More confident now, he strode over to the bodies and bent down to examine one. The eyes, he saw, were milky and occluded. He was about to ask Denholm if he’d noticed that before the animal died, or if he’d noted anything unusual in the steers’ appearance or behavior, when sudden movement near the lower portion of the steer’s face startled him and made him yank his hand back.
From the cow’s mouth slithered a creature unlike any he had ever seen, a terrible wormlike organism that thrashed in crazed death spasms as soon as it emerged fully into the air. Initially a sickly greenish color, it quickly dissolved into a gray gluelike mess on the dirt.
“What the fuck is that?” Denholm shouted, stepping back and away.
The other animals started moving. Their legs trembled and jerked, their heavy bodies shuddered, and then suddenly those wormlike creatures were everywhere, wiggling out from both ends of each steer, thrashing about as they hit the air, dissolving into slime once they were fully exposed.
The rancher and his cowhands watched from afar, having backed up several yards. Jose, too, moved away. On an intellectual level, he was fascinated by what he saw, but on a human level, he was repulsed and frightened in a way he had not been since childhood. Part of him wanted to stand here and observe, while part of him wanted to run away as fast as his feet would carry him.
Intellect overrode emotion, and he remained in place, watching, until it was all over. From the emergence of the first creature to the dissolving of the last, not more than three minutes had elapsed. It was a frighteningly quick episode, and when it was done, the dirt was wet with sticky gray goo and the six steers were little more than hide-covered skeletons. Whatever those wormlike organisms had been, they’d hollowed out the animals’ insides.
In his bag, Jose had tongue depressors and petri dishes, and he used one of the wooden sticks to scoop up some of the gluelike residue from the dirt. He had no illusions that he would be able to identify its origin, but he wanted to examine the substance anyway. He’d also send a sample off to the lab he used in Tucson. They should be able to provide him with a detailed chemical analysis, although he had absolutely no idea what that would show.
“What the hell happened?” Denholm said. They were the first words any of them had spoken since the dead steers had started convulsing.
Jose usually tried to give comfort to the owners of his patients, to provide them with hope even when he was unsure of an outcome. But this time, he was forced to be honest. “I have no idea,” he said.
It was the same at the other three ranches, though in each case he arrived too late to see what happened to the animals’ corpses. Strangely, descriptions of the witnesses were different at each location. At Joe Portis’ place, yellow spiderlike creatures had spilled from the cattle’s mouths and anuses, again dissolving once encountering air. Jack Judd’s cows expelled multi-legged things that vaguely resembled centipedes, and at Cameron Holt’s, bright red moths flew out of the animals, falling instantly to earth as sticky gray gloop.
Jose took samples at each location.
From the positioning of the bodies, he still believed that someone was involved, that a person had deliberately arranged the cattle into specific shapes, but he had to admit that he had no clue as to how or why. And the presence of those creatures pretty much threw his poison theory out the window.
He had never encountered anything like this.
He was not sure anyone had.
And as he headed back to his office, he kept glancing at the seat next to him, where his petri dishes sat in his black bag, to make sure that some new monster didn’t emerge from the collected slime to attack and kill him as he drove.
EIGHT
Having fallen asleep in front of the television and then gone to bed early the night before, Ross awoke with the dawn on New Year’s day. He’d been planning to make himself french toast but found that he didn’t feel like going to such effort. Instead, he heated water for oatmeal in the microwave, poured himself some orange juice and turned on the TV. It was what he usually did on this morning—eating breakfast while watching the Rose Parade—but something seemed wrong today. He felt listless and low. Even the parade floats looked less colorful than usual. Outside, the sky was leaden, high clouds blocking out both the sun and any trace of blue, the monochromatic grayness mirroring his mood.
The feeling did not dissipate as he went out to feed the chickens and collect eggs. The hens, too, seemed unusually subdued, making very little noise and pecking at their food in a desultory fashion. There were probably half as many eggs to be gathered as on a usual day and when he took them over to the house, the doors and drapes were closed. Ross left the egg basket on the back porch then returned to the guest house. He thought he might go online and do…something. But his laptop was unable to access the internet. That was probably to be expected so far from civilization, but he had had no problem until now, and, on impulse, he tried to access the internet using his cell phone.