Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

RED DIRT BY MIRA GRANT

Pallets of bottled water sat stacked against the wall of a storage container, waiting to be shipped on to their next destination. They were a new brand, something hoity-toity that claimed to come from the purest sources on Earth. As if that weren’t what they all said; as if it weren’t pure bullshit, designed to strip-mine the wallets of the rich and indolent. This stuff cost pennies to make, and probably drained some poor community that couldn’t afford to lose its groundwater in the process.

Matthew O’Neil had been a night watchman for seven years. He knew where the cameras were. He knew when the other watchmen came through. Most of all, he knew what was safe to steal — or to allow to be stolen. He never took a damn thing for himself. That would have been a crime and a sin, and his mama didn’t raise no sinners. She’d raised three good, God-fearing boys who just wanted to give back to their communities in whatever way they could.

The men who stood before him now, looking at the water, were practically drooling in their excitement. Clean water was always a good thing, and too often, it cost too dear for the people who needed it the most. The shelters and the hospitals would benefit like nothing going from having this, and the people who’d shipped it here? Who’d abandoned it here? They wouldn’t even notice that it was gone.

“You’re sure?” one of them asked, for the fifth time.

“Bill says it was supposed to ship out months ago,” said Matthew. “I don’t know whether a wire got crossed or whether their original buyer got cold feet, but it don’t bother me none. No one’s watching this stuff. Take it away, and if anyone ever comes looking — which I doubt — I’ll play dumb. Get it where it’s needed.”

“You’re a good guy,” said one of the men, clapping Matthew on the shoulder. He drank in the praise, and watched as the three of them began hoisting water onto their shoulders and toting it away.

God might help those who helped themselves, but there was nothing wrong with giving His hand a little nudge in the right direction every now and then.

Sick people had a smell.

Kathleen had known that since she was a little girl, when her Gram had gone down ill with the cancer, and taken to her bed to sweat the sick out as much as she could. “No hospitals for me, muffin,” she’d said when she caught her granddaughter and dearest love looking at her with concern. “Doctors can’t cut out what ails me, and they’ll just take all we’ve got left to us in the world and not leave you with a penny to call your own. Let me sleep. I’ll get better, if I can sleep.”

Kathleen had known even then that cancer wasn’t like the flu. You couldn’t just sleep the cancer away. Cancer would have its due, and cancer had had its due, putting her Gram into the ground not six months after she’d been diagnosed. Half the town had come out for her funeral. Kathleen had spent the entire thing hiding her face in her mother’s skirts, and all those people had called her shy and delicate and sad, and not one of them had realized that she was furious. Rage was eating her alive the way cancer had eaten her Gram, because where had all these people been when Gram was dying? A dollar from every one of them would have paid for doctors, and tests, and time. Money bought time.

Rich people could afford to get better. Poor people couldn’t afford anything but sleep, and when sleep didn’t cure what ailed them, they’d get a six-foot hole and a good pine box, and someone else would get their feather pillows.

Kathleen had gotten her grandmother’s feather pillows, and then, when the will had been read, her grandmother’s life savings, kept in the bank and hidden from everyone else in the family. Her mother had been the one to take her down to the bank, to hear the number, and to tell her daughter, in a voice Kathleen had never heard before, “You need to pretend this never happened. You don’t have that money. You can’t loan it to me for the grocery bill, or use it to buy yourself a new pair of shoes. That money isn’t real until it’s time for college. Do you understand?”

And Kathleen, who never wanted to see another person sleep the cancer away, had nodded. Had told her “Yes,” even though she hadn’t fully understood — not then, and not for another ten years, not until that money had been the seed that she planted to carry herself all the way to college, and then to medical school after that. No one else in her family was ever going to worry about a doctor taking them for everything they had. Never again.

