Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  My shadow stretches out in front of me, chased by the setting sun, showing me the way. I place my hand over my chest, feel the weight within my heart, and know that you are with me. I drop my helmet visor, toe the bike into first gear, twist the throttle hard enough that the rear tire screams white smoke, and accelerate toward the horizon.

  RURAL ROUTE

  Donald J. Bingle

  Donald J. Bingle may be a big city lawyer, but as a kid he attended tractor pulls and plowing matches southwest of Chicago, before the suburbs had chased all of the farmers away. In addition to writing stories in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller, and comedy genres for anthologies like Steampunk’d, Timeshares, Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies, Imaginary Friends, The Dimension Next Door, Front Lines, and Fellowship Fantastic, Don is the author of two novels: Forced Conversion and GREENSWORD: A Tale of Extreme Global Warming. Check out his webpage at www.donaldjbingle. com for complete writing information and an update on his most recent novel, a spy thriller. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the International Thriller Writers, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium, and the St. Charles Writers Group.

  Clancy spun the wheel of his John Deere 4755 tractor with the expertise gained by forty years of experience, lining it up to fertilize the last rows of soybeans in the south quarter section, next to the pasture for his small herd of cattle. Downstate Illinois wasn’t really cattle country—the flat land for miles around was all corn and beans, when it wasn’t beans and corn—but Clancy raised a half-dozen cattle on a narrow strip of acreage by the creek. The irregular parcel along the drainage was too uneven from gully-washes for mechanized farming and the natural grazing stood up better to flooding than a commercial crop would. Besides, the beef parade wasn’t for the feedlot boys and professional slaughterhouses; it was strictly for local consumption. Might as well get something out of the land and avoid all the mark-ups from meat processed and put onto Styrofoam platters and wrapped in clear plastic at the Piggly-Wiggly in Mahomet.

  He let his eyes roam over the pasture as he trundled down the edge of the field spraying fledgling bean sprouts with the latest liquid fertilizer—all natural, nontoxic, of course—recommended by the county farm bureau. Three, four ... he rose up a bit from his seat for just a second to look into the washes for the rest of the herd, but not enough to trip the automatic cutoff between the seat sensor and the engine ... yep, five.

  Just five. He frowned and looked back to his task at the tractor, flipping off the feed to the sprayers and slowing down at just the right pace so the dwindling mist fell as evenly on the last few sprouts as it had half a row back. He cut the engine and stood to peer further into the washes. Rufus was missing, yet the gate near the barn was still closed.

  It was a close race as to what gave it away first: the coppery scent of blood on the air now that the spray of fertilizer had ceased; the uneven drone of the flies since the tractor’s engine had rumbled down to nothing but an occasional pop as metal parts began to cool; or the smear of red against the green and gray of the rocky pastureland at the edge of one of the washes gullying toward the creek, the wash with the cloud of insects massed above.

  Dagnabbit! He used the perch provided by the tractor’s cab to jump over the old wooden fence between the bean field and the pasture. He didn’t use barbed wire, but there was a single electrified strand of naked wire across the top, isolated by insulators from the upper rail, to keep the cattle from leaning on the fence and making their way to tastier, more expensive, grazing. He landed with bent knees and made his way to the wash where he knew he would find Rufus. He’d thought even dumb son-of-a-bitch cattle were smart enough not to step into an erosion hole in the gully and break a leg or perhaps gash a shin on a rock and bleed out, but he must have been wrong. Cattle were apparently even stupider than he imagined, or at least Rufus was.

  When he finally got an angle on the scene, he found out just how far past wrong he had been. Rufus hadn’t been stupid; he had been attacked.

  Clancy tried to keep the bile down—after all, he slaughtered his own livestock when the time came—but this was foul and rancid and downright unholy. Rufus hadn’t simply been killed, he’d been mutilated. His leather was sliced into bizarre geometric patterns, his intestines pulled out and coiled into festering loops, his eyes gouged out, and his teeth pulled from his mouth and left in a pile next to a jumble of hacked up meat and organs.

