Broken Chain

by Lisa von Biela

  But it was a new world, and who knew when farmers would be able to produce meat, milk, and eggs the way they used to. Meat, milk, and eggs that wouldn’t screw up your brain, that is.

  Les downed the rest of his beer, got himself another, and took it into the living room. He parked himself on his threadbare couch and flicked on the remote. And regretted it immediately. Even on mute, it was clear what the top news story was. Again.

  Panic in the streets. In all the major cities. All those people so removed from what it was like to work a real-life producing farm. They were used to getting their food all nicely cellophaned in the market and now they were up in arms to see meat cases that were darkened and empty. They’d been hoodwinked into thinking their readily available meat and animal products would always be safe and plentiful. Now they were neither.

  “Idiots,” he muttered at the TV.

  So you had the panicked people, wondering how and what they should eat in this new world, and you had the angry people who just wanted to scream and yell about it. They wanted someone to blame. He could understand that, but as a practical person, he didn’t think it mattered now. What mattered most was how the hell to rebuild the industry on safe footing. He had no idea how long that would take, or how it would be accomplished. But it surely wouldn’t happen overnight.

  All those people parading around with their signs, sparking violence in those already predisposed because of the damage wrought by the screwed-up food chain—well, they weren’t accomplishing anything. They were making it worse. He hated the waste of it all.

  Les clicked off the television, chugged the rest of his beer, and then decided to have a bit of the harder stuff tonight. It’s not like he was going to get a call to attend a breech birth or something. Death could wait.

  CHAPTER 46

  Daphne grimaced as another sharp pain spiked through her lower back. She rubbed the knotted muscles with one hand and stirred the various meals-in-progress on her grill with the other. Two sides to every coin, she thought. The valine scandal and all it had spawned had forcibly and dramatically changed everyone’s eating habits overnight. People no longer had the choice to eat unhealthy—and now deadly—animal- and soy-based products. And because of that, they were flocking in desperation to where they could eat nutritious, balanced food that wouldn’t kill them or destroy their brains.

  The irony was not lost on Daphne as she surveyed the bustling café from her vantage point in the kitchen. Though her menu items were easy to prepare, it still took all her energy to get through the day and handle the crowds. Fortunately, demand for her meals was such that she could charge way more than she imagined possible and sock away a nice profit. Good thing, too, because her suppliers had raised their prices substantially, and sometimes she didn’t get her deliveries because they ran out of stock. Then she had to be extra creative with what she had left on hand to keep her customers satisfied.

  Despite following her doctor’s instructions to the letter, Daphne felt her health slipping away a little more each day. So she didn’t dare pass up the opportunity to make some good money while she still could. In fact, she’d begun to wonder just how long she’d be able to keep the café going.

  More customers arrived, forming a line that snaked out onto the sidewalk. They’d have to wait for a table to open up. Daphne shook her head. The way business had been when she first opened her café in this meat-obsessed town, she’d never dreamed her little place would ever be standing room only.

  Daphne gazed out the front window. The midday light had begun taking on that wistful sort of look that only comes with autumn. She’d always loved that light, so beautiful and pathetic at the same time. She pressed her lips together and fought off tears. Her own health was fading like that autumn sunlight.

  And that sunlight wouldn’t last much longer.

  CHAPTER 47

  Jim “the Fox” Sullivan threw his head back and laughed at the TV news report. He laughed with his entire body, convulsing from head to toe and stopping only when he began to choke. He wiped the moisture from his eyes, cleared his throat and took a few deep breaths to recover from his excessive mirth.

  Molly hurried in from the kitchen. “What’s so funny, Dad? Must’ve been something good.” She perched herself on the arm of the couch and took a bite of her sandwich.

  Every time the Fox looked at his daughter, tall and healthy and beautiful, he knew he’d made all the right choices. Moving out here to establish his enclave when she was a little girl, and leaving that airhead mother of hers behind in the city. Molly had grown into a smart young woman, and he could envision her running the place some day.

  “Did you hear the news report just now? It’s happening. It’s all happening as I predicted, only worse. I’ve always said GMOs would destroy the food chain, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”

  Molly smiled. “You were right, and I’m glad you were.” She held out her roast beef sandwich. “Our food won’t kill us. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be able to trust what you eat.” She shivered and took another bite.

  “Yeah, it’s crazy out there, with people killing each other. Damned GMOs have wrecked their brains. They’ve pulled the dangerous stuff off the shelves, but without a Plan B. So now everything’s going to hell.”

  “What’s happening now? I couldn’t hear the TV from the other room.”

  “Oh, people fighting in the aisles at grocery stores, shooting wild animals in the national parks. Restaurants closing, farms failing, unemployment going through the roof. And widespread malnutrition.”

  Molly frowned. “God, it’s like the total collapse of everything.”

  “Yep, they screwed the pooch but good this time. Broke the food chain and the economy—as well as allegedly civil society in general. Just shows what lurked beneath it all, doesn’t it?”

  “They should’ve listened to you. Everybody here’s happy and healthy, with plenty of good, safe food.”