Now, as she walked the halls of Troy Memorial, heading for her office, she wanted nothing more in the world than to sink into her bed — still loaded down with feather pillows, even if they didn’t smell like Gram anymore — and sleep something else away: exhaustion. Being the head of Oncology for a hospital this small and this strapped really meant being the head of Whatever Damn Well Needs Doing. Over the course of the day she had set two broken bones, talked a pair of children into getting their shots, given prenatal vitamins to Susie from down the block, and helped a young woman get her brother, who was obviously suffering from some sort of overdose, into the exam room. It wasn’t just that she was young, and pretty, and still new enough to be enthusiastic about her work. It was that she came from here.

Every other doctor in this hospital came from Away, that wide and nebulous place outside of Alabama, where people who didn’t understand their way of life tried to make laws defining it. There were people who didn’t want to be seen by anyone but her. She’d come from Here. She understood them in a way that no doctor from Away could ever hope to. So when emergencies came in, even if she wasn’t on call, she was more likely to be called in than anyone else in the building.

Because of all this, and more, it was no surprise when she heard running footsteps behind her. “Kat! Wait up!”

“Phil, no, and no, Phil, and every other variation on that sentence that you can come up with.” She turned, making no effort to hide her weariness. Maybe if he realized how tired she was, he would have mercy for the first time in his benighted life. “I’ve been on shift for twenty-four hours. I’m not a resident anymore! This shit is supposed to stop!”

“I know, I know, and you know I wouldn’t do this unless it was an emergency.” Phil slowed to a stop, shoving his glasses back into place. They had slipped halfway down his nose, giving him the appearance of a genially absentminded professor.

The impression wasn’t too far wrong. Dr. Phil Clines was a general practitioner, and was actually responsible for the sorts of things that Kathleen spent half her time doing. She wasn’t picking up his slack, either — if there was anyone at the hospital who worked as hard as she did, it was Phil. It was just a matter of too many patients and not nearly enough funding keeping them perpetually scrambling for solid ground.

He really did look worried. Kathleen took pity. “What is it?”

“I’ve had three cases in the last week that don’t match up with anything I’d expect to be seeing. You had one of them, actually. Winston Black?”

“Presented with difficulty speaking and tracking conversation, mild motor impairment, and difficulty breathing,” said Kathleen without hesitation. “All signs pointed to a mild stroke. We kept him overnight for observation, and then his family took him home.”

“He died.”

Kathleen froze. “What?” she finally managed to squeak. Apart from his stroke symptoms, which had been reasonably mild, Winston Black was a man in the pink of health. He didn’t smoke, didn’t eat red meat, and ran two miles every morning. She had actually been worried about how healthy he was — paradoxically, the people who had the fewest problems before a stroke could have some of the worst problems after, when they had to adjust to their new limitations. Physical therapy and rehabilitation could restore the bulk of their lost function, but not always. There was no magic bullet where brain damage was concerned.

“This morning,” said Phil. “He was also presenting with early-stage cataracts.”

“Yes, I noted that on my report.”

“Kat, he had galactosemia, and we didn’t catch it, and he died. His heart stopped.”

Kathleen stared.

Phil continued: “I only caught it because something looked off on his blood work, so I dug deeper. There was a child in the family fifteen years ago who died of the same thing.”

“I remember.” Little Suzie Black, less than a year old, and dead because her family hadn’t trusted the doctors who tried to convince them to cut all dairy from her diet — even her mother’s own milk. They’d heard galactosemia as lactose intolerance, and thought the doctors insisting that it was something different were just busybodies, looking to interfere with the way they’d always done things.

Kathleen had been in college when Suzie Black died. It had been in all the papers, and she remembered thinking that it was a death that she could have prevented, if she’d been there to talk to the family, to explain to them what was happening to their daughter. They had needed the local touch. That was one of the cases that had sealed her determination to come home after she had her degree, to work at a local hospital and make sure that things like this would become the anomalies they should have been all along. But Winston…

“That’s not possible,” she said, finding her voice again. “Galactosemia appears in children, infant children, not in adult men. It must have been something else.”

“There’s a family history. He shows the blood markers.”

“I’ve seen him eating pizza with his family! He wasn’t even lactose intolerant!”

“I know how this sounds, but I’m telling you, it was galactosemia, and that’s not the real problem.”

“What is?”

Phil looked at her wearily. “We have two more cases presenting exactly like his.”

