging the valley wore their high snows majestically. Pale blue and glowing in the almost primeval darkness, the snowfields resembled nothing so much as an ethereal tiara settled delicately on the top of the earth.

From the other side of the planet, Greg Simpson decided to destroy the serenity of that beautiful night in the frigid highlands of northeastern Afghanistan as a lesson to Flint, and to the world. He was going to teach everyone the true meaning of the word
power.
And show them who held it. All of it.

His game of vengeance began with a rapid and unseasonable rise in temperature. The few brave hikers who venture to cross the Wakhan ranges every year know enough to climb by night, aware that at such altitudes the snow’s hard surface crust softens quickly under daylight’s strong, unfiltered sunlight. As the dawn broke that day, however, the endless expanse of hard snowpack had already become glistening mush. The softened snow blanketing the peaks began to melt, to trickle, then rush, then thunder down the steep, barren slopes, pushing rocks and mud ahead of it into the tiny settlements sparsely dotting the slim corridor. The farmers’ fields, so miraculously prosperous the season before and already furrowed and primed for another bountiful year, were washed away. As were the farmers, their families, livestock, livelihoods. Their goodwill.

*   *   *

A short while later, in a place halfway around the world from the Wakhan, but just as rural and nearly as remote, Maggie Price drove her lumbering twenty-five-year-old 125-horsepower John Deere tractor under the roof of the carport. She turned off the engine and the vibrations she’d endured for the last four hours, and most of the four hours before that, stopped abruptly. She climbed off the beast to stand on shaky legs. It still sometimes seemed hard to believe that she’d traded in her three-year-old fully loaded 5-series Beemer sedan for a ten-year-old Bronco and this aging contraption, both of which had forced her to learn more than she ever wanted to about combustion engines.

The sweat trickling from beneath her favorite but ratty Australian bush hat was scraped away with a cotton-clad arm that left her forehead tingling in its damp wake. Another day’s work done on her 400-acre farm. Her finally-certified organic farm. The farm that had been in her family for 206 years, give or take a few months.

Hers was the only family farm left in the western half of tiny Bullston County, Indiana. Make that the only piece of arable land in the county not already owned by Flint AgroChemical—not that those bad boys weren’t trying every trick in the book to get their hands on it.

Maggie pulled off her hat and ran her calloused hands through her short, wet hair. Despite the cool, early-spring weather, the sun had been pleasantly hot in a clear sky until the last hour or so, and she was sweating like a just-run racehorse. Working alone, it had taken her days to get her fields plowed and planted. That was in between repairing the overhead field irrigation system that was on its last legs and taking care of the chickens, cows, horses, and one heavily pregnant sow. The dirty, unglamorous work left her exhausted in a way working on Wall Street never had, but she wouldn’t trade a minute of it.

When Maggie had announced she was buying out her grandparents, she’d stunned everyone she knew, including her parents and siblings, all of whom were firmly ensconced in the sprawling suburbs of various large and interchangeable American cities. But the decision had been easy: she’d loved visiting the farm as a child and the thought of her grandparents selling it to the soulless behemoth Flint was more than she could bear.

The land was too good to be destroyed by Flint’s chemicals and greed. Flint’s local land acquisition executives—gangsters, in her opinion—had seen things differently, and had done everything they could to get her off the land. They’d filed frivolous lawsuits designed to bankrupt her, but she’d succeeded in having most of them thrown out. Knowing the local judges had helped immeasurably. They’d sprayed the fields that bordered hers so heavily with herbicides and fertilizers that it had delayed organic certification on part of her land for more than a year. She’d solved that by devoting a strip a few acres wide along the entire perimeter of her farm to native prairie grasses and had that area specially designated as a wildlife refuge, which forced Flint to back off on its chemical use. She’d filmed Flint aircraft flying over her land and spewing something over her fields. The local TV news station had been happy to air the footage before sending it up to their network and loading it onto YouTube.

As tiresome as Flint’s war games were, Maggie knew the company would keep up its efforts to oust her from her land. She’d sworn to herself that she would keep fighting back until she didn’t have any fight left.

She walked the twenty-five yards along the pasture fence to the house as she dislodged the foam earplugs that kept her sane while on the tractor. At the western horizon, a dim glow hinted at the setting sun that lay behind a thick wall of ominous clouds. They had begun to accumulate in the last hour, and they looked bad. Real bad. Low, thick, and heavy, clouds like that only meant one thing: a storm would be here soon. It would be a gullywasher. Maybe worse.

In the last few minutes, the sky had begun brandishing the greenish glow that too often presaged a tornado. News that twisters were forming in the area wouldn’t surprise Maggie. It was the right time of year for them and the unseasonable temperature fluctuations the region had been experiencing in the past few days were priming the residents for a big hit. Days dawned warm and grew scorching by late morning, and then the temperature would plummet twenty degrees in five minutes a few hours later. Sometimes, it was a lather-rinse-and-repeat day and that sequence would happen two or even three times. It was weird, but there was no such thing as normal weather in this part of Indiana, and there never had been.

