by Jon McGoran
In a matter of seconds, the fumes were almost overpowering. I tried to keep my head clear, tried not to picture what could happen to me if I screwed this up, or if I didn’t get out in time. Staying low, I crossed the aisle and squeezed my way under the next planting table and out into the next aisle. I looked both ways before crossing, then climbed through the next table.
As the fumes got even stronger, I could hear the shouts growing inside the tent, the tone changing, becoming more frantic. I took off again, crossing another aisle, pushing through another table. I looked up and saw the sprinkler heads coming on, one by one, the spray of gasoline working its way up the center row toward me.
I heard another metal cable snapping overhead, and I looked up as it arced through a royal blue sky, glinting in the light from the rising sun. I started moving even faster. As the gasoline got closer, the shooting abruptly died out. The yells and screams grew louder and shriller, making it harder to ignore my own fears.
With the gasoline raining down from the overhead sprinkler system, the mixture of butterflies and green haze became even more bizarre and that much more surreal. One of Levkov’s gunmen ran past me in a panic, wiping his faceplate. I got a clear glimpse of Levkov, just for an instant, loosening the next roof cable at the far end of the tent. He turned, and our eyes met. Before I could shoot, he was gone, back to the roof cables, and I was running again.
I pushed through the space under the fourth table just as the sprinkler over Rupp started spraying gasoline. He was already screaming, but at this, his screams became piercing. When I approached him, he swung the gun around at me, his eyes round with terror.
I took the gun from him and grabbed him by the collar. Then I pulled him under the last table, through the hole I had just made in the plastic, and back outside. He whimpered in pain as his leg banged against the ground, but I kept dragging him, all the way to the hazmat shower forty yards away. Then I turned and looked back.
The roof was halfway retracted now, butterflies already milling around in the air above it, illuminated from below by the pale fluorescent lights. As I watched, another roofing cable sprang loose, and the corner of the tent where the support post had been severed crumpled to the ground, leaving a large opening.
I could see Levkov jump up on one of the tables, M60 in hand. He climbed over racks and hurdled aisles, headed toward the hole left by the collapsed wall. He seemed to be staring right at me. Part of me hoped he would take a shot, because I was sure that would be enough to set off the gas fumes. But he didn’t. He just kept coming toward us, jumping from one table to the next.
I fired once, and came close enough that he ducked down. But he kept coming, never taking his eyes off us. He was climbing over the final rack when I fired again. I had been aiming for a metal box near the uprights to the sprinkler system. I must have hit something electrical, because one moment, I saw Levkov launching himself toward the hole in the crumpled back wall, and then it went dark. For an instant, all I could see were butterflies, black silhouettes against the pink and blue dawn sky, and below them, in the darkened tent, a cascade of orange sparks bouncing on the ground before winking out.
Then the place went up.
I saw Levkov one last time, his dark form momentarily outlined against the flames. Then the fire swelled out around him. He was there, and then he was gone.
A wave of heat washed over me, penetrating the damp cold that had seeped into my bones.
The butterflies suddenly glowed a brilliant orange against a sky that seemed to have darkened back into night. The heat and the shock from the explosion pushed the butterflies high into the air. Then the fire rose up after them, consuming them one by one.
As the fireball died out, one last butterfly struggled to fly higher, its wings no longer fluttering but thrusting, pushing against the air as it inched higher into the sky. The ball of fire collapsed beneath it, releasing a last jagged shard of red orange flame, but that missed it, too. Even with everything that was at stake, part of me was pulling for that butterfly to escape. But while the fire didn’t reach it, the heat apparently did. The butterfly lit up brightly for a moment; then the glow faded, and it drifted down into the inferno.
In the flickering orange light of the flames, I saw two of Levkov’s men climbing unsteadily to their feet near the far side of the tent. When they spotted us, they started firing. I dropped to one knee and lined up a shot, but before I could pull the trigger, there was another blinding flash as the gas tank exploded on the other side of the tent. The concussion popped my ears and pulled the air out of my lungs, rolling me back like a candy wrapper in a strong wind.
