Dick knew enough to assume the worst and he expected to find that Mrs. Skye's sheep would have to be destroyed and the carcasses incinerated. He didn't exactly skip down the path into the sheltered valley. It was tough to be grim on that track, though, with the sunlight streaming down through the branches in long dusty shafts, with the musty smell of pine needles baking in the warmth of spring mingling with the fresh winter smell of powdery snow. He had a smile on his face when he approached the main house. 'Hello!' he called while he was still a hundred yards away. 'Hello there!' In this part of the West, in such a secluded spot, you made a point of announcing your presence well before you arrived. You had to assume that everyone you visited was heavily armed and unfond of intruders. 'Hello! Mrs. Skye?'
The house had seen better days. Its clapboard walls looked sturdy enough but its windows had been broken in several places and replaced with butcher paper and duct tape. Pine needles littered the covered porch where a cord of fire wood had collapsed and spilled out into the yard. Broken and rusted farm implements hung from the porch rafters'sickles and mallets and hoes as well as some nasty bits of iron specific to sheep herders, like a mulesing saw and a tooth grinder. The tools look hand-made. 'Hello!' Dick shouted, as loud as he could.
A woman holding a hatchet came around the side of the house and squinted at him. She wore a tie-dyed quilted jacket and her long white hair played around her shoulders in thin strands. Her face looked like a contour map of the mountains around her, filled with lines and blotchy shading. 'You,' she called out to him. 'You from the Health department?'
'Dick Walters, NIH,' he agreed.
'You do me a favor, Walters. You run over to that tree and back.'
Dick laughed but then he looked at her hatchet. The sharp edge was filthy with blood and hair. This was a farm, and animals on farms got slaughtered all the time. Still the sight of it made him uneasy. He swallowed and dashed over to the tree, then ran back to where he had originally been standing.
The old woman nodded. 'Fair enough. They don't move that fast.' She dropped her hatchet on the carpet of pine needles and stomped into her house, her boots crunching in the snow. The door had no lock. Not knowing what else to do Dick followed her inside.
Monster Nation
Chapter Five
MORMON BISHOPS FORBID POLICE INVESTIGATION: Tabernacle Could be Hiding Terror Cell, State Bureau of Investigations Warns [Deseret Morning News,Salt Lake City , 3/18/05]
They left her there for hours, strapped to the bed, unable to move. She didn't grow stiff or uncomfortable but she couldn't even reach over to turn on the television set mounted in a steel bracket above her bed. She tried to sleep but she failed at that, too: her body refused to truly relax, not when she kept hearing screams outside her room. No more gunshots, at least. She tried to calm down and failed.
It left her with a lot of time to think. To try to remember. She pushed hard into the dark parts of her brain, like developments full of houses with no lights on at all and nobody home. In the abandoned suburbs of her mind she tried to piece together anything, anything at all: the faces of her parents, her lovers, her friends. Did she have kids? Did she have a home somewhere? She tried not to color her thoughts with half-hearted guesses, but failed: the clothes she had on, the piercings had to mean something, at least, that she wasn't homeless, that she didn't work in an office, at least. These superficial deductions got in the way, though. They summed up a caricature of a life with no detail, no texture at all. She tried to put them out of mind and remember something. She dug for any shard of memory at all. A birthday party. A trip to the mall. Where she had left her purse. She tried to remember her own name, even her initials.
She failed.
WEIRD: Horse bites dog inWyoming . Apparently the horse was sick and the dog was a jerk. Cats and dogs still not living together. [Fark.com news portal, 3/16/05]
The Blackhawk set down well clear of the prison fence. There were pressure plates and laser sensors and dogs trained to attack without barking in there. Searchlights stabbed out from the guard towers and bathed the helicopter in a brilliant glow. As the rotor spun down Bannerman Clark jumped down to the sandy soil of the outer perimeter and looked for the man he was supposed to meet.