Cotton Crossing Read online

  Small town living, indeed.

  “What did you choose this time?” She began the process—turn the book over, run the barcode under the scanner, check title and author to make sure. At least this county library system had decent inventory infrastructure. One of her former classmates was working out in Wyoming, in a tiny place where they still stamped paper cardstock with due dates. Progress had brushed the edge of this particular armpit of America. “Zane Grey. Good choice. And some of the series. They’re really popular.” Hotspur, one of the paperbacks screamed, in lurid red font. A seventies version of a half-naked saloon floozy was hanging onto a guy who looked like he’d stepped off the old Bonanza show they used to have in reruns when Gin was a kid. Romances for men, really, although you couldn’t call them that.

  Military Felon didn’t say a word. Just looked at her. The set, steady expression on his face turned what might have been a kind of sullen attractiveness into something downright forbidding. Was he thinking she was judging his reading material? Of course, this guy never did say anything. Just stood there while she checked his books, then touched the brim of whatever hat he was wearing and hurried away. Maybe he thought he’d get cooties from talking to an out-of-towner.

  She finished the stack. He took each one as she slid it across the counter, and packed it into the bag. She glanced at his pile of returns. Huh.

  For a second she thought of telling him he’d checked out The Lone Star Ranger this time, too. Then she decided to leave well enough alone. “Well, there you are. Due back in three weeks, but I’ll probably see you before then. Have a lovely afternoon, Mr Quartine.” She took her best guess at pronouncing it, as usual, and as usual, got nothing in return. Not even a correction. He just reached up as if to touch his hat-brim, getting sandy hair instead because he’d taken off his cap like a good Boy Scout. Then he turned sharp as a pin, the Military half of her private name for him winning, and headed for the door at a long-legged, limber clip.

  Ginny clicked to the other screen and began checking the returns in. Philly Lou popped her gum again, and Ginny shook her head, her hands moving automatically and her internal countdown to quitting time clicking forward step by step.

  Number Hasn't Changed

  “I’m an idiot,” Lee muttered. “Pure-d grade-A idiot.” His tongue had just stuck itself to the roof of his mouth, while he stood there like a dumbfuck watching her beautiful wrists move, her dark-green, almost black nail polish slightly chipped, her big dark eyes open and welcoming. No wedding ring, but that didn’t mean much nowadays. The braid wrapped around her head wasn’t quite loose, but a few stray strands of buckwheat-honey hair were coming free, and it suited her. No earrings today, though. Usually she wore small, pretty gold hoops and a thread-thin gold bracelet or two. He would bet they were all real metal, too. She was class.

  And today she’d even talked to him. Said his name—well, it would be right there on the computer screen, wouldn’t it, and she’d pronounced it wrong. Today she was in a knee-length herringbone skirt he hadn’t seen before and a black sweater, one with a scoop neck that showed her collarbones. Even those were pretty, for God’s sake.

  He’d never noticed how many of the goddamn songs on the radio were wailing about some broken heart or another. Finally, he switched to AM, but that was full of windbags, pulpit-pounders, and the weatherman talking about snow chances. Any fool with a nose could tell there wasn’t any yet, though there was a bit of iron on the breeze if you sniffed deep. Lee spun the ancient radio dial some more, the craving for a cigarette rising under his skin. He hadn’t smoked since he was twenty, but damn if he didn’t want to go back to it now. A shot or two of something hard wouldn’t go amiss, either.

  Have a lovely afternoon, Mr Quartine. She pronounced it a different way each time, like she was searching for the right one, and he couldn’t even correct her.

  He finally found a news station; a soothing female voice—not as pretty as the library girl’s, but all right—purring along in that educated way.

  She talked that way. Each word distinct, none of them rubbing against each other. Poppa Q would have called that Yankee, and mocked it. Talk like they’s spittin’ the words, boy. You don’t ever trust that.

