ON THE MORNING of the most disastrous day in Windale history, I’m in the passenger seat of my dad’s patrol car, dripping sweat. The ailing Crown Vic hasn’t had fully functioning AC since last summer, when Dad burned out the blower, and today is already one of the hottest days on record. I shift and squirm, trying to find some relief. But my clothes are glued to my skin and my bare arms are peeling off the leather like it’s flypaper.
“Dad,” I say, “are you ever going to take this thing in to the shop? I think I lost ten pounds just this morning.”
Behind the wheel, Dad turns the patrol car off Route 24, onto Old Briar Lane. We were in the Triangle before this, sitting in the damp, stagnant air of the car, parked right in front of the air-conditioned police station. We were breathing in the reefer stink coming from Sid Porter’s comic shop, and Dad was trying to decide whether he wanted to go in there and bust him for possession (again) while I was around. Then the voice of Rebecca Conner, Dad’s top deputy and right-hand woman, crackled through on the radio, told Dad she needed him out at the Webber farm right away. And off we went.
Dad caresses the worn-out steering wheel and says, “Why would I take it to the shop”—I mouth the next part along with him—“when I can just fix it myself?”
He doesn’t see me mocking him, so it’s safe to keep jabbing. “Because you don’t have time to fix it yourself. And if I’m going to ride around with you all summer, I can’t keep sweating like this. It’s going to totally screw me for football next year.”
Dad’s lips press together. He knows what I’m doing, trying to skip out on him. Not just today, but the rest of the summer. I told my dad I wanted to be a cop because I thought it was what he wanted to hear. I told him I wanted to play football for the same reason. Now I’m bartering with one to get out of the other. For now, at least. It’s my last summer in Windale, before senior year, before graduation. I’d rather spend it with my friends than cruising around town in this piece-of-shit car, wasting away in the heat.
The Webber farm comes into view, a wide swath of flat, grassy fields surrounded by low hills and dense trees. Clark Webber runs a cattle farm, and his land is all pasture, but today there’s not a cow in sight.
Dad angles the Crown Vic onto the property and parks behind his other two deputies’ patrol cars. He shuts off the engine, and the car chuckles with relief.
“I thought you wanted to do this with me,” he says, looking at me but also not. He’s squinting at something just over my head. I’m forced to stare at either his mustache, coated in droplets of sweat, or the ring of damp fabric that’s supposed to be his collar.
“I do,” I lie. “Just, you know, not all the time. I’ve only got one summer left, Dad.”
“And you’d rather spend it with your friends.” There’s color in his cheeks, and I can’t tell if it’s from the heat or from his rising anger. Maybe both. “Is that what you’re doing this afternoon?”
Here we go. “Yeah. We’re just getting together for lunch. Then maybe a movie at Sonya’s place.”
“Where’s lunch? The diner?”
“Dad, why are you interrogating me?” I say, gesturing out the window at the farm. “Shouldn’t we…?”
“Just tell me where you’re having lunch, son.” Dad’s tone is patient, but his words are exactly the opposite. This is a conversation that’s nearly as old as I am.
I mumble the answer, because I shouldn’t have to say it when he already knows.
“Come again?” he says, raising his eyebrows. He stops short of cupping his hand around his ear.
“Dagger Hill,” I say, louder this time.
“There it is.” Dad leans back, looking satisfied but also seething. Meanwhile, through the windshield, Rebecca Conner appears and waves, a little frantic, her brown skin shining with sweat. Dad gives her the “one second” finger, then cocks a thumb in my direction. Subtle.
Rebecca doesn’t miss a beat, though. She nods, gives Dad a thumbs-up, then catches my eye and winks. Hang in there, kid, she likes to say when Dad is on one of his tirades. Melvin O’Connell, Dad’s other deputy, is as good a guy as they come, but Rebecca is easily my favorite. She’s exactly the kind of person you want on your side when the shit starts to hit. Usually, when it comes to arguments between me and Dad, she’s on mine.
“Gabe, I’ve been telling you and your friends to stay off that hill since you were ten,” Dad goes on. “It’s not safe.”
“Dad,” I say, dropping my head back against the seat, “can we please talk about this later? Like, somewhere that’s not five hundred degrees and smells like cow shit?”
“Language,” Dad says, not with any conviction. Cussing apparently doesn’t bother him as much as me and my friends hanging out in the only place we ever have to ourselves. “I really don’t like it when you kids go up there, son.”
“We’re not kids, Dad. And we just go up there to … I don’t know … get away. Everyone else from school is always down at the Heart-to-Heart Bridge, and I know you definitely don’t want us hanging around that crowd. Dagger Hill is just the next best option.”