  “God damn them to hell!” Clancy muttered as he stopped heaving his breakfast into the grass and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Them kids have gone too far.”

  Clancy had been vandalized before. When his corn had been trashed late last summer by some suburban yahoos mimicking crop circles they saw on the Internet, he had gotten sympathy, but little concrete action from the county sheriff.

  “Just kids out for a lark,” Sheriff Buntry had drawled. “Your crop insurance will cover it, after the deductible.”

  “And who’s payin’ that? You?” Clancy didn’t wait for an answer before continuing his tirade. “Besides, that ain’t the point. Whole damn township went to hell when McMurtry sold his acreage to that slick, fancy-pants subdivider. I don’t care if them kids is unhappy ’cause they don’t want to be livin’ out here in the sticks. I don’t want’em here either, but they got to learn to get along, not be pullin’ damn stunts like this with people’s livelihoods.”

  “I’ll send an extra patrol down your way when the corn is high, and I’ll see if anyone’s bragging about the deed on their Facebook account, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on anything coming of either one. The suburbs, they’re creeping out to the country. We all gotta adapt.”

  Clancy hadn’t liked Sheriff Buntry’s attitude then and he was sure he wouldn’t like it any better this time around. Truth told, Buntry was a lazy, good-for-nothing politician more than a lawman. The local farmers needed action, not sympathy. Buntry had better do something soon or he’d get booted out of office come next election. Trampling crops was stupid and costly vandalism, but this ... this was violent and depraved. What’s a peaceful, God-fearin’ man supposed to do when sick, black things happen in the dead of night?

  Jill Urbancek leaned back from the flat-panel monitor while the nearby laser printer made a hard copy of last night’s test run of the revamped vector study program. Sure, the Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta already had all sorts of automatic programs tracking disease clusters, outbreak correlations, and pathogen routes, but there was still room for improvement. Her new vector program was the first to use government-mandated electronic filing and coding protocols to get a head start on tracking epidemics in the making. It did so by factoring not only suspected outbreaks from hospitals, but unusual patterns in non-routine appointments with general practitioners across the country. The program even anticipated potential cross-species contagion by relating the patterns with veterinary reports and quarantines handled by the various state and county farm bureaus.

  Despite the relative rarity of cross-species contagion, multispecies epidemics could happen—and they could be devastating. Not just rabies, but Ebola and avian flu. The unfortunate rise of swine flu and the quite nonsensical reduction in ham consumption it had caused had, she was a bit embarrassed to admit, been instrumental in securing both support and funding for her project. When bad things happened, Congress tended to take action, whether they understood what they were doing or it made any sense.

  Of course, if Jill was going to secure permanent funding, the damn program had better start working. Her quick glance at the vector maps onscreen before she hit print had suggested there were still a few glitches to work out. She walked over to the bin, picked up the stack of printouts, and dropped the sheaf onto her cubicle desk with a plop and an audible sigh.

  That was a mistake.

  Greg Keefer, head of epidemiology, sauntered by with an oversized mug of hot caffeine in his hand and a look of distaste on his face. Sh
e knew from experience the look was not caused by the coffee—that was a Jamaican Blue blend brewed up in his own private machine in his spacious office in the northwest corner of the building. Greg pretended to study her printouts from over her shoulder for a few minutes while she pretended not to notice—it was their routine interaction. Finally, he took a noisy slurp of coffee and the needling began.

  “Still having problems with the data stream from the general practitioners, I see,” Greg announced, then gave a dry, haughty sniff—his usual way of ending a declarative sentence. Jill imagined that Greg thought the habit made his pronouncements sound superior, but the affectation was a pretty disconcerting habit for someone whose life work was tracking infectious diseases.

  Jill yearned to disagree with Greg’s pronouncement—not only because she disliked the guy, but because it would mean she had worked some of the kinks out of the system. Unfortunately, his observation was spot on—while the new program worked to identify pathogen vectors in urban and suburban hospitals two to three days ahead of prior analytical techniques, it did nothing to enhance analysis in rural locations. In fact, the latest data dump showed even less going on in the boondocks than had last week’s run. Jill shrugged and did her best to put on a good face: “Country folk are more self-reliant—maybe I need to make some adjustments to take into account that they’re less likely to go to the doctor’s office in the early stages of an illness.”

