Quentin walked around to the window. The fall deer season ended in a few weeks. Sure, he would have gone out and used up his tag fee.  He knew Chuck. He lived on deer meat and chickens he raised, and in summer a large vegetable garden he planted. He had learned how to can things, too. He and Marie used to compare notes on their gardens.

A snowmobile started up across the meadow at the bed-and-breakfast, then another. Quentin walked around to the window. It was dark in the cabin. He pulled out his mag-lite and turned it on. He let the beam move over the rough wooden table. He smiled when he saw the new Apple computer. He moved the light across the living room and saw the Christmas tree.

Everything was in order. Neat. A set of canning jars was out on the kitchen counter, the jars lined up, neat; their lids stacked nearby. Quentin moved the beam of light to the hallway and stopped. There were several gun cases. He walked into the hallway and opened the gun lockers, looking for a .30-30. That was what Chuck would have taken with him, knowing that the deer this late in the season hid during the day in heavy brush.

Quentin moved the light from case to case. There were scores of military-style assault rifles—probably semi-autos, Quentin guessed—combat shotguns, and high-powered hunting rifles, all perfectly legal.

“No machine guns,” Quentin said out loud. That guy Cooley doesn’t know a machine gun from a horse’s ass. He saw an empty space in an older antique wooden gun case with a glass front. That was it. He’d gone hunting and had forgotten to tell Mordecai, their mailman. Still, that was a lot of mail. He would have gone out overnight, at most, not more than two days.

Quentin turned around and looked out at the new bed-and-breakfast across the field through the cabin’s open door. It was a stone building, two-story. No one he knew could afford to stay there. It cost four hundred dollars a night. Someone in town had told him it cost three million to build. He could see the steam coming out the windows of the indoor pool even this far away.

I better call up to the Ranger station and let them know just in case. If he doesn’t come back by tonight, we’ll start a formal search.

Quentin took the mail from his belt and laid it on the wooden table next to the canning jars. He kept one envelope and wrote a short note across the back.

      Chuck—Please call me at the office.

      Want to know you are OK.

Quentin.

Quentin took the package from where he’d stuck it in his jean jacket and laid it on the table. He glanced at the return address: Remington Firearms, Fort Wayne, IN.

        *   *   *

It was snowing hard when Chuck Phelps gave up trying to fix the snowmobile. There was a gold-colored gas stain on the snow where the fuel pump had ruptured. Most men would have been scared. He was at least ten miles into the Emigrant Gap wilderness and it was snowing. He realized there was no fixing the pump and he would have to walk out. Compared to the Tet offensive in Hue, this would be a cakewalk, he told himself. No sweat.

His mustache and beard were covered in wet new snow. He took off his blaze-orange balaclava, rolled it out so that it could cover his face and slid it down. Better, he thought. He looked at his watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday. He’d gone too far to make it back home on foot in one day. That meant he would have to keep moving all night or sleep here. He’d dig a snow cave, he decided, then start back home in the morning.

Stupid, he thought, getting angry enough to come out too far, not checking the weather report. My fault. He sat on his snowmobile and buckled on his snowshoes. He slung a small pack with survival gear and his .30-30 over his shoulder. It started to snow harder. If I hadn’t run into that damn runt accountant. I wouldn’t have run the machine so hard and blown the fuel pump. It had taken all his self-control not to deck the little fat guy.

He snowshoed across the field and over the rise. He decided to make a snow cave on the west side of the hill to take advantage of the cover. He continued up the rise, the .30-30 slapping his back. The snow was powdery and clean on the top of the rise, and, just underneath, he could feel it was hard, older snow. He could hear that odd crunching sound it makes when you break frozen snow late in the afternoon, after the sun goes down. He got to the top of the hill. He looked carefully for a good place to build the cave. He found a spot where the new snow had drifted deep near a stand of trees. He pulled out his small two-piece shovel from his pack. That was when he heard the first strange-sounding howl and turned around.

Below him, on the field he’d just come across, Chuck saw a gang of people running toward him. At first he thought he was dreaming, or that he’d gone crazy. They were running at him through the deep snow, across the empty field, all kinds of people: kids, old people, teenagers—too diverse a group to be search-and-rescue people. He thought he even saw a sheriff’s deputy. He wondered why they were running.

Why are they out here? He wondered where they’d come from as he watched them. Maybe they’re making a movie.

He smiled. That was it; they were making a movie. Then he heard the howling sound again. It went through him like a shot. He looked hard at the scores of people running across the field at him. Somehow it reminded him of the war. Some of the people stopped, squatted in the snow and tilted their heads back like coyotes. He watched them tilt their heads at a strange angle and begin howling, making a strange monkey-like howling sound. The sound was raw and sounded more like what chimpanzees might make, than humans. The howls echoed against the surrounding mountainsides.

“Fuck this.” Chuck instinctively un-slung his weapon and took a knee in the snow. “These things ain’t human.” Chuck Phelps pulled the hammer back on the .30-30 and waited for the first one to get close. “I knew something bad was coming,” he said out loud, not particularly frightened, and began to fire his weapon.

Mobbed by the monkey-like things, Chuck Phelps died standing up, fighting, using the .30-30—emptied of ammunition—as a club. The U.S. Marines would have been proud.

CHAPTER 5

“This is not your grandmother’s tomato, ladies and gentlemen.” Genesoft’s PR man prattled on from the podium about something Genesoft was calling R19: the company’s long-awaited line of bio-engineered food products, including a salmon gene that was cross-referenced with the DNA of sugar beets and tomatoes, so the vegetables would produce omega-3 fatty acid. Time magazine declared the company one of the ten most innovative biotech firms in the world.

Miles Hunt watched the over-dressed PR man hold one of the genetically engineered vegetables in the air above his head, like an Olympian. Reporters from several of the state’s important dailies had come to Nevada City. The reporters had all been given a free breakfast and were now dutifully taping stories into their laptops, taking down the PR man’s words as if they were gospel.

A huge inflatable tomato-balloon floated above the crowded auditorium. R19 was painted on the balloon like a cute little label. It was corny and somehow frightening at the same time, Miles thought. He looked again at the pitchman, who was just warming up to his subject and looked to be on the verge of shouting at the audience à la Microsoft’s famous CEO, Steve Ballmer. The auditorium’s lights shone on the PR man’s gray Nordstrom’s suit, and on his bald and shiny pate. He looked, Miles thought, slightly engineered himself. You would have thought he was talking about something truly important, the way he was swinging around the stage with excitement.