Coming of Age at the End of Days

by Alice LaPlante

  Her hands are shaking on the wheel. Here they are. At last. Close to the epicenter of an operation that would throw the world into chaos. Anna marvels that it’s been under one hundred hours since her awakening in the waves. She has no plans. She has no idea of how she will prevent the End of Days.

  “Must be one hell of a muddy place when it rains,” Anna says as they get out of the car. Lars looks as excited as Anna is anxious. The bare earth that surrounds the house is dry with large cracks making a crazy sort of jigsaw puzzle. Approximately two hundred yards from the house are some buildings that look in better repair, and behind them, a larger structure that could be a barn. Then an enclosed space with perhaps twenty cows penned in. About half are lying down. The temperature has dropped precipitously with the sunset, cold enough to see their breaths.

  Three pickup trucks and a late model Lincoln Town Car, all covered in dust, are parked next to the ranch buildings, away from the house.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Take a deep breath, and let Fred know we’re here,” Anna says. She tries to steady her hands.

  They approach the front door, and, after searching unsuccessfully for a doorbell, Lars knocks, first timidly, then louder. No answer. No sounds of anything within the house.

  They look at each other.

  “You know how loony he’ll think this is, us just showing up?” Anna asks.

  “It’s His will,” Lars says. “Mr. Wilson can’t argue with that.”

  They walk away from the house, toward the first outbuilding. Inside they hear voices, one raised above the others. Lars cautiously pushes the door open. It’s a sort of laboratory, with burners, glass containers on counters, cartons piled on shelves. In one corner of the long room, four large freezers. Stainless steel everywhere, like a restaurant kitchen.

  Three men are gathered around a tall table. One of them has his eyes to a device resembling the microscope from Anna’s biology class, but instead of just one eyepiece, it had two, one for each eye. The man is peering into the tubes and counting.

  “Two, three, five . . . I count eight!” Fred Wilson, dressed in perfectly creased jeans and a button-down shirt, looking as dapper as he had in California. Incongruous given the setting.

  At that, the other two men give whistles of admiration. “Great catch!” says the younger one. Unlike Fred Wilson, he’s dressed for the farmyard, with work-worn jeans and a flannel shirt.

  “Whooee!” says Fred Wilson, and pumps his fist into the air. “Most if not all of them viable, I’d guess.”

  “Not a bad haul,” says the youngest.

  “You said it,” Fred Wilson responds, straightening up. “Okay, Richard, get these into nitrogen and labeled. Put them in 3a. I have high hopes for no. 3. Our friends in Jerusalem should be very happy. Good times are here again!”

  He sees Anna and Lars and abruptly stops talking. The other two men swing around.

  Lars is standing in front of Anna, and quick to take control. He sticks out his hand. “Mr. Wilson, Lars Goldschmidt. I met you at Reverend Michael’s church in California. The ­Preparing-for-Him congregation.”

  Fred is frowning. He catches sight of Anna. “You look familiar,” he says.

  Anna steps nervously forward. “We’ve been corresponding by email,” she says. “Anna Franklin.”

  “Anna . . . Anna. The name’s familiar. And I recognize your face,” he says, and finally he relaxes into a smile. “Your hair’s longer. It suits you.” Anna tugs at it self-consciously, shrinks into her sweatshirt.

  “So what are you kids doing out here?”

  “We’re here to help,” Lars says.

  “Help?”

  Anna speaks up. “You said in your emails that He needs all the help He can get.” When Fred Wilson looks blankly at her, she adds, “You mentioned couriers.”

  Fred Wilson glances over at the two other men, who have been listening quietly.

  “Richard, go on, get these embryos into the nitrogen. Larry, take Betsy back to the barn. I’ll check on her later.”

  “I thought we also wanted to flush Billie today,” Richard says.

  Fred runs his right hand through his hair. “Let’s get to work, then. Larry, bring Billie to the flushing stall.” He turns back to Anna and Lars. “You can watch, if you’re interested.”

