Fallow

Chapter 1: Chain of Transmission

The call came at 4:17 a.m., which was fine because Jo Reddick hadn't been sleeping anyway.

She was sitting in the fluorescent hum of the CDC's Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta, her third styrofoam cup of coffee going cold beside a laptop open to seventeen tabs she no longer remembered opening. The Salmonella cluster in Memphis had finally resolved—traced to a single produce distributor whose walk-in cooler had failed during an August heatwave—and the after-action report was due by Friday. Jo was ahead of schedule. Jo was always ahead of schedule. It was the only direction that felt safe.

Her phone buzzed against the laminate desk. Nebraska area code. 308.

She stared at it long enough for the vibration to migrate the phone half an inch toward the coffee cup.

308 was Elam County.

Elam County was a locked room in her mind, and she had swallowed the key at nineteen years old, standing in a courtroom that smelled like floor wax and old men's cologne, saying words she had rehearsed until they stopped feeling like lies and started feeling like nothing at all.

The phone stopped buzzing.

Then it started again.

Same number.

Jo picked it up the way she picked up everything—clinically, with the part of herself that catalogued symptoms and drew transmission trees and did not, under any circumstances, feel things before she had sufficient data.

"Reddick."

"Dr. Reddick, this is Paulette Schenk, Elam County Public Health. I don't know if you remember me—"

"I remember you." Paulette had been the school nurse. She'd given Jo ice packs for bruises Jo claimed came from the monkey bars and Paulette pretended to believe came from the monkey bars because that was what adults did in Elam County in 1999. They pretended.

"We have a situation," Paulette said. Her voice had the particular flatness of someone who had been awake too long and was no longer sure which details mattered. Jo recognized it. She heard it in her own voice most days.

"I saw the preliminary report. Insomnia cluster, eleven cases. Your state epi team should be handling—"

"It's not insomnia."

Jo waited.

"They stopped sleeping, Dr. Reddick. Eleven people. Three weeks ago. Not one of them has slept since."

"That's not—"

"Possible. I know. I've been saying that for three weeks and it hasn't changed a thing. Their EEGs are wrong. Not wrong like artifact, not wrong like they're faking. Wrong like I've never seen a pattern like this and neither has anyone at UNMC. We sent the readings to Johns Hopkins. They asked us to recalibrate and resend. We did. They stopped returning calls."

Jo pulled up the preliminary report on her laptop. Eleven cases. All adults, ages thirty-one to seventy-four. No common workplace. No common water source. No shared meals, no shared prescriptions, no recent travel.

One common variable.

All eleven lived along Township Road 9.

The road that bordered the old Reddick quarter-section.

Jo's hand tightened on the phone.

"There's something else," Paulette said. "Your mother is patient twelve."

The fluorescent lights buzzed. The coffee went from cold to irrelevant.

"What happened?"

"Deputies found her at three a.m. last Tuesday. Standing barefoot in the fallow field—your family's old field. November, Dr. Reddick. Twenty-six degrees. She was in her nightgown. Hands in the dirt. Planting something. When they pulled her out—" Paulette paused. Jo heard her swallow. "When they pulled her out, the ground breathed."

"The ground."

"A cloud of something. Spore-dust, maybe. Rose up in their flashlights like breath on a cold morning, except it came from the soil. Both deputies became patients thirteen and fourteen within six hours."

Jo closed her eyes. Behind her lids, the locked room rattled.

"I'll be on a flight by morning," she said.

"Dr. Reddick—Jo. I should tell you. The field where they found your mother. It's the quarter-section. The one that's been sitting empty since—"

"Since the trial. I know what field it is, Paulette."

Silence. Then: "The county sprayed it this spring. Some kind of experimental soil treatment. Hasker Seed paid for it. Regenerative agriculture pilot. Nobody understood the paperwork, but everybody signed because Hasker offered money and this county hasn't had money since the ethanol plant closed."

"Hasker Seed," Jo repeated, writing it down. Agribusiness giant. Publicly traded. She'd seen their name in USDA briefings. "What was in the spray?"

