The Influence (7 page)

At the party, the guns were going off.  

SEVEN 

It had been over three hours, and his knees hurt so much that he doubted he would be able to stand without rolling onto his side first and then pushing himself up with his hands, but Father Ramos remained kneeling, hands folded in supplication as he continued to pray. It was good that his knees hurt. They should be bloody. His legs should be broken. He should be in constant torturing pain for the rest of his life. 

He had been there. 

He had seen it.  

He was a part of what had happened.  

He closed his eyes even more tightly, squeezing out a tear and letting it roll slowly, unobstructed, down his cheek. He asked for God’s guidance, but heard nothing back, felt nothing. No ideas implanted themselves in his brain, no helpful advice was presented to him. Either God was deliberately ignoring his entreaties or— 

There was a voice. 

Father Ramos stopped praying, silencing the words in his head and listening for sounds in the stillness of the church. 

It came again, a word. 

“Hector.” 

His heart pounded so hard he thought it was going to burst. The ecstasy he’d always assumed he would feel should the Lord actually speak to him directly did not materialize. Instead, he was overcome with terror, a paralyzing fear that rooted him in place, even as he heard his name called again. 

“Hector.” 

He should have run from the party as soon as it happened. He should have fled this town and never looked back. But that was animal instinct, gut not head. That was a human reaction. For while, as a man he might want to flee, as a priest, he knew that he could not. God was everywhere and He would know where he went and what he did. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, was exactly what he had done: remain and pray on it. If he was to be punished, so be it. If Magdalena was to be wiped off the map, its memory erased from the world, then that was what would be. It was the Lord’s decision to make, and whatever He chose would be right. 

Father Ramos thought of Sodom and Gomorrah and how, when the angels visited Lot, the people of the town demanded that Lot surrender the angels to them. The people were struck blind, and the next day their cities were destroyed. 

Was that what would happen here? 

“Hector.”  

He was sobbing, and was dimly aware that he’d wet his pants. 

There was another sound in the empty church. A shuffling noise behind him, as though something large and barely mobile was shambling slowly across the concrete floor toward the front of the church. The priest closed his eyes even more tightly, so tightly they hurt, his lips mouthing a fervent prayer. 

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. 

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. 

The message
No Signal
appeared on his screen. 

The TV continued to come in fine—all channels, as far as he could tell after a quick check—and he was able to use the land line and call his parents to wish them a happy New Year’s, so there was probably nothing major wrong, only a temporary glitch. But building on his already gloomy mood, the lack of internet access bothered him, and he felt distracted and unsettled as he played previously loaded games on his computer for the rest of the morning until Lita invited him over to the house for lunch. 

**** 

Ross could tell something was wrong when Lita called around dinnertime. There was a strange hitch in her voice, and when he walked over to their house (the Big House, as he’d started to think of it), both she and Dave were seated on the couch in the living room. Usually, around this hour of the evening, Lita would have been cooking, but there was no smell of food from the kitchen, and neither of them looked as though they had any desire to eat. Indeed, Dave seemed stunned, almost in shock as he stared blankly at the coffee table in front of him, nodding listlessly in response to Ross’ greeting.