“You sure?” I asked, skeptically.
“Positive,” she replied, with just a detectable trace of uncertainty.
“What—woman’s instinct?”
“Don’t knock it. It’s never failed me before.”
“I’d rather have a compass,” I told her, “and a map.”
“Men,” she said.
“Women,” I mimicked.
She looked up at me, squinting over a wry smile. “What? What about women?”
“Always changing your mind, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your usual complaint about men is that we never ask for directions. Well, I’m asking, am I not?”
“And I’m answering,” she insisted, and pointed again.
I studied her raised arm. “Yes, you are,” I admitted. “But in a slightly different direction now. As the crow flies.”
We ate what we could, then left the backpack behind, along with Julie’s jacket. Carrying her piggy back wasn’t as much fun as I expected. Her arms were crossed in front of my chest, and my hands were locked under her legs for a good fit, but I guesstimated her weight to be a hundred fifteen pounds, to my one hundred eighty. Relatively light, but with every step that I took, an electrical spike of pain shot from my leg through my groin and into my back. I didn’t complain at first, with her arms and legs snugly around me, but it soon felt more like I was carrying a backpack filled with Tom Cruise’s fee on a Mission Impossible sequel—and in hundred dollar bills, no less. Whenever my left leg impacted the ground, I gave a slight wuffing sound, as though repeatedly gut punched.
“You really should leave me,” she said.
“In the middle of nowhere, with Cody and company on the loose?” I noticed that the dirt road ahead appeared to parallel what looked like a hog farm. “Besides, what would I have to do then?” I indicated the buildings there, while panting with fatigue. “Carry a wounded hog?”
Wuff, wuff, wuff.
She shifted one hand to throttle my neck.
“Careful,” I gasped when she released pressure. “If I pass out, then where will you be?”
She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t know. I surely didn’t.
A farm house came into view beyond a stand of maple trees. The large corrugated prefab storage building beside it bore the word Jensen’s on top in faded twelve foot letters. I could hear animal sounds too, but there was no movement on the grounds yet. Then, with a subtle shift of an uncomfortably hot breeze, we soon smelled the unmistakable odor that only confirmed what I’d guessed at a greater distance.
“Do you want to tell me what you saw in the last house now?” Julie asked with an erratic hesitation, as though she’d been waiting a long time for the appropriate moment to ask.
“No,” I replied quickly, against the image that threatened to return.
“Okay.” Her response was without detectable disappointment. She indicated the farm house that now almost flanked us on the other side of the road, and changed the subject. “Do you think they’re outside Zion’s calling area?”
“Have you heard the name Jensen before?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You can’t carry me for another six miles, or however many miles it is,” she noted.
She had a point. “No, I can’t do that, either,” I agreed. “So I’ll go as far as I can, then we’ll get help. When we have to.”
Wuff, wuff, wuff.
“How far is that, do you think? Sounds like another mile, tops.”
I gave in and set her down in frustration. But I knew it wouldn’t be six miles before my legs gave out.
She hopped on one foot, using me for a brace. “You want me to go with you this time?”
I stared up the rutted dirt driveway opposite us toward the hog farm. “No,” I told her, fearing danger. “Wait here. Understand?”
She didn’t try to stop me, although she lifted one hand to finally make a fist. I walked stiffly toward the corrugated steel building, which was closer and seemed to anticipate me, its smaller door thrown wide, the excited grunting of animals emitting from somewhere inside it. The soil beneath my feet became darker and heavier with moisture as I approached, and I saw that near the larger padlocked sliding door the consistency approximated that of mud. Yet it had a weathered, cracked look—as though the pyroclastic flow from a volcano had recently dried into a blasted lunar landscape, and fanned outward from this side of the building.
“Hello?” I called, hands cupped to my mouth. Then louder toward the house: “Hello!”