"Mycorrhizal something. I'm a nurse, not a soil scientist. But I can tell you this—whatever's happening to these people started after that field got treated, and it's spreading along the road like it's following a root system."

Jo hung up. She sat in the empty operations center and listened to the building breathe around her—the ventilation system cycling, the distant hum of servers, the particular silence of a government building at four in the morning when everyone with sense had gone home.

She hadn't been home in twenty years.

Home wasn't a place she went. Home was a coordinate she navigated around, the way ships steered clear of rocks that didn't appear on charts but every captain knew about.

She opened a new tab and typed: Elam County, Nebraska.

The search results were thin. Population 2,100 and falling. County seat: Brading, population 814. Primary industries: corn, soybeans, silence. The kind of place that appeared in national news only when something went wrong enough to escape its own gravity.

Something had gone wrong enough.

Jo pulled up her contacts and called her supervisor.

"Denton, it's Reddick. I need a field team for Nebraska. Fourteen cases of anomalous sleep cessation, possible environmental exposure, possible biological agent."

"Nebraska," Denton said, still half-asleep. "Since when do you volunteer for Nebraska?"

Since never. Since it was the last place on earth she wanted to go, which meant it was exactly the place she needed to go, because Jo Reddick had spent twenty years running from Elam County and running had not made her free. It had made her fast.

"Since now," she said. "I need a mycologist and a USDA liaison. And I need them by tomorrow."

"I'll see what I can do."

Jo hung up and stared at the screen.

Elam County stared back.

She thought about calling her ex-husband, David, because that was what she did when the walls closed in—reached for a hand that was no longer there, like pressing a bruise to confirm it still hurt. They'd been divorced for two years. The marriage had lasted five, which was four years longer than either of them had expected, held together by the same force that held Jo together: momentum. David was a good man who had loved a woman who was not entirely present, and when he'd finally asked her where she went when her eyes went flat, she'd said nowhere, and he'd said that's the problem, and that had been the end of it.

She didn't call David.

She booked a flight instead.

Des Moines to Omaha, then a rental car for the three-hour drive west into the part of Nebraska that the interstate forgot. She packed the way she always packed for field deployments: two changes of clothes, her sampling kit, her laptop, her credentials, and a bottle of dextroamphetamine prescribed by a psychiatrist who had stopped asking questions two refills ago.

At the airport, waiting for the 6:15 a.m. departure, she bought a granola bar she wouldn't eat and a bottle of water she would forget to open and sat in the hard plastic chair and thought about Billy.

Billy Reddick. Seven years old. Blond hair that wouldn't stay flat. A gap-toothed grin and a scar under his chin from the bike wreck when he was seven, two weeks before the end, when he'd gone over the handlebars on the gravel drive and come up laughing with blood running down his neck and Jo had pressed her palm against the cut and felt his pulse hammering under her fingers like a small, trapped bird.

Billy went into the grain silo on a Tuesday in September.

Billy did not come out.

Not the way he went in.

Jo's father went to prison. Jo went to the witness stand. Elam County went on existing, the way small towns do—not by healing but by growing scar tissue over the wound and pretending the scar was the skin they'd always had.

Jo had not been back since.

The gate agent called her flight. Jo stood, shouldered her bag, and walked toward the jetway with the same controlled stride she used entering hot zones.

Elam County was a hot zone now.

It always had been.

She just hadn't had the right equipment to see it.

---

The drive from Omaha was three hours of diminishing civilization.

Interstate 80 carried her west through Lincoln, where the state capitol's tower rose like a gold-tipped needle against the gray November sky, and then the exits began to thin. Grand Island. Kearney. The towns got smaller. The sky got bigger. By the time she turned south off the interstate onto State Highway 47, the horizon was a flat line of brown and gray that went on forever in every direction, broken only by grain elevators and the occasional wind turbine turning with mechanical patience against clouds the color of old concrete.

Nebraska in November was not beautiful. It was honest. The corn had been harvested, the fields reduced to stubble, and the land lay exposed in its true shape: flat, enormous, and indifferent to the people who scratched at its surface.

Jo had forgotten how big the sky was.

