by Nick Pirog
Was it something to do with Neil’s research? Had there been a dioxin spill in Tarrin, and Neil Felding uncovered it? Or had Neil uncovered that Lunhill was unfairly suing farmers like Randall? Was it specific to Tarrin or was it something bigger? Something about corruption at the state level? Federal? Presidential?
Obama had signed the Lunhill Protection Act a few years earlier. Had Neil Felding found out something about that?
How high did this go?
I stared at the wall for a long time, until the floral wallpaper pattern began to separate like one of those 3D images.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a flicker and turned. Through the upstairs window, I could see flames.
“Wha—”
The barn was on fire.
I took the stairs three at a time, smashed through the front door, and hightailed it toward the blazing barn. Fifty feet away, I could feel the heat, a pulsing wall pushing outward.
I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and ducked, making it to the paneled door. I pushed the door aside, the wood hot, but still bearable. The fire was louder than I would have expected, a symphony of cracks and pops. Smoke billowed from the open doors, and I dropped to my knees.
“Harold! May!” I screamed.
Since hiding there to get away from the fireworks on July 4th, the piglets had been spending most of their time in the barn, dug into the hay.
Coughing, I crawled to the piglets’ new home. Through squinted, watering eyes, I could see two shapes. I crawled to them.
They both whined.
“It’s okay.”
I picked one of them up in each arm—no easy task as both weighed nearly thirty pounds—took a deep breath, and darted through the approaching flames. The fire nicked at my flesh, but a moment later, I was safely through with the piglets. I continued running with them until I was back in front of the farmhouse. I set them down and took a few satisfying breaths.
“Are you guys okay?” I wheezed.
They were both covered in a fine layer of soot. Harold seemed fine, but May’s breathing was labored. She sat down on her butt, taking in small wheezy breaths. I wiped her nose clean of soot, hoping that would help, but it didn’t.
Turning to look over my shoulder, I gazed at the barn. The entire thing was ablaze, flames whipping in the soft breeze. If I’d gotten there a minute later, there was no doubt in my mind both Harold and May would be dead.
Who did this?
Lunhill?
Blackwater?
The Chief?
Was this a warning?
May’s breathing broke me from my reverie.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I told her, rubbing her head gently.
Then I ran inside and grabbed my cell phone.
She answered on the third ring.
“Wheeler!” I shouted.
“Yeah, what’s wrong?”
“Someone lit my barn on fire.”
“Oh my God. Did you call the police?”
I half expected the fire trucks to show up any moment. But then again, if any of the far-off neighbors did see the flames, they probably just assumed I was burning brush. “Not yet,” I said.
“Do you kno—”
“The pigs were in the barn,” I blurted.
“Shit! Did you get them out?”
“Yeah, just barely, but May isn’t doing so hot. She’s having trouble breathing.”
“I’ll be right over.”
She must have driven twice the speed limit because she showed up ten minutes later.
Her truck screeched to a halt in the drive and she jumped out. She had a black bag in her right hand and sprinted to where Harold, May, and I were sitting on the ground near the front steps.
Thankfully, over the course of the past ten minutes, May’s breathing had improved.
“How is she?” Wheeler asked, falling to her knees.
“I think she’s doing better.”
She turned and looked at the barn, squinting into the flames, and asked, “How long do you think they were in there?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe five minutes, maybe longer.”
Wheeler seemed satisfied with this, then spent the next few minutes examining May. She took her blood pressure, listened to her heart, checked her oxygen levels, felt around her throat, looked into her mouth, and swabbed the inside of her nose.
Finally, she said, “Well, the good news is she seems to be doing okay. She definitely inhaled some carbon monoxide, but it doesn’t look like it was enough to do any real damage. Oxygen levels are a bit down, but should improve. Biggest concern was burned airways, but those look fine.”
“And the bad news?”
“Sometimes symptoms of smoke inhalation don’t appear until a few hours after exposure, so she could still—” She stopped. Didn’t say it.
“She could still die?”
She reached out and grabbed my hand. “I think she’s going to be fine. You just need to keep an eye on her for a little while.”
I gave her hand a squeeze and let go.
She switched her focus to Harold, giving him a quick examination, then declared him “Fit as a fiddle.”
As if on cue, Harold oinked then pawed at May. Wheeler and I both stared at the little girl, on edge how she would react. She pawed back at her brother, and the two scampered a couple feet away and began wrestling.
I let out a long sigh.
“I told you, she’s going to be fine,” Wheeler said, taking a seat on the ground next to me.
We were both facing the barn. It was an inferno, the flames at their peak. You could still feel the heat from a hundred yards away. After some debate, I’d decided not to call 911. They would have had too many questions that I would have to circumvent. For example, “Who would have torched your barn? And why?”