Frenzied squeals, and lots of them, seemed to chorus the sole reply to my yelling. Then I detected a new sound, which was like the whir a small motor makes. Or like a hornet trapped in a jar, or a radio controlled airplane on a climb. Or a hand held circular saw, minus the blade guard, in an enclosed pen?
I turned to glance back briefly at Julie, who was lowering herself onto a flat rock to wait for me, her face animated with the discomfort of the effort. I lifted a finger to say I’d be right back—in just one minute—but she didn’t see it. Then with a subtle shift of air, the earlier smell returned to me. I turned back into it, detecting more than just the odor of decay, or of hog shit. It was a sweaty nauseous stench like that which a compost pile might make if a rabid raccoon had climbed into it and died.
I stepped cautiously through the muck to the edge of the open door, which had an overhang blocking out the sun. I noticed a trickle of water running out from beneath the larger padlocked sliding door beside me. Visible just inside the smaller door were the rollers of a gate that fronted the larger entrance. The screened metal widened on either side into the dim windowless building, and although I squinted into the gloom of the large room, I elected not to enter into full view until my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light. From where I stood, I had the image of multiple pens laid out in a grid, with the restless oval shapes of dirty gray animals merging behind the tubular sectioned steel with the avidity of sharks nearing a feeding frenzy. Not only could I sense their hunger, but the coppery scent of blood seemed to tinge the stagnant air. Something that was not quite masked by the stronger smells.
Still holding to the edge of the sliding entrance door, I felt along the wall nearest me for a light switch. My hand met an electrical switch box. Its lever was down, so I flipped it upward. There was a sharp click as the spring inside shot its electrical contact home. But the silver half moons of light fixtures retreating into the blackness along the ceiling still did not come to life. There was no juice for them. So now I suspected that the motor sound coming to me from the other side of the pens was a generator of sorts.
But for what purpose?
Both curiosity and my newfound fear of farm houses figured into my decision—if decision it was—to investigate. I also wanted to get out of the light, away from where I was framed in the door. Squinting, I reluctantly moved forward, cautious and intently listening. My feet clumped the muck they’d picked up outside onto the wet concrete floor, and I paused six feet to the side of the door, staring into the vague distance illuminated by the narrow halo of sunlight next to me. Out of that rectangle of light myself, I could see the hogs in the pens nearest me much more clearly. They were strangely animated, wild creatures, yet surprisingly quiet for all their agitation and the obvious aggression they demonstrated to each other in passing. Still, the combined sound was loud enough—a steady rumble of grunts, brays, and shrieks—and I guessed there must be hundreds in total here, although I couldn’t see to the other side of the building because it was too dark over there. Dark, and oddly ominous.
“Hello!” I called out again, somehow hoping not to hear a reply this time. But no flashlight beam was focused on me, and no human voice asked my business.
I had almost turned away when I smelled exhaust fumes, which had mingled with the other odors. The generator engine was firing erratically, now, on the last of its gasoline. Against my bette
r judgment, if only to get a shadowy glimpse of the thing, I tread closer through occasional puddles of water, pinching my nose and ignoring the panicked motion behind the iron bars of the holding pens.
“Anybody here? Mister Jensen?”
At the very edge of the light I came to an intersection amid the grid of pens, and thought I saw the generator some thirty feet ahead, and also what resembled a thick hose snaking out from another piece of equipment. A pump? There was something else there, too. Beyond it, and also outside of the pens.
Something moving.
Dropping my hand from my nose, I smelled the acrid odor of blood again, only stronger now. Much stronger.
“Hey! Are you okay?”
The generator finally coughed and died. Then a movement again. The shape on the floor shifted. I could make out a shoe. I edged closer still, my eyes wide but unable to distinguish the form—or forms—that hunkered there, apparently injured.
“I’m coming, okay?” I confirmed. This was more to myself than to the shadows, and perhaps to validate my own intentions, or to bolster my courage. Then I considered what might have been the cause of injury. And a word popped into my brain, as from the dark depths of a Magic 8-Ball.
Electrocution.
