The shuffling grew closer.
He turned quickly, letting out a cry so sharp and frightened that he startled himself. But there was nothing behind him. There was only the voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere, saying his name. “Hector.”
“What do you want?” he cried.
Laughter was the response. Not the loud, eardrum-bursting laughter he would have expected, but a low sibilant snickering that seemed to emanate from the building itself, swirling and echoing around him until it graduated from stereo to surroundsound. He was enveloped in cold, an icy dampness settling over him and chilling him to the bone. He expected an accompanying revelation, assumed he would now be told what was in store for him, but—
It was over.
The church was empty save for himself, and the abandonment left him as devastated as the revealing of punishment would have. He fell forward onto the floor, filled with anguish and despair, sobbing in remorse for what had happened and in fear for what it could bring.
****
Jorge ran breathlessly into the kitchen from the side porch while a still-hungover Cameron was eating breakfast. “Senor Holt! Senor Holt!”
Cameron shot him a withering look. “How many times have I told you to knock first, pendejo? This is my home! You can’t just run in here whenever you feel like it.”
“But Senor Holt! The cows! They are dead!”
“What?”
“The cows are dead!”
His head was pounding, and he wanted to be angry, but there was a triphammer of fear in his chest as he stood up and followed his foreman out the door. All of his cows couldn’t be dead, he knew. Although he realized with dismay that he would not be surprised if they were. None of this surprised him, in fact, and the most frightening thing about what was happening was that he’d somehow suspected it.
He thought about the party last night and shivered.
All of the cattle weren’t dead. But six of them were, and they lay in the yard next to the house in an almost perfect circle, touching head to tail, their legs pointing in toward the center of the circle like the spokes of a wheel, their spines curved to form the outer ring. It was an eerie, otherworldly sight, but he expected nothing less. He glanced around at the gathered crowd and realized that they were looking to him for reassurance. Their faces held nearly identical expressions of confusion and fear. A couple of workers were missing, and though he wanted to believe they were busy elsewhere on the ranch, he had the feeling they had fled.
More men would run away if he didn’t nip this in the bud, so Cameron pushed aside his own fear, put on his toughest face and ordered everyone back to work, telling them in his pidgin Spanish that he was going to call the vet and have him do an examination to find out what had killed the animals. If the meat wasn’t contaminated, they were going to butcher the cows this afternoon.
A few of the men crossed themselves—not a good sign—and though Cameron wanted to yell at them, berate them for being ignorant superstitious peasants, he did not. Partly because he did not want to drive them away.
Partly because he understood their fear.
He glanced involuntarily at the smokehouse, then looked quickly away. He couldn’t tell from here whether the door was still locked, but he wasn’t about to go over and check, not with his workers hanging around. He didn’t want to remind them. The last thing he needed was for the rest of them to run off.
He ordered Jorge to make sure the men stopped lounging around and started doing what he paid them to do. Then he walked back into the house to call the vet.
****
Was this the beginning of an epidemic?
Jose Gonzalez had barely hung up the phone when it rang again. The fourth call this morning. It was another rancher, Cameron Holt this time, with an almost identical story. Holt, too, claimed to have lost six cows, which put the total right now at twenty-four.
This was scary.
In rural areas such as the desert surrounding Magdalena, outbreaks weren’t usually so sudden or spread out, and already he was wracking his brain trying to determine what it could possibly be. In the back of his mind was the nagging specter of a man-made pathogen, an airborne biological weapon that had escaped from some secret lab.
Even though it was New Year’s and he was supposed to have the day off, the veterinarian promised to come out to Holt’s ranch as soon as possible, and he quickly cross-referenced the symptoms that had been described to him, using both the textbooks on hand and several dedicated websites. He found nothing promising, and by the time he got to the first ranch—Cal Denholm’s—Jose was worried enough that he put on a surgical mask.
The six steers were lying on the dirt, bodies stretched out and arranged in the shape of a rectangle, two forming one long side, two another, and one each creating the short sides connecting them. Denholm had said nothing of this, and the sight, while bizarre, eased Jose’s mind. The animals had been deliberately placed—they certainly could not have died and fallen this way by accident—and that meant human involvement. Poison, most likely. In his mind, the chance of an airborne pathogen diminished greatly.