  The Fox shrugged. “They had their chance. I can’t tell you how many letters and emails I’ve written to how many presidents over the years. None of them had the courtesy to even respond. Treated me like some crackpot. Idiots didn’t listen, and now look what’s happened. If they’d read my manifesto, the country—the world, for that matter—wouldn’t be turned on its ear right now.”

  Molly finished her sandwich and stood. “Well, how about a nice thick steak for dinner later?”

  “That sounds great. I’ll be plenty hungry by then.” The Fox clicked off the television, rose from his well-worn recliner, and went out to the mud room to prepare for his afternoon farm chores. His enclave’s way of running their farms may be considered old-fashioned, even quaint. But it got the job done and they were having the last laugh now.

  Thanks to his brilliant planning, of course.

  CHAPTER 48

  Ted Warner was a born worrier. But unlike most worriers, he was a man of fearless action. That combination made him a natural for his job as head of the Department of Homeland Security. He could think of doomsday scenarios better than anyone he knew, better than any way-out novelist. And he was as good at solving problems, no matter what it took.

  For years, he’d figured something would happen to the Homeland’s food supply to create a national emergency of epic proportions. Granted, he’d expected the root cause would be terrorism, not some screw-up, but the result was the same: panic in the streets, economic and social turmoil. He shook his head. Terrorists couldn’t have hoped for better, had they been behind it.

  No matter. He’d come up with a plan to get the ship righted again. He already had some ideas. And absolute authority to implement them. The president preferred it that way—plausible deniability if Ted had to do something a little unorthodox to get the job done. Yet another reason he loved his job. He’d been able to implement plenty of new programs to keep the Homeland safe, and no one ever got in his way.

  Someone knocked on his office door. “Come in.”

  In stepped Alex
Russell, head of the USDA. Ted noted with satisfaction that he was right on time for their meeting. Punctuality pleased him. He took it as a sign of the respect due a man with his power.

  “Have a seat.”

  Alex sat in the guest chair, arms folded across his chest and an uncertain look on his face. His posture came as no surprise to Ted. The very name of his department tended to intimidate people. It conjured up all sorts of images in their minds—many of them quite sinister.

  “I know you have a lot going on right now, so I’ll get right to the point. I’m working on a response to the food-chain crisis, and I wanted to check with you on a couple of assumptions before I put the plan into action.”

  Alex frowned and spoke hesitantly. “Sure. What do you need to know?”

  “The way things stand right now, I see two closely related problems. First: the soybeans. The inventory of all existing soy—both beans and soy-based products—had to be destroyed, and seed lines that don’t harbor the faulty valine molecule need to be reestablished, is that right?”

  Alex’s frown deepened. “Yes. I’ve been in close touch with the key BigAg players, and they all agree the fix is perhaps a couple of years out, and then of course we’d be a couple of years’ harvests away from having anything close to a working inventory of actual soybeans.”

  “So the only way to shorten that up would be to already have a line of seeds known to be safe—there’d still be the need for multiple harvests after that to reestablish sufficient inventory, yes?”

  Alex shifted in his chair. “That’s right. There may be some farmers out there with small supplies of safe soy seeds. But the GMO versions had become so popular because of their rapid growth and weed resistance that they mostly squeezed out the non-GMO versions.”

  “Okay, and the second problem is the livestock supply. Once we have safe feeds that won’t re-create the problem, we need to develop livestock lines that haven’t been exposed to the bad soy feed, right?”

  Alex’s shoulders slumped and he let out a sigh. “That’s right. It’s really a knotty problem. Until there’s a safe line of soy, there isn’t much to feed any livestock anyway unless we start diverting corn from ethanol production. Though with fewer people driving, demand for ethanol has dropped, so that may be more possible now than it would have been a few months ago.”

  Ted noticed a slight tremor as Alex ran a hand through his wavy brown hair and continued. “But there are likely only small pockets of unaffected livestock to begin working with anyway. The popularity of that all-in-one soy feed made sure of that.”

  Ted couldn’t think of any other questions for Alex. He’d learned what he needed to know to move forward. He stood and extended his hand.

  “Thanks, Alex. That was helpful.”

  “You’re welcome.” Alex hesitated and opened his mouth as if to ask a question, then pursed his lips and left without another word.

  Ted wrote down a list of the team members he wanted to conduct the operation he had in mind. He only needed to work through a couple of remaining logistics items, brief them, and they’d be ready to go.

  He loved his job. Every problem had a solution. You only had to recognize it and not be afraid to get it done.

  CHAPTER 49

  Stu Walters recognized the look on Ken Barnes’s face. He’d seen it before, when Ken had a new product in the pipeline and had a good feeling about it. He hoped that was the case today. He’d called Ken and Eric Regan, his head of marketing, into his office to discuss progress on the lab-grown meat product.

  “So Ken, how’s it going?”

  “Things are moving along.” He leaned forward in his chair, his arms and legs restless with energy. “I think we’re going to have a near-term and a long-term solution.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re close to production-ready on the simpler version, the one we were already working on before the crisis. It’ll be fairly easy to produce, but it’s only available in, well, sheet form. That’s because we use a flat-matrix base to maximize the surface area for nutrient distribution. The muscle tissue grows quite readily on that.”

