But the longer she sat, the more convinced she became that she had to see for herself what was going on with Roland Storm. Convinced that she'd made a positive decision, she changed into a T-shirt and jeans, then traded her sandals for a pair of walking shoes. She could take Porter's ATV partway up the mountain, but she would have to park it at least a mile from Storm's house and walk the rest of the way so as not to be heard.
With purpose in every step, she hurried to the barn and threw the tarp off the ATV.
Ally was nervous as she started up the road. What she was going to do was as intrusive a thing as she'd ever done. She wasn't the kind of woman who butted into other people's business, nor was she a woman who ever passed gossip along. Yet here she was, going to snoop on her brothers and their employer. She hadn't even thought of what she would do if she found something wrong. All of her focus was on just getting there.
Roland was sitting in a corner of the third drying shed, staring at what the Monroe brothers had brought in today. Sap was oozing out of the ends of the stalks, spilling into puddles below the tables. Ants were everywhere, crawling on the stalks and drowning themselves in the puddles. The brothers had told him about the dead animals they kept finding in the field, and Roland knew that unless he did something soon, this devastation was only the beginning.
Last night, after he'd finally gone to bed, he'd had the satisfaction of realizing what he'd done wrong, but it gave him no peace of mind. During the years of his research, he'd only used the leaves, drying them the same way marijuana was cured. Each time he'd started a new phase of his research, he'd simply gone to the field and pulled leaves from the stalks. Not once had he
cut the entire stalk and carried it into the lab. If he had, he wouldn't be facing this runaway disaster. Then again, if he had, he would probably already be dead.
Yesterday he'd learned that the stranger in the old house was an ex-soldier named Wes Holden. But that didn't explain his interest in Roland's business, and he was too bothered by his crop's mutation to delve further. After the Monroe brothers had gone home, he'd taken some of the stalks into the lab, then gone out to the barn and brought in the last of the lab rats he had on site. There was no time to run the proper tests, but if what he suspected was true, then time would be the least of his problems. He'd started by doing a quick-dry process on the leaves, then running his old set of tests on the first pair of rats. The rats had reacted as he expected—first highly agitated, then lethargic to the point of being rendered unconscious before starting the cycle all over again, so he knew that the property of the leaves was still the same.
Then he took another pair of rats and put them in the cage with oozing chunks of the stalks. The inside of the cage was soon coated with the stuff. The rats gnawed on the stalks, their behavior quickly changing to something approaching drunkenness. They staggered into each other, then into the walls of the cage as if they didn't know they were there, all the while snarling and snapping at each other.
But it was the third set of rats that proved his biggest fear was no longer a fear, but a fact. He taped their mouths shut so that they could neither lick nor eat any part of the stalks, then dipped them in the sap, rubbing it firmly into their skin. When they were thoroughly coated, he took the tape from their mouths and set them loose in a third cage. Within an hour, they had begun to gnaw on their own feet and on each other. Blood began to ooze from their eyes and ears, but it was their constant, high-pitched squeals of pain Roland couldn't forget.
They were both dead before midnight.
Roland wasn't certain if they were dead because they'd killed each other, or from blood loss due to the internal hemorrhages they'd both suffered. All he knew was that of the three sets he'd tested, they were the only ones that had died so quickly, proving it was the sap, not the leaves, that held the strongest concentration of Triple H. Roland hadn't created a new drug, he had created a monster. It was the ultimate high that kept on giving and giving until, ultimately, it took the only thing the user had left.
Life.
He thought about the sap that had been all over Danny's and Porter's skin and clothes, and felt sick. They were going to die. He didn't know when, but he knew it as surely as he knew his own name that they couldn't last long.
This wasn't supposed to happen, and he was scared as hell. He looked down at himself. Even though he'd taken extreme precautions, they might not have been enough. He'd worn two layers of clothing into the lab, plus his lab coat and surgical gloves and a mask.
Suddenly he couldn't get out of there fast enough. The sky was scattered with clouds as he ran outside, making it difficult for him to see, but he wasn't going to waste time going back inside to get a lantern. He could see enough to do what he had to do. He hurried to the shed, got a can of charcoal-starter fluid, then hurried over to the barrel he used to burn his garbage. He stripped where he stood, dropping everything into the barrel, including his shoes and socks. The gloves were the last things he removed.
The night was still, the air thick with humidity. He wondered if it would rain again before morning, then wondered why he cared. The harvest was a joke. There was nothing to harvest here but death.
He emptied the can of starter fluid into the barrel, then stepped back a couple of feet, struck a match and tossed it. As it passed over the barrel, the air ignited with a loud, roaring whoosh. Roland felt himself flying through the air backward, then landing on his back several feet away. When he could breathe without choking, he rolled over onto his hands and knees, and quickly crawled out of reach of the flames.
Finally, when he was far enough way to be safe, he stood up, then ran his fingers over his face and neck. The smell of singed hair was thick in his nostrils, and his skin felt as if he'd been out in the sun too long.
"Shit," he muttered, and then ran for the house.
That had been last night, and now here he was in the sheds, breathing air that was probably polluted with Triple H and staring at the blackened grass around the barrel. There was a thin gray spiral of smoke still rising from the ashes.
It was the shoes.
Leather and rubber weren't easy to burn.
Out in the field, Danny and Porter Monroe worked like two madmen, slinging the cut stalks onto the wagon by the armfuls.