Rudy Sanchez was considering the merits of a cold beer, a warm bath, and a bed that split the difference between the two when his phone rang.

His first impulse was to ignore it. He wasn’t on duty, and the number wasn’t Joe’s: for Joe, he would have answered even if the world had been on fire. There were other people who could do everything he could do for the office, and many things he couldn’t do: everyone who worked for the DMS had their own area of specialization. Let someone else mop up the mess for a change. He’d earned the time to himself.

Guilt followed hot on the heels of the idea that he had earned anything. He was still standing, wasn’t he? So many others weren’t. They deserved his full attention to duty, the willingness to serve when he was called upon, no matter what. He grabbed for the phone.

The ringing stopped.

Rudy blinked for a moment, nonplussed. Then he chuckled, half-wry, half-relieved. “That settles that, I suppose,” he said.

Someone knocked on the door.

He was on his feet before he’d consciously decided to move, heading for the sound with long, ground-eating strides. Not fast enough; the knock came again, harder this time, until the entire door shook in its frame.

“I’m coming!” he shouted as he reached the door, unlocked it, and swung it open to reveal two of the last people he’d been expecting to see on his doorstep. He blinked.

Bunny, standing with his massive hand raised for a third round of knocking, looked abashed. “Evenin’, Dr. Sanchez,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you were home.”

“The lights are on, my car is in the driveway, and when I left, I said I was going home,” said Rudy. “Where else would I be? Mars?”

“I hear the weather’s good there,” rumbled the mountain standing behind Bunny. Top was one of the only men Rudy could think of who could make the hulking Farm Boy seem to have been built according to normal human scale.

Just my luck, he thought. I wanted to help the world, and wound up playing the Lilliputian in an action remake of Gulliver’s Travels. Aloud, he asked, “To what do I owe the honor?”

“We have a bit of a problem,” said Bunny.

Nothing about this was normal. Had he been looking for normal, Rudy wasn’t sure he would have been able to find this moment on the adjoining maps. He took a step back, making space for the two to enter. He did not, however, invite them in. If they wanted that particular pleasantry, they were going to need to explain what they were doing there after hours.

Rudy would never have done this if Joe had been on his doorstep. But Joe was his friend, even outside of work, and more important, if Joe had been involved, the world would already have been on the brink of ending.

They came in. “One of the analysts flagged a report from a hospital in rural Alabama,” said Top. “Lots of medical jargon, but one bit that really stood out: they’re seeing a sudden cluster of adult-onset cases of a rare genetic disorder called ‘galactosemia.’”

Any thoughts Rudy had about his disrupted evening dissolved like sugar in water. “That’s not possible,” he said. “Galactosemia is diagnosed in childhood. It’s diagnosed, or you die.”

“Well, we’ve got five cases at a hospital in Troy, Alabama. Started at three a few hours ago. Four of the people involved are related.”

The Dragon Factory. The diseases they’d designed to kill the people whose genetic backgrounds they hadn’t approved of. People like him. “That’s not possible,” Rudy repeated, even though experience told him that it was bitterly, brutally possible. Things like this happened every day, whether he wanted them to or not. “All the agents were caught before they could deploy the viruses. We stopped the release of the bottled water that would prime populations for contamination. We stopped it.”

“Nice ‘we’ there,” said Top with dark amusement. “Doesn’t change the report we intercepted.”

“Joe—”

“Joe’s busy,” said Top in a tone that brooked no argument.

Rudy wondered sometimes whether Joe was aware of how many of his men — of his friends — would gladly die to protect him, even when he didn’t need protecting. He didn’t think so.

“I’ll get my coat,” he said. “You call Dr. O’Tree. If we’re doing this, I’m not going to be the only medical authority on hand. I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“So we’re doing this?” asked Bunny.

Rudy paused long enough to look at him wearily. “Was there ever any question?”

“Kat, we’re up to fifteen cases, and we’ve lost three more.” There was a weary helplessness in Phil’s tone that Kathleen had never heard before, not once. He sounded beaten.

That frightened her.