  According to the news, there was another war in the Middle East. Lee’s shoulders hunched slightly, his chin dropping. That part of the world was a blood fountain, and every goddamn politician wanted to keep it that way. Another weather report, nice mild fall weather, the man said. Back to the female voice, while Lee waited for the turn onto the highway. Something about a big old protest in DC, and last of all, a reminder to get your flu shot. The Center for Disease Control recommends yearly shots for the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. This year’s flu season is expected to be the worst in recent history—

  Well, wasn’t that just peachy. Something about it nagged at him, but he was too busy to chase it down because the little sedan in front of him had slammed on its brakes. Which meant Lee had to as well, and thankfully he had new pads on the truck because it was a mite heavier than those fiberglass imports. A screech of peeling rubber behind him, and he hoped he wasn’t about to get into a smash-up on a Sunday afternoon to top everything off.

  The hold-up was a dead porcupine. The poor thing wasn’t even bloating yet—not enough heat, and its gut was split open. You wouldn’t even want it for meat, though it might do in a pinch. People remembered the lean times around here—at least, the older ones did, and Poppa Q had imparted a deep and abiding respect for the old ’uns in his little grandson.

  Lee exhaled, hard, shaking away all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts. Sooner or later he’d get up the nerve to say something to her. He just had to work himself to it the right way.

  He was coming up on Cherry Hill Road when it occurred to him that sometimes she went across to Mayburn’s Diner after she locked up the Cotton Crossing library. Not that he’d been sitting in his car watching like some kind of preee-vert, as Poppa would call it. He’d just happened to notice her crossing the street two weeks ago, while he propped a book on the steering wheel and tried to fool himself into thinking he was reading a Louie Lammer something or another about a man who got dropped into Russia and had to walk out, or some such foolishness. If a man wanted to sit in his truck and read it was his own damn business, right?

  He decided against hooking the right on Cherry Hill and going back into town. Next week he’d plan it so that he went in the library around closing time, and maybe, just maybe, she’d lock up and head across the street. It might be easier to talk to her in the diner, a simple hello there. Maybe even offer her a cup of coffee, though the swill they had in there was likely to push a big-city girl’s nose into the air sooner than saying turn off the paved road. Motton’s was where the good coffee was, or so they said.

  The radio kept going. Something about a riot in New York, now? He grimaced a little, reached over, and flicked the knob. It died with a squawk and he drove the rest of the way in silence, his lips moving every once in a while as he tried out different sentences.

  Hello there.

  Well, hello.

  It’s the library gal!

  Nothing sounded right, but he could keep trying. If there was one thing he was good at, it was practice.

  * * *

  The little red light on his ancient message machine was blinking. Plenty of people had those cell phones, but something about them just rubbed Lee the wrong way. When he was out, he was out, and if someone wanted him, they could wait until he was good and ready to answer. Besides, he’d heard they could be tracked, and he wouldn’t put it past the government to use the little electronic boxes just like tagging a deer. People wandered around staring at the things, they also drove staring at them. It was enough to make him want to mount something heavy-duty on his truck and hire a gunner.

  Now wouldn’t that be satisfying. No doubt he’d find quite a few takers for the job.

  Two messages. One, a recording about carpet clean
ing. The other was…well. A cigarette-roughened rasp, the snap of command hiding under an easy almost-drawl, and the sense that the speaker was sitting bolt-upright on something mildly uncomfortable.

  Colonel Grandon also sounded tired, for once. “Lee? Pick up if you’re there, son.” A pause. “Number hasn’t changed. Give me a jingle, will you?”

  Lee stood next to the pink Formica kitchen counter his grandmother had set numberless bowls of bread dough to rise on, and for a moment he wasn’t in the familiar manufactured, the holes worn in the carpet from many vacuumings and the thin wood of the cabinets glowing with finger-oil and Murphy’s soap. He was standing on concrete instead, a hot wind pulling at aluminum siding, flies buzzing on deadmeat and—

  “Nosir.” Lee’s own voice startled him, hard and crisp. He almost jumped out of his own damn skin. “That ain’t in the paperwork. Ain’t calling you back.”