  “On the other hand, you can usually get an appointment with a country doctor the same day you call.” Greg sniffed again. “Wouldn’t that cancel, or at least ameliorate, the self-reliance delay theory?”

  Greg had a point, but Jill was in no mood to admit it. “By that theory, the veterinary vectors should be similarly lacking, but they’re not.” She pointed to a strong vector correlation that almost seemed to leap out of the page.

  “Garbage in, garbage out,” muttered Greg as he leaned over her shoulder to read the data entries.

  She might accuse the jerk of trying to look down her blouse, but she had taken to wearing turtlenecks to the office after the first day, during which she had encountered both Greg’s over-the-shoulder management style and the frigid setting at which they kept the air-conditioning in the sunny Atlanta offices. “A favorite catchphrase of nonprogrammers to explain anything they don’t understand,” she huffed.

  “My, aren’t we defensive this morning,” replied Greg with an insincere smile. “I’ll have you know I was running punch card programs in Fortran when you were”—he gave her a long up and down look—“still wearing a Catholic girls’ school uniform.” His smile morphed from insincere to leering.

  Jill was more creeped out than when she had donned a Level 4 hazmat suit to study mutation of hemorrhagic viruses in grad school. She narrowed her eyes and gazed right back at him before responding in a cold monotone: “Methodist. Public school.” She flicked her hand on the printout. “Why do you think the input is garbage?”

  Greg didn’t even blink at her response. “General practitioners out in the country aren’t used to coding forms that well—there’s a significantly lower percentage of the population with insurance in the sticks. Veterinarians, on the other hand, have been coding for quarantine analysis for decades. Not to mention that farmers take better care of their critters than themselves.” He sniffed, apparently for effect. “Besides, I wouldn’t put too much stock ... no pun intended ... in that cattle vector.”

  Jill could feel herself reddening—she hadn’t even gotten a chance to look at her data before she had started arguing with Greg. She turned her eyes back toward the printout. “Why?”

  “It’s for cattle mutilations, not for any bovine illness at all.” Greg smirked and straightened. “Apparently there’s a wave of them moving across the Midwest.” He gave a long, expansive sniff and began sauntering back toward his spacious office. “Maybe you should sound an alarm before the farmers start mutilating each other ...”

  Sheriff Buntry turned away from the hideous mess of maggot-ridden meat in Clancy’s pasture. “Don’t know why I needed to see that, Clancy. You coulda just taken a few pictures for the file.”

  Clancy stood his ground. He wasn’t about to make it any easier for Buntry to refuse to do his job. “Ain’t you gonna take the remains?”

  Buntry gave Clancy a fierce look. “What the hell for? You want me to ask Doc Jenkins to perform an autopsy? The man’s a certified coroner, not a butcher. Besides, cause of death isn’t exactly a mystery here. Rufus got slaughtered—knifed up by some kids or a passing motorcycle gang or some farmer looking for the insurance money cause prices are down ... again.”

  Clancy was more disgusted by Buntry than the piles of putrefying meat and bones defiling the gully, and it showed in his snarling, sarcastic tone. “I don’t know. I was just thinkin’ that you might want some evidence, maybe. You know it’s them kids, them juvenile delinquents, from McMurtry’s subdivision. Probably some gang thing from Chicago or East St. Louis, or something.”

  The sheriff rolled his eyes and pulled out his cell phone. He flicked it open and aimed it at the obscene charnel down in the gully, then pressed a button. “Got all the evidence I need, Clancy.” He turned and hefted his bulk toward the squad car. He turned back toward Clancy before clambering in. “You clean up that mess, mind you. It’ll attract critters and create a public health hazard and I wouldn’t want to have to write you up for creating a public nuisance, but I will if I have to. Understand?”

  Clancy gritted his teeth. Damn Buntry to hell. If no one else would step up, Clancy would run against the shiftless bastard himself come the Republican primary next year. He spat on the ground and got himself to the task of cleaning up the crime scene.

