Sector C (24 page)

There were exceptions. Where men mainly still rode herd on cows and steers, the goat farms scattered in the scrubbier plains were mainly owned by women who tended to see their stock more as companion animals than commodities in a shifting market. The connection was more emotional. Every goat in a small commercial herd was likely to have a name and its owner would be able to cite not only production values for each animal in terms of gallons of milk or number of kids or pounds of wool, but would be able to single out personality traits: the Houdini goat that could escape out of any enclosure, the chow hound, the attention lover, the clown. With the goats, there were many more tears and the visits more emotionally exhausting.

In stark contrast were the handful of cattle ranchers far from resigned to the government’s mandate that they willingly submit to the destruction of their property and the obliteration of future profits. These ranchers and their hands waited for the Guard to come the same way their Old West counterparts had waited for the sheriff and his deputies to come in time of crisis. Rifles in hand, they collected at the head of the drive where a gate or cattle guard was all that separated private property from a public road. When Donna and Mike saw such a company of men, they drove on.

“It’s not that I can’t sympathize with them,” Mike said the first time they made the decision to avoid contact with such a group. “What makes them dangerous is that these guys don’t even care that the odds are against them. They can’t win — and yet here they stand. Brave? Yeah, I’ll give them that. But smart? Not so much. The Alamo mentality just doesn’t cut it any more.”

“They’ve got a lot of anger they
have
to expend,” Donna pointed out. “If they can’t do it here and now, they’ll direct it elsewhere. Better for everyone to just head-butt it out here in the open and get it over with.
Hopefully without anyone getting killed.”

/////

By the time Mike and Donna arrived back at the clinic, the sun had already set and the deserted building squatted like a derelict in the gathering dusk. Even the pickup parked nearby couldn’t shake the feeling of abandonment the clinic exuded. Mike rolled up to the front door and the glass stubbornly reflected back the light from the headlights, making the building feel even colder. Dark and empty like it hadn’t been since before it opened six years ago.

Donna sat in Mike’s SUV, making no move to get out, simply staring at the silhouette of the building that had somehow transformed overnight from the embodiment of her American dream to a lonely outpost of defeat and disillusionment. Sitting there, she knew exactly what each of the ranchers had felt waiting for the Guard to come and rip that dream away. Her gut twisted as the realization that her own life’s work would also be destroyed picked her up by the scruff, shook her with bone-rattling force and tossed her aside like chaff.

 Mike watched, touched hard by her hollow stare and the emotion that trembled so visibly through her body. “Would you rather I take you home instead?” he asked.

She shook her head, reluctant to face the overwhelming emptiness certain to confront her there, unready yet to walk into an Alfie-
less house
.

“Let me take you to dinner then.”

She didn’t refuse, so Mike took that as consent.

The diner by the hotel in Williston was
quiet,
few clients willing to venture out after the president’s news and fewer still willing to chance food they hadn’t inspected and cooked themselves. Their waitress proactively assured them all cooking oils and seasonings used were plant-based, and handed them a printout of the regular menu with all beef and pork entrees and appetizers marked out.

They dined in relative silence, Donna mainly pushing green beans and lettuce around on her plates in lieu of actually eating despite Mike’s encouragement. In the background, a television tuned to an all-news channel whispered the horrors of the crisis as scene after scene of slaughter, packed emergency rooms and vehicles being turned forcibly at state lines filled the screen.

Mike scrolled his way through dozens of emails, none of them directed to him any longer. His own job here had become superfluous and he was little more than an afterthought now, a name on a cc line or a nearly anonymous entry in a distribution list.

“At least they haven’t cut me off yet,” he told Donna.
“But no big breakthroughs today.
Mainly just everyone scrambling to catch up or dealing with the aftermath.
Tomorrow we should be getting more news, hopefully on the research front. The CDC labs will be in overdrive, I imagine.”

“Maybe, but prion diseases are generally pretty slow — to replicate or grow.
BSE  only
shows up in its latter stages in older humans and mature cows. Even though we are seeing this one in kids and calves, it still generally behaves like Alzheimer’s and other prion-like neural disorders. Maybe we’ll catch a break, but it still won’t be like trying to distill a vaccine for a new strain of flu.”

Centered though she was in her own issues, Donna didn’t fail to see the shadow that passed over Mike’s face. “What are you thinking?” she asked softly.

“Of all the people with Alzheimer’s and epilepsy and stroke and anything else that resembles VTSE.  My God, how many of them will simply be abandoned out of fear? How many of them will have their families turn on them and leave them to face their suffering alone? What if —” he choked on the thought, “— what if my mother’s nursing home refuses to care for her? Or to care for others like her? With the quarantine, I can’t even get to her now. If this thing isn’t resolved in a few days, how deep will the fear reach?”

There was, of course, no answer. Donna simply stared back at him, her own eyes filled with the same questions, her hand trembling as she took a last sip of water to counter the despair that left her dry.

“Do you want to go home?” Mike asked her.

