The edges of the CIA agent’s lips lifted in what Mike swore was an attempt at a smile. “I can assure you there won’t be much left of Mr. Thurman’s personal assets once the CIA is done with him. After that, he’ll be turned over to local law enforcement to face whatever charges you care to bring against him. As for the company,” he leaned forward, “get your grievances in early. I see a landslide of lawsuits heading Triple E’s way.”
“How about the animals?” Donna asked.
“Hell, a friggin’ mammoth hunt?” The colonel was enjoying the proceedings. “You couldn’t keep the Guardsmen away. We’re missing two wolves and some kind of big bear still, according to Dr. Volkov there. Otherwise, they’ve all been tracked down and taken care of. I’ve asked the troops to keep it quiet for a bit longer, but all the pictures they took are bound to surface soon. It’ll be a media frenzy. Can’t imagine what kind of uproar it would cause if it weren’t competing with this VTSE thing.”
Donna slid a finger thoughtfully along the edge of the table. “Can I go back there? To Triple E?”
“Why would you want to?” The colonel asked. “Everything but the museum is burned to the ground. The animals are all dead. There’s nothing there.”
“I’d just like to see it all one more time. The animals in the museum are going to be put into cold storage, aren’t they? Until they can be studied.”
“Yeah. Along with the fresh kills. There’s Guard there now in hazmat suits 24/7 until we can get the trophies moved. But you’re already infected, or were or — hell, I don’t know where you stand on that. If Volkov there says it’s okay from a medical standpoint, then sure. I can let my men know.”
Dr. Volkov shrugged. “We have yet to do extensive studies on re-exposures to VTSE. But as Dr. Bailey has so far proved less than a perfect study subject, I see no reason she shouldn’t be allowed back on the campus. While the prions appear highly infectious, we are, luckily, dealing with a very well-defined route for transmission. Much like AIDS, now that we know it exists, it can be contained at the individual level through prudent practices. After all, many of the Triple E employees remain disease free despite being at Ground Zero for many years.”
He looked around the table, making contact, making it personal as he drove his next point home. “Note I do not say it can be contained wholesale. The vectors are too numerous, their paths both uncontrollable and unpredictable. Even if the Vf prion proves a satisfactory cure, the way we live our lives must change and change radically if we as a race are to survive. The future, my friends, does not look too terribly bright.”
CHAPTER 56
ONCE SHE’D LEARNED WHAT THE VECTORS were for VTSE, Donna had known where it would inevitably lead. And while she’d refused to openly acknowledge yesterday what Dr. Volkov meant by radical changes and race survival, deep down she knew what the next step had to be.
What she hadn’t comprehended was just how very vast the chasm between knowing and accepting would prove.
Nor did she realize just how fast it would come.
She couldn’t remember most of what the president had to say this morning. Miraculously, the news of the megabeasts hadn’t been leaked yet. Doubtless President Del Campo would be standing in the Gardens delivering that news in the next day or two. Today, he had another directive for the citizens of what had recently become known as the quad-state area: the Dakotas, Montana and now Wyoming.
What stayed with Donna were the words: “For the safety of your children, your parents and yourselves, I regret that a great sacrifice must now be made. As with most sacrifices, this one will be hard; it will carry with it much grief and, in some cases, much anger. I urge you all to put aside your personal emotions and to understand this sacrifice is not being asked lightly of you, but is required for the continued health and safety of your communities.
“There is no way to phrase it so that the shock is minimized or the hurt lessened. I will simply come out and say it: All dogs and cats and any other mammals, whether pets or strays, are to be destroyed.
“Any mammal you find outside your home — squirrels, rabbits, skunks, deer, raccoons, gophers, rats, mice, the list goes on — can and should be destroyed.
“The only exceptions are service animals that are necessary to the independence of an individual.
“If you live outside the quad-state area, I urge you to remain calm and take no action at this time.
“Medical professionals and animal care centers are asked to donate any excess euthanasia drugs. The Red Cross is being enlisted to gather these drugs across the nation and special military units will distribute them in the quad-state area.
“Owners may surrender their animals for free humane euthanasia at any National Guard Armory or government-run animal shelter. Drug supplies will be limited so check with your personal veterinarian before you take an animal to him or her.
“Of utmost importance is that you take your animals to an approved center and do not abandon them at a care center that is not adequately staffed. In addition, no animal is to be released onto the streets or into the wild. Law enforcement and militia now have orders to shoot on sight any stray mammal they find. I assure you, humane euthanasia is far preferable for the animal and mandatory for the health of your community.