Only some of that is true. Charlie, Sonya, Kimberly, and I—we couldn’t show our faces at the Heart-to-Heart even if we wanted to. The four of us have been friends for so long, and we’re so tightly knit that we’ve funneled ourselves into our own subcategory of the high school social hierarchy. They like to call us the Almost Nobodies.
Dagger Hill has been our escape for as long as I can remember.
Dad sighs, scratching at the scruff under his chin. It makes a sound like sandpaper. “We will table this conversation until later. But you’re not off the hook, Gabe. Just because you’re going to be a senior doesn’t mean that the rules no longer apply to you. The same goes for your friends.”
I don’t say anything, just nod. With Chief Jack Albright, there’s a good time to speak and a bad time to speak. Opening your mouth after he thinks he’s had the final word falls under the latter.
We open our doors, step out into sweltering sunshine. It’s hot and hazy, shimmering with the slow drip of summer. But a slight breeze makes it a little more bearable than the baking dish of Dad’s patrol car, though there’s a whiff of something unpleasant attached to it. Dad pulls his hat out from behind the driver’s seat and screws it down on his head, shading his face. Then we crunch up the gravel driveway to where Rebecca and Mel are waiting.
Out here, the morning sun is already well above the horizon. Long golden streams of light reach out from between the trees at the edge of the farm, and the shadows are all strung out like dark caricatures of the objects casting them—the house, the barn, the fence, the herd.
The herd.
As we approach Deputies Conner and O’Connell, I only take a cursory glance at the property. Dad too. Thumbs stuck in his belt, aviator sunglasses on over his eyes, hiding his expression. If he were any more of a stereotype, he’d have on chaps and a cowhide vest with a gold star pinned to it.
But something about the herd of cattle inside the far fence makes us both do a double take. I look back, and my stride slows. Dad’s jaw unhinges, dropping open. He stops completely, pulls the shades off his face. I feel my stomach churn as we stare.
“Hell of a sight, huh?” It’s Rebecca, closing the distance between where Dad and I halted and where the others were waiting—her and Mel and Mr. Webber.
“I…,” Dad starts, but the words die in his throat. He smacks his lips together a couple of times, as if trying to get the motor running again. “What the fffffuuuu…” Those words get lost, too, dissolving into a noisy exhalation.
“What … what happened?” I ask. My mouth feels very dry.
“Not a goddamn clue,” Rebecca says, standing beside us now with her arms folded. Her thick black hair is pulled into a tight bun, and the creases in her uniform are all but perfect. She stands straight and tall, as always, never willing to take a single ounce of bullshit from anyone. Still, there’s something in her voice today. A tremor that I’ve never heard before. I doubt Dad has, either.
The other two men begin stomping through the dirt toward us, led by the pulled-taffy shape of Clark Webber—tall, pale white, withering, and hunched over like he’s got a crick in his back. He probably does.
I try not to, but I glance at the cattle again, really seeing them for the first time. Really smelling them, too.
A few yards into the pasture, piled into a mountainous heap, the herd lies dead. Their knobby limbs jut out this way and that, their heads—the ones that are still all the way intact—loll to one side or the other, tongues dripping from wide-open mouths like coagulated oil. Glassy, surprised-looking eyes stare out in every direction. Some of the animals have been shot, bullets shredded into meat, leaving flaps of shiny pink muscle dangling like gruesome Christmas tree ornaments. Deeper down in the pile, there are cows that appear to have died from being smothered or broken by the others. One poor heifer has another’s entire leg shoved far back into its throat, a look of shock and horror on its face so real that it’s almost comical.
The entire herd is like that—twisted and mangled, wrapped up in each other in a way that looks like they were trying to push themselves together, to merge into a single supercow. Already the flies have begun to swarm, buzzing in and out of the mass, creeping across the marbles of the cattle’s eyes.
Mel and Mr. Webber join us, and our entire group of five can do nothing for a few moments but stare into the field, as if we’re at one of the art shows Kimberly’s always going on about, observing a sculpture that doesn’t make any sense to us.
Dad is the first to break the silence. “Anyone care to take a crack at trying to explain just what in the absolute shit happened here?” His eyes fall on me for a moment, and when I look over at him, I feel like I might puke or pass out or both. Dad’s face is hard as stone, but I can see that some of the color has drained out of it.
Mr. Webber steps forward then, breaking the moment. Dad takes the farmer’s hand and shakes it, a strange formality given the circumstances.
“Jack,” Webber says.
“Clark,” Dad replies. “Feels like we haven’t caught up in a while.”
“Not since the last time yous were out here. Couple years ago, I think that was. When the Williams kid stole my tractor.”
“Ah, you’re right.” Dad glances over at me with a slight smirk, drops a hand on my shoulder. “You remember my son, Gabe. He’s riding along with me for the summer, getting a few internship hours under his belt before college.”