Maggie had seen too often what havoc those roller-coaster temperatures could do, how fast they could stir up a tornado. And she’d seen the damage twisters could inflict. In the last few days, there had been tornadoes all over the state, but most had been fairly small and hadn’t done much beyond tearing up fields and blowing down a few trees.

That may be the only upside to having nothing but factory farms for miles in every direction: there’s no one for the tornadoes to kill and no homes to destroy.

The cynicism that had become her new best friend brought a wry curl to her mouth as she clomped up the quaintly sagging wooden steps leading to the back porch—she couldn’t bear to fix them, they’d been that way too long—and sat on the top step to pull off her mud-caked, steel-toed boots. They were a long way from the Ferragamo pumps she used to adore, just like her new wardrobe staples of heavy jeans, waffle-weave thermals, and plaid wool overshirts were a far cry from the Armani suits and Kate Spade bags she’d worn with such high-powered pride.

They’re just different uniforms.

Maggie peeled off her two layers of thick cotton socks and let the cooling air waft around her bare toes, then stood and walked into the small clapboard house. Ten minutes later she was back on the porch with a glass of iced tea in her hand, with clean shorts and a T-shirt on her freshly showered body.

There was a menacing stillness to the air now, a heaviness she didn’t like. The sky was darkening rapidly, but not to the gorgeous purply blue twilight she’d gotten used to seeing. The color was edging toward a vicious, venomous green, backlit by an unearthly yellow brightness that defied logic.

The wind picked up suddenly, blowing hard. A pot of geraniums she’d just planted last week crashed off the porch’s middle step and shattered. The large leaves served as sails as the plant swirled dizzily across the gravel drive, scattering dirt as it went. Maggie glanced at the heavy Bilco doors that lay near the corner of the house. They led to the root cellar, the only safe place in a bad storm.

Time to go.

Turning to the screen door, she whistled for the dogs. She’d last seen them cowering under her bed.

The wind gained strength steadily, its sound changing from a low moan to a high-pitched keening. Underlying it now were the first rising notes of the county’s tornado sirens, which hit their drone-like crescendo in seconds and held it.

She whistled for the dogs again, but the sound died on her tongue as the sky commanded her attention. On the not-so-distant horizon, a thin black vertical line danced sinuously, maniacally, against the backdrop of the vertiginous clouds. Maggie’s stomach dropped. On land this flat, the horizon was only about three and a half miles away. A tornado could cover that distance in a New York minute.

She bellowed for the dogs, knowing she—they—had to get into the storm cellar
now.

The tornado grew as she watched. Wider, taller. She was frozen with awe for critical seconds until the adrenaline rush hit her brain and every synapse fired at once. As she turned to run for the safety of the cellar, the winds pummeled her, shoved her against the peeling wood siding of the house. Her head smacked into the edge of the door frame, setting sparkles of pain dancing at the edges of her vision. Ignoring the throbbing sting on her forehead, she ran along the porch, the wind urging her along, and leaped over the railing.

Holding on to the wood with one hand, Maggie flung out her other arm for stability. In that spread-eagled moment, her baggy shirt and shorts captured the stream of air blasting her from behind. She lost her balance—and gained momentum.

Stumbling, nearly cartwheeling as she fought clumsily to regain control of her limbs in the face of the merciless wind, Maggie passed the heavy metal doors that led to her only possible sanctuary. She couldn’t turn back. The wind wouldn’t let her. She knew then she’d never reach the strong cellar walls that would have sheltered her. She’d have to face the storm in the open.

Her terror was a thing alive. The air that bullied her was turning black, becoming thick and fragrant with the earth she’d plowed earlier. Fine particles of soil bit into her skin like the teeth of a thousand evil gods, lodging in her streaming eyes, her screaming mouth. The screech of the wind was wild, and sounded like the demons in the Hell she’d grown up hearing about. The rapidly dropping air pressure was making her eardrums fit to burst.

Her body slammed into the huge elm she’d climbed as a child, that her father and grandfather had climbed as children. The impact knocked the breath out of her, nearly knocked the sense out of her. She didn’t care. The tree was solid and Maggie clung to it. The rough, striated bark scraped her cheek raw as she looked over her shoulder, turning her face into the wind. The nightmarish vision before her drove all thought from her mind.

A spinning, sucking cone of darkness moved toward her as if with a purpose, as if
she
was what it so angrily wanted to consume.

From behind the barn, a burst of flapping, alien color rose into the churning air. It took Maggie a minute to realize that the henhouse had exploded, and the chickens were being pulled into the storm. The roof of the barn tore away from its walls with a scream that was nearly human. Shingles and beams spun up into the sky as the barn wall nearest her began to shake and shimmy. One by one the wide boards came loose as if pried by unseen fingers and were flung into the raging river of wind.