“What did the CDC say?” she asked.

“They’re sending a team, but they don’t expect to be here before morning. The fact that it’s clustering in families makes them think it’s something environmental, and that moves it down on the priority list. Government funding isn’t what it used to be.”

A chuckle crawled up Kathleen’s throat and escaped before she could bite it back. “Oh, is that what they call leaving the poor to die in their own filth these days? ‘Government funding’? Maybe I should go tell everyone in the waiting room to go home and sleep it off.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

The voice was female, and unfamiliar. Kathleen and Phil turned.

The woman behind them was stunningly beautiful, enough so as to appear to have wandered out of Central Casting and into a medical drama. Her long black hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she was dressed practically, not calling any attention to her curves. She didn’t need to. Even if she hadn’t been the kind of lovely that launched a thousand ships, the fact that she was flanked by a pair of men large enough to have been professional wrestlers would have commanded a certain amount of attention from anyone who saw her.

The third man was of slightly less imposing build, being roughly the height of a normal human being, with dark, tousled hair and a blazer over his button-down shirt. He produced an ID wallet from inside his jacket, snapping it open to show them the badge and snapping it closed again before Kathleen could get more than a glimpse of the credentials inside.

She was about to protest when the man said, “We’re from the government, and our funding is just fine. Please, will you show us your patients?”

Kathleen knew these people were more likely to be from a tabloid looking for a scoop or from a company that thought its products might be somehow responsible for the situation than from the government, but in that moment, she didn’t care. She had people sick, and she knew them: if she didn’t do something, they would go home to “sleep it off,” just like her Gram. They’d all die. Just like her Gram. If trusting these people — if risking them betraying her — meant even a sliver of a chance, then she’d take it.

“This way,” she said, and turned on her heel, motioning for them to follow.

Phil fell into step beside her. “You know they’re probably not with the government. Last time I checked, the American government didn’t base its hiring decisions on ‘could they break kneecaps for the Mob.’”

“I know,” said Kathleen. She felt oddly serene, as if a weight were being lifted from her shoulders. These people wanted her problems? They could have them. Let them pore over the charts and data, let them scowl at lab results that couldn’t possibly exist. She’d go back to the patients. She’d hold their hands and keep them breathing calmly until a treatment was found. “I just don’t care. If there’s a chance that they can help, we’re going to let them try.”

“Excuse me.” It was the woman. Kathleen turned. The woman smiled. “I’m Dr. Circe O’Tree, and this is my associate Dr. Rudy Sanchez. Whether or not you believe we’re with the government, I’m afraid we’re definitely not deaf. I read the report you sent to the CDC while we were on the plane. Can you please walk me through this?”

The shorter man was close behind her, where he would be able to listen as well. Kathleen swallowed a sigh.

“First thing you need to know is that this could be a lot more widespread than we’re seeing,” she said. “People around here don’t think much of doctors, and the symptoms come on vaguely enough that we may have a lot of folks staying home and waiting to feel better until it’s too late.”

Dr. O’Tree frowned. “I heard you say the CDC suspected an environmental cause, due to the family clustering. Have you contacted the police, asked them to check the homes inside the infection zone?”

This time, Kathleen actually laughed. “Oh, because people who don’t like it when they have to go to the doctor are going to react so well when they find the police on their doorsteps. I start sending the cops around, I might as well buy a bulk lot of plots down at the boneyard. No one else will die from this disease, because they’ll all be too busy shooting each other.”

“My apologies, Doctor…?”

Kathleen flushed red. “Dr. Kathleen Abrams. This is my colleague, Dr. Phillip Clines.”

“You’re the head oncologist, aren’t you?” asked Circe. “I saw your name on the directory near the front desk.”

“Yes, but I’m also our… call it ‘cultural ambassador’ to the locals. I grew up here. I know how people think.”

“That’s more important than a lot of people realize, especially when you’re dealing with an isolated population,” said Dr. Sanchez. He sounded almost admiring.