  Then, “Couriers, huh? You’re awfully young. But that might work in your favor. We’ve had some trouble with paperwork lately.”

  He takes Lars and Anna into an adjoining room, empty except for a makeshift stall full of straw in a corner.

  Larry comes through a back door. Before it closes, Anna sees that it leads to the cattle yard. He’s walking in another cow. She’s mostly red, but has white ears and some speckles of white on her back, as if she’s been lightly salted.

  “Billie is several generations away from where Betsy is today,” says Fred Wilson. “But we’re optimistic for her line. We think the generation will give us the results we’re hoping for.”

  “You said in your last email that you’re close,” Anna says. She tries not to show how intensely interested she is in what he is saying.

  “Very close. We’ll keep two of the most promising of ­Betsy’s embryos, transplant them into two of our healthiest incubator heifers. We’ll send the rest to Israel. They’ll be born there, but carefully tracked. If one or more is pure red and makes it to two years without any impurities, bingo, we’ll have the genetic recipe we need.”

  “Your partners in Israel being the Third Temple Commission?” Lars asks.

  “That’s right. Strange bedfellows, aren’t we?” Fred Wilson gives a short laugh as he prepares. He’s pulling up a low metal stool and is hanging a clear bag of some kind of liquid on a tall steel pole on wheels. “Once the fighting ends, and construction on the Temple actually starts, they’ll need many, many Red Heifers to cleanse all their workers. Our job is to provide them.”

  “You’re doing His work,” says Lars.

  Fred puts on a pair of rubber gloves. The other two men are doing the same. “We’re just a cog in the wheel. But an important cog, if I do say so myself.”

  “We agree. And we want to help,” says Lars. “You should use us. We’ve been sent.”

  “Actually, you might be the answer to a little problem we’re having with exporting,” says Fred Wilson. He stops fiddling with the bag of liquid.

  “What kind of problem?” Anna asks.

  “We had a visit earlier this year, from the USDA,” Fred says. “The Animal and Plant Health Inspection guys. The inspection was a bit of a surprise. They weren’t too pleased with our setup here—the flushing of the embryos is supposed to happen in a different facility than the impregnation. So we’ve temporarily lost our certification that gets our shipments through customs.”

  “How could we help?” Anna tries to sound excited, but not overmuch. She is information gathering.

  “Well, young persons like yourself, especially if you dress nicely and act real polite, you’re not going to be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that an adult would be. Neither of you fit any risk profiles.”

  “You’re saying we’d smuggle the embryos into Israel?” Lars asks. He looks thrilled. Anna tries to put a suitable expression on her face.

  “Perhaps. For a while. That’s the only way we can keep our operation going, keep the folks at the Temple Commission happy. Since they sign the checks, that’s important. I need capital to build the requisite facilities. But they want to see how Betsy’s progeny turn out. The embryos aren’t much good to me here. If I can’t get them to Israel, they’re just a novelty. These cows aren’t particularly good for either dairy or eating.”

  While the men are preparing Billie, Fred takes them back into the first long room, to where the large white containers are lined up. He’s still wearing his gloves. “Here, the embryos are frozen, labeled. I’
ve got a generator so that even if we lose power, we’re safe,” he says.

  “This family”—he points to a section of the freezer labeled 2D: Great White Hope—“we thought we’d succeeded in breeding out the white tufts on the ears. For some reason, the ears are always a problem. So we shipped the embryos, they implanted, and out of five embryos, we got one that looked like the real deal. Everyone was thrilled. But in her third year, some impurities showed up on her belly, some white patches. Big, big disappointment.”

  “When do you next need couriers?” asks Lars.

  “Real soon. I want to get them Betsy’s embryos that we just extracted ASAP.”

  “We’re ready,” says Lars.

  “Whoa, cowboy. Just take her easy. One thing at a time. Right now we need to do another extraction, where we take the fertilized eggs, the embryos, out of the cow. Billie’s waiting. It’s actually a very simple procedure. Not surgical.”

