by G M Eppers
While I was turned, I heard a bigger splash and refused to turn around again. The stuff would be everywhere. I heard Billings. “Let’s get him out of there before he regains consciousness.” More splashing sounds. I took a deep breath and told myself not to visualize anything. Focus on something else, like a light fixture or the bay doors. With bravery of which no one here knew the extent, I spun to see Billings and Sir Haughty hauling Boyd out of the vat, pulling a large wave of chunky goo with him. He slumped between them, dripping into the growing puddle on the floor. Filthy Disgusting Boyd, I thought. The goo was also on Billings and Sir Haughty all the way up to their shoulders and the puddle on the floor was spreading ominously in all directions. Badger pocketed his cell phone and pulled out a set of handcuffs, preparing to relieve Sir Haughty of his burden.
Before he could get the cuffs on Boyd, however, Badger slipped in the goo and went down, sliding into Boyd’s legs and knocking the lot of them to the floor like a bowling ball and pins. Boyd, who’d been stunned by his fall, recovered enough sense to regain his footing quickly and he tried to run away, but fell to the floor, pulling Billings and Sir Haughty with him. Billings tried to rise but with his hands and arms slimy with the stuff he was unable to keep a grip on anything. Boyd and the cuffs were both on the floor getting further from each other all the time. Sir Haughty used the side of the vat to pull himself up, but was afraid to let go as his feet continued to slip.
Roxy, hiking her skirt up, stepped gingerly into the melee to try to drag someone, anyone, out of the mess, succeeding only in sprawling onto her butt. Sylvia stood on the sidelines opposite me, carefully observing the movement like a cat waiting to pounce. I stayed back, telling myself I was observing in order to write a clear report later, but I was starting to retch. I took a deep breath to control myself. I holstered my gun. Until someone got sure footing, there wasn’t going to be any shooting going on. I stepped closer to the edge of the puddle, waiting for Boyd to get close as everyone was bouncing around like balls in a pinball machine, punctuated by random shouts of aggravation and amusement. Across from me, Sylvia was doing the same. We both had our own set of handcuffs in hand. At some point in the scramble, someone knocked the plug out of the drainage tube and a new gush of goo, this time mostly whey, came pouring out onto the floor. I was forced to back up again. The goo level in the vat was sinking, but it was still more than half full. Some of them were grabbing handfuls of the goo and throwing it to try to clear floor space, but it was as useful as bailing water on the Titanic with a spoon. “This stuff is Uber, don’t forget!” I yelled. “Keep your mouths closed!
From time to time, someone would gain their footing, but it only seemed to last a few seconds before they were down again. Finally, I saw a play. I motioned to Sylvia to follow me up the catwalk to the first level. I moved over to a position just above the tribute to Mack Sennett’s pie fights. With Sylvia holding my feet, I lowered myself from above, one cuff open and ready. I grabbed, but the first arm slipped away, leaving a slime of goo on my hand. I wiped it on my thigh, still hanging upside down, and reached again.
I managed to grab an arm and throw my cuff around the wrist, but it turned out to be Badger’s so I let go. “Sylvia, hand me your cuffs!” I called up. I didn’t dare pull my stun gun. The puddle of whey would conduct the energy to everyone.
“I can’t without dropping you!” Sylvia yelled.
I did a vertical sit-up and decided this idea wasn’t going to work. At most I would succeed in handcuffing another member of my team.
Sylvia asked, “You want me to try?”
I shook my head. “I’d probably drop you.”
From below, I heard Sir Haughty yell, “I got him! Wait, no I don’t!”