“As your president, I do not make this order lightly. But make it I must as my trust is, first and foremost, for the health and well-being of the American people. Only swift and decisive action can help defray the crisis that is upon us.”
There was more — reassurances that government and private corporations were working together to control the outbreak, more pleas to remain calm, a personal challenge to look out not just for yourself but for your neighbors — but none of it was really important. Not after the shock of hearing said aloud what Donna had known would have to be mandated since the moment the Guard had taken their first shot on the Spalding Ranch. Knowing it was coming, though, still didn’t make it any easier.
Donna laid her head in her hands and wept.
Mike sat beside her, draping a protective arm over her shoulders. “We don’t have to go to Triple E today. We can stay here if you want.”
She shook her head, sniffing back the tears. “It’s too overwhelming right now. I have to get out of here. Do something or else I might just go as insane as the rest of the world.” She gestured toward the TV where correspondents were reacting to the news with a dispassion and objectivity that crushed Donna’s heart. “I want to go back. Especially now.”
“What do you really hope to find there?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just want to go stare extinction in the face. To try to truly understand what forever means. To connect one last time before it’s all taken away from us. Before I have to figure out how to live my life in the face of everything’s that’s happened. To try to figure out why it had to happen now.”
At the crux of it, Mike understood. Knew the visceral pull of the need to know, to fathom, to point a finger at cause and effect. His response to it was not so metaphorical as Donna’s, but he respected her need to react in her way.
In fact, he was finding a lot to respect about her.
They took their time driving to the compound, avoiding the small towns, keeping to the back roads, unwilling to confront the chaos they knew would be rampant in every town and city and metropolis, not just within the quarantined regions but spilling across the balance of the nation and into the nightmares of the rest of the world. Because if such laws and strictures could be implemented in the United States, poster child of democracy, then what hope did anyone else have when this disease began to spread its horror through the winding streets and alleys of other countries, other continents?
Donna’s head felt ready to explode. “Can you drive awhile?” she asked, breaking the small silence that had grown around them.
“Sure. Something wrong?” Mike watched her closely as she pulled her truck to the side of the road.
“Another headache. Probably stress.”
“Yeah, I bet the aspirin companies are gonna profit big time from all this.” Her tight lips and the lines he could see forming at the edges of her sunglasses worried him. “You’re sure it isn’t something else?” He jumped out of the cab and hurried around the front of the truck to the driver’s side letting Donna just slide across the bench seat.
She pulled out her phone and recorded the headache and its intensity level in a journal she’d been instructed to keep. “Who knows. If it’s the only side effect, I’ll consider myself lucky.”
“But if it means something else is going on …”
“I know. I can’t let myself think about that now. You okay?”
“Except for the occasional inappropriate rush of testosterone that tells me I should be watching out for you, yeah, I’m fine. I think. No headaches, no tremors. No forgetfulness, unless I’m forgetting what I’m forgetting. I wonder how long it’ll be before we know for sure if those Vf prions are really benign?”
Donna shrugged. “Something like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease can incubate for decades.”
“Decades? Like I’ll be 70 or 80 when I start showing symptoms? If I’m not dead of a heart attack or cancer by then, how will anyone know if it’s this prion thing and not Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or whatever new designer disease is popular then? Or even dead from worrying about what might happen?”
“VTSE incubates only a few weeks,” Donna said. “But I get your point. We’re all going to die from something. And if we make it to 70 or 80 we’re actually pretty lucky. God, I hope this new protein is the answer.”
“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “I’d like to keep you around at least a little while longer.”
Donna scooted to her left till her hip was touching his, and laid her hand comfortably on his knee, enjoying the feel of him beside her.
She’d lost so much in so short a time — friends, family, career, the idea of a self that belonged to her alone. Every biological unit had a point at which it was simply impossible to break down into any smaller component and still retain the characteristics that made it uniquely that thing. She felt sure she’d reached that flashpoint where if she lost one more part of herself, she would no longer be Donna, no longer be sane.
Only one thing stood in the way, and he was sitting beside her now.
It felt good, it felt right, and they rode the rest of the way to the compound in silence.
The guard standing by the gate today wore a white, form-fitting hazmat suit and carried a rifle. When he found Mike and Donna’s names on his daily orders, he notified his superior, handed them each a pair of disposable shoe boots and waved them through with a gloved hand.
Much of the debris from the fire had been cleaned up, but the blasted carcass of the parking garage hulked over the lot where the blackened chasses of two vehicles still sat. One of those chasses was what was left of Mike’s rental. The license plate was half melted but some of the number was still recognizable. Mike snapped a few pictures in case the insurance company needed them before he and Donna drove down a long, narrow asphalt drive that climbed a small rise then dropped down the other side.
