A couple of miles on, sweating profusely in the afternoon heat, they veered across the plain toward a cluster of native elms that offered shade and concealment where they could pause a moment and catch a breath away from the glaring sun. But it was an uneasy rest. “We aren’t the only animals that are going to find this place attractive,” Donna pointed out. On a day as hot as this, neither predator not prey would be far from water or shade.
Warily, they made their way through the copse of trees, lingering in the relative coolness. Even small sounds made them jumpy—a twig falling to the ground, a squirrel chattering an alarm. It didn’t matter that the odds of running across any animal in daylight more interested in them than in smaller, easier game would normally be zero. With the smell of smoke and fear in the air, any animal could be provoked into unnatural behavior. Especially animals as unnatural as the ones loose in this unfamiliar terrain.
As they emerged on the other side of the copse of trees back into the glare of the sun, Mike suddenly threw up a protective arm, pinning Donna behind him.
A deep groan to her right set off internal alarms. The muscles in Donna’s stomach tightened in panic. Half-hidden behind a canopy of leaves and branches something big moved. A giant head dipped up and down, scenting the air then tasting the ground. Frozen in place, they listened to the cadence of its growl.
For a heart-stopping moment they knew they had been found. Donna had seen bulls charge for the unlikeliest of reasons. And it wasn’t likely a mammoth or rhino would be any more reasonable under the circumstances.
She held her breath, trying to make herself as small as possible behind the tree at the edge of the plain.
The low rumble cycled into a mechanical hum that rose and fell, and when they dared at last to peer around the tree trunk the oscillating shape resolved itself behind the spreading elm.
A nervous laugh escaped Donna as she and Mike stepped around the tree. The steel horse head of the pump jack nodded in unbroken rhythm, its up-and-down action powering the piston drawing oil from a rich underground basin. A second machine nodded in the distance.
“Who’s afraid of a herd of stampeding oil pumps?” Mike shouted at the machines.
Donna sagged against the elm tree, her muscles unclenching in profound relief, allowing her to take a deep, steadying breath. It was easy now to chide herself for her irrational, foolish fear. The consolation was that she and Mike were feeling foolish together.
Putting the menacing pump jacks behind them, they struck off north once again, looking for help.
Chapter Fifty
IT WAS THE BARBED WIRE FENCE they ran across late in the afternoon that took Donna and Mike by surprise. Cross-fencing was common enough out here, but a few hundred feet of this fence had been torn from the ground. Snapped wires curled into the air and rusted T-posts lay on the land like dead soldiers.
Mike fingered the points on one of the barbs. “Probably even less annoying than thorns if your hide’s as thick as an elephant’s.”
Donna nodded distractedly, but she wasn’t looking at the wire. “I think there’s a house up there.” She pointed to the top of a rise.
“God, about time. I was beginning to think we’d have to walk all the way to Watford City before we found someone.” In comparison, walking a few hundred yards uphill didn’t seem so bad.
The house, once they got to it, appeared to be completely off-grid. No road around that Mike or Donna could see. Not even a driveway. Just a bit of bare ground on which was parked an older-model Chevy pickup with mismatched quarter panels and a John Deere tractor with its trademark green and yellow paint faded into pastels. The house itself had started off as a mobile home, but weathered boards and plywood slapped up around it showed the owner’s efforts to expand the domicile. As shelter it didn’t look too substantial. As a home it looked even less so. As they got closer it was clear upkeep wasn’t top of mind with this owner, and Mike began to worry they might not even have a phone.
“Hello!” he called while they were still a good distance away, realizing these could be the sort of people who might not appreciate unexpected visitors.
The man who stepped out onto the leaning porch was bearded and wiry. His shirtless chest sported a colorful array of tattoos that spilled down his arms and disappeared beneath his belt. It was the shotgun, though, that drew Mike’s attention. Double barrels aimed squarely at him.
“Just looking for a phone or a way into town,” Mike said, spreading his hands upward to show they were empty.
“Don’t got either.” The man didn’t relax his hold on the shotgun. “Go on outta here.”
“But your truck—”
“It don’t run.”
“Surely you have a way to get to town, get supplies,” Donna said.
“Don’t matter none whether we do or not. Disease and pestilence took our babies. There’s fire in the air.” He jerked his chin, pointing over their heads to the smoke on the horizon behind them. “And today I’ve seen God’s messengers laying waste to the land. It’s the apocalypse come. Go and make your peace with the Creator.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do. But we have to get to town.”
“His messengers will find you wherever you are. If they could find us here, they’ll find you, too.”
Mike decided maybe he could get somewhere by humoring the man. “These messengers—can you tell us what they look like? So we’ll recognize them if we see them.”
A shadow passed over the man’s face, though the shotgun didn’t budge an inch. “Bigger than any beast on this earth. Trumpeting like Gabriel’s horn. You’ll see them soon enough. But not here. Not on my land. Go. Leave us to our salvation.”
Donna took a step forward. “Sir, look, if you’ll just—”
“I ain’t sayin’ it again.” The man’s voice went hard, dispassionate. “Get off my land.” He raised the gun sight to eye level.