  His mouth was dry, his heart going a mile a minute. Why the fuck was the man calling him? It couldn’t be anything good. He wouldn’t pick up the phone just to shoot the shit, would old Colonel Strap-Yo’-Balls-On Grandon. No, there were only two reasons he’d bother and they both boiled down to him wanting something out of one Lee Quartine.

  It was almost a relief to have something other than his own dumb ass to think about, though. Lee stood stock-still for a few minutes, breathing deep and sweating, hearing the wind pick up as the sun headed downslope towards its nightly rest. Days were getting shorter.

  One good thing about not getting a damn cellphone, he could say his number’d changed. Or that the message-tape had malfunctioned somehow. Maybe Grandon would find someone else to bother.

  Yeah, and maybe you’ll talk to that girl at the library after all.

  When he could move again, he headed for the fridge. There was an emergency six-pack tucked on the bottom shelf, behind the pickle jar, and he suspected he needed at least half of it.

  Flu Shot

  Abe Jackson, fifty-two and greying, settled in a familiar, creaking chair with his chest tight and his palms suspiciously damp. The smoked glass wall separating his office from the rest of the floor, a drawback masquerading as a perk, was a blind eye watching him, especially at this hour. Down in the basement the boards were up, frantic motion hurry-scurrying with damage control and strike vectors. Several hot zones had been pushed rudely down the priority list. Putting out fires was an Umbrella specialty; when he’d been young and juicy at this job he’d actually enjoyed it.

  FBI. CIA. NSA. DHS. Alphabet soup, and then there was the Umbrella, the uncle nobody in the family wanted to talk about. Recruiters even managed to make it sound glamorous, until you realized it was a glorified janitorial detail. Scrubbing and shoveling shit all day long and most of the night, too, especially when you had an active Situation.

  The files were scattered across his desk. CLASSIFIED. EYES ONLY.

  And, worst of all, PROJECT STEVE. Chowder to cashews, laid out on paper, someone’s bright idea picked up in a fucking committee. The science was great, but instead of truth, justice, and Captain Fucking America, there were three major cities on lockdown, the media getting restless, and the military suddenly crying in their soup because the civilian testing to build a better soldier was going to eat the entire damn country for lunch and probably everything on the continent for dinner before looking around for dessert.

  He had to put the papers away, button his collar, straighten his tie, and go back to the basement soon. Leadership was important in a crisis, and his was the ass in the fire now, whether he liked it or not.

  New York. Chicago. San Diego. Houston. Whose idea had it been to deploy there? Probably a halfhearted attempt at masking. When dealing with biological agents, though…

  The idiots. The goddamn idiots.

  He flipped through the lab trials. Color pictures of lacerations, taken a few days apart, showing healing with incredible speed. Reports on oxygen uptake, metabolism profiles, stress tests—you could just see the pencilheads creaming their shorts.

  Small-scale testing on enlisted subjects returned results interesting enough that civilian testing was floated as an option, just like with the Penobscot retrovirals. They figured, well, the “flu vaccine” delivery had worked before, might as well do it again, the infrastructure was in place.

  Except someone, somewhere, had fucked up. Or good old Ma Nature had decided the bastards tinkering with her double-helix art needed a finger-singe or two.

  Abe pinched the bridge of his long, narrow nose. Nothing in this pile of paper would offer him a solution. Nobody downstairs knew how bad it was. He’d briefed the two upstream heads who were cleared to take this to the President, who was probably still in shock. That motherfucker was an idealist, and would probably have a stroke if the future dimensions of Abe’s inevitable course of action was, through some clerical error or fucking miracle, revealed.