Oh, I don’t know, maybe a little company you may have heard of called Lunhill. And maybe because they wanted to give me a not-so-subtle warning to stop probing into their involvement in the Save-More murders.
That said, there was nothing the fire trucks could do. There was no saving the barn. And having de-brushed the immediate area surrounding the barn, there was little risk the fire would spread.
Wheeler asked, “What were the pigs doing in the barn?”
“They went in there when the fireworks were going off over the weekend and I think they liked it. They’ve slept there the last couple of nights.”
“Did you see anybody when you came out?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Why would someone want to burn down your barn?”
“A warning.”
Her eyebrows jumped. “A warning?”
“Yeah, to stop poking my nose where it doesn’t belong.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Does this have something to do with the Save-More murders?”
“Yeah.”
“You think there’s more to it than just Lowry?”
“I know there’s more.”
It’s the way I said the words. With purpose. Each letter granite. Each syllable as strong as the steel frame of her truck.
She looked at me. A look of want. Seductive. In any other situation, I would read the look as pleading for my lips against hers. But it wasn’t my lips she wanted. It was information.
“What do you know about Lunhill?” I asked.
“Not a whole lot. Big Biotech.” She scrunched her nose. “What have they got to do with anything?”
“I think they were behind your dad’s murder.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“Come with me,” I said, pushing myself up. I held out my hand to her. She glanced at it for a moment, uncertain, as if by taking my hand she was giving credence to the ridiculous statement I just uttered.
She ignored my hand and pushed herself up. “Follow you where?”
“To the bedroom.”
She cut her eyes at me.
“Not like that.”
Unless.
Wheeler fo
llowed me up to the bedroom, and I flipped on the lights. Her eyes found the far wall, where I’d taped all the pictures I’d drawn. “What is that?” she asked.
“That’s my investigation.”
She took a couple steps forward and said, “Your investigation looks like the wall of a kindergarten classroom.”
“Oh, come on, they aren’t that bad.”
“Uh, they’re pretty bad.”
I smirked.
Then I tapped the picture of Neil Felding and said, “It starts with him.”
It took me twenty minutes to run Wheeler through everything I knew so far. At first, she seemed reluctant to believe a word out of my mouth, but inch-by-inch, the way a glacier etches a canyon out of rock, I could tell she was coming around.
She said, “So Lowry getting his revenge against Odell was just a cover?”
“I think so. I think the Lunhill guys got to Lowry. I think they paid him to make it look like a revenge killing when Neil Felding was the target all along.”
“Because Neil Felding was going to blow the whistle on something big at Lunhill.”
“That’s my theory.”
“But Lunhill couldn’t risk Lowry getting caught and they killed him in his car and made it look like a suicide.”
“Right.”
I could see her running everything over in her head. This didn’t change the fact her father was still in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it did change who was responsible, or at least partly responsible, for his murder.
Wheeler’s next words would say a lot about who she was.
She said, “We need to find out what Neil Felding knew.”
I tried to fight back a smile.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. I just like your spunk.”
This made her blush.
There was a loud crack and the two of us darted to the window and peered through.
“The barn,” Wheeler said. “It’s crumbling.”
The two of us ran outside.
We slowly made our way closer to the barn until we reached the point of being singed by the flames.
Maybe it was the fire’s destructive power, its absolute disregard for anything but oxygen and fuel, but it made me think about Lunhill. They were just like fire. They didn’t care who they hurt—people, animals, the planet—as long as the flames continued to burn.
“We’re gonna bring them down,” I said.
Wheeler turned.
I could see a crack in her veneer. Her eyes were moist, her breath caught in her throat.
I wondered what she was thinking about. Her father? Lowry? Lunhill?
Our hands were hanging a couple inches apart. Her fingers grazed mine, touched, fled, touched, fled. Then slowly her fingers climbed into mine. Her fingers were soft but strong.
She tilted her head upward just slightly. This time there was no questioning what she wanted.
Me.
I closed the distance between us, my lips brushing lightly against hers.
There was a loud whoof as the barn collapsed. Dust and ash swept over us and we covered our heads.
A moment later, we walked back to the farmhouse. I thought about grabbing her hand, pulling her to me, but like the barn, the moment was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I was exhausted. I spent the entire night awake checking on May every twenty minutes to make sure her breathing was regular. Finally around 5:00 in the morning, I decided she was okay and that I could get some shuteye.
That’s when I first heard it.
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
I sat up in bed.
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
What the?
The piglets remained undisturbed by the sound, and I crept to the window. I pulled the curtains apart. The sun was just beginning to wake. I squinted in the direction of the chicken coop, and low and behold, standing on the outside fence just like in the picture hanging on the fridge, was a rooster.
Randall must have dropped him off at some point after we’d finished up for the day.
I shook my head.
If I had access to a time machine and I only had one thing to change about my past thirty-five years, I would travel back to when I asked Randall to acquire a rooster and hit myself in the face with a sledge hammer.
