“I’m okay.” I didn’t mention that no one had relieved me of my responsibilities. “Have you done psy-meter readings of all the employees?”
“About half so far. Nothing’s redlining and nothing is above human normal.”
“What about talking to the techs involved with the testing? The nonwitch techs. And what about the witches themselves?”
“Yes to the techs and clerical staff. All human so far. All willing to talk about lasers and how they work and how the tests went. Up to two weeks ago. Then they stopped being so involvedfor reasons I haven’t discovered yet. Of the employees on-site, not away on vacation or leave, all fall within normal parameters for species. There’s no background psysitopes on the premises. No psysitope-active employees.”
I pulled the baggie out of my pocket and said, “Would you read this?”
T. Laine shrugged, pulled a handheld unit from her own pocket, and read the baggie. “Nada. Nothing. Why are we doing this?”
“Before I answer, will you read this plant?” I walked to the too-tall nandinas.
T. Laine looked annoyed, but she took a reading. “What the hell?” she said.
I leaned over and saw the results. Total psysitopes were at nearly fifty percent. “Occam drove off with my handheld psy-meter in his car,” I said. “May I borrow yours? I want to take some new readings at the houses of the people who were contaminated.”
T. Laine put the small unit in my gloved hand. Her face was pulled down in worry, but she didn’t explain, saying, “Whatever. It’s been a long day. I need to take off this stinky suit, eat a shower—adonut—and take some downtime.”
Behind her, through the windows, the lights flickered and came back on. I frowned and T. Laine turned to see what had my attention, but the lights inside were back on. “What?”
I told her what I had seen and added, “I thought all these labs and research and development companies were part of the TVA grid administration, on multiple power sources. No electrical outages for them, thanks to the overlapping energy sources.”More than any city in the nation except DC,I thought. I remembered the itchy, irritated feeling of the ground when I scanned it at one point, though the readings all had run together by now.
“Yeah. I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I’m too tired to give a rat’s ass right now.” T. Laine walked away from me, pulling her plastic face shield back in place. I wasn’t sure what rats had to do with the case, but I shrugged and got back in my truck, stowing the borrowed handheld psy-meter 1.0 in the driver door’s side pocket. Sitting in the lot, engine running, I opened up the latest case reports on my tablet and discovered a note to the PsyLED team from someone named Lieutenant Colonel Leann Rettell, which I opened. The e-mail had a.govaddressand was purported to be from an assistant to General David Schlumberger, asking someone from PsyLED to read the patients at UTMC with a psy-meter.
Since Rettell didn’t specifically request the P 2.0. I notified JoJo that I could go by the hospital and provide readings shortly. But would I send them to JoJo and let her send them to the VIPs. I’d rather let a senior investigator handle talks with the military.
In another report, I found that KEMA had ordered a more widespread evacuation of the residential area so they could spray a black mold that started growing there. They would spray around each infected house at the north triangle site with a virulent fungicide. I had to see how bad things were there.
***
I eased the truck up to two sheriff cars, blocking the way in to the neighborhood where the strange “virus” had struck three families, and up to the armed guards, both wearing white unis, gun holsters belted across the outside and automatic rifles close to hand. I slowed, lowered the windows, and held out my ID. “Hi, guys. Can you update me on what’s happened here?” I asked.
“Regular law enforcement to whacko law enforcement?” the older deputy asked. “Sure.” His partner winced, letting me know thatwhacko law enforcementwas said as a joke but wasn’t amusing even to him. The older guy, clearly a self-appointed spokesperson, said, “We got weird tar growing up from the ground. You got any ghosts or goblins who can make that happen, send ’em here. I’ll shoot ’em for you.”
I didn’t bother telling him I was fully capable of shooting my own goblins, should they actually exist, nor that ghosts couldn’t be wounded by gunfire. It was a waste of breath to attempt to educate a man whose main professional goal seemed to be being persistently annoying. At which he was clearly successful.
Though he was chiefly a snark, he did know that all the occupants of every house had been evacuated, some by force, to hotels, to shelters, to other family members. “The National Guard brought in lights and chemicals to get rid of the growths. They treated one house and yard so far,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of lights or treatments, but I can guess that the tree huggers would complain it’s bad for the environment.” Which heclearly thought was amusing, not knowing or caring that I was a tree hugger. Of sorts. Though not a particularly pacific one.
A chemical stink wafted in through the window and the heater vents, strong and cloying, sticking to the back of my throat like acid glue. I had to agree with the cop’s imaginary tree huggers, that whoever ordered the spraying were idiots, contaminating the ground with poison that would harm the residents when they returned. There were other ways to kill mold and plants than poison. But that wasn’t my decision or my job.
Which started something tickling at the back of my mind—something important that I should do and know, something scampering across my brain on sticky feet, not alighting long enough for me to identify it. So for now I ignored the sensation of tiny lizard feet and did my job.
I said, “I’d like to enter the area that was evacuated and cordoned off.”
“Suit yourself. You have to sign in.” He indicated a traditional clipboard with a paper. “I’d suggest you stay on the street,” he added. “And when you get back, you’ll have to leave your uni here.” He pointed to a red biohazard container with an orange stripe across each side and a hinged top.
I left the truck, dressed in a clean uni, and walked down the street alone.
The crime scene tape at the three houses still fluttered, but the tents were gone. The occupants were gone. And the people who should have been in the other houses were gone too. The neighborhood had no cars, no pets, no people beyond the talkative deputy and his silent partner at the entrance, no nothing. Except the dots of black slime that climbed the trees and coated the leaves of grass. I called Rick as I walked, but it went to voice mail. I tried JoJo, and she answered, but only long enough for me to hear her talking to a military person she called Colonel, probably at the DoD, before she hung up.
I remembered one report I had skimmed. According to the feds, the media had been told that the mold was simply an unidentified fungi and was probably normal, but global weather changes, altered rainfall, and acid rain had stimulated it to take over. It was a lot of government nonsense-speak meant to calm the public without telling them anything about the source of the psysitope-active leak. And not tying the mold into the “viralillness” of the homeowners. Which could be wise, as the source hadn’t been identified and most people panicked easily. I stopped at the first house and studied the lawn, which was green, blanketed with a black slime, slick looking, with colorful little things like buds or antennae sticking up from the tarry mess. Black also coated the trees.
It was probably stupid, but I needed to read what was happening in and under the ground. I’d made enough waves in Spook School with my nonhuman self. There was no point in drawing attention my way again, so soon after getting free, but... I couldn’t help myself. I knelt on the street, one knee down, one up. I peeled back the glove portion of the uni and placed a single finger on the ground, no more than a foot inside the grassy area of Point B, Alisha Henri’s two-story home, Dougie’s daughter’s yard. I slid my consciousness into the earth and back out fast. The land was full of shadows that pulsed with shifting red and blue lights. It didn’t feel like my land. It didn’t feel like any land I had ever touched. The energies were odd and... humming, for lack of a better word. In my experience, land usually breathed, silent and aware, or slept, like a winter hibernation. This felt sick. Contaminated. Full of pain. This was... wounded.
I looked out over the lawn again, studying the black, tarry slime, and wiped my fingertip on my uni pants. This was bad, and I had no idea what to do about it. Worse, I had a feeling that the bad things weren’t finished for the day.
I walked back to the barricade and stripped off the uni, depositing it into the biohazard container. Back inside my truck, I cleaned my finger with a wet wipe and rolled the dirty wipe back into the foil package, thinking.