If the man was crazy enough to think it was the end of the world and the mammoths he’d seen crossing his land were messengers from God, Mike figured he was just crazy enough to shoot the two of them. “OK, OK, we’re gone,” Mike said as he and Donna stepped away.
“Pray!” the man shouted at their retreating backs.
For a moment Donna was certain the man was going to shoot them anyway. Anticipatory chills ran down her spine. She imagined the bullet tearing through her. Wondered if she would feel it or if it would kill her instantly. She sucked at air through lungs clamped tight in fear. Keeping her back to the gun was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. But if he wasn’t planning on shooting them in the back and she turned, that might set him off instead.
They’d walked nearly a quarter of a mile at a decidedly brisk pace when Donna said, “Do you think we’re out of range yet?”
Feeling like Lot’s wife at her critical moment, Mike craned his head around to look back at the house. The man had disappeared from the porch.
For a moment they stared at the dilapidated home and the smoke in the distance that continued to billow skyward.
“Do you think he’s right? About the apocalypse?” Donna asked. “Not maybe the one in the Bible, with a lake of fire and God’s wrath and all of that. But plagues and beasts…”
Mike shrugged. “Personally, I’m ready to buy into the Biblical one. Especially the lake of fire part.” He gestured toward the smoke. “Maybe they should just let it burn.”
“The buildings? The research?” Donna shook her head vehemently. Not that she wouldn’t mind seeing Walt Thurman take the hit, but the rest of the country didn’t need to pay for one man’s greed.
“Hell, I’m talking the prairie, the county, the whole damn state. How else are you going to stop it?”
That rattled Donna. Taken one species at a time or even one small region at a time, VTSE could likely be contained, even without a cure. But with so many susceptible species and as far as it had likely spread already, even if every package of contaminated meat and carton of contaminated milk went untou
ched … God, how were stores disposing of contaminated product? In trash bins where the mice and rats and strays could get to it?
There had been plagues before. Eventually they’d all run their courses. Even the several times Bubonic plague had taken hold and it looked like humanity was doomed, people had outlasted it. And there were humans around when the megabeasts went extinct, so humanity had survived this disease once already. It may have taken a couple of thousand years for humans to reclaim the northern hemisphere, and the deep freeze before the thaw may well have ensured humanity’s survival, but that they did survive meant they could survive again. Still Donna had to admit Walt was right – isolation likely had as much to do with survival as anything else. Pockets of humanity untouched by disease. Plus, given enough time, any mutation that was successful had to continue to have available hosts to succeed in.
At least that was the case for living organisms. Donna understood that maxim of evolution clearly enough. But what of prions, which weren’t alive the same way even viruses were alive? Natural law would seem to favor evolution within the affected species themselves. Perhaps there was some genetic code that didn’t allow variant prions to remake normal prions in their own image. Perhaps Ice Age humans had that capacity or could adapt quickly enough that they didn’t succumb to extinction the way the megabeasts had.
Finding that mechanism seemed far more preferable to Donna than the introduction of a second mutation, which was the research Triple E had sold.
Still, had she been given the choice instead of had it forced on her, would she have opted for injections of PrPVf, the allegedly benign prion Triple E had developed, before it was thoroughly tested? Would she have chosen to risk certain debilitation and early death for something that could either be the proverbial miracle cure or potentially produce even more serious complications and even quicker death?
Hell, of course she would have. Just as she hoped researchers would continue searching for a more natural-state cure after the short-term fix stabilized the immediate population of infected people.
Damn Walt Thurman and damn Triple E Enterprises for forcing her into this and for capitalizing on that hunger to survive at any cost, by any means just to line their pockets with blood money.
And while she was on a personal note, damn them for screwing with her career and killing her dog.
Because, yes, getting back to Mike’s observation, slaughtering millions of livestock alone wasn’t going to be enough. Not now. Companion animals would be next, though trying to enforce that edict in some households wasn’t going to end well for either the owners or the Guardsmen. There were bound to be bloody days ahead.
But even that wouldn’t be enough. Pronghorns, elk, deer, coyotes, foxes, mice, rats … leaving any vector alive meant prolonging exposure and keeping the VTSE engine running. The only way to truly eradicate this disease before it spread to uncontainable proportion—if it wasn’t there already—would be to kill every living mammal in the affected area, burn their carcasses and sterilize the ground on which they moved.
A lake of fire.
But burn every acre of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, and there would still be host animals that would escape, racing through the Badlands, swimming the Red River, crossing the Bitterroot Mountains. There was a reason whole populations of animals died out from disease. And one as insidious as VTSE was going to wring the land, the earth, the world dry of life before allowing it to flourish again.
The enormity of it all was truly sinking in now with Donna. Perhaps if she had been in a bustling city like Bismarck, bombarded with newscasts and in the thick of people with little regard for the lives and industries outside their personal spheres of interaction, rather than here in McKenzie County where life to her had always seemed less plastic, she would have caught on quicker. Or maybe she had simply passed through the first stage of grief and tragedy: denial. What came after that? Anger? And after that?
