Three Hundred Jackals On Fire

The swollen boy spoke only of the Dark Angel and the World. I watched him wrestle sweaty sheets, his face smooth and slack. It reminded me of my own. Around his bed gathered twenty elder Mennonites, mainly men, stroking their beards and muttering at their Bibles, faces nicked by tilts of dusty morning sunshine.

"Will he live?" said Jasch Hildebrandt, in a strong Plautdietsch accent.

My stomach clinched. None of these people realized I was an inoculator. They thought I was God's own messenger.

"Will you perform the miracle?" Jasch added.

I wondered again what was I was doing here, on this antique colony nestled between blue hills, cut off from what these people called the World.

As an employee of Zoar, the world's largest food conglomerate, and a doctor who kept his oath, I had to find a medical explanation. I suspected allergenic molecules, delivered through gene drift from nearby crops. But after the diagnosis, I would have to decide whether to administer a secret inoculation, as I was licensed to do. The other option was magical thinking and career-crashing.

I knew what my wife would have done. Ex wife, as she would have reminded me.

My own face, especially the eyelids, had begun to droop just before the divorce, a year earlier. My wife made the diagnosis: a pathogenic toxin that targeted peripheral nerve endings, and concentrated at unpredictable points in the body. She dragged me to the hospital. The synapses, once damaged, were permanently wrecked. Weak, almost unable to swallow, I spent five days in the hospital on a heavy rotation of antitoxins.

My dear wife proclaimed the toxins a mystery, while I suspected a link to new foods designed to resist botulism. She exploded. We blazed through the old argument. I was a Utopian frankenfood reactionary. I lived by vestigial ethics, and would never climb the corporate ladder. Worst of all, I was a closet patriarch.

"Most of our managers are finally women," she would say. "And suddenly you men wonder about the whole show. How convenient."

My wife had no use for patriarchs, and, finally, none for me. But I knew she was wrong: I had Merlin Syndrome, and I would need a daily dose of antitoxin just to keep me smiling. Literally.

Hoping for a dose of luck, I snuck out of the hospital and hit the road. I took only my Inoculator's Kit, phone, a box of antitoxins, and a paper photo of my wife, which I tried gamely to throw away. I couldn't.

The room began to reek of heat, and the swollen boy of sweetness. Some of the Mennonites shuffled out to whatever chores awaited at the seventh week of drought. Others remained, watchful and silent. I could smell my own sweat, mingled with the astringent tinge of orange disinfectant. It reminded me of my wife's fragrance. I removed her picture from my pocket, filled with the exquisite longing that attends aromatic memories. When I held it up to a slope of light, the swollen boy pointed a quivering finger and wailed.

"What is it you carry?" asked a bearlike redhead, rising.

"Nothing important," I said.

The swollen boy muttered in Plautdietsch, something with the cadence of prayer or invocation.

"Let us see," said the redhead.

I pressed the picture to my chest.

"Let us see," he insisted. "This is our world. You are the visitor."

Reluctantly, I handed him the picture. He coughed, then flipped it over, hiding it from the swollen boy.

"May I have it back?" I said. But the redhead began to fold it, crease after crease, while the men in the shadows shifted like spooked horses.

"Peita," said Jasch. "Return him his photograph. He is a guest."

Slowly, with one great grimed hand, the man handed back my picture. I began to unkink it. Orange stung my nose and watered my eyes.

"Vaut es daut?" said the oldest man in the room, a goatlike greybeard leaning on a carved ash cane.

The redhead put a hand on the swollen boy, the way he would calm a pony, until the swollen boy's moans subsided to a soft keen.

"Vaut es daut?" the greybeard repeated.

"De dunkla Enjel." The redhead sat shakily. "Enoch has a photograph of the dark angel."

After leaving my wife and the hospital, I had hitched south through winding forest roads with a gang of boho gypsies who made their own food. They were intrigued by my antitoxins, but didn't talk much. I had plenty of time to think.

Inoculator was a bastard job to start with. Part doctor, part fixer, all spinner. Whenever poisoning or contamination was suspected by the info analysts at Zoar, and an inoculator dispatched, it was as important to wash the situation as it was to cure the patient. Whatever the truth about engineering, it was always a public relations disaster waiting to happen, especially when the frankenfood radicals seized upon strange violations of the species barrier. Residual morality? Perhaps. Personally, I studied each case carefully. String-pulled foods had their benefits. But I always tried to weigh the interests of the patient. I never once bought off a victim, even though I had an unlimited expense account for that very purpose.

My wife thought me an idiot. She was the best inoculator in the business, ruthless and crafty, with one eye always on the hot money. She was everything I hated and loved.