Kathleen relaxed a little. Maybe these people weren’t just here digging for a story after all. “It can be hard to get people who’ve never had the government on their side to understand that doctors aren’t all here to hurt them,” she admitted. “But we’ve made great strides — or at least, we had, before all this. Honestly, I’m hoping the CDC is right and it’s something environmental that just happens to perfectly mimic adult-onset galactosemia.”

“What is galactosemia?” asked Bunny. He put on his best expression of profound puzzlement. “I don’t have a medical background. Use small words.”

“I know someone playing stupid when I see it,” said Kathleen. “But in the simplest of terms, galactosemia is a genetic disorder which stops the body from properly processing galactose.”

“What’s that?” asked Bunny.

“You’ve heard of lactose intolerance?”

“Yeah. I had a buddy in the service who’d get the worst gas you’d ever smelt if he had so much as a piece of cheese. We all used to say that his ass should have been banned as a weapon of mass destruction.”

“Well, lactose intolerance stops the body from properly breaking down lactose. Galactosemia doesn’t do that. Lactose breaks down normally, into glucose and galactose. That’s where the body gets confused. It can’t break down the galactose. It doesn’t know what to do with the stuff, and so it builds up, leading to all sorts of complications. Renal failure, cataracts, cognitive impairment, neurological impairment—”

“You just said that,” said Bunny.

“No,” said Kathleen. “Cognitive impairment impacts the mind. There can be massive learning disabilities and delays as a consequence of this condition. Neurological impairment tends to manifest itself as tremors, seizures, other issues involving the interface between body and brain. It’s hard to say which kills more quickly. Infants with galactosemia have very poor survival statistics, especially when it goes undiagnosed or is not immediately taken seriously by the family. If they attempt to treat it like lactose intolerance, and continue breast-feeding or otherwise exposing the children to lactose, they can and will die.”

“But it doesn’t manifest in adults,” said Phil, jumping into the silence that followed her explanation. “There’s just no way. This can’t be galactosemia, because if it were, all these people would have died years ago. Decades ago.”

“All right,” said Dr. Sanchez. “I think that’s enough background to bring us all up to speed. Can we see the patients now?”

Kathleen and Phil exchanged an uneasy glance before nodding.

“This way,” said Kathleen.

Sick people had a smell. The smell of the sick people packed into their makeshift isolation ward was sweet and cloying, almost sugary. Twelve of the beds were occupied. Four more waited, empty, for their occupants to come.

“I thought there were fifteen cases?” Rudy made the question mild, looking around as if he expected three more patients to simply appear.

“The others are under three years old,” said Phil. “They’re in a sterile ward, intubated. They’ve all stopped breathing on their own. That’s part of why we think this must be something else that mimics galactosemia — it doesn’t move this quickly. Even in children with the condition, we’d expect to have several months between presentation of symptoms and a total system collapse.”

“Thank you,” said Rudy, and produced a pair of gloves from his pocket, moving forward into the room. Circe and Bunny followed, leaving Top standing next to the two doctors.

The team moved from patient to patient with ruthless efficiency, reading charts, checking pulses, doing everything short of drawing more blood. When they had reached the far side of the room, Rudy looked up and nodded, once.

“These families,” said Top. “What do they all have in common?”

Kathleen jumped. She couldn’t help herself. She’d been so wrapped up in watching the rest of them that she’d managed to virtually forget Top was there.

“They’ve all been living here in town for generations. They’re proud of their self-sufficiency. Don’t like asking for help.”

“Do they attend the same church? You mentioned that they don’t like asking for help. Do they visit a local food bank?” Sensing Kathleen’s reluctance, Top lowered his voice and said, “Help us help you. If there’s an environmental factor, we need to know how to find it. Even if you don’t want to trust us, we’re your best chance at finding a solution for these people.”

“They… don’t go to a food bank, no,” Kathleen said reluctantly. “But there’s a church group that distributes supplies. Things that they say would go to waste, so it’s really a charity to take them.”

“The hospital doesn’t accept any of their donations,” Phil added. “They mean well. They’re also a little fast and loose about the legality of the things they pass around, and we’ve never wanted to risk getting caught in a lawsuit.”