  Ken sat back and chewed on his pen for a moment before continuing. “On the one hand, this is an inferior version of the product I would prefer to produce, but in light of the crisis, it may be more palatable to consumers in the near term than it would have been otherwise.”

  Sheets of beef tissue didn’t sound terribly appealing to Stu, even though a good steak already seemed a distant memory. “Aside from the form, how is it?”

  “I’d say the flavor’s close to naturally produced beef, maybe a little milder. The texture’s as similar as it can be, given its quarter-inch-thick profile. This version doesn’t re-create the depth and grain of a natural steak, or the marbling. We inject it with fat cells to give it moisture and flavor.”

  The corner of Eric’s mouth twitched down. “That sounds a lot like the Frankenbeef design that consumers rejected in surveys. Could be a hard sell, even under the circumstances.”

  Ken gave him a sharp look. “I’d love to hold off releasing it until we had a more natural-looking design, but we don’t have that luxury. There’s a dearth of complete protein substitutes out there, what is available is going for sky-high prices that people can’t afford, and malnutrition is already becoming a big problem. Consumers have few options available. We need to put something out there to take advantage of the opportunity.”

  Stu nodded. “I agree. Cornucopia’s bottom line needs something now to help stop the bleeding—and consumers need an additional source of complete protein in the food supply. What’s the ultimate plan for the product, Ken?”

  “I have a separate team working on that right now. Version 2.0 will use a more complex, three-dimensional matrix structure, much like artificial capillaries that will carry nutrients to the muscle tissue as it’s being grown in the lab. We’ll handle marbling in a more sophisticated way, too. We’re aiming for a more natural-looking cut of beef, nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  Eric smiled. “That’s more like it. I can see that being a real winner, especially if it’s a long time before safe lines of natural cattle can be reestablished.”

  Stu tried to ignore a sudden desire for a thick, rare steak. “And speaking of safety, have you run the necessary tests on Version 1.0?”

  “Yes, we’ve been testing extensively. The valine is properly formed. In fact, we’ve verified that all the amino acids are properly formed. We’re taking no chances with this, none at all.”

  “Good. We might end up with some profitable new products out of this crisis. That’s some consolation, I suppose.” Stu still worried that the soybean division might bleed enough to take down Cornucopia Technologies in the end, but maybe they could still mitigate the losses. He stood. “Thanks, guys. Keep up the great work. I need to get ready for my next meeting.”

  He didn’t look forward to his meeting with his CFO, Jamie London. He’d probably need a good, stiff drink after that one.

  CHAPTER 50

  Jack Rawlins kept one eye on his semi outside and one eye on the cashier as he paid for a bottle of full-caffeine Coke and a bag of ranch-flavored Doritos. He was glad there were only a couple of other customers hanging around.

  “Thanks, man.”

  He grabbed his change and hustled back outside into the bright fall afternoon. The longer he left his rig unattended, the greater the danger. He’d stopped for gas, then took care of business and got his snack in the C-store in record time. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching him, then quickly unlocked his rig, got in, and relocked the door.

  Jack set the chips aside for later, opened his Coke and took a good long guzzle before capping it and setting it in the holder. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and belched. Then he opened his glove compartment and glanced at the handgun he kept in there. In all the fifteen years he’d been trucking cross-country, he’d never felt the need to arm himself. But things had changed. You could run
into a crazy anywhere these days.

  And with the way things were, he might as well be transporting a load of pure gold from Fort Knox. A few months ago, he’d never imagined a truckload of farm-raised catfish could make him a target. But now it did, and he had to deal with it. So he’d bought himself a gun, took the necessary training, and got his concealed-carry permit last month. He slammed the glove compartment shut. You couldn’t take any chances.

  Jack started up his rig and eased it out onto the road. He glanced at his GPS. On a nice clear afternoon like this, he ought to be able to make it to Olathe, Kansas, in about four hours. He’d decide where to stop for the night when he got closer to Olathe. He wanted to avoid stopping in Kansas City if he could. Larger cities worried him. He felt more secure staying at a small-town motel where he could keep his rig within view of his room.

  After a few blocks, he took the on-ramp and pulled into traffic on northbound I-35. Jack worked his way up the gears, settling into cruising speed. Not too fast, not too slow. He glanced around. Traffic was moderate, and the GPS didn’t show any particular jams ahead. He relaxed a little in his seat and took another swig of his Coke.

  Jack switched on the radio and flitted among the stations until he found one playing country music. He liked listening to local stations. The commercials gave him a feel for the places he drove through. He tapped his hand on the wheel in time with the song that was playing. That was the best part of driving—other than the pay—being out on the road by himself, the rumble of his rig and the radio keeping him company.

  Something disturbing in his side mirror caught his eye. A huge pickup, maybe an F-250, was in the lane to his left, about seven o’clock from him. He could barely see it in the mirror, at the edge of his blind spot. He shifted his attention back to the road ahead of him. There was another semi a ways ahead of him, and a smattering of passenger cars in the other lanes. Nothing unusual for this time of day south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border.