by Jon McGoran
“Who the fuck is this?” Levkov asked, glancing at me, then looking back, recognition in his eyes and a slight smile stretching his mouth. He walked over to Rupp. “What’s going on here?”
“That’s Carrick,” Rupp told him. “The cop. The one Mikhail was supposed to—”
Levkov’s hand shot out and slapped Rupp across the face—not hard, but a bracing blow that rang throughout the tent. My own cheek tingled at the memory of a similar blow. Rupp froze, shocked. The butterflies responded to the sound, wings twitching and fluttering.
“Fuck you!” Rupp squealed. “You can’t hit me. Don’t forget whose operation this is. This is my operation.”
Levkov snatched the gun out of Rupp’s hand. “What have you told him?”
“I … I … nothing.” Rupp put his hand up to his face. He closed his mouth.
Levkov looked over at Leo. “Was he talking?”
Leo nodded slightly, adjusting the hazmat hood so he could see Levkov better. “Just like with the fucking Mexicans.”
Without hesitation, Levkov raised the gun a couple of inches and shot Rupp in the thigh.
A thick glob of blood spurted out of Rupp’s leg and he screamed and stumbled backward, crashing against a large steel cabinet and collapsing onto a pile of sacks of potting soil. Several of the butterflies took flight.
Levkov pointed the gun at Rupp’s chest, and two things went through my head: First, that if I didn’t do something, Levkov would kill Rupp. And second, if Levkov killed Rupp, I was next.
While Leo was adjusting his hood again, I drove my elbow into his throat and ducked behind him. Even as I locked one arm around Leo’s neck, Levkov and the other guy started firing. I could feel the bullets hitting Leo as I pulled him backward on his heels. My wet feet slipped on the floor, and I dragged Leo behind me for cover. The bullets from the handgun wouldn’t penetrate the body, but I hoped the M4 wasn’t firing jacketed rounds. Leo struggled at first, trying to get his feet under him, but after a few hits, he went slack. I found the trigger of Leo’s rifle with my free hand and squeezed it blindly.
Butterflies filled the air with fluttering wings, thickening the gray-green haze of spores drifting in the fans’ currents. By the time I reached the far end of the tent, the return fire had faltered. My feet skidded in the dust as I turned the corner, and I paused behind a row of tables, dropping Leo to the floor, dead. I pulled my gun out of his belt, and kept his, too. When I straightened up, I saw that Levkov had returned with reinforcements and a belt-fed machine gun, maybe an M60. I suppressed a shudder, thinking back to how he had handled me when he was unarmed. I reminded myself I wasn’t scared of him.
At least four bad guys were in the tent now, not counting Rupp. Two of them were coming toward me down the row. I had to resist the urge to set the gun to automatic, but the memory of running out of bullets was fresh in my mind. I aimed carefully and squeezed off two shots—boom, boom—and took them both down. Then I started back down the row, toward the front of the tent. The air was so full of dust and butterflies, I almost tripped over one of the men I had just shot.
I had made it halfway to the front of the tent when two new gunmen appeared at the far end. Apparently, they were unconcerned about their ammunition supply, because they seemed to have no qualms about firing on automatic.
Bullets zipped through the air, tearing through the butterflies and sending bits and pieces of them floating to the ground like dirty snow. I dove into a gap in the row of tables and returned a few shots, first down one aisle, then down the other. The spores stuck to my damp skin. A plague, Rupp had called it. I tried not to think about it, but without much success. I wiped my hands on my wet jeans, leaving a grayish smudge.
During a lull in the shooting, I heard a quiet voice calling my name. “Carrick,” it said faintly. It was Rupp, crumpled against the steel cabinet. His legs were splayed out in front of him, his feet sticking out into the aisle. I looked over at him but didn’t reply.
“Am I dying?” he asked.
He sat in a pool of the blood that seeped from his thigh and from another hole that had appeared in his side.
“Looks like it, yeah.”
“Fuck,” he rasped.