When Jasch and I sat to drink coffee in the cool evening, beneath a fragrant poplar, he asked me a surprising question.

"What is your wife's name?"

I burned my tongue on the coffee. "My wife!"

He chuckled. I heard spoons clink in the kitchen, the spray of water, the clunk of dishes.

"Enoch, sometimes I know a man's story just by the tightness in his shoulders or the lines around his eyes. Sometimes God whispers."

"Why did Pieta call her the dark angel?"

Jasch looked down. "Some of us have seen a shadow wander our colony. Some have seen her talk with Abram, our patriarch, back when he was still healthy. Sometimes, even here, a beautiful woman can bewitch a man."

Bewitch? Christ. And sometimes even a smart inoculator can romanticize the Old Ways.

I sighed and fished my wife's picture from a pocket. "Her name is Delilah."

"God's mercy." He took the picture. "Are you joking?"

I shook my head.

He smiled. "She is very comely. Why do you run from her?"

I shrugged and sipped.

"Delilah is a woman in the Bible," Jasch said. "Her husband was named Samson, and his story holds a special place for my people. Do you know of him?"

"No."

"An angel visited a woman," Jasch began, "and told her she would have a son, who would deliver the Israelites from slavery to the Philistines."

"Samson's mother?"

Jasch nodded. "From that time forward she was to eat no forbidden food. And since she obeyed, she did give birth, and her son did become a deliverer. He was a Nazarite, commanded by God to never cut his hair." Jasch leaned forward and made a fist with his free hand. "And for as long as his hair continued to grow, God gave Samson such power. Once, when his bride was given to another, Samson was so angered that he tied three hundred jackals together by the tails, lit them on fire, and set them loose to burn his enemies' crops."

"Delilah?" I guessed again.

"No." Jasch released the fist and looked down. "Delilah was his second love, who bewitched him and cut his hair."

Bewitched, again. I plucked my fingernails. I found myself cheering for Delilah.

Jasch continued. "Unlike his mother, Samson did not obey God to the very end. He was weak. This is the lesson for my people."

I nodded for him to go on, but he stared down at his cooling coffee. The sky had darkened. Soft light blurred the kitchen windows, where the women washed spoons.

He looked up. "For us, the World is Philistine, ready at all times to enslave us. We will not grow the devil's seed, even now, during this drought."

I gulped coffee, heartbeat quickening. And I knew then I would not inoculate the swollen boy. I would sneak off the colony taking some of this potent mythology with me.

Trust the Zoar Corporation, inhabiting the very contradictions of the transnational market, to break up families then put them back together. Well, if not exactly together, in proximity at least. Two months after I had fled Delilah, she and I were reunited, assigned to the same job in Northern Saskatchewan. It was a run-of-the-mill case in which a young woman's body immunized itself against friendly gut bacteria and became toxic with fungal overgrowths. I administered the inoculation. Delilah spun damage control. An old American FDA agent in a white linen suit did the paperwork.

Afterward we went for a drink in a faux-Irish pub, and were both surprised at how the old sparks flared. I touched her dark hair, releasing that Delilah smell, orange and cinnamon. String-pulled cinnamon, no doubt, but no less deadly for that.

"The way the Flippie media whines." She winked at me, sipping foam from her Guinness. "There is no gene drift. It's a fact."

I gulped Bushmills. It burned. Stringed foods were sold mainly to the poor, who'd never challenge lax regulations or scrub up enough to buy boutique food. I was about to bite the hook, but the FDA agent leaned forward, rustling his linen suit. We had forgotten about him.

"Here's a fact." His voice was dry as blistered corn. "The food your rich folks are pigging on ain't exactly organic, and gene drift real or imagined is the least of the company's worries."

Delilah rolled her eyes.

The agent slurped an ice cube from his vodka. "You notice an increase in assignments lately?"

"Go on," I said.

"Zoar is engineering crops that hide their own stringing. Selling them labeled organic for five times what they're worth. But look closer: these crops have shatterproof seeds. They bloom quicker, offer silly high yields." He crunched the ice cube. "Can't be traced. Far as I can guess, that very mod is what's making 'em toxic."

Delilah slammed down her pint. "And exactly where are they growing these crops, Captain Horse and Buggy?"

He stood and flicked a rumpled bill at the table. It landed in his glass and sank. "I ain't kidding. They call the crops manna."

Delilah gagged. "Oh come on, Reverend Horse Shit."

"Where can we corroborate these allegations?" I gripped the table's edge.

"No." He waved his hands. "I retire in two years."

He walked away, spitting ice. I stood.

Delilah grabbed my wrist. "Don't follow."

"Let go."

Her fingers tightened. "You waste your energy." Her voice crackled with familiar rage. "Every new environment changes the rules."