  He dropped one of his big-knuckled, manicured hands to his left. The drawer whispered open, and the bottle of Wild Turkey glowed mellow amber, right next to a small black case with both numeric and thumb locks. A long, longing look at the case, his grainy, bruise-circled eyes blinking quickly, and he shook his heavy head. Not yet.

  There was also a sleek black rectangle snugged into the side of the drawer. He pressed the power button, it scanned his fingerprint, and his monitor blinked back into life.

  “Only one way to love your country,” he muttered, hardly aware of speaking.

  His cell rattled and buzzed, buried under a two-page inform sheet on recombinant vaccine method and the heftier background checks on the science team behind Steve’s trials. He snatched the phone, glanced at the screen. It was Sienna, and he accepted the call with a swiftly quashed sinking sensation in his gut. “Hey, honey.”

  “Good evening, Abe.” His sunny-tempered wife thought that was hilarious. “I’m about to go to bed.”

  “Tease.” It was getting goddamn hard to compartmentalize. It had been ever since the first reports from the Queens clinic had come in. Spending so long looking at possibilities and seeing the patterns play out got you into the habit, and after a while, you couldn’t shut it off. “I’ll be home soon, sweetheart. Just got to put in one more appearance at a meeting.”

  “The man who never sleeps.” That small tinge of jealousy. Oh, Sienna Jackson was proud of her husband in the hush-hush industry, and for a while it had seemed a delightful game. Abe was lucky to have snagged her instead of some goddamn college-fed feminist who would want to stick a nose in where it didn’t belong, and he knew it.

  “Getting older, though.” Aged about twenty years in the last week, it felt like. “When’s retirement again?” Another one of their private jokes.

  “You tell me.” The sound of sheets moving as she shifted. “When you get home, just whisper it in my ear.”

  “That’s a deal, sweetheart. Love you.”

  “I love you too.” Surprised. He rarely said it first.

  Abe hung up, closed his eyes, and tried not to think about what he was going to have to do. Really, it was simple, and the quicker he did it…

  The cat was well and truly out of the bag, despite all the roadblocks, travel restrictions, media blackouts, and no-cell zones at his disposal. There were at least two confirmed exposures flown out of Newark in the past week, one for London and the second for Missouri. At eighty percent communicability, the spread rate was pretty goddamn geometric. Christ knew how many unconfirmed exposures made it out of LAX or Houston. Still, it was his duty to make sure.

  And Abe Jackson would be damned if he’d let the rest of the world pick America’s bones.

  He tapped his codes on the sleek ergonomic keyboard and straightened the avalanche of papers while he waited for the channel to clear. The papers would go in the safe, though there was really no point. Also shelved would be the question of whether he was wrong. If the infection burned itself out inside the US, the borders would have to be closed hard to keep it from re-entry. If it burned itself out overseas…

&
nbsp; He’d run the numbers so many times they were luminous behind his eyelids every time he blinked. Four out of five of the initial infected in Queens had infected others, rubbing against crowds, talking to neighbors, buying coffee. Carrying around a cloud, like Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons.

  Except Pigpen’s cloud was visible, and harmless enough.

  His monitor woke again as the channel clicked to clear. Abe typed.

  CODE RED GAMMA SCEN 4 (4). You always repeated the scenario number, to cut down on error.

  The cursor blinked. It asked for verification, and he typed in the string.

  The agents were prepped, and had been waiting for go-time all week. Once he sent the word, the ball would roll, and any sad sack running in front of it would be crushed. Nondescript, thoroughly trained travelers would fly out through other airports, carrying the nasal sprays camouflaged as OTC allergy meds. Their destinations were chosen for maximum spread efficiency, and once they arrived they would use the sprays at carefully chosen public places, then…circulate. The 72 hour incubation period was optimal but not guaranteed, and they would spend as much time as possible in proximity to civilians.

  Patriots, one and all, even though they had no idea what would happen once they snorted the goddamn sprays. If one or two of them suspected, or was immune by some freak chance, the others would overlap. The percentages were high enough.