Out of sight of the entrance and main campus they came up on the modular, steel-frame building that housed the Triple E museum.
The simple act of stepping through the door of the museum was jolting. It wasn’t just the transition from the hot, sun-filled day outside to the cool, dim interior that captured their breaths.
It was the time-travel leap they took when they walked inside.
The cavernous room felt intimate, cramped almost. Crowded into the space were elite trophies, the monstrous remains of megabeasts that artisans had crafted into meticulous poses chosen by the hunters to memorialize their skills. Beside each work of art rested a plaque with the hunter’s name, picture and date of kill.
Holding hands, Mike and Donna wandered among the great beasts, pausing to marvel at the artful way a mammoth’s trunk rose above its topknotted head in a silent trumpet that echoed through the ages. They stepped into the middle of a pack of snarling dire wolves, noting the subtle differences of pose and expression that made each pack member stand out on its own. Looking up twice their height, they stared at the black-ringed nose of a short-faced bear rearing above them. The challenge stance of a woolly rhino ready to charge captured each exquisite detail down to the flared nostrils and swiveled ears that tipped toward its invisible target.
A saber-tooth cat sitting back on its haunches on a faux granite boulder, its neck outstretched, opened its mouth in a forever roar showing off its fearsome teeth. Just looking at it from within arm’s distance was enough to make Mike’s heart skip a beat. It would take more than a couple of days for the memory of its live cousin to fade and longer still before Mike would be entirely comfortable around even the stuffed variety.
Donna snapped a few dozen pictures, many taken from angles that would only occur to someone with a strong interest in anatomy.
“We’ll see them again, you know,” Mike said. “Once all this has been forgotten. The technology won’t go away.”
“I know.” Donna’s pragmatic tone was nevertheless laced with a certain wistfulness. "But they’ll never be anything more than a curiosity. In his way, Walt Thurman was right. The world can no longer sustain them, any more than it can sustain dinosaurs. The past is the past. It’s time for us to look to the future.”
Mike put his arm around her and pulled her close. “I’ve been waiting for that future for a long time,” he said, tilting her head to bring her lips to his. “Care to share it with me?”
“You do know the risk, don’t you?”
“Would I have been swapping fluids with you otherwise?”
Donna smiled, something as recently as this morning she wasn’t sure she would do again. “The world can well be going to hell in a hand basket. This isn't over — not nearly. We still may be heading for extinction, you know.”
“So?" Mike smiled back. "That just means forever will be here sooner than we thought.”
/////
About the Author
Over the years, several of Phoenix Sullivan’s short stories have been published under her real name in various pro anthologies and magazines. Marion Zimmer Bradley was her first editor. In the corporate world, Phoenix was a professional writer and editor for 23 years. Before that, she was a registered veterinary technician, working with small animal clinics and wildlife rehab centers.
Phoenix maintains a writing- and publishing-related blog at: http://phoenixsullivan.blogspot.com
Her Confessions of an Animal Junkie blog features heartwarming stories about running her small farm in North Texas, being an ex-vet tech and learning to engage with the animals around us. She invites you to come share YOUR stories and pictures too.
http://animaljunkie.blogspot.com
~~~
A compilation of her Vet Tech Tales, a Friday feature on her blog, is available through Amazon.
From the description page of Vol 1 of the Vet Tech Tales series:
Armed with the belief that simply loving animals would be enough to see her through high school, college, and eventually into veterinary medicine, Phoenix is in for some rude surprises as she navigates her way toward a career working with animals in “The Early Years,” the first installment of her VET TECH TALES series.
From the dying finch found miraculously “resurrected” in a pet store to the diabetic poodle that gives its elderly owner a purpose in life to an embarrassing incident with a coyote, these engaging true tales reinforce how the animals we meet teach us the greatest lessons about what it means to be human.
A charming coming-of-age story for anyone who’s ever had a dream or a pet.
17 Tales - 25,000 words – about 100 pages
To find out more about Phoenix’s other books and to purchase direct from Amazon, see the Steel Magnolia Press website at www.steelmagnoliapress.com.
~~~
Subscribe to Fresh Leaves, the Steel Magnolia Press newslett
er, to be notified when Vol 2 of the Vet Tech Tales series is out (planned release is April 2012) and to hear about other new releases and subscriber-only specials: http://eepurl.com/gCgrX.
(You can also subscribe from the Steel Magnolia Press website.)
~~
Find Phoenix on Twitter: @phoenixsullivan
Copyright 2011 by Phoenix Sullivan
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without the written permission of publisher or author, except where permitted by law.
Sector C Page 27