I fired once again down each row. In response, I got two single shots from the two guys on one side and a sustained stream of mayhem from Levkov’s gun. It shredded plants, tore through the wooden tables, and disintegrated countless butterflies.
Rupp touched a finger to the hole in his side. “I don’t want to die.”
I ducked down as another swarm of bullets screamed overhead. “Tell me what the fuck is going on here,” I told him. “And I’ll see what I can do for you.”
I could tell just by looking what I could do for him: not much. But he didn’t need to know that.
I glimpsed Levkov through the foliage, and I took a shot but missed. He returned fire with another barrage. The tip of Rupp’s boot exploded into shreds. He whimpered, but it sounded like fear not pain. Seeing him cowering behind the steel cabinet, though, I realized his position was better than mine. I darted across the aisle to where he was sitting. Grabbing his pant leg, I pulled his feet out of the line of fire.
He reached into the outside pocket of his jacket, took out a bottle of pills, and shook a capsule into his hand. “Here,” he said, holding it up to me.
I looked at it, then at him.
“Take it,” he said. “Hosing you off isn’t enough. Take the pill, and it’ll protect you for two days. Otherwise, with the dose you got, you’re a dead man.”
When I hesitated still, he rolled his eye and took it himself. Then he shook out another one and held it up with one hand while the other hand returned the bottle to his jacket.
I didn’t trust Rupp, but the green spores scared me more than any pill. My hands were still damp, and now they were coated in a thin layer of green. I wiped my finger off on Rupp’s jacket before taking the capsule from him. As I swallowed it, I caught a glimpse of Levkov and took a few shots.
When it was quiet again, I could hear Rupp rambling on. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to himself. “You know, I grew up not far from here. An awkward adolescence.” A brief wistful smile twisted into a grimace. Then his eyes turned dark. “I hate this fucking place, almost as much as I hate these fucking people.”
After the next volley, Rupp called out again, weakly. “Carrick.”
Tears had cut two paths through the thin film of dust that coated his face. I ignored him. The last thing I needed now was to be taking down the final words of the asshole who was responsible for whatever the hell was going on.
“Carrick, you’ve got to stop them.”
Sure, I thought, now that he was on the outside.
“Carrick,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry about your mother.”
That stopped me. I looked over at him.
“That’s why you’re here, right?” he went on. “We tried to save her. We tried to dust her with Mycozene, from the plane, contain it like we did with you. But by the time we tracked her down, she was already in the hospital. She was dying anyway—you know that, right? That’s why it got her so fast, because of the cancer, the chemo, her weakened immune system.… Once it spreads to the brain, it’s too late.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We put the test houses in the middle of nowhere to keep that from happening. But before we incinerated them, one of the Mexicans escaped. It’s not contagious, you know, not person to person. But he must have had spores on him. That’s how your mom got exposed.” He shook his head, sadly. “Just bad luck. She brought the spores to the library. Not much we could do about that. Books can be so dangerous.”
I stopped and looked down at him as half a dozen pieces clicked together. The gun was in my hand, and I closed my eyes and pictured myself placing the barrel against his head and pulling the trigger.
68
But that’s not what I did. Instead, I grabbed him by the collar. “What the hell is going
on here?”
“You’ve got to stop them, Carrick.”
“Stop them from doing what?”
“It’s all my fault.”
“What? Stop them from doing what?”
“It starts out like the flu, kills in a couple of weeks.” He snorted. “Unless you get a mega dose, like you got. Then it’s a few days.” He smiled weakly.
“The flu?” I immediately thought of Nola. It wasn’t MCS at all, it was this crazy plague. Same with all those people swamping the emergency room. “Half the people in town are down with the flu. Are you saying they’re dying?”