“Understandable,” said Top. “Tell me, does either of you have close contact with the families who receive those donations? Outside of the hospital, I mean?”

“Vince Taylor works at the coffee shop where I stop most mornings,” said Kathleen. “Nice kid. Smart. He’s going places. I know his family gets donations from the church.”

“All right. This may seem like an odd question, but have you seen him drinking bottled water recently?”

“Bottled water? Please. No one around here would waste money on—” Kathleen stopped. There had been that nasty business with the water filters downtown, hadn’t there? They’d stopped cleaning the water properly, and some people had gotten sick. Not bad sick, no, just some minor bacterial infections, but it had been enough to scare a few households into drinking bottled water, at least until the matter was resolved.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I saw Vince with a bottle of water last week. I didn’t even think about it.”

“Was it a brand you recognized? Had you ever seen that kind of water before?”

“I don’t think so, no. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Top nodded grimly. “People generally don’t. It’s interesting. A man switches from Coke to Pepsi, people will notice. Switch brands of bottled water, and it’s just so much background noise.”

“Was the water poisoned? Was there some sort of federal recall?”

Top and Bunny exchanged a look. “Is Vince Taylor one of your patients?”

“No,” said Kathleen. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject. I noticed.”

“That’s fine, ma’am, but right now, I think we need to find Vince and see if he can tell us where he got that water. Preferably before there’s some sort of a public panic.” Top folded his arms. “Can you do that?”

Kathleen was suddenly, terribly reminded of how large these two men were. If they wanted to break her, they could.

But her people needed her. The people she’d grown up beside, the people who believed she could take care of them, they needed her. If these men were government goons sent to make this whole thing disappear, she could work with that. First, she needed to know what “this whole thing” actually was.

“Dr. Clines, please stay here with our guests,” she said, offering Phil a short, tight nod. She wanted him to know that she understood what she was doing. She wanted him to know that she’d be fine.

To her great relief, he nodded back and said, “I’ll notify you if anything here changes.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Gentlemen? Please follow me.”

Rudy glanced up as Top and Bunny filed out of the room. Then he went back to reviewing the chart he was holding, while Circe made notes.

This was bad. This was very bad.

The coffee shop where Vince worked was only a few blocks from the hospital — close enough that it wasn’t unusual to see doctors in their white coats and nurses in their scrubs passing their lunch breaks packed around the tiny tables, desperately trying to consume enough caffeine to stay standing for the rest of their shifts. The place kept hospital hours, staying open late into the night, and profiting accordingly.

The two men behind Kathleen drew considerably more glances than she did, some appreciative, others wary. She looked toward the counter.

Vince wasn’t there.

Kathleen frowned as she walked up to the register and waved for the attention of the woman on duty. “Sandy, when was the last time you saw Vince?” she asked.

“He called in sick Monday and Tuesday, and today, he just didn’t show.” Sandy frowned. “It’s not like him. Anyone else, they’d already be fired, but Vince… You know something I don’t?”

“We have a few of his relatives at the hospital. Looks like it might be food poisoning. He’s probably exhausted and trying to sleep it off, but I’ll go and check on him.” Kathleen forced herself to smile. “I’ll stop by on my way back.”

Sandy brightened, a look of pleased surprise on her face. “You’d do that?”

“It’s no trouble.” Kathleen kept smiling as she turned and walked out of the coffee shop, with Top and Bunny behind her.

The smile died as soon as she was outside.

“The Taylors live about a mile from here,” she said. “I’ll need to get my car.”

“No, you won’t, ma’am,” said Bunny. “We parked on the street.” He pointed to a black SUV that all but screamed government agents, and smirked. “Seemed like the right car for the job.”

“Of course it did,” said Kathleen.

She was now not just leaving with two strange men who might or might not be who they claimed: she was getting into a car with them. If her body was never found, well, that would just about serve her right. But if there was anything she could do to save the people who were filling her hospital, she had to do it. She had to try. That was what she had promised to do when she’d gone away to medical school, and that was a promise she intended to keep.

As if sensing her discomfort, Bunny smiled and said, “We’re pretty good drivers. We almost never get into Vin Diesel — style car chases. And when we do, we always win.”

