Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  It had to be a glitch, yet she could find nothing in her software that would cause that kind of systemic impact on the data. Could it be hardware? She checked with the IT center and no one else was reporting any anomalies. She finally got desperate enough to check if there were problems with the data transmission sources—a glitch in satellite Internet hookups could explain why she was getting the usual plethora of info from urban locations utilizing cable, but almost nothing from the hinterlands that relied on satellite. When the satellite providers replied that all systems were operational, she was forced to turn to blogs and chatrooms for more information. After an hour’s fruitless efforts, she gave up the approach—most blogs she could identify in the anonymity of the Web as being posted by farmers didn’t have recent entries, but it was hard to measure the significance of the lack of updating. Weren’t farmers pretty busy this time of year?

  She dove back into her own data—or lack of data—instead, tracing back the wave of cattle mutilations, looking for other correlations. By noon she had found something—not that it made any more sense than the rest of her data. A wave of reports of crop circles showed up in county farm bureau reports six to eight months ahead of the mutilations (not just cattle, she found, but horses, sheep, goats, and even an occasional dog). Then, after the spike of mutilations, nothing. No more reports of animal diseases and a quick dropoff in doctor visits by humans in the same jurisdictions.

  She began to map the affected territories, marking the dates on dotted lines, like the isobars of a massive low pressure system on a weather map. Point of origin seemed to be somewhere in western Nebraska, near the Colorado and Wyoming borders, then spreading in widening circles, except that the dotted lines avoided any urban areas they touched, surrounding the citified pockets and then progressing. She pressed on, working through lunch, both mystified and compelled by what she had found.

  Greg stopped by her cubicle on his way back from lunch.

  “What’s this?” he sniffed, leaning over her to grasp one edge of her map.

  “It’s a pathogen map,” she blurted out—too accustomed from her grad school days to answering questions when asked to ever really be successful at office politics.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Greg. He looked down at her from over her shoulder, his eyes leering while his mouth frowned in disapproval. “A pathogen map would show lines of progression emanating from typical contagion sites and pathways—airports, commuter rail stations, college campuses, and tourist attractions. Cities with airline hubs would typically be infected early on, with passengers in transit spreading the pathogen from town to town.” He dropped the corner of the map in apparent dismissal. “This shows early point of origin arising in the middle of nowhere and marching outward willy-nilly with no regard for interstate highways, geographic features, eco-zones, or much of anything else.”

  “Not everything spreads the same way,” Jill replied, her voice more defensive than she intended.

  “Consultants have such compelling insights,” replied Greg, sniffing twice at the end, apparently for emphasis. He wrinkled his nose. “I suppose you could get an airborne pathogen that mimics some of these characteristics. Maybe an expanding cloud of gas, like in Bhopal, but even that analogy doesn’t really match up with what you have here. Your point of origin isn’t anywhere near an industrial area or even a rail line. Besides, the expansion of a gas cloud wouldn’t avoid the cities—yet that’s what you seem to have.” He reached over her to point at the map and she shrank bank to avoid letting his arm graze her turtleneck or its contents. “There and there and there.”

  She wanted to slap his hand away from the map, but didn’t. Instead she gritted her teeth and responded. “Maybe something in the urban areas keeps it out.”

  “Like what? Fluoridated water? You’re not talking about a vector analysis of tooth decay, are you?”

  She was at a loss. Once again he had provoked her into an analytical discussion before she was fully prepared. “Maybe higher CO2 levels counteract them. There’s more pollution in cities.” She was grasping at straws.

  “Thank God, a reason to promote global warming. Oh, you’re sure to get funding for that.”

  She knew better, but she let him goad her. “Maybe light keeps the pathogen at bay. Cities have streetlights. It’s dark in the countryside.”

  He barked out a guffaw. “Where do the gas-borne germs go in the daytime? Are they hiding, taking refuge? Should we alert the media that the CDC is recommending nightlights to keep the bogeyman away?” She expected him to march off in triumph with the last comment, but he lingered. At least his eyes seemed to be roving over the curves of her map instead of over her curves, as best she could tell, thank God. “What this does resemble is a map for an occupying force.” He inhaled long and hard, prolonging and enlarging his usual sniff. “You land somewhere remote and safe, then expand, avoiding pockets of sustained resistance like cities, but surrounding them and cutting off their supply lines.”

  She looked at her map, the urban areas arrayed like white polka-dots against the gray lines shading the rest of the center of the country, spreading steadily across the land. There was something there, but she couldn’t get a handle on it. “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “Goodness gracious, woman. I wasn’t being serious! Have you gotten any reports of jihadists or commies or little green men falling out of the sky in Nebraska and hiding in barns and sheds until the power goes out and they can take the cities?”

  Jill flushed red. “No.”

  “Any concentration of patients? You know, groups of people who are actually sick?”

  Jill gritted her teeth. “No.”

  “Well, sweetie, patients are what we look for here at the Centers for Disease Control. You might want to focus on looking for a contagion vector that actually makes people sick, instead of wasting any more of our resources ... even if they are only consulting resources.”

  Greg spun on his heel and marched back to his office.

  Jill looked at her map for another minute, before folding it up and sticking it in a desk drawer. Greg was a bore and a jerk and a chauvinist pig, but he was right about this. She was grasping at shadows. And for what? There was no danger. Her software—her apparently defective software—showed at the very most that a wave of good health was spreading across flyover country, albeit on the heels of crop circles and cattle mutilations. At the very worst it would eventually surround all the cities and, if whatever was keeping it out of the urban areas failed, the phenomenon—whatever it was—would merely bring good health to city folk just as it had their country kin.

  There’s no problem if there’s no patient. The creep was right about that.

  No harm, no foul.

  Three days later, just as bizarre and grisly images of strange deaths in the hinterlands began to spread like contagion across the Internet, the power grid collapsed. All the power plants were as far from population centers as economies of transmission would allow: the nuclear plants in case of meltdown or radiation; the smoke-belching coal plants because of pollution; the hydroelectric because of steep terrain; and the wind farms because of a desire to maintain pristine views.

  And when darkness fell and the sodium vapor streetlights no longer hummed to keep the night at bay, the shadows came to the cities and took their victims, not by ones and twos and fives, but by tens, and scores, and more. Soon, the shadow victims began to carve the designs, the designs that called to them and demanded to be put upon flesh, deeper and darker with each passing night. Eventually, the shadow victims carved upon each other until no one was left. Only then did the shadows move across the face of the earth and, finding no survivors, fly up into the dark vastness of space to find the next place to feed and spread the designs of blackness and of death without hindrance.

  No survivors, no foul.

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  Jean Rabe is the author of more than two dozen fantasy and adventures novels and more short stories than she cares to count. She relis
hes editing anthologies—this is her seventeenth—almost as much as she likes tugging on old socks with her dogs (and she likes that a lot). She resides in Wisconsin, where the winters are too long, the summers are too short, and the football and the local countryside are just right.

  Martin H. Greenberg is the CEP of Tekno Books, now the largest book developer of commercial fiction and nonfiction in the world, with over 2,300 published books that have been translated into thirty-three languages. He is the recipient of an unprecedented four lifetime achievement awards in four genres—the Milford Award in science fiction, the Solstice Award in science fiction, the Bram Stoker Award in horror, and the Ellery Queen Award in mystery—the only person in publishing history to have received all four awards.

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