Monster Nation(8)

The house had seen better days. Its clapboard walls looked sturdy enough but its windows had been broken in several places and replaced with butcher paper and duct tape. Pine needles littered the covered porch where a cord of fire wood had collapsed and spilled out into the yard. Broken and rusted farm implements hung from the porch rafters'sickles and mallets and hoes as well as some nasty bits of iron specific to sheep herders, like a mulesing saw and a tooth grinder. The tools look hand-made. 'Hello!' Dick shouted, as loud as he could.

A woman holding a hatchet came around the side of the house and squinted at him. She wore a tie-dyed quilted jacket and her long white hair played around her shoulders in thin strands. Her face looked like a contour map of the mountains around her, filled with lines and blotchy shading. 'You,' she called out to him. 'You from the Health department?'

'Dick Walters, NIH,' he agreed.

'You do me a favor, Walters. You run over to that tree and back.'

Dick laughed but then he looked at her hatchet. The sharp edge was filthy with blood and hair. This was a farm, and animals on farms got slaughtered all the time. Still the sight of it made him uneasy. He swallowed and dashed over to the tree, then ran back to where he had originally been standing.

The old woman nodded. 'Fair enough. They don't move that fast.' She dropped her hatchet on the carpet of pine needles and stomped into her house, her boots crunching in the snow. The door had no lock. Not knowing what else to do Dick followed her inside.





Monster Nation





Chapter Five


MORMON BISHOPS FORBID POLICE INVESTIGATION: Tabernacle Could be Hiding Terror Cell, State Bureau of Investigations Warns [Deseret Morning News,Salt Lake City , 3/18/05]

They left her there for hours, strapped to the bed, unable to move. She didn't grow stiff or uncomfortable but she couldn't even reach over to turn on the television set mounted in a steel bracket above her bed. She tried to sleep but she failed at that, too: her body refused to truly relax, not when she kept hearing screams outside her room. No more gunshots, at least. She tried to calm down and failed.

It left her with a lot of time to think. To try to remember. She pushed hard into the dark parts of her brain, like developments full of houses with no lights on at all and nobody home. In the abandoned suburbs of her mind she tried to piece together anything, anything at all: the faces of her parents, her lovers, her friends. Did she have kids? Did she have a home somewhere? She tried not to color her thoughts with half-hearted guesses, but failed: the clothes she had on, the piercings had to mean something, at least, that she wasn't homeless, that she didn't work in an office, at least. These superficial deductions got in the way, though. They summed up a caricature of a life with no detail, no texture at all. She tried to put them out of mind and remember something. She dug for any shard of memory at all. A birthday party. A trip to the mall. Where she had left her purse. She tried to remember her own name, even her initials.

She failed.

WEIRD: Horse bites dog inWyoming . Apparently the horse was sick and the dog was a jerk. Cats and dogs still not living together. [Fark.com news portal, 3/16/05]

The Blackhawk set down well clear of the prison fence. There were pressure plates and laser sensors and dogs trained to attack without barking in there. Searchlights stabbed out from the guard towers and bathed the helicopter in a brilliant glow. As the rotor spun down Bannerman Clark jumped down to the sandy soil of the outer perimeter and looked for the man he was supposed to meet.

Assistant Warden Glynne of the Florence Administrative Maximum Corrections Facility greeted him with a snappy salute he did not return. Military personnel were not supposed to salute civilians and vice versa andClark already knew enough about Glynne to know the man had never been a soldier.

'Welcome to the Big One,' the Corrections Officer said, unfazed. The man hadn't shaved in days and his tie hung loose from an unbuttoned collar. 'I'm glad you came so quickly. Things are degenerating and we could really use some help.'

'I understand you have a riot on your hands, Mr. Glynne and that it's been going on for three days. I'd appreciate knowing why I'm here, though. Surely this is a problem for a SWAT team or the CBI. The National Guard shouldn't be called in unless''

Glynne spoke over him. 'This isn't a riot, Captain. This is a complete protocol failure. It's been going on for seventy-nine hours. You're here because this is something we've never seen before. Follow me, please.'