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“I have two beds in my hotel room. You’re welcome to stay the night with me. No strings. I can run you by your house in the morning to pick up whatever you need before we head over to Triple E.
Unless
you don’t want to go there now.”

“No, I want to go. I need something to focus on.
Something to rage against, if you want to know the truth.
I need someone to blame, because if there isn’t someone, then the universe just sucks, so why bother with it, you know? I want to find out
why
.”

 
“And tonight?”

“Tonight —” Donna drew a deep breath, making a decision she hadn’t made in a long, long time. “—
Tonight
I want to be convinced that life doesn’t suck and that there’s still something to look forward to in the future. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, some unsuckiness would be great.” It wasn’t the most eloquent invitation or response to participate in a life-affirming activity that Mike had been party to, but it was definitely the most honest. “Are you ready?”

Donna pushed away from the table. Mike’s question was open enough to mean almost anything.
Ready to leave?
For tonight?
For everything to come?
She looked into his warm, green eyes and said, “Yes.”

THE HALOGEN GLOBES HANGING just below the roof of the small roping arena cast just enough light for the clutch of men sitting along the fence to conduct the business at hand. Eleven ranchers and landowners all wore the same grim expression and carried the same caliber of rifle.

Carl Swanson had sent out the call looking for like-minded ranchers as pissed as he was about the actions of the Guard, from trespassing on private property to suppressing resistance with deadly force to indiscriminate destruction of personal property. “Are we going to stand by and let the Government screw with our rights and our lives?” was the question Carl had raised, and the men sitting on his fence in the middle of the night were here to not only shout a resounding
No!
but
to decide how to make their point even clearer.

Jim Thompson, Chad’s uncle, had surprised himself by showing up. Never an anti-Government advocate, he had little respect for the views of men who preached anarchy or socialism. What he did respect was law and the moral code, of consequences for actions that deliberately abused the rights of others. Men who stood up for their rights, eschewing the judicial system and its agonizing crawl toward justice, held a special esteem. And he was beginning to suspect a crime worthy of the kind of swift retribution that only men of
a certain
mettle would be capable of.

Jim didn’t know whether the men gathered under the tin roof, perched above the dust and chugging beer would be willing to listen to him tonight, but he was here to make himself heard, nevertheless.
And to redirect their attention.

He let them get it out of their systems first. Let them shout and rage against an enemy too big to fight, too entrenched for them to gain even a toehold against the beast. Let them beat themselves into a frenzy trying to come up with a viable plan that would be anything more than a Lilliputian gesture spit the Guard’s way.

And when the men were sufficiently frustrated and about ready to admit they were resigned to the futile consequences of whatever pathetic actions they devised, Jim stepped off the fence and gathered their attention with the simple raising of his hand.

“Blaming the Government is easy,” he began. “But they didn’t start this thing. That much is a fact. So who did? My nephew’s dead and I want to know why. The news is saying this county is Ground Zero.
This
county.
What’s so blasted special about here?” He looked around at the anxious faces, but no one volunteered an answer.

“There’s only one thing here that we’ve got that no one else does. A company called Triple E Enterprises. I found out a couple of things about them. One, that it’s conducting some sort of genetic experiments on exotic animals, and two, that tiger I found that’d been killing stock showed up right about the time our livestock started dying. Even Chad thought there could be a connection — told that to me and his Katy not two hours before he died.

“I went to the sheriff about it right after. Sheriff says he can’t go in without probable cause because the company’s got all these permits. Well, hell, if this thing started because of them, we can’t let them get off scot-free now, can we?”

“What are you suggesting?” Carl asked, and Jim approved of the interest, eagerness even, that colored the cowboy’s tone. It was abundantly clear what Carl wanted, and Jim delivered.

“That we do what the sheriff can’t and make them pay for the hell they’re putting us through. We get to them like they got to us.”

Dejection over having to deny the enormity of an enemy too vast to defeat turned immediately to a lust to engage an enemy this group stood a good chance of bringing down.
If they could conquer the logistics.

“I’ve studied everything I could find on the layout of their operation,” Jim said. “Given what they do, there must be labs inside that compound. The SatMaps show a cluster of buildings off the main drive.”

“I’ve been by the place,” Carl said. “It’s a fortress.”

Sparked, the conversation tripped over itself as the ideas flowed.

“Yeah, stockade fences made from telephone poles by the looks of them.”

“There’s one thing that’ll take ‘em down.
Fire.”

“It’d have to be a big one to generate enough heat to burn through the poles.”

“Not to mention that place is huge.”

“Accelerants poured the day before.”

“Set at least a dozen fires around the perimeter at the same time.”

“If those really are utility poles, they’ll be full of preservatives. They should catch pretty fast and be a long time in putting out.”

“We’ll probably have to pack in, so we’ll have to travel as light as possible.”

“And if the animals escape?”

“I wouldn’t expect many would be able to get out alive, but if they did, what worries? We don’t have any livestock left for them to kill.”

“And with no livestock, something needs to be out there for the coyotes — either for them to kill or to kill them.”

“You think it’ll burn fast enough?