He raised a hand and tried to point at me. “They’re sick because of you, Carrick. You and that Mexican. We tried to keep it contained, so no one would know where it came from. So much for that. Not with you tearing holes in the containment, tracking it all through town, shooting at the crop duster.” He shook his head. “But it’ll be released soon anyway, and then it won’t matter.” He stared at his hand as he rubbed his gray-green fingers together. “Once it’s out in the environment, it can’t be undone. It can be cured, but it can’t be stopped.”
“People are going to die.”
He nodded and blew air through his lips. “A lot of people are going to die. But people always die, Carrick. That’s what they do. And the rest of them, they’re going to pay a fortune.” His eyes turned sharp for a moment. “And that asshole out there is going to make billions.”
“This was your plan?”
He smiled proudly for a second, like he was taking a compliment. But the smile faded. He coughed, and a bubble of blood formed on his lips. “That’s how billions are made.”
Once again, I fought the urge to shoot him. “So how were you going to release it?”
He reached up and grabbed my wet shirt, pulling me down to him with surprising strength. “It’s going to be at dawn. As soon as it’s light out. They’ll have to move it up to today.”
“How? How are they going to release it?”
He looked past me, up at the ceiling of the tent. Through the cloud of butterflies and the clear plastic roof, I could see the night sky. It was just starting to show the earliest hints of dawn.
“The monarchs,” he said.
I looked back at him. “Butterflies? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He laughed with a wince. “I know, it’s brilliant, right? They’re cheap, they’re quiet, and they cover a lot of territory. As they flutter down to Mexico and back, the spores will drift down onto half the states in the country and slowly start to grow and spread where they land. A few people will get it early, but it’ll take a year or so before the epidemic begins. By then, this place will be long gone.”
We heard a loud, metallic sproing, followed by the sound of something whipping through the air. Rupp flinched.
“What’s that sound?” I asked.
“Roof cables. The top of the tent comes off. Levkov is letting them out.” Rupp looked worried. “Once the sun comes up they’ll take flight. Then it’s too late.”
The monarchs. I looked around me, at the thousands of butterflies fluttering around inside the massive tent. Their stripes and dots and colors were barely visible through the coating of gray-green spores.
Nola’s words came back to me: “An army on the move across two thirds of the country.” Within a couple of months, they would fly south down the Eastern Seaboard, across the Southeast, west to Texas, and down to Mexico.
“How do I stop it?” I asked Rupp.
He looked at me for a moment, his evil genius brain working hard. “I don’t know. There’s fungicide in the hazmat showers, but not enough. Heat doesn’t kill most spores, but these ones, it does.”
“Heat?”
“Yes, but it’s got to be really hot, like three hundred degrees. That’s their only weakness. That and the Mycozene.”
“Where’s the Mycozene?”
“This is all I have,” he said. He held up the bottle and rattled the pills, then slipped it back into his jacket pocket.
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“Don’t know. Levkov handled transport.”
“What about the corn?”
“Gone. Processed already.”
“Where?”
Rupp shook his head, and his face fell.
There was another loud sproing, and at the far end of the tent, a corner of the roof came opened. “Carrick,” Rupp said urgently. “You’ve got to stop him.”
I couldn’t even see Levkov, but I figured he was in the corner where the roof was opening. I fired a couple of shots in that direction to slow him down if nothing else. Levkov replied with another storm of bullets. The rack of plants next to us disintegrated. Then rounds started pelting the steel cabinet, making as much noise as the gun itself.
Cowering on the floor, I closed my eyes against the noise. Levkov was going to release this terrible plague, and people were going to die. A lot of people. Including Nola. And when Levkov was done, he was going to hunt me down with that big-ass gun.
I spotted a roll of duct tape hanging on a nail next to some gardening tools. It gave me an idea. An idea I really didn’t like. Grabbing the duct tape, I started to tell Rupp to wait right there, but he wasn’t going anywhere. I checked the clip and gave him the rifle instead.
He looked at me, confused. “What?”
“You count slowly to twenty, and shoot once in that direction,” I told him, pointing to where Levkov had been. “Then count to twenty again and shoot again, every twenty seconds. And if anybody but me comes close, shoot him.”