“I’m sorry about your herd, Mr. Webber,” I say, shaking his hand, then stuffing my fists into my pockets.
Webber sighs. “You and me both, kid. I don’t…” The man falters, and he looks down at his feet, kicking at the earth with the toes of his boots. “I had to shoot some of them myself. Put them out of their goddamn misery. That’s where the bullet wounds came from. I … I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“Clark says they went crazy,” Mel interjects. It’s the first time he’s spoken, which is unusual, because Mel is my dad’s version of my best friend, Charlie—a wisecracking, sarcastic son of a bitch who knows the exact wrong thing to say at exactly the wrong time.
Dad nods at his deputy, then turns back to Mr. Webber. “Can you tell it one more time, Clark? For my sake?”
Rebecca shifts uncomfortably on her feet, as if she doesn’t really want to be around for this again. I glance over at her, offering what I hope is a comforting smile. Hang in there, kid. And she grins.
“I heard ’em before I saw … before I saw what was happening,” Webber says, keeping his eyes fixed on any point that is not the dead cattle. “They weren’t just out here making their usual noises. Sometimes at night, they would get a little spooked. They’d give a little holler now and then, maybe just talking to each other, making sure they’re not alone. But this … Last night they weren’t just talking. They were screaming.”
I glance back into the pasture, eyeing the corpses again. I’m glad I haven’t eaten anything yet today, otherwise my stomach would be doing a horrible song and dance.
Webber keeps going. “So I came out here. Something told me to grab my rifle on the way out. In all my time on this earth, I’ve never heard cattle make noises like that. I knew something was wrong. I knew something was scaring the shit out of them.”
“And was something scaring the shit out of them?” Dad asks, keeping his voice firm, though I can hear the cracks underneath.
“That’s just it,” Webber says, “I never saw a damn thing. Not a raccoon or a fox or even a goddamned bear, which I know don’t really live out here, but still. I just can’t imagine what would have caused my herd to be so afraid.”
“What was the herd doing when you came outside?” Dad says.
Still without actually looking at it, Mr. Webber tilts his head toward the hill of wrecked cattle, frozen in a state of violence the likes of which I didn’t think these animals were capable of. “They were doing this. I … I think they were trying to huddle together, trying to protect one another. But they got so scared that they just … they just started climbing all over each other. They were scrambling and flailing. In the dark, it was hard to see. But I thought maybe there was something in the middle that they were … I don’t know … attacking. Cows don’t know how to defend themselves. You bump into one of ’em with the tractor, they just get out of the way like it was their fault. I just … I keep trying to come up with a rational explanation, and I can’t do it.”
After a beat, Mel asks, “When did you start shooting, Clark?”
The farmer doesn’t hesitate. In a steady voice, he says, “When I started to hear their bones breaking.”
Rebecca and I both wince.
“They went on like that for hours,” Webber continues. “I yelled and screamed and threw shit at ’em, but nothing got them to stop. They were killing each other. Terrified enough to forget the herd and do whatever it took to survive. They just used their own kind to try to climb up and out, to try to get away from whatever it was that scared them. When the ones that made it to the top started crushing the ones on the bottom, that’s when I fired my gun. I didn’t know what else to do. Most of these cows were on their way to the slaughterhouse. They were as good as dead, anyway, ya know? But it’s different like this. Whatever the fuck happened here, it isn’t right. I couldn’t let them suffer.”
Dad grips the man’s shoulder and squeezes. They’re by no means friends, but they’re neighbors—in that old-fashioned, small-town sense of the word, anyway. “You did the right thing, Clark.”
Webber’s eyes are wide and bloodshot. There’s a weary rage in them that makes us all uneasy. “No offense, Chief, but it doesn’t matter if it was right or wrong. When you don’t have a choice, the ethics of a thing go right out the fucking window. This farm has been running for three generations. We raise the cattle, treat ’em right, feed ’em well, and make sure they meet the end as humanely as possible. This…” Finally, he looks at the mass of brutalized animals, his animals, and his eyes well with sudden tears. “This took all that out of my hands and left me with only one thing I could do.”
“Let them kill each other,” Dad says, “or kill them yourself.”
Mr. Webber nods, sniffling. And again, our group is quiet.
I think for a second that we’re done here. Dad didn’t write anything down, but I notice a tiny notebook in Rebecca’s hand, the fleshy pink of a pencil eraser sticking out from between the pages. I’m itching to check my watch, even though Dad would say it’s impolite. I shove my hands deeper into my pockets to resist the urge. I’m not just anxious to get back to the Triangle and meet up with my friends—I’m also anxious to leave this horror show behind.