“Encouraging,” said Kathleen, and followed them to the car.

It was a new model, kitted out with all the bells and whistles that people seemed to expect these days. The seats adjusted themselves automatically when Top started the engine, and the air-conditioning was better than anything Kathleen had experienced as a child. She watched out the window as Top followed her directions to the Taylor house, wondering what her hometown looked like to these strangers, these men who could afford new suits and fancy rental cars and last-minute plane fares.

Growing up poor in Alabama meant hands stained red from the dirt and scabby knees stained the same color by eating pavement. It meant making do and making repairs and making a dollar do the work of ten. It meant pride, because pride might not fill a belly, but it could sure make the sting of hunger seem righteous, like something that had been honestly earned. Kathleen had always hated the rich, happy-looking kids she’d seen on television, because they were nothing like anyone she’d ever met. Where was the red dirt under their fingernails, the stains that could have been earth and could have been blood and were really both at the same time? Where was the hunger, big enough to eat the world? Where was the need?

It was here. It was ever and always here.

They pulled up in front of the Taylor house. It was small, and clean, with a well-weeded vegetable garden out front. Kathleen frowned when she saw Top eyeing it speculatively.

“Sorry there isn’t a truck on cinder blocks out front, to tell you you’ve got the right place.”

He turned his gaze on her. “You’ve got a lot of mad in you. That can be a good thing. But please don’t aim it at me. I’ve never said a thing to make you think I’d be that judgmental.”

Kathleen flushed red. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long week.”

“I’m sure it has.”

They got out of the car, Kathleen leading the way up the narrow path to the front door. She rang the bell, stepping back and waiting. And waiting.

And waiting.

“Let me try,” said Bunny. He stepped past her and twisted the doorknob hard to the side. There was a clicking noise as something inside the lock broke. He pushed the door open, offering Kathleen an apologetic smile. “Looks like it was open.”

“I hope you’re ready to pay for that,” said Kathleen, and stepped past him into the hall.

The smell of sickness stopped her in her tracks.

Sick people had a smell, and that smell hung heavy in this house, sinking into the walls. She took a breath and started forward, Top and Bunny close enough behind her that it should have felt claustrophobic. Instead, she found their presence oddly reassuring, as if by having them there, she could prepare for whatever she might find.

She was not prepared.

The back room — formerly the TV room — had been transformed into a makeshift medical ward, presumably because the family couldn’t afford to send anyone to the hospital, if they even trusted it after the number of people they’d seen admitted over the past week. Four of them were lying there, two on the couch and two on the floor. All four were dead. Kathleen recognized Vince and his sister, Angie; the process of elimination said that the other two must be their parents.

Something scrabbled at the back door. They had locked the dogs out at some point, maybe when they realized how sick they were. That was all that had saved them from being eaten by their own pets, whose domesticated behaviors would eventually have given way in the face of hunger. Kathleen’s stomach did a slow roll. This was so much worse than she could have dreamed. So much worse.

“Look.” The voice was Bunny’s. She turned to see him holding up a bottle of water. The label was something bright and geometric, with no clear brand. He was looking at Top, expression grim. “We missed one.”

“Fuck,” Top said tonelessly. He sounded resigned, as though he had never expected anything better from the world.

“Does someone want to tell me what’s going on?” asked Kathleen.

The two men exchanged a look.

Kathleen sat behind her own desk, fuming silently. These people — these strangers — came to her town and refused to answer questions, refused to provide solutions; refused to do anything beyond going through the Taylor house and confiscating half a flat of bottled water. It didn’t make any sense.

“We’re not from the CDC,” said Dr. Sanchez.

Her head snapped around. “You said—”

“We said we were from the government: that was true,” he said. “We belong to a bioterrorism task force, responsible for preventing and intercepting scientific threats to life as we know it. What I am about to tell you is confidential.”

“People are dying,” she said.

“You have my profound sympathies, but those people are already dead,” said Dr. O’Tree. “They have been exposed to a biological agent which has caused a normally genetic disorder to become communicable over short distances. The good news is, it can only activate when the exposed person is already a carrier for the gene in question.”