  “What if you found the perfect cow and the perfect bull to mate and something happens to one of them?” Anna asks. “What do you do? Start over?”

  “When we get what we think is going to be a genetically important cow or bull, of course, we get as much semen from the bull, and extract as many eggs as we possibly can from the cow,” says Fred. “We freeze it all. Even if every cow in my stable died overnight, and I lost my bull, I’d be fine.”

  Fred gestures toward the freezers.

  “What counts the most is stored here. And we have backup generators, of course. But we’re also almost done putting together a disaster recovery plan that will make our operations fail-safe. I’m transferring half my stock to another ranch with freezing capabilities, in Texas. Another rancher among the faithful. He doesn’t have the skills to do any of this, but he has the freezers. He’ll have a mirror image of my stock.”

  “What about your records?” Anna asks. “From what little I know of genetics, you have to be careful to track everything.”

  “We keep meticulous records. For one thing, we need to for regulatory reasons. The other reason, of course, is that we need to precisely track the genetics of each embryo we extract, freeze, and implant.”

  “It’d be terrible to lose those records,” Anna says.

  “It’d be catastrophic. But every night they’re backed up, off site.”

  An impatient voice calls from the other room. “Fred? Ready and waiting.”

  Fred Wilson leads Lars and Anna back to the adjoining room. “I palpated Billie’s ovaries yesterday,” he tells Larry, who is sitting on a stool next to a reddish cow with white ears. “I estimate only four corpora lutea, so we won’t be getting the same volume as we did from Betsy.”

  Anna and Lars watch as Larry washes and then rinses the cow, then Fred Wilson takes a long tube and inserts it carefully into her hindquarters.

  “This container has been coated with Teflon, like a frying pan, so the embryos don’t stick together. There. You need to get the right mixture of air and water into the uterus,” says Fred Wilson.

  Fred’s hands are surprisingly gentle, his face relaxed as he talks. The quick-pattering salesman has been replaced by a genial country doctor.

  “We start by flushing the uterus and then—easy, now, Larry. Richard, calm Billie down, she’s getting a little agitated,” says Fred, lifting a bag of fluid and hanging it from a hook on the ceiling. “We then examine all the fluid that comes out of the cow’s uterus under the stereoscope. Then it’s a game of Where’s Waldo.” He grins, then starts stripping off his gloves. “Larry, do the cryopreservation. Richard, take care of the certificates. Don’t miss any of the data. They’re keeping a close eye on us. We have to do everything by the book.”

  Fred leads the way into the other room, to the microscope-like instrument, carrying the container of fluid extracted from Billie.

  “How do you know that you haven’t missed any embryos?” Anna asks. “Aren’t they awfully small?”

  “We put three pairs of eyes to examine each searching dish. Here, you be one of them. What do you see?”

  Anna puts her eyes against the stereoscope. At first, nothing. Then she catches her breath. Floating in the pinkish solution are three tiny circles, one almost perfectly round, the two others bumpy around their perimeters. She sees tiny circles within those circles.

  “I found three,” Anna says.

  “I actually saw four, but the fourth is quite small, and its shape is suspect. We look for thick membranes and even cleavage planes. We won’t keep that one. Good job spotting three. You’d be amazed how much you can miss. It’s a tedious job. That’s why we need multiple eyes.”

  Fred claps his hands and gestures to Anna and Lars to follow him. They exit through the laboratory into a completely changed landscape. Black. Pitch black. Since they were last outside, the sun has set and a cloud cover moved in. No stars and not a light generated by man in sight. The already chill air has turned positively frigid.

  “Here,” Fred lights the way with a powerful flashlight. He picks out their car among the other three. “You kids staying at the Comfort or the Quality?”

  “Neither,” Lars says, and pauses. “We were hoping you might be able to put us up.”

  Fred runs his hand through his hair.

  “I don’t see why not. My wife’s out of town, in Lincoln. She’s in a spot of trouble due to some pro-life work she’s been involved in. It’s funny, she got interested in that from helping here, seeing the embryos so small. ‘We think of them as cows already,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we think of them as people?’”