I knew what I was going to have to do. I walked deliberately back to the ground level. With Sylvia’s handcuffs in my hand, I climbed into the vat from the far side, wincing as the warm curds and whey mixture soaked into my shoes and pant legs. Then I winced some more as I sunk down to one knee to distribute my weight. There’s no way this vat was rated for this. I dragged myself across the vat keeping one arm and the cuffs out of the moisture. With most of the whey now on the floor, the mixture had a consistency of wet marshmallows, or, if there were such a thing, coconut Jell-O that had only partly set. When I reached the other side, I climbed out onto the edge of the vat and perched there, holding onto the edge with my other hand for balance. I found Boyd in the crowd and followed his movements, and in a few moments he rolled toward me. I dropped onto his back, stopping his movement instantly. He said “oof!” and I pulled one of his arms behind him and slapped on the first handcuff. Then I grabbed his other arm and finished the job.
The rest of the team stopped moving and looked at me. “How did you do that?” asked Roxy, her dress coated in white drippy chunks.
“It’s called a paratrooper move. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.” Taking a lesson from Sylvia, I had just made that up.
Without a quarry to catch, my team was able to pull themselves up at the side of one vat or the other and use it to guide themselves to dry ground. I slid off of Boyd, landing on my backside, keeping hold of one of his arms. Boyd sputtered and rolled to get his face out of the puddle. “Let me up!” Moving very slowly, I was able to get to my feet and assist Boyd to the edge of the vat, where he used his cuffed hands to follow the rest. Everyone was exhausted and Boyd had no fight left in him. I was very conscious of the mess that my clothing had become, but overall pleased. I handed Boyd off to Billings and went quietly into a corner to retch.
As I pulled a large curd off the seat of my pants, I considered that a Boyd in the handcuffs was worth goo on my tush.
Meanwhile, Sir Haughty had begun examining the setup more closely, trying to identify which kind of cheese was being produced. He’s our expert. He can name 723 varieties of cheese by taste, smell, unique ingredients, geographical history, or production processes,--over 1000 if you include varieties with a bacon additive. With his predilection for cheeses, it’s a wonder he is still alive. Sir Haughty prefers to wear a suit and cravat-- today’s was orange--and occasionally a top hat. He is almost six feet tall, with perfect posture, perfect teeth, and a very nice set of dimples in his cheeks when he smiles, which isn’t overly often. He has dark eyes and hair which tends to curl (the hair, not the eyes) when he lets it grow out, which also isn’t overly often. He stepped over to the milk tank, which was still squirting a steady stream like one of those fountains with the naked little boy on it, and took a taste. I wasn’t worried. There was no problem with the milk. The Uber was in the rennet, which was added later. He smacked his lips, then announced, “This is sheep’s milk. I believe they were preparing Queso de la Serena. It’s usually found in Southern Spain or Portugal. Quite possible that Boyd was going to export it. We should look into who was buying.”
“Thank you, Sir Haughty.”
Roxy was on her cell phone, calling in the authorities and requesting Uber containment. I felt weak, and leaned against a catwalk stairway. We normally dealt with packaged and processed cheese, which is easier for me to handle. In the raw form, even some cheese lovers can’t stomach it. “Can someone hose us off before I throw up?” To myself, I added ‘again’.
“With pleasure,” said Billings, grabbing the nozzle end of one of the pressure hoses used to clean the tanks. It was high pressure, so it wasn’t exactly fun, but it did get the cheese residue off of us. Afterwards, Badger presented his wrist from which dangled my pair of handcuffs. I removed them for him and stuck them back on my HEP belt.
Roxy finished her call and said, “Containment is on the way.”
“Good. Go read him his rights and show him the search warrant. I’ll be over here.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What the heck is Uber and how did we get to where we are busting people for making cheese? First off, you need to know a little bit about cheesemaking. Everyone knows you make it with milk, but there are other ingredients, too. There’s someth
ing called starter, which is basically bacteria and is similar to yeast. Then there’s rennet, which is derived from calf stomachs and sometimes vegetable matter. I know, gross. Fortunately, the enzyme from the calf stomachs, chymosin, was isolated and reproduced through fermenting of certain vegetable matter and fungi, so calves don’t have to be sacrificed on the altar of cheese. However, about a decade ago, Dr. Maria Angelina Conchetta Thomasina Hortencia Smith found a way to treat the rennet that resulted in what we call Uber. Rennet is what makes the cheese separate into curds and whey. Uber Rennet produces much firmer, sweeter curds, and really powerful whey, which is used in cottage cheese and yogurt products. It was said that it made cottage cheese taste like crème brûlée. It was a huge hit, and Dr. Smith even published the recipe as a video on YouTube. I won’t be telling you the recipe, of course. It’s probably still on YouTube, next to the videos on how to make an H-bomb, and how to legally bury people in your backyard. It wasn’t long before the thing went viral, and big and little cheesemakers began using it all over the world.