I ambled back to the bed and flopped down between Harold and May.
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
“Shut up!” I screamed. “Shut the fuck up!”
He didn’t.
I slept fitfully for a few hours, then finally gave up. I pushed myself out of bed. I threw on some clothes, fed the piglets, ate, then made my way outside.
The sun had risen a couple inches on the horizon, showering the rooster in an aura of yellow.
I was already plotting ways to kill him.
My eyes traveled from the rooster to the still smoldering pile of rubble that had once been the barn.
The previous night, I’d been too worried about May to concentrate on anger. But not now. My fists flexed into knuckled balls of white. My teeth gnashed together, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if droplets of venom began to squirt from my canines.
A moment later, I felt a sharp pain in the back of my mouth and cringed.
“How did you do this?” Donald Roberts DDS asked.
I debated telling him the truth, how I’d been so angry I bit down and cracked my molar in half or how the tooth had first been loosened by a spinning round kick to the side of my face. But that would lead to a series of other questions or a series of awkward silences, neither of which I was in the mood to deal with.
“Just eating cereal this morning,” I lied. I’d actually eaten three waffles, Chocolate Chip Eggos, which were now being carried at the Harvest Food and Market thanks to my bribery.
“What kind of cereal? Must have had some nuts or clusters.”
“I think it’s called Tons of Clusters.”
He eyed me suspiciously, then said, “Well, you need a crown.”
I nodded.
“It’s gonna take a couple days to make, need to send it to the lab in Kansas City.” He smiled, showing brilliant, nearly perfect teeth. “But we can give you a temporary today.”
“Will that make the pain go away?”
After my tooth broke, I’d walked back into the house to rinse out my mouth. When the water hit my tooth, or lack thereof, it felt like someone drove a nail into my jaw. I could literally feel my heartbeat pulsating through my gum the entire time I searched my phone for a dentist with an opening.
Dr. Donald nodded. “Right now it hurts because the nerve is exposed. The temporary crown will take care of that.”
“Good.”
“Now, let’s get you numbed up.”
After shooting me up with novocaine, a hygienist stopped by to say she needed to do some impressions, though she didn’t say who. Hopefully, she did a good De Niro. She said that she’d be back in “a bit.”
While waiting for the novocaine to take effect, I took out my phone and loaded the second movie in the Terminator franchise: Terminator II: Judgment Day.
I watched ten minutes of the movie, then the hygienist returned. I waited for her to break out her Pacino, but apparently, she was taking impressions, not doing them, and she proceeded to stick this metal plate with pink goop in my mouth. Several minutes of gagging later, she removed the hardened material and allowed me to rinse my mouth out.
Once my temporary crown was fitted by Dr. Robert, I made an appointment to come back in a week, then returned to my car, where I decided to watch the rest of the movie.
Two hours later, the credits were rolling and I was ripping out my hair.
I was more confused than ever.
Now Arnold Schwarzenegger was a good guy?
WTF?
I really didn’t want to watch six more hours of robots and I searched “Terminator and Lunhill”
on my phone.
And wouldn’t you know it…
The name of the article was “Lunhill Terminates ‘Terminator Seed’ Technology.” The article was dated March 23, 1999.
I skimmed it, reading aloud bits and pieces.
“Sterile seed technology—dubbed ‘terminator technology’ in the press—is a gene-use restriction technology whereby second generation seed (seed produced by the crop) will be sterile…After consulting with international experts and many small landholder farmers, Lunhill has made a commitment not to commercialize Sterile Seed Technology in food crops and has no plans or research that would violate this commitment in any way.”
I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.
In 1999, Lunhill did away with their Terminator seed research, but according to Neil Felding’s coworker, that’s exactly what he was working on.
When I made it back to Tarrin, it was close to noon and Randall’s truck was parked in front of the farmhouse. I could see the tractor moving off in the distance. Nearly half of the 250 acres had been tilled and it was beginning to resemble something of a farm.
I parked and watched as Randall and the tractor cut across the perfectly manicured lines in my direction. Coming abreast of me in the large red tractor, Randall killed the engine and stood up.
“What happened to the barn?” he belted.
“Id barned dine.”
“What?”
“It baruned deen.”
He jumped down and squinted at me. Maybe he noticed the slobber on the left side my face.
“What happened to you?”
“Boke may ooth.”
“You broke a tooth?”
I nodded.
“Was this before or after you burned down the barn?”
“Agger.”
“Right. So what happened?”
“Unill.”
“What?’
“Undild!”
“What?”
I took a deep breath, concentrated. “Lundild!”
His brow furrowed. “Lunhill?”
It took a few hours to tell Randall everything. Partly because half my mouth was numb, partly because Randall had a thousand questions. But by midafternoon, Randall knew everything I knew.