  Lars is yawning, and Anna’s legs are aching from standing so long. “I’ll get you kids settled,” he says. “We’ll discuss logistics for the long term later.”

  52

  ANNA AND FRED ARE SITTING in the living room. She is still marveling at the deep darkness that surrounds Fred Wilson’s stronghold. The light from the curtainless windows slices a bright five-foot beacon into the shadows, then ends abruptly, as if hitting a wall.

  “In the summer that light would be thick with every type of bug you could imagine,” says Fred. “But December’s a sterile month for the flora and fauna around here. Thank God.”

  The room is comfortable. Not overtly luxurious, but money has been spent. A flat-screen television hangs on one wall, wired to speakers in each corner of the room. Fred Wilson is working on a tablet while sitting on the couch. A laptop sits on the dining room table, amidst a pile of papers. The phone rings periodically. Fred ignores it.

  “You’ll hear the phone really start ringing at about 1 am, when Israel wakes up,” he says. “Those are the calls I take. I’ll try to keep it quiet, but don’t be alarmed if you hear noises in the middle of the night.”

  Lars is in bed, which is surprising because he slept so much in the car. Without excusing himself, he went off to the guest room with the twin beds, decorated with staid blue and green plaids. Mrs. Wilson doesn’t seem to have much of a decorative flair, favoring dark colors with busy patterns and the kind of Christian art Anna’s parents had abhorred. Lots of crosses. The kitchen has three calendars from the Valentine Christian Assembly of God. One was marked legislative, one community, one personal. Many of the squares across all three calendars are full. Mrs. Wilson clearly leads a busy life. On today’s date, she’s written Lincoln and underlined it three times.

  “We have to have a conversation, Anna,” Fred says. He pulls up a chair and sits down. “Lars went to bed before I could bring it up with him, too. But we’ll start with you. So tell me. What exactly is going on here?”

  Anna doesn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry, Anna, but you need to come clean about what you’re up to. I can’t harbor two minors who simply show up on my doorstep. We agreed that you were going to come when you were eighteen. But Lars is clearly younger than that.”

  “I’ll be eighteen in five months,” Anna says.

  “W
ell, you’ll be welcome then,” he says. “But you’re not answering my questions. Do your parents know you’re here?”

  Anna ponders how best to answer. “No one knows we’re here,” she says finally.

  “Where do your parents think you are?”

  “Lars’s parents think he’s at a ministry in New Mexico,” Anna says.

  “Yes?”

  Anna isn’t sure she trusts him, so she tells him part of the story. About her parents, and about the original plan, that Lars and she had intended to join his operation eventually, that it happening this way was just an accident.

  She doesn’t tell him about her change of heart in the waves. She doesn’t tell him that she is now, in effect, playing for the other team.

  He is quiet for a long time after Anna finishes talking. Then he says, “You poor kid.”

  Anna squirms. She hates pity.

  “But can we join you? That’s the question.”

  Fred is still gazing upon Anna, his eyes wide, in an apparent attempt to communicate compassion, sympathy. An act, unskillfully played.

  “Too risky,” he finally says.

  She smiles back at him, a smile so patently insincere it hurts her mouth. “But when I’m eighteen?”

  “When you’re eighteen. Yes. You can come back then.”

  “Are you kicking us out tomorrow?”

  “No. No, I wouldn’t do that. We’ll wait until Mrs. Wilson gets back in two days and then have a discussion.”

  “You’re full of common sense for someone who believes the End Days are near,” Anna says. “How do you reconcile all this”—and she gestures around the room, at the entertainment, the gadgets, the electronics—“with the fact that you are actively trying to trigger the Tribulation?”

  Fred considers. He takes his time before answering. “I’m a scientist,” he says, finally. “Not by education, I barely finished high school. But at this point I know as much as any geneticist.” He has a curious habit of patting his hair. He does that now. A mirror hangs on the opposite wall and he is watching himself as he talks, pats, talks, pats. He leans back and crosses one thigh over the other.