Clark Webber wipes his face with a dirty rag that came from his back pocket, and he looks at my dad, then at the rest of us—maybe to make sure we’re paying attention—and nods at something over our heads, behind us to the west.
“This is all their doing,” Webber says. His voice is empty of grief—there’s only that exhausted fury left.
I know exactly what I’m going to see before I turn around, but I turn anyway, for the same reason that I didn’t check my watch. Dad gives me a look as we turn, but I don’t know what it means.
Out beyond the pasture, decorated now with the pile of mostly self-slaughtered cattle, is a stretch of tall trees that run the length of Mr. Webber’s property. Thick branches, thicker trunks, a canopy of bright green leaves so dense that the shadows beneath it are almost black. With the perfect blue sky behind it, the whole scene could be a Bob Ross painting—except for the dead cows, of course, and the cluster of antennas and satellite dishes poking up from behind the tree line. From here, I can just barely see the gray concrete rooftop they’re attached to.
“TerraCorp,” Dad says.
“I don’t know what kind of wacko science experiments they’re up to in there,” Mr. Webber says behind us, “but that place has been doing damage to this property for almost twenty years. Since before you were chief, Jack.”
I continue to stare at the radio cluster on TerraCorp’s roof even as Dad turns back around to face Webber. The biggest satellite dish is a shiny metal bowl, sparkling in the sunlight as if it were made of aluminum foil. After a few seconds, something else grabs my attention, taking shape in the sky to the northwest. At first, it’s just a dark blip, an ink smudge, a “happy accident.” But then it turns an olive shade of green, and it grows a pair of wings. It has a low belly and a couple of big turbine engines, one under each wing. I hear it before it comes all the way into view, a soft, coughing roar.
“Did anything strange happen out there last night?” Dad is asking Mr. Webber. “Something that might have startled your animals?”
“Startled?” Webber chuckles. “You call that startled, Jack? Really?”
“Uh, Dad?” I say over my shoulder, my eyes pinned to the incoming plane. It’s clearly some kind of military cargo jet, and it’s angled toward Windale, coming down steep, turning slightly. TerraCorp is a government installation, top secret. People in town whisper about what goes on there, our own personal Area 51. There are plenty of wild theories, but I’ve definitely never seen a plane coming in to land out there.
“You know what I mean, Clark,” Dad says. “That was a poor choice of words. Did you see anything happening out at TerraCorp last night that we might be able to link with what happened to your herd?”
“Dad?” I try again, watching the plane descend even more, growing clearer, sharper. “Rebecca? Anyone?” The sound of the engines is building, swallowing up the buzz of the cicadas.
“Nobody’s seen inside the walls of that place since they built it in ’71. You should know that better than anybody,” Webber says to Dad.
“Dad!” I yell. Everyone goes quiet behind me. Dad steps up to my side, mouth tucked tight under his mustache, his brow crushed into a knot.
The plane is louder than ever now. It pivots in the air, dropping lower and lower, swooping in like a hawk. It glides over the treetops, then disappears behind them. I brace for an impact—but it never comes. All the way out here, the record-scratch sound of tires touching down on tarmac carries.
“Since when does TerraCorp have a landing strip?” Rebecca asks.
“No idea,” Dad says, distracted. But I can see his eyes drift over to me, casting the same look as before. I know what it means now.
“Bastards.” Mr. Webber again, speaking through gritted teeth. “They killed my herd. Murdered ’em. What’s next? Am I gonna open the henhouse and find all my chickens in a heap just like this one?”
I turn back around, now that the sky has gone quiet and empty, and find Mr. Webber shaking, fists clenched.
“Someone’s gotta answer for this,” the farmer says.
“Clark,” Dad says with a warning in his tone, “don’t do anything that’s going to make me have to arrest you. You did the right thing by calling us. Let us take it from here.”
Webber is still shaking, his eyes trained on the smooth, light-filled bowl of TerraCorp’s main radio dish. “You’ve done enough,” he says. “Thank you for coming. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a mess to clean up.”
His head dips ever so slightly toward the mountainous tangle of cows, and I can’t help but take in the sight one last time. A light breeze picks up the smell and drags it over to us. Heavy, coppery—ground beef and pennies. It’s so overwhelming my eyes start to water. I have to fight to not gag.
I step up to Mr. Webber and put my hand on his shoulder. I squeeze gently but firmly, the way Coach Ferguson does to me on Friday nights before a game.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Webber,” I say, trying to sound polite and comforting and probably coming off as neither. “Good luck with everything.”
He seems startled for a second, both from my touch and my words. But it breaks the hold, and his eyes finally drift over to me. I’ve got a good few inches on him, but I’m tilted to the side so that we’re almost eye to eye. His are bloodshot and wrapped in angry red rings.
“You too, kid,” he says.