About six months later, the deaths were beginning to mount up. Hundreds of thousands of people began developing very serious bowel obstructions that defied even surgery in most cases. It was more than just constipation. The peristalsis that normally kept, um, product moving through the colon eventually simply shut down. The product itself was also rock solid and simply wouldn’t move. Doctors tried installing colostomy bags, but even those require peristalsis to work. Eventually, the large intestine would burst and infect the abdominal cavity and peritonitis would develop. The suspected bacterial strain resisted normal antibiotics, just to complicate matters even further, because, as it was much later discovered, it wasn’t a bacterium. And OTC meds like stool softeners were nearly useless. Loose stool might find its way out from the descending colon thanks to gravity, but it pooled in the ascending and transverse colon anyway. At first, it was a subject for late night comedians and water cooler jokes, but it soon became very serious. Scientists at the CDC were stumped. They couldn’t find the source of the problem, though they were working day and night to isolate either a virus or a bacterium. Finally, a 14 year old chemistry student named Banana Harris, made the connection first to cheese, then to the Uber Rennet used to make the cheese, and to an addictive quality created by the Uber similar to heroin. She’s 24 now and working at the Mayo Clinic.
Banana Harris found the answer, like most scientific discoveries, by accident. At 14, she had already skipped two grades, which put her in her junior year of high school. She decided to enter the science fair, using an experiment to discover whether mice preferred the old cheese or the new cheese. At the time, of course, new cheese (it wasn’t yet called Uber) was readily available and relatively cheap. She had a slight advantage in that her parents owned a pet store, and they provided her with a dozen mice which she split up into three groups. She fed one group old cheese, one group new cheese, and offered the third group both. In two weeks, two-thirds of the mice were dead and Miss Harris was devastated. She hadn’t intended to kill any of the mice. She went to her instructor with the problem, and he speculated that at least one of the mice had already been ill and had spread an unknown toxin to the rest. He told her to make a notation in her records and replace the mice.
She started again, duplicating her original setup, and had her mother personally select the healthiest mice. But it happened again. All the mice that ate the new cheese died, and so did the mice that had a choice. The mice that ate the old cheese survived and didn’t even grow fat. And this time, her lab partner, Peter Shardz, had been hospitalized with an unresponsive bowel obstruction and she thought perhaps he had infected the mice. The hospital isolated Miss Harris as well, as a contact, but a week after Peter died she still hadn’t shown any symptoms and was released. She was given permission to continue her experiment.
After the two groups of mice died yet again, she noticed that the choice group had given up on old cheese altogether by the second day. So their diet was equivalent to the new cheese group. She changed the focus of her experiment to the effects of new cheese, then wrote her report and entered the science fair with those results. After winning a blue ribbon, a trophy, and a $1000 scholarship, she expanded the experiment to try to find out why the new cheese was killing the mice. With help from her instructor, she was able to analyze the contents of the cheese and trace the source of the toxin to what became known as Uber. Not long after, she was found almost nightly on the entire lineup of Sunday morning news shows, and late night talk shows, and was on the cover of TIME magazine, PEOPLE magazine, and DISCOVER all in the same month.