Somehow I landed, stumbling, on my feet. A foot fell out of the sky and bounced on the ground next to me. I looked around and saw the rest of the two men scattered around me in little pieces. Rupp was moaning loudly, still leaning against the hazmat shower where I had left him.
My ears were filled with a noise like rushing water, but through it, I heard the sound of tortured metal and I looked up to see the remains of the gas tank, glowing a dull red and outlined in flames, slowly twisting high in the sky. It looked almost peaceful as it reached the top of its trajectory and started the return trip back to Earth. I’d never been particularly good at tracking pop flies, so I turned and ran, and I kept running until I heard a loud ringing thud and a clod of dirt hit my shoulder.
When I stopped and turned, I saw the crumpled metal tank half buried in a shallow crater where the hazmat shower had been. Right where I had left Rupp.
70
Rupp was dead and I wasn’t sorry, but I was glad I wasn’t the one who’d killed him. I don’t know how long I stood there, dazed from the explosion, looking down at his legs sticking out from underneath the tank, like the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy’s house. When I looked up, I noticed that the sun had fully risen. It looked like a nice day.
My ears were ringing from the explosion, a sound that seemed to echo in my skull, but through it I could hear the quiet lapping of the flames and birds chirping in the distance.
I knew I should be doing something else, but I couldn’t seem to think of what. I couldn’t tell if my wits had been addled by Rupp’s pill or the explosions or the exhaustion, or if it was because I had no experience with any situation remotely like the one I found myself in.
A breeze brushed up against me, gently prodding me into action. Smoke was still billowing into the air as I started limping back to the truck. But then I remembered the doomsday spores that still covered me, and I doubled back.
The trailer was now burning wreckage, but it seemed to have absorbed the brunt of the explosion. The hazmat shower next to it was intact. I stripped off my damp clothes, turned on the shower, and got in.
I knew I’d be leaving the clothes behind. They were probably hopelessly contaminated. But I brought my car keys and my gun into the shower once again. I was keeping my gun.
The shower smelled reassuringly harsh, and it stung, like serious chemicals. As cold and unpleasant as it was, I stayed in there and did a thorough job.
When I was done I started off across the fields, back to my truck, dripping wet and naked, my gun in one hand, keys in the other. I gave a wide berth to the remnants of the tent, so I wouldn’t pick up any more spores.
The walk back across the fields seemed a lot longer than when I had followed Rupp the previous night. As much as I tried to avoid it, the corn stubble scratched my legs and cut my bare feet.
When I came up against the fence, I took my time, especially at the top, making sure nothing got scraped, snagged, or torn. Neither Rupp and his plague nor Levkov and his belt-fed machine gun were as scary as climbing over the top of a chain link fence in the nude. After that, crossing the rest of the fields didn’t seem so bad.
It was early enough in the morning that there was no traffic as I crossed the road to where I had left Frank’s truck. I climbed in behind the wheel, grateful for the cloth seats.
In my rearview mirror I saw fire trucks al
ready responding to the smoke cloud. Through the fog in my brain, I realized I needed to warn them off. I stared at my phone for a few seconds, thinking. Then I dialed 411 and got the number for Noreen Good, at home. She answered on the first ring, and I knew I had made the right call.
I told her who was calling and she laughed nervously. “It’s Sunday morning.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You sure you don’t want to talk to Chief Pruitt?” she asked. “He’s been looking for you.”
“I bet he has. Actually, Noreen, I was calling for you.”
She laughed again, this time with no trace of nervousness. “Oh, were you now? What, you want me to go on the run with you?”
“That’s not a half-bad idea,” I replied. “Maybe some other time. Right now, there’s a situation, and I need your help.”
“Right.”
“There’s some fire engines responding to a call at a farm on Valley Road, just off Bayberry.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Well, this is going to sound crazy, but you can’t let them go in there. There’s a dangerous disease in there, a plague, and if they go in there, they could all die.”
She was quiet for a lot less time than I would have been. “A plague? Are you messing with me?”