  What with the nonsense with the sheriff and all, it was late afternoon before he even started to work on hauling away the detritus of the attack. Worse yet, it was slow, unpleasant work, cutting the remains into small enough segments so he could use his pitchfork to heft them up out of the gully to the flatter portion of the pasture, where he had a wheelbarrow waiting to cart the chunks to the fence line. Then he had to pitchfork the bloody, infested meat across the fence into the flatbed of the trailer he used for hauling hay. As the sun began to dip, Clancy repositioned the tractor to shine its headlights into the pasture to provide some illumination to complete his task. It wouldn’t do to leave the remains outside in the dark, when scavengers would roam.

  It was impossible to aim the tractor lights well, though, not without crushing even more of the soybeans than he already had. The shadows were long and sharp. And the angle of the light was wrong for the task—too high to reach down into the bottom of the gully, where the shade grew into flat black nothingness when the gloaming waned. Still, he kept at it, into the moonless night.

  He was bent into the dark, his pitchfork seeking out a writhing haunch of maggoty beef, when the sharp white light marking the edge of the gully began to flicker, as if a flock of birds had swooped in, blocking the tractor light as they alighted on the field. But the shadows were long and disorganized, and there was no flutter of wings. He stood to look, his eyes blinded momentarily by the beams of the tractor, before the shadows came for him. The blackness engulfed him and he panicked, slipping on the greasy gore of the gully floor and falling into the filth he’d been trying to clean up. Then the shadows descended upon him, trying to force foul, icy tendrils onto him ... into him. At first he thrashed about, seeking escape. He closed his mouth and his eyes hard shut; he threw up his arm to block his nose and his ears as best he could, but he felt the weight of his attackers pressing him down as cold sought any entrance it could gain. He grew dizzy from the lack of air and numb from the chilling shadows assaulting him.

  He could struggle no longer—he needed to breathe. He inhaled the foul, black shadows with an icy, shuddering gasp. The grasping tendrils of the shadows engulfed him, body and soul. He fell, joining the dark void as he was consumed by its ravenous hunger and its dark vision.

  An hour later he ar
ose in the dead of night, his body covered with dried mud and blood and offal. Bits of bovine intestine and teeth clung to his flannel work-shirt. As he embraced the night, a wave of euphoria spread over him to replace the dread and disgust he had felt as he had commenced his grisly task. Suddenly, he understood; he felt at peace. It was all so simple, so easy, so beautiful ... so perfect. The designs in the hides made sense—the shadows had explained them. Now the designs called to him.

  Before the night was out, he had repeated their patterns five more times on the rest of the herd, then boarded his John Deere tractor and hauled the carcasses out to the fields of his five closest neighbors, so he could share his good fortune. Not only was he no longer revolted by the butchery—he reveled in it. It made him feel strong, powerful, energized, and happy, deliriously happy. Hell, even his bursitis was cured.

  In fact, his only worry was that he needed more bodies to spread the word—spread the feeling. He had no more cattle to use, but there were plenty of bodies ready for slaughter over at McMurtry’s subdivision. Human, animal; it made no nevermind. Meat was meat, the bloodier the better. Sure, some would have to die to bring the good fortune to others, but that was the nature of meat, of sustenance. One per family would be enough—he’d focus on the kids. Easier to control, easier to hold while his knife practiced the patterns, dancing and slashing into sinew and guts.

  There was a pattern here, but it made no sense to Jill. In fact, the data dump made no sense, in whole or in part, once she had really gotten into it. It wasn’t just that there was a spike in cattle mutilations moving its way across the Midwest—a tremendously high pulse that plummeted back to nothing almost immediately—but the flow of data following the spike was almost nonexistent, human and animal. Not only did her program not detect any pathogen vectors in the boondocks, it was showing negative vectors—as if the cattle mutilations were somehow curing all disease, all illness, even all congenital and degenerative conditions in the surrounding areas. She was getting almost no reports at all from sources in the affected counties.