In Atlanta, the sky was something you glimpsed between buildings. Here it was the dominant feature of the landscape, pressing down with a weight that was not physical but felt physical, the way silence could feel loud if there was enough of it.

She passed through Brading at 2:00 p.m.

The town looked the way she remembered it, which was to say it looked like it was slowly being digested by time. Main Street had a hardware store, a diner called The Buckboard, a Farm Bureau office, and a bar called Skelly's whose neon sign had been broken since before Jo was born. Half the storefronts were empty. The ones that weren't had the defensive cheerfulness of businesses that knew they were dying but refused to admit it—hand-lettered signs in windows, American flags on brackets, a sandwich board outside the diner advertising a Thanksgiving special that nobody would order because everybody cooked at home.

She did not stop.

She drove south on County Road 12, then east on Township Road 9, and the land opened up around her like a wound.

The Reddick quarter-section was unmistakable.

Every field around it had been harvested—corn stubble in neat rows, the geometry of industrial agriculture. The Reddick land was wild. Twenty years of neglect had given it back to the prairie grasses, the volunteer corn, the thistle and foxtail and ragweed that reclaimed abandoned ground the way water filled a hole. In summer it would have been a green tangle. In November it was brown and dead and matted, and it stood out from the surrounding fields like a bruise on clean skin.

At the center of the quarter-section, barely visible above the dead vegetation, stood the remains of the grain silo.

Jo pulled the rental car to the shoulder and stared.

The silo had been demolished after the trial—torn down by the county, officially for safety reasons, unofficially because nobody wanted to look at it. But the foundation remained. A broken ring of concrete, maybe twenty feet across, rising a foot or two above the ground. From the road it looked like a rotten tooth.

Jo's hands were shaking.

She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white, then released, then gripped again. A technique David had taught her. Squeeze and release. Ground yourself in the body. Except the body was in Elam County, and the body remembered things the mind had spent twenty years trying to forget.

The smell of grain dust.

The dark.

Billy's voice, calling her name from somewhere below.

Jo put the car in gear and drove on.

The Elam County Sheriff's office was in Brading, in a low brick building that shared a wall with the post office. Jo parked and sat for a moment, watching a flag snap in the wind. Then she went in.

Sheriff Lewis Prather was waiting for her.

He was older. Of course he was older—twenty years did that to a person. But the change was more than temporal. Prather had been lean in 1999, a young deputy with a careful mouth and eyes that missed nothing. Now he was heavy in the way of men who ate their feelings and washed them down with beer: thick through the middle, soft in the face, with hands that looked too big for the pen he was holding when Jo walked through the door.

He looked up.

Their eyes met.

Twenty years collapsed into a single held breath.

"Jo," he said.

"Sheriff."

"It's been a while."

"It has."

He stood. The chair creaked with relief. He extended his hand and she shook it, and his grip was dry and firm and carried the particular weight of a man who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had learned to distribute the load across every interaction so no single moment buckled.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "I know this isn't—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "I know this is hard."

"Where are the patients?"

"Fourteen of them are at the community center. We set up cots, but they don't use them. They sit. They stand. They walk around. But they don't sleep. Paulette's been monitoring vitals. Your mother—" He paused again. "Lorene's at the hospital in Ogallala. They transferred her after the field incident."

Jo nodded. Clinical. Controlled. The investigator, not the daughter.

"I need to see the EEG data, the field where my mother was found, and whatever documentation you have on the Hasker Seed spray."

"The Hasker rep is in town. Wendell Dorr. He's been cooperative. Smiling, helpful, the whole show. I don't trust him."

"Good."

Prather studied her. The same quiet he'd always had—that impossible, patient silence that could make you say things you hadn't planned to say, confess to sins you hadn't committed, simply because the silence needed filling and your guilt was the nearest material.

"You look tired, Jo."

"I'm a field epidemiologist. Tired is the job description."

"I meant tired in a different way."

She met his gaze and held it. "Show me the patients, Sheriff. We can catch up later."

He nodded slowly, reached for his hat, and led her out into the Nebraska wind.