“Noreen, you know who I am, you know where I’m from. You know how much shit I’ll be in if I’m making this stuff up.”
“Honey, you’re already up to your neck in it. You’re wanted for murder. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s bullshit. Noreen, this is the same stuff that’s been making half the town sick, only this will be much worse.”
She gasped. “Oh my God. This is for real, isn’t it?”
“Just get those firefighters away from there before they get hurt. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Stan Bowers had told me about an asshole he knew at Homeland Security, a guy named Craig Sorenson. I called DHS and told the woman who answered that I needed to talk to Craig Sorenson. When she asked who was calling, I said, “Stan Bowers, over at DEA.”
Special Agent Sorenson was not available, she told me. Before she could ask for my message, I told her it was an emergency, a biological weapons attack at Bayberry and Valley in Dunston, Berks County, Pennsylvania, some sort of fungal pathogen, and they needed to get a hazmat team and a fire suppression team over there right away. Then I hung up.
As I drove, I tried to think of what else I should be doing.
When I reached the house, I parked in the back and walked gingerly across the gravel, just me and my gun. My head was still ringing, but a warm breeze had picked up and it felt good on my skin. For a moment I felt like things might work out.
When I opened the back door and stepped inside, I saw Moose perched on a kitchen chair, hugging his knees and staring out the window. His face was as pale as a sheet of paper, and his thumbnail was wedged firmly between his teeth.
He looked at me—face, body, face—then back out the window.
In the quiet, I heard the coffee maker gurgle and hiss. Moose already had a cup, so I got one for myself.
“So, you went into the garage,” I said, sipping the scalding coffee, very careful not to spill.
Moose glanced at me again, then looked away and nodded.
“I told you not to.”
He nodded again, conceding that point.
“So that’s the guy who killed the lawyer?” he asked without looking at me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What did you do to him?”
“He had a gun on me. Said he was going to make it look like a suicide. As we were driving, I drifted over, got him in the head with that broken tailgate sticking out from Squirrel’s truck.”
Moose winced and shuddered, but he stayed quiet.
“It should be safe to stay here now.”
“Good,” he said quietly.
I set my cup down on the kitchen counter. “Guess I’ll go put on some pants.”
“Good idea.”
Upstairs, I confronted a bit of a laundry problem. Between the clothes I had left at the hazmat shower and the bloody clothes in the bag, all I had left was my funeral suit.
I put it on and looked in the mirror. My face was haggard as hell. I looked like a guy who’d been up all night after a funeral. Actually, I looked like I could have been the guest of honor.
Sitting down on the bed to pull on my socks, I saw for the first time how badly my feet were torn to shreds. A large splinter of bloody corn stalk pierced the skin between my toes. As I pulled it out, I thought about Nola, farming in bare feet, and I winced. She was tougher than I gave her credit, I thought. Then I stood up.
Nola.
71
Perhaps with a little more sleep, a little less head trauma, or a few more IQ points, I would have thought of it earlier. With my foot on the floor, speeding down the country roads, I tried to focus on the task at hand instead of beating myself up for having forgotten the obvious.
Rupp told me I had been exposed to the spores the first time I went into the tent. He sent the crop duster to contain the outbreak; that’s what kept me from getting sick. What did I do between exposure and treatment? I hugged Nola, kissed her, then forced her out of the treatment zone. Nola wasn’t suffering from an attack of her Multiple Chemical Sensitivity; she had a deadly fungal plague, one that came from me.
As I drove up Valley Road, I called the hospital. They told me Nola was in room 308, but when they put me through, there was no answer.
Fire trucks were lined up on the side of the road. In front of them were a half-dozen black, government-issue SUVs. The smoke rising in the distance had thinned to a wispy white haze. Passing the fire engines, my heart fell at the sight of the cruiser with the seal of the Dunston Borough Police Chief.
I barely slowed at the driveway to the abandoned farm across the road, skidding as I cut a sharp right and pulled up into the back, behind the barn. I had three-quarters of a tank of gas in the truck, so I left the engine running. Either I’d be leaving soon and I’d be in a hurry, or else it just wouldn’t matter.