“The bad news is, there is no cure,” said Dr. Sanchez.

Kathleen stared at them. Phil spoke first.

“This is bullshit,” he said. “What is this, a chemical spill? There was something in that water, something that wasn’t supposed to get out, and now you’re making up stories to cover your own asses? You may think we’re hicks here, that you can say whatever you want and we’ll just believe you, but we’re American citizens. We have rights. You can’t just use us for your experiments and expect to get away with it.”

Dr. Sanchez looked briefly, profoundly, weary. Kathleen found herself wondering how old he really was, how many rooms like this he had sat in, how many suspicious local medical experts had called him a liar because he’d given them information that they didn’t want and didn’t know what to do with.

She believed him.

It was a small, terrible realization. Small because it came so easily, at the end of so many other, impossible things; terrible because it meant that she now lived in a world where this sort of thing could be believable, where this sort of thing could be real. This could be her reality. It was not a comfortable thought to have. She would have rejected it, if she thought that she could.

“What can we do?” she asked.

Dr. O’Tree looked to her. “You can make them comfortable,” she said. “The normal treatments for galactosemia should slow the progression of the more ordinary aspects of the disease, while the rest continue unabated. You’re going to lose them all. You should accept that now. It will make everything else easier.”

“If this is in bottled water, there should have been some sort of public notice,” said Phil. “A recall. A health and safety alert.”

“It’s not only in bottled water,” said Dr. Sanchez. “There are two aspects to this attack. Bottled water, to provide the activation sequences; in this case, they activated the carrier gene for galactosemia. And the groundwater.”

“What?” Kathleen half stood, alarmed. “It’s in the water?”

“Without the bottled water, what’s in the groundwater is harmless,” said Dr. Sanchez. “My people will sweep the town and recover all remaining bottled water. We think the biological agent was released accidentally. A storm, a crack in a containment tank — or this town was meant to be one of their testing grounds, and was canceled before it could be activated. Whatever the reason, this is a terrible accident. You have our full sympathies. The CDC is already en route, and they will be able to help you with the care these people need.”

“How many more cases can we expect?”

“It all depends on the water.”

There had been six flats of water.

Top and Bunny had been able to recover five, and the three remaining bottles from the sixth. They had been stored in garages and under the stairs at the church soup kitchen. Top stacked them in the back of the SUV while Bunny looked on.

“There’s one good thing about all this,” he said.

“You found something good?” Top asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s not summer yet.”

It took a moment for him to catch Bunny’s meaning. He grimaced. “Hell.”

“Yeah.”

Summer would bring soaring temperatures and increased water consumption. Many more families would have been exposed, if it had been summer. This was a tragedy, but in July? It would have been a disaster.

Top put the last of the water into the back and slammed the hatch. “All done,” he said. “We’ll get this home and hand it off to the techies, and then I’m going to take a long damn shower.”

“Do you think this was the only place?” Bunny asked. “No other leaks?”

Top looked toward the hospital, where even now Rudy and Circe were trying to make the locals understand that there would be no coming back from this. No miracle, no cure; no chance of survival. The bastards at the Dragon Factory had been too damn good at their jobs.

“I hope so,” he said. “I really fucking do.”

The Alabama sun shone down on a red-dirt town, and there was nothing else to say, and nothing else that could be done. Not for the living; not for the dying; not for the dead.

Mira Grant lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest, where her home overlooks a large swamp filled with frogs. Truly the best of all possible worlds. When not writing as herself, Mira writes under the name “Seanan McGuire” and releases a truly daunting number of books and stories during the average year. She regularly claims to be the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people; any time spent with her will make this surprisingly credible. Mira shares her home with two enormous blue cats, a lizard, some very odd bugs, and an unnerving number of books about dead things. She loves horrible diseases and is not always a good dinner companion. Keep up with Mira at www.seananmcguire.com, or on Twitter @seananmcguire. Mira would very much like to show you what lurks behind the corn, but for some reason, the editors won’t let her.