I’d seen Rupp handling a gun and I didn’t think he’d do much good with it, but I didn’t want Levkov to realize I was gone. The clip had about twenty bullets in it. I figured that gave me five minutes. I grabbed the duct tape and a trowel and clambered behind the table next to us.
Rupp looked panicked. “Carrick!” he called after me. “Wait! Where are you going?”
As I tore yet another hole in the plastic wall of the tent and slipped through it, I could hear him calling in a loud, frantic whisper, “Carrick! Don’t leave me here!”
69
The cool night air on my wet clothes and skin was a shock to my system after the stuffiness inside the tent, like jumping into cold water. For an instant, I was stunned. Then I heard another sproing, and a silver cable snapped out overhead, lashing up into the paling sky. It was followed by a crumpling, billowing sound, like a tarp in the wind.
My shoes made squishing noises as I ran along the side of the tent, staying close to the ground. A light fog had formed, and in the darkness, I could see little shafts of light streaming through the bullet holes that speckled the tent: single ones here and there, and then broad swaths densely peppered by the automatics.
As I rounded the corner, I saw that one of the corner supports had been shot completely through, the shredded top of the pole suspended in the air in front of a tattered, gaping hole in the plastic. I slowed and came in close, peering around the edge, looking across the entrance to the tent. No one was out there. They were all inside.
I heard a couple of shots from inside the tent, and through the hole, I could see two of Levkov’s men creeping toward Rupp. I had a decent shot at them, but didn’t want to risk giving away my position. At the sound of a gunshot, they ducked back and a flowerpot exploded next to them. Maybe I hadn’t given Rupp enough credit.
I hurried past the entrance to the tent, and as I rounded the other side, I saw what I was looking for. The gas tank.
I slid once more into the gap between the tent and the gas tank, and lifted the nozzle off its hook. Pulling the hose with me, I squeezed through the hole in the tent. Inside, I paused under the potting table with my back against the torn plastic, and I listened. Rupp fired off his regularly scheduled round from the far side of the tent, and Levkov’s men returned fire. No one seemed to be standing near me. When I pulled the hose taut, it just reached the open space between the rows of tables.
Next came the tricky part
—partly because I risked revealing myself, partly because I had serious doubts as to whether it would work, but mostly because the whole plan filled me with dread. The hose Rupp had used to wash me off was just a few feet away, one end connected to the water supply and the other end near the connection for the sprinkler system.
The intensity of the gunfire was growing, but I couldn’t tell if Levkov and company were stepping it up or if Rupp was panicking and blowing through his ammunition.
I crept out onto the floor, across the aisle, and quietly picked up the loose end of the hose. Crouching flat against the table and as low as I could, I reconnected the hose and the sprinkler connector. Then I unscrewed the other end from the water supply. Water drained out as I pulled that end back under the potting table.
The nozzle on the fuel hose looked to be an inch and a quarter in diameter, and the sprinkler hose was an inch and a half—a closer match than I had expected. I held the nozzle flush to the sprinkler hose and wrapped the connection with duct tape as tightly as possible. Then I quickly covered it with another twenty layers. The gasoline would eat through the adhesive, but I hoped the time it took to get through twenty layers would be time enough for what I had in mind.
When I was done, the connection between the two hoses looked like a big silver ball. I squeezed the handle on the nozzle, and heard the pump kick on. The hose jumped in my hand as the gasoline coursed through it. I jammed the trowel through the handle and used the last of the duct tape to hold it in place.
The connection stayed dry, but I had to fight to stay focused as the fumes from the gasoline enveloped my head. I was having a hard time breathing, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the vapors or from my subconscious skipping ahead to the next stage of the plan.
Climbing out from under the planting table, I looked up and saw the gasoline starting to mist down from the first sprinkler head. The sprinklers were set up in five rows, with a row of sprinklers over each row of tables. As I watched, the second sprinkler started misting, then the third.