The area was crawling with feds in dark suits, most wearing shades. They milled around in little clumps, separate from each other, like they were from different agencies or jurisdictions. Maybe Noreen had called the FBI or something, but I figured the confusion could be helpful. My vehicle may not have blended in, but from a distance, my funeral suit did.
Staying back from the road, I jogged about fifty yards, to a low point where I could cross unseen. On the other side of the road, I charged up a steep incline to an open, rolling field. A hundred yards in front of me was that ten-foot chain-link fence. To my right, I could see the gate Rupp had gone through the previous night, open but crawling with feds.
A couple of hundred yards to the left, the fence disappeared behind the trees, where I had climbed over the night before. I realized it was the endpoint of that screen of Siberian elm. I felt a small sense of satisfaction at seeing the end of that massive green curtain. Even though I’d been through it half a dozen times, seeing the end of it made it feel somehow less intimidating. Knowing that the bad guys with the guns were dead helped, too.
I took off at a brisk walk toward the Siberian elm and once again used it for cover as I climbed over the fence. I was really starting to hate this fence, but I was getting pretty good at crossing it, especially with clothes and shoes on.
Brushing myself off and flattening down my hair as best I could, I started off in what I hoped was the direction of Jason Rupp. I tried to adopt the stoic, superior demeanor of most of the feds I had worked with, the ones that drove Stan Bowers nuts.
I knew I was getting closer when I smelled smoke and burnt plastic. I passed another cluster of suits. When they looked over at me, I ignored them, like I was more important than they were.
Up ahead, I could see half an acre cordoned off with red caution tape. Inside it, the feds weren’t milling around in standard dark suits; they were milling
around in white hazmat suits. At the center of it all was a huge blackened oval where the tent had been. Next to that was the overturned earth where the apple trees had been, the melted wreckage of the trailer, and the hazmat shower, still intact.
Strewn across the ground, I could make out the bits and pieces of Leo and his friends. Little yellow flags were planted in the ground next to each piece. There were a lot of them. It looked kind of festive.
The guys in the hazmat suits seemed to be doing a lot of standing around with their hands on their hips, like they were having a hard time making sense of it all. Good luck with that, I thought.
I’d help them later, but I wasn’t going to risk spending hours in an interrogation room while Nola’s infection killed her.
Off to the left, just inside the red tape, was the twisted, flattened metal hulk of the gasoline tank, standing straight up, maybe six feet high, plunged into the ground like a knife. None of the hazmat suits were anywhere near it, and there were no little yellow flags. They hadn’t yet noticed Rupp’s body pinned underneath. I had been worried about tracking around more of the spores, but the tank had come down some distance from the tent, and it had been engulfed in flames when it went up.
I walked along the outside of the perimeter, keeping my distance from the red tape until the tank was between me and the guys in the white suits. Then I ducked under the tape and hurried over to the tank, crouching down so I would not be seen.
Rupp’s legs were still sticking out from under the gas tank. A piece of the trailer lay across his legs, but when I pulled it off, there he was, soaking wet and smelling strongly of the chemical decontaminant.
The way it was twisted, I couldn’t tell if the bottom of the tank was three feet underground and, with it, the rest of Rupp’s body, or if that part of it was resting lightly on top of him.
He had kept the pills in the outside pocket on his jacket. I was pretty sure it was the left side.
Reaching under the metal, I could feel the damp fabric of his jacket with the tips of my fingers, but the metal was firmly against his body. When I pushed against the tank with my shoulder, it rocked forward. A wet, sucking sound came out from underneath it, and I tried not to think about what it was doing to the remains of Jason Rupp. I pulled the fabric closer, but not enough to reach in the pocket. With my shoulder against the tank, I pushed with my legs and moved the tank back enough that I could reach in with one hand. I tried not to think about what would happen if my legs slipped out from under me, how the tank would rock back and crush my hand, trapping me there. My fingers found the pocket, and when they wrapped around the pill bottle I had to resist the urge to relax.