I looked down. I could barely see my own feet, but by moving them slightly I could tell that I was standing in a puddle here. The puddles were behind me, and in front of me. Yes, I decided. That had to be it. That would explain it. Electrocution. An electrical short in the generator while farmer Jensen kneeled in water, maybe touching one of the metal bars that honeycombed the holding facility. Although it didn’t explain the scent of blood.
Or did it?
It is so easy to get into trouble. You walk right into it, one small step at a time. Curiosity is what reels you in, slowly taking up the slack on the invisible line which has hooked you. You come in willingly, against all the warnings, until it’s too late. Then comes the snap and the net.
21
I took an experimental step into the darkness before me. Into another puddle. I sloshed at the water, moving my foot from side to side. But the generator was dead now, so what was the danger?
Another step, closer to the hose, the pump, the generator, and the dark shape beyond it on the floor ahead. The large body appeared to move as though sitting up, a phantom form barely discernible on the edge of a nebulous black hole that threatened to swallow both it and me.
On impulse I turned my head back toward the door in the distance behind me, wanting to coax more radiance from it. But it was too small, too narrow, while the overhang above it on the outside blocked any direct light from the noonday sun. Most of its light was blocked inside too, by the metal screen in front of it, and by the pens between it and me. Inside of those pens, though, I could see silhouettes of jostling shapes in a frenetic motion so fast now that it startled me.
I turned back into the blackness, into the void in front of me, and waited for my eyes to readjust. Then I took several more steps, willing myself forward. I came at last to the hose, and stepped over it. Then the generator, the pump, and a round drum that I realized was a five gallon can of gasoline. Finally, I clearly saw the shoe, and the leg, and then the torso of the man who lay in a puddle that I sensed was not water, but blood. And it was then that I realized that I had been walking in that blood. As had something else . . . something which was not a shadow or pool of water as I’d imagined.
The grunt emitted from directly before me was almost a snarl. A loud complaint, as when an animal on the Serengeti plains of Africa is disturbed while feasting. The angular head that lifted from its corpse—its found meal—shrieked at me. I stumbled backward in shock as it came forward in response, as though to defend its kill. It was a large animal that had been lying beyond the dead man, gnawing at his facial bones. I imagined the man’s eye sockets were only pool of blackness, now, his scalp already ripped clean.
I screamed as I tripped over the hose, and the thing attacked me. I doubled over, arms crossed around my head as it struck me in the back, pitching me forward against the generator. Then its snout found my cheek, its jaws widening in close peripheral vision as I jerked to the side and rolled away.
I tried to pull myself up as it went for my legs. The bulk of it broadsided the nearest pen, against which other hogs clamored. Then I was struck again, lifted as though by a bucking bull, and flipped to the side of the cart where the generator engine was bolted. Jowls fanned the fetid air for me, and missed.
Hooking the gas can with one hand, I propelled it heavily forward into the animal’s questing snout, dodging its near-sightless lunge. Its massive weight slid past me, its skin like coarse sandpaper, as its heavy flank-steak hindquarters bumped me aside. I struggled to my feet.
Aware that I was being followed, I ran with the half full can sloshing in my arms. Blindly turning corners whenever I smashed into a fence of sectioned steel pipe, I realized that in my panic I’d run in the wrong direction, and soon I couldn’t distinguish between the insane virus-induced rage of the animal hunting me from the other excited shrieks and grunts coming from those still imprisoned in this maze of dark pens. Were there other hogs that large on the loose as well? I wondered. An entire accidentally freed pen full of heavy-hoofed ham out for revenge?
