Both range crews worked night and day at calving, and they pulled in people who usually had other tasks. Cord, so exhausted that if he stopped moving he fell asleep standing up, had never seen a calving like this. Even Spring, perpetually cheerful, went grimly about the grim business. They were shorthanded because all the female teenagers who usually worked range crew were pregnant. The only women were Lillie, Senni, and Bonnie. Twice Cord caught Bobby, who had a sensitive stomach, vomiting.
Cows, pre-delivery, post-delivery, and not pregnant at all, died constantly. First the animal began to tremble as its nervous system was affected. A few hours later it lay down, lowing in pain. Half an hour after that the cow thrashed on the ground, desperately gasping for air, often breaking its legs in the process. A few minutes later it died.
Dakota and Keith, both good riders, tried to cut the trembling cows out of the herd and drive the animals away from the rest. It seemed to hurt them to walk, but the men kept at it anyway. They forced the cows as far away as possible, then shot them to spare the animals their inevitable agony. The rifle shots terrified the others, as did the smell of the rotting carcasses of the dead.
If the cow was pregnant, Jody and his crew induced labor, trying to get the calf out before the mother started to tremble. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes not. A few cows died, thrashing, with calves halfway born, and most of these calves died, too. Cord saw his mother stick her hand up a cow whose induced-labor calf hadn’t turned properly and turn it by sheer force. He looked away.
The surviving calves were carried, bleating for their dying mothers, to the antiseptic dip. There was no time to clean up anything. The ground was slippery with blood, placentas, death. The reek and noise were indescribable.
Cord, covered with blood, finally could work no longer. Jody said roughly, “Go lie down, Cord. Now.”
“I can’t, the—”
“Do it!” He pushed Cord toward the bedrolls set upwind. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”
Cord collapsed onto the blankets, not washing first, and was asleep instantly, the smell of dead cattle in his nostrils.
When Lillie woke him, he put out his hand to ward her off, unsure where he was, who she was. “Cord, wake up. We need you to take charge of getting the surviving calves onto the truck and back to the barn.”
He nodded, stumbled upright, lurched back to the pens. The sky had clouded over, low angry clouds, and Cord didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon, or of what day. He set to work. The small, slippery calves, some premature from the induced labor, bleated piteously. One died on the way, falling to the truck bed where the others, packed in, crushed it with their tiny, deadly hoofs. At the barn, taking the calves off the truck and finding the dead one staring at him with open eyes, Cord succumbed. Ashamed of himself, he cried.
Emily, Sajelle, Julie, Carolina, Hannah, and Lupe waited at the barn. Emily showed them how to wash the calves again with the brew she’d concocted, and Cord showed them how to grasp the animals to carry them inside.
“Cord, you smell awful,” Hannah said distastefully, and he was too tired to feel his own anger.
Lupe had learned somewhere how to feed calves. She’d prepared bottles of warm solution designed by Emily for maximum nutrition. Under Lupe’s instruction, the women awkwardly began to hold bottles for the calves, two at a time, while Emily efficiently gave each a shot in the neck from prepared syringes.
“This is a gene sequence delivered by a bovine version of an adeno-type viral vector,” she said to Cord. “It’s tailored to this specific pathogen. It’ll splice in genes to create T-cells with receptors for the pathogenic virus. There’s also expo molecules to drastically increase the frequency of gene expression so that—Cord, are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” said Cord, who wasn’t. He couldn’t focus enough to understand her.
“Never mind,” she said kindly. “Go in and sleep. But wash first. Do you hear me? Don’t go in like that.”
He fell asleep in the yard, beside the outside pump, before he even had his clothes off. Somebody rigged a tarp over him to shield from UV, and he slept.
They saved only twenty calves. Three of those died despite attempts to nurse them. The others fought off the bioweapon micro even when they contracted it. There were seven bulls and ten cows. Eventually they castrated three of the males. Four bulls were a lot, but Jody and Spring didn’t want to risk being without any sperm for the next generation.
That decision was, Emily said, an act of pure unjustified faith that there would be a next generation.
Cord wondered about that. Staring at the surviving calves, he remembered the huge herd of his early childhood, when Grandma Theresa had been alive. It had seemed to Cord then, held firmly on the front of Uncle Jody’s saddle, that the world had been full of living, breathing cattle. All gone.
He turned away from the pen and stumbled toward the house.
CHAPTER 23
Sajelle, thinking ahead to winter, put everyone on rationing, the calories carefully worked out for men, women, pregnant women, children. Cord always felt slightly hungry. He assumed that everyone else did, too, but not even Dolly complained. Even the youngest children understood how close to the edge the farm might be balanced. But there were still—for now, anyway—enough game to trap, enough plants to gather. Wild onion, chicory for coffee, salad greens, agave to make the sweet syrup that Cord loved. Plus, this year’s harvest would be good, thanks to careful irrigation. The chickens, mercifully, didn’t contract any diseases from bioweapons.
“Well, that makes sense,” Emily said. “You start fooling around with avian pathogens, you could infect all birds and really ruin the ecology.” She fell silent, realizing that it was she who was not making sense.
“Aunt Emily, how many other people are left alive near us?” Kezia asked plaintively.
Uncle DeWayne said, “There are still some groups posting. A large one in Colorado, one in east Texas, one in the Arizona mountains. A few more, farther away. Then there are groups in the East, plus a few overseas. But there are fewer every month.”
Dr. Wilkins said, “Nobody else has the enhanced immune systems of our people.”
But not all enhanced equally, Cord thought. His generation, built genetically by the pribir, could probably survive in ways they didn’t even know about, as he had during the sandstorm four years ago. The men and women who had gone up to the pribir ship, including his mother, at least never got sick with anything. But DeWayne, Robin, and Dr. Wilkins had no engineered protection. Neither did Grandma Theresa’s children, Senni and Jody and Spring. Spring’s kids had boosted immune systems from their mother, Julie, but Jody’s and Senni’s children were vulnerable. Including Clari.
Cord went into their bedroom. Clari wasn’t there.
She, like Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins and Aunt Robin, wasn’t supposed to go outside. But sometimes she did anyway, dressed in a plastic rig Sajelle had created, with a mask over her face. Cord knew where to look for her.
The sun was setting in the west, fanning theatrical rays of gold and orange over a purple sky. A full moon shone gloriously on the eastern horizon. Over it passed momentarily the silent silhouette of a hawk. With the return of rain, some of the plants new since the warming had revived. Cord smelled the cool fragrance of sage, the stronger odor of cedars brought to him on a shifting breeze. Grandma Theresa had been buried under a stand of cedars, a quarter mile from the house.