Gonzalez did not respond.
Cameron frowned. “Did you even send that stuff to a lab?” he demanded. He suddenly had the sneaking suspicion that the little beaner was lying to him, and the thought made him furious. He was tempted to just sweep his hand across the counter to his left and knock all of Gonzalez’s veterinary implements to the floor, but he restrained himself.
“Of course,” the vet said.
“God didn’t tell you to pray about it instead?”
“I told you. I am waiting for the results. As soon as they come in, I will let you know. Yours are not the only animals that died, you know. I collected samples from all of the affected ranches.”
Cameron didn’t believe him. What the vet said was logical, reasonable and might very well be true, but it sounded like a lie to him—or, rather felt like a lie—and Cameron stepped forward, putting his finger in Gonzalez’s face. “Get the results. Today. If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’m coming back. I can’t afford to have any more of my animals die. If they do, it’ll be your fault, and you’ll pay for that.”
The threat was strong, the moment was right, and Cameron strode out, back to the waiting room, where a worried-looking old woman with an orange cat in a cage had joined Rye Callahan and the Mexican guy. The cat was whistling, an odd birdlike sound that made the hairs on the back of Cameron’s neck stand on end and for some reason made him think of the red moths that had flown out of his dead cattle. All four people, including the receptionist, had obviously heard the shouting from the other room, and they stared at him silently as he walked past them.
He pushed open the door and headed into the parking lot, trying to ignore the freakish whistling of the cat. But the tune stayed with him, stuck in his head, and by the time he drove back to the ranch, he was whistling it himself.
****
Cameron Holt was the last straw.
Jose Gonzalez had been thinking about leaving Magdalena ever since he’d learned what had happened New Year’s Eve, but it was Holt who made up his mind for him. No job was worth this risk. Not just the physical risk, but the risk to his soul. God was angry at Magdalena, and the sooner he got out of here the better. There was always need for a good livestock vet. He could get a job anywhere there were farms or ranches. He didn’t need to stay here. Sure, he liked the area, and he’d made a lot of friends, but things were going bad, and they were going bad fast.
On a practical level, his cell phone reception, which had been hit and miss, was now almost exclusively miss. WiFi no longer seemed to work, and even the DSL line in his office was out more often than not. He’d been relying on dial-up for his computer, which was slow under the best of circumstances, and in the case of looking up information for medical emergencies, of which there’d been more than a few the past week, was almost completely useless.
There was a power here that was interrupting all of these devices.
The same power that was creating monsters.
For it was not only the ranchers who were affected now. The problems were spreading. He’d seen pets in the last few days that exhibited symptoms and behavior he had not only never encountered before but had never imagined before, pets that were not merely ill but that had been transformed: a suddenly hairless German shepherd that had given birth to a macaw, a rabbit whose ears had fallen off and been replaced by horns.
Maybe he could have gotten a jump on all this, maybe he’d had the opportunity to nip it in the bud, but Holt was right; he hadn’t sent in the samples to be analyzed. He couldn’t. Because the petri dishes had fallen on the floor once he’d gotten them back to his office. Or, to be more accurate, they’d jumped to the floor. Returning from the bathroom, he’d arrived just in time to see the last petri dish spring off the counter where he’d placed it and fall to the floor, its gray goopy contents spilling out and joining the gelatinous mess from the other samples that had slopped onto the tile. The entire thing quivered as though it was alive and filled him with such revulsion that he’d reacted without thinking, holding his breath so as not to breathe what might very well be toxic fumes and pouring a bottle of alcohol on the blob in an effort to kill it. The mass dissolved into a smoky liquid, and he quickly left the room, going to the supply closet and putting on gloves and a surgical mask before returning to clean up the mess with a mop and bucket that he threw in the dumpster immediately afterward.
He’d intended to go back and get some more samples from the bodies of the cattle that had not yet been burned, but then he’d found out what had happened, and he’d been afraid to return. He’d been ducking Holt and the other ranchers ever since, and, knowing this day would come, he had started thinking several days ago that maybe it was time to leave Magdalena.