Welcome to the Fun House, I could almost hear Darryl summing up. But it was a bit more nutty than having eight kids in a crowded, starving world controlled by taxes and terrorism. It was more like being in a horror movie as the star victim, and on a set with no director, no script, and no lighting supervisor other than the Prince of Darkness. Because somewhere over there, the only door to the outside world suddenly swung shut. Its light winked out like the sliver of the sun’s corona the instant before total eclipse. The wind? Impossible. There was no wind, only hot air out there, moving as slowly as Satan’s contented breath. Someone from the house? Possibly, but then where was Julie? Trapped in here, I couldn’t help her or myself. And, as in hell, the darkness was complete—already a fading memory on my retina. Only the noise remained, loud and disturbing, as though the cries of the damned had morphed into animal voices, merging into a singular choir of demented desire beyond all possibility of hope.
With a snout attuned to many scents, the berserk hog would find me, I had no doubt of it. Amid this labyrinth of pens it trundled—a massive, strange, and intelligent creature whose species we farmed for organs, and whose flesh we ate. It was a scavenger that ate many things itself, now including its tormentors.
I lifted the gas can, quickly screwing off its lid. Well over a gallon inside. Maybe two. I sniffed at the volatile fumes. Would it cover my scent to the door?
I dribbled the fuel behind me, brushing the rail to my left to keep to the side as I moved, hoping not to run into my nemesis should we intersect. I felt other questing snouts poking against my hip as I passed blindly and tried to gauge my position against the vague and incomplete grid I conjured in my mind. Twice I heard an overlong sloshing and grunting nearby that could not have been made by a hog trapped in a short pen. Had the gasoline confused it, like perfume sprinkled about an area where a pig hunts truffles?
The remaining gasoline was half gone when my foot struck something blocking my path. I reached out and felt a metallic cube with a spongy bottom, attached to a larger convex metal casing.
It was the air filter to the carburetor, and the engine of the generator.
But in which direction was the door?
Feeling for the generator’s gas tank, I twisted open the cap, and poured at least a pint of gasoline into it. Then I climbed atop the cart that suspended the engine above the wet floor. Balancing myself and careful not to touch any metal, I found and pulled at the crank. Once, twice, jerking at the nylon cord as it rasped and reeled.
The engine fired, coughing once, and died again.
I frantically felt for the carb, pulled out the choke, then cleared myself. I was preparing to jerk at the cord again when I heard, not far away, a sloshing motion. Like hoov
es approaching.
There was no way to brace myself for an attack. I could only wait for it, bending forward, one hand grasping the starter grip, my other hand curled around the handle of the gasoline can. Turning my ear toward the darkness in front of me, I tried to ignore the noisy tumult in the pens on all sides, to hear at last what I had not escaped in time. Smarter than I thought, the thing had made the connection somehow, and followed the gasoline scent back to me. Now it closed in for the kill, snorting its way to me in gloating anticipation.
Sure that it was wading in the puddle nearest me now, I planted my feet again on either side of the wooden cart that supported the engine, and jerked at the starter cord.
This time the engine sputtered to vibrating life, along with a new sound that met its steady rumble with what seemed almost a roar. A spark, like the sustained flaring of a sulfur match, blossomed from beneath the cowling of the attached pump. In that instant I glimpsed the blood streaked face of the animal which now shrieked as it sensed an electric current like a hard pinch felt everywhere at once. It saw me too, and came at me, only enraged by the pain I had induced. So I turned the gas can in my hands to let the remaining fuel splash down over the faulty pump below.
And gas found spark.
A geyser of flame rose between my arms.
I hurled the engulfed can at the hog’s head. It struck one of the animal’s dirty egg eyes, flinging fire in a whistling cascade across its back.
Dazed by the bull’s eye blow, the thing turned in a tight circle as though in a frantic effort to rid its forehead of the tiny flame that danced there like some holy spell of judgment.
I did not wait to see what might happen next. The generator engine flamed as I leapt from my perch, and the pain from my leg wound felt worse at impact than the feeble current which had penetrated my shoes before I stamped out of the puddle behind me. With grim resolution I limped toward the distant door that was illuminated by a flickering and dying light. And by the time that light faded back into nightmare behind me I’d already targeted my escape, and soon blindly—but gratefully—groped for the doorknob . . .
The Methuselah Gene Page 16