Donna took a deep breath. After that came bargaining, and it was clear what she would be bargaining for personally. What humanity would be bargaining for to live. What the world would be bargaining for to survive.
But first she and Mike would have to make it back into the world. And as the sun slipped beneath the horizon, there were still many miles to go to accomplish that.
Chapter Fifty-One
MIKE SCOWLED. THERE WASN’T MUCH that had gone right the past few days. Why would he think nature would cooperate tonight? The setting sun did bring welcome relief from the relentless heat, but the moonless sky forced them to stop when they would have gone on. They couldn’t be more than a couple of hours away from a populated area, but the faint slash of the Milky Way and the bright specks that were Jupiter and Venus simply didn’t spill enough light onto the landscape to make walking safe.
His dry throat didn’t make spending another few hours without water appealing, either. There were streams and rivers around, he knew. The Little Missouri to the south and a tendril of Lake Sakakawea to the north with a few rivulets in between. Just not any streams of water they’d run across. At least not any that weren’t dry in high summer. And swallowing smoke back in the lab hadn’t helped.
Of course, he could still be back in the lab, charred to a crispy critter, so that was a consolation. His and Donna’s luck hadn’t been all bad.
Well, his luck anyway. So far. Donna—not so much. He’d played it safe with her last night, even before either were aware she was infected. Working where he did and with the data he did, he was fully up on all the nasty STDs out there and he always had a couple of condoms at the ready. Not that he’d needed many before last night, but simply having them was as much a part of his generation’s mentality as carrying around a phone or packing a toothbrush.
He only hoped his luck would hold out. VTSE wasn’t like AIDS. If the pattern of transmission actually followed the path he and Donna had traced out, then coyotes and foxes and other scavengers had contracted VTSE from the saliva Triple E’s escaped tiger had left behind on its kills. That meant you could get it from simply kissing or drinking after one another. All those myths the CDC had to dispel about sex and AIDS 30 or 40 years ago were now legitimized by VTSE.
The ramifications just from that would be tremendous. But if VTSE were like other prion diseases—chronic wasting disease or mad cow, for instance—the altered prions would remain viable and transmissible for weeks or months after they’d been deposited outside the body. Only a few nights ago he’d read a study where researchers had left the carcass of an elk with chronic wasting disease in a field to decay. For two years the field remained fallow before the researchers introduced a handful of healthy elk who promptly fell ill simply from grazing over the land where the carcass had been.
Two years outside a viable host. Two years of exposure to rain, snow, ice and summer heat.
Two damn long years. And it survived.
No wonder the Ice Age extinction had been so complete.
What did it mean for humanity when so simple and natural an act as a mother comforting a child or a couple affirming their love could quite literally be the kiss of death?
Mike rubbed the back of his cramping neck and squinted toward Donna, the future seeming as dark as the night that closed around them.
Like him, Donna sat on the ground, a large tree trunk at their backs and their bodies angled away from each other to keep an eye on the most area possible. Not the most comfortable sleeping arrangement but certainly the safest given the circumstances. Not that either of them were likely to do much sleeping tonight anyway.
Unlike him, Donna had spent many nights outside in fields with cows and horses that needed her attention. She was used to the long stretch of solitude and the feeling of vulnerability that came as the dark deepened around them. But being used to feeling vulnerable didn’t make it any more pleasant, especially amplified as it was by the circumstances.
Mike, though, had only a few camping experiences under his belt, mainly in the Appalachians and mainly in
campsites frequented by several other scout troops. Solitude and vulnerability had never been a part of those experiences. Nor had encounters with native fauna.
Moving shapes, just at the edge of sight, might have been real or imagined. They might have been grazing pronghorns or foxes simply passing by. Or they might have been cave bears or saber-tooths trolling for prey.
When a sharp howl broke the silence, every sense in Mike’s body jumped, going on hyper alert. And when other voices joined in the yap yap yowl, he instinctively reached for Donna’s hand, though it was unclear whether he meant to give reassurance or take it.
“Coyotes,” Donna said, and Mike could feel the smile in her voice.
“You’re sure they aren’t dire wolves?”
“I’ve lived out here a long time. They’re coyotes.”
“Have you ever heard a dire wolf? They’ve been dead 10,000 years. They could sound just like coyotes, you know.” Mike’s attempt at levity fell as flat as the valley around them and they were left with an even more uncomfortable silence punctuated only by the occasional chirp of a night bird and the odd rustle of leaves.
In the dark, they continued to hold hands, clutching tight, unwilling to give up that touch, that tangible presence of another person sharing the same fortune whether good or ill. Just knowing they weren’t alone lent comfort enough to make it through the night.
Or almost through it.
The eastern horizon held the merest hope of light when Mike, half dozing, caught a blur of darkness to his right, nearly behind them. Almost immediately the shadow creature slipped from sight behind the trees, but Mike knew he’d seen something. Something big. Not mammoth or rhino big, but big enough for concern. A slinking something that wasn’t a deer or antelope. A predator of some kind.
He squeezed Donna’s hand.
Drowsing, she came awake instantly. Feeling the tension in Mike’s grip, she instinctively froze as he pointed toward the darkness behind them.
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