When they'd showed up for work this morning, he'd been surprised. Their attitudes the night before had not been good, yet they'd come back. Today, though, there had been a look in their eyes that left him nervous, and a purpose in their behavior he couldn't quite identify. A short while ago, he'd seen them accidentally run into each other out in the field, then throw down the stalks and trade punches.
He couldn't quit thinking about the last pair of rats— the ones that had started gnawing on each other's feet. When the Monroe brothers came back with this last load, he was sending them home. He didn't want to be anywhere in their vicinity when they began to come undone.
The last time Ally had been this far up the mountain, Clifton Nelson had still been alive. But after he'd passed and left his property to a distant nephew who turned out to be Roland Storm, she'd had no occasion to come back. Storm had taken up residence with the attitude that he wanted to be left alone, and the people in Blue Creek, as well as the ones on the mountain, had gladly abided by his wishes.
The ruts left from the recent rain were deep but beginning to dry. Still, the axles of regular vehicles were too far apart to match those of an ATV, so Ally was forced to make her own path along the side of the road, which made the going slow and rough.
Finally she began to recognize landmarks and knew she was close. Reluctantly, she drove the ATV off the road and hid it from sight, then started walking through the woods.
The going was harder than she had imagined. She stumbled often, nearly went down more than once, and before she'd gone a quarter of a mile, had taken a hard fall.
She caught her toe on a tree root that had been uncovered by the recent rains, and went flying. Winded from the impact, she struggled to catch a breath. Only when she was able to draw oxygen into her lungs did she begin to feel pain. Her chin was burning, as were the palms of her hands. Tears shot across her line of vision as she rolled over onto her back and willed herself not to cry.
"Damn stupid foot," she muttered, and slapped the ground with the flat of her hands.
Soon she was up, but the fall forced her to move slower, which only heightened her frustration. Frustration soon gave way to stress, and stress to strain, as she clambered over roots and rocks. She was making progress, but it was painfully slow.
Finally, when she saw the backside of the barn through the trees, she knew she'd arrived. As she paused, a case of nerves shot a dose of adrenaline racing through her system.
She'd done it.
She was here.
Now what?
She stood for a few moments, studying the lay of the land, then decided to move a little closer. If Danny and Porter were supposed to be helping Roland Storm harvest his herbs, then they should be in the field. In any other circumstances, she would have driven right up to Storm's property, then out to the fields and confronted them on the spot. But after the way Danny and Porter had behaved about their clothes, she was afraid.
She took care to stay concealed as she moved past the buildings, then to the fenced-in land beyond. She thought she could hear a tractor running, but the sound was muffled by distance, as well as the trees, and she wasn't sure.
Focused on nothing but seeing Danny and Porter, she all but fell over the dead buck in her path, then stifled a scream that was more disgust than fear. The scent of decaying flesh was strong as she circled it, and she couldn't help wondering why the hunter who'd shot it had left without taking either the rack or the meat. It wasn't until she got a closer look that she realized it hadn't been shot. The animal's face looked as if it had caved in. Over the years, she'd seen plenty of animals brought down for food, but never one quite like this. She vaguely noticed the blood head high on a tree near to the buck, but she had no idea what it meant and kept walking.
Less than fifty yards away, she came upon a dead possum, then, a bit farther on, a skunk. After that, she found a rabbit and three birds, then an owl, then an assortment of small rodents, and she realized that she could smell death in every direction. Also puzzling was the fact that no carnivores were among the dead, and that they had not fed off the carcasses. She couldn't help but wonder what they might know that humans didn't.
The hair on the back of her neck suddenly stood on end. Something was horribly wrong. She couldn't imagine what could be killing the wildlife with such abandon, but whatever it was, she had a bone-deep certainty that it involved her brothers. She began to hurry, desperate to find them. Then, when she finally did, she wished she hadn't.
She saw Danny first, Danny with the broad shoulders and round face and with skin as red as his hair. When he wasn't staggering, he was moving at a jerky, frenetic pace. Porter was on the other side of a wagon, tossing an armload of stalks into the air without aim. Somewhere he'd lost his hat, and he kept swiping at his face with his hands. She frowned as she watched him, thinking that she'd never seen Porter leave the house without shaving, but he must have, because she could see the dark stubble from here. The longer she stood, the more
she began to see she'd been wrong. That wasn't the beginnings of a beard on Porter's face; it was ants. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny black ants.
"Good Lord," Ally whispered, and suddenly looked down at the ground, imagining that they were crawling up her feet and legs, too.
Then, before she could panic, she heard what could only be described as a scream. It was part rage and part pain, and she looked up just as Porter began digging and slapping at his face. When he began tearing off his clothes, she started to shake.
He was screaming and shouting, cursing in obscenities she'd never heard. Danny moved toward him and got a punch in the face for his troubles. Blood spurted. When she saw Danny bend over, then spit out what looked like a tooth, she thought she was going to throw up.
"Oh, God...oh, God...please make them stop."
She didn't know she'd spoken aloud until a bird that she'd startled lifted off from the branches over her head, squawking as it flew.
Immediately, Danny and Porter stopped fighting and looked into the trees. Even though she knew they couldn't see her, she felt threatened.
While she was debating about what to do, Roland Storm appeared in her line of vision. She watched her brothers waving their arms and pointing, then saw Storm pivot toward the trees where she was hiding and realized they'd told him what they'd seen. Granted, it was just a bird taking flight, but if something illicit was going on out there, then they were likely to look into it, and she would be in danger.
To her horror, Storm waved his arms at her brothers, as if ordering them back to work, then began walking toward the woods.