By the time Banana Harris published her findings, the damage was done. The cheese industry all but crumbled, if you’ll pardon the pun, almost overnight. They spent billions of dollars stripping Uber Rennet from their products and promoting “clean cheese” with inspection standards and unlimited oversight. It was a very confusing time. Rennet isn’t the only thing people use to solidify cheese and there are certain types of cheese, like cream cheese, that don’t require any rennet at all. It was very difficult for the public to determine what was safe to eat and confidence in any cheese plummeted like a bowling ball thrown from the Eiffel Tower. The industry survived, but only because of government subsidies that kept it afloat until the market could recover, until labeling, inspection standards, and simple flat-out education began to ease the distrust. The big problem wasn’t the market after that. It was the black market. As with any addictive substance, an underground network grew by osmosis, keeping the problem alive indefinitely.
In the second year of what came to be known as the Big OOPS, or Offensive Obstruction Pandemic Sweep, the Cheese and Uber Rennet Disposal Service, or CURDS, was born. An offshoot of the CDC, facilities sprang up in every major city. In hindsight, we should have been affiliated with the FDA, but no one knew that then. The system went worldwide. Three quarters of the world’s independent nations built “chembassies,” embassy-like networks that policed local areas and provided CDC/WHO type services to their respective countries. The other quarter, mostly the Asian and Southeast Asian countries where cheese had never been popular to begin with, pretty much stayed out of it. After a decade, there’d been no major outbreaks in Asia according to what we were being told, and no one had a clue what was happening in North Korea, whose leadership all but vanished from every communications outlet.
Someone needed to be proactive. Someone had to hunt down the Uber and any cheese made with it, confiscate it, and destroy it. That someone was CURDS. We knew we’d made it when several months into the job CURDS was mentioned in a clue on Jeopardy. A couple of months after that, we got a whole category! Those episodes are permanent residents on the TIVO at our HQ.
A legal mess was also created in that we couldn’t simply reclassify cheese, or even rennet, as a schedule 1 drug. Both clean cheese and clean rennet were still available on the open market, and labeling restrictions, while helpful to the industry and comforting to the general public, were too easily forged to be a definitive solution. So only the Uber additives were classified as schedule 1, which is kind of like banning nicotine but allowing cigarettes. It’s a very difficult system in which to operate.
My name is Helena Montana and I’m an international coordinator for CURDS. I was born in Illinois, not far from what they call Abraham Lincoln’s Log Cabin in Charleston, but it really isn’t because he was born in Kentucky. His parents lived there, but he was a lawyer in Springfield by then and only visited from time to time. I went to the University of Chicago, graduated with a degree in teaching, and spent several years doing the usual falling in love and having a family while I taught twelve year olds that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t born in Illinois. My son Billings was born in Chicago. As for his father, Butte--now my ex, who also wasn’t born in Montana--when the epidemic hit, he went off to fight in defense of the stuff, if you can believe that. I don’t think he used it, obviously, since he’s never gotten sick with obstructive disease. He just
felt that people should have the right to get it if they want. He’d let his own mother purchase a kilo of meth if she wanted to. I run into him from time to time, but we’re usually in each other’s way. And no one has a harder time with it than Billings. I’ve had to pull them apart more than once.
CURDS headquarters is in Washington D.C., but not inside the beltway and not in one of those big, imposing buildings. As coordinator, I had a say in how our budget was spent, and housing for a team that spent most of its time in other parts of the world simply wasn’t a priority. In fact, I didn’t require team members to stay there, though no one so far had turned down the free accommodations. It was basically a modified group home. Four stories, with a kitchen and meeting rooms on the first floor and suites of bedrooms on the other three. Everyone got their own bedroom with bath, just like a hotel, and everyone shared in housekeeping duties for the common rooms and was responsible for the cleanliness of their own. I tried to be pretty lenient about the condition of their private rooms, but I would only put up with so much. I didn’t hold inspections, but if I happened to notice weird smells in passing or things leaking out into the hall, I would definitely say something. I had to dismiss a team member once because he was hoarding cheese in his room. I dismissed him right into rehab and as far as I know he’s still there.
Addiction was a problem even in our ranks sometimes. That’s why my aversion to cheese and Billings’ lactose intolerance were such pluses that we were allowed positions of authority. You don’t put the glutton in charge of the buffet.