"Let go. Please."

"We live in a swamp," she said through clenched teeth. "Get used to it."

I shook my hand free. Delilah's eyes and mouth softened.

"Stay," she pleaded.

I left, and haven't seen her since. She went north, I went south, following a thirsty river towards blue hills and week-old drought, with one of her raven hairs still caught in my fingernail.

I woke after midnight, and rose from my cot to see walls so bright the moonlight itself seemed string-pulled. Gathering my few things, I passed through the well-oiled door and down a silent hallway. Somewhere, in a distant room, voices argued in Plautdietsch, one deep, one wheezy and strained.

Outside, wind dried my eyes. I snuck beneath the windows of the dinner hall. Inside, someone gathered ice from the deep freeze. I walked through the pumpkin patch, away from the buildings. If anything, the world seemed brighter away from the lights. My senses pinked. I smelled corn, heard water.

Water?

I headed west, following a thin path that wound through increasingly thick weeds and shrubbery. Clouds blew in, blotting the moon, forcing me to squint and slow my pace. The ground began to rise and fall. Still I heard water, getting louder. I carefully crawled beneath an ancient barbed wire fence, leaving a shred of my shirt. The path dipped, then climbed steeply to a crest, where I parted a sheaf of thinning shrubs.

I gasped.

All along the vales below and hills above, dense as quills, rustling like a small ocean: tall stalks of multicolored corn. Blue, brown, white, red, purple, black—I licked dry lips, hair lashing my eyes.

Reaching with quivery fingers, I pulled my GenetiKit from a cargo pocket. My wife's picture came with it. I held one in each hand, then looked out across the corn.

The rage came swift and hot, starting in my gut and sweeping up to the roots of my hair. I glanced down at the crumpled photo of the dark angel, then clenched my kit, knowing I wouldn't bother to use it. No confirmation needed here: a Mennonite colony was the perfect secret garden for illegal seed stock.

I hardly cared that she had lied to me and the FDA agent. But how could she take advantage of these people? Flinging the kit to the dust, I reached into my shirt and drew a lighter instead.

After the FDA agent's story, I had lit out for the territory like an angry Huck Finn. I didn't have a map or a plan. I had heard there were antique colonies further south and west, where deeply religious people lived antique lives.

I began to turn down assignments. I threw away my company wafers and began to eat local. For a few days I even refused to take my antitoxins. All I could think about was the company, with its profit streams and greenwashing campaigns. After a month my natural mood began to reassert, and I felt like I could breathe again. But something had shifted.

I stopped at a market fair to buy some organic green apples, where I heard rumors about a swollen patient quarantined on a near colony. I asked some bearded men for more information. They silenced.

"I might be able to help," I said. "I'm an inoculator."

"Enoch?" said a large black-bearded man. He considered me for a long silence. Then said, "We have prayed for many nights...."

He turned to the others. "Enoch jink met Gott."

A long discussion followed, some of it animated, much of it angry. After, the black-bearded man turned to me.

"I am Jasch," he said. "What are you doing for supper this evening?"

"One minute." I phoned Zoar to inform them of the case. The analyst put me on hold for ten minutes. When he clicked on again, he sounded almost panicked, and told me to stay off the colony and get out of there immediately.

"Absolutely. Will do. " I hung up and threw my phone to the dirt. "Pleased to meet you, Jasch. I have no supper plans."

The dry corn flared like it was doused with Old Time ethanol. I leaped back in surprise, as the crop roared and the air blistered in great wave of heat.

"We should have trusted God instead," said a wheezy voice, heavily accented.

I turned. It was the swollen boy, leaning on a walker, looking slightly wasted, but fitter than I had ever seen him.

"You are God's messenger, Enoch." He held a hand up toward heaven. "We should have trusted. Now...." He looked out at the sea of fire.

My back scorched with heat. "What?"

He stared sadly. "We deserve your wrath, and the Lord's."

"Why?"

"We have leagued with the devil."

"Oh." I slumped. "Oh, God."

My anger smoked away. I fanned the photograph, unable to think of anything to say, to him or to myself.

"We have faced too many droughts." He coughed.

"So you've heard of the Zoar Corporation?" I said.

"Of course. Philistine itself."

I stared at this boy. "Who told you?"

He looked up at me, eyes narrowed, then glanced back in the direction of the colony. "This is my flock. They follow my word. Will you then petition the Lord to hold me responsible for this sin?"

I looked at him closely. His smooth face was scratched with faint static lines, skin tight and upper eyelids drooping. Christ. It wasn't a swollen boy at all, but a hairless, almost wrinkle-free man in the late stages of Merlin Syndrome.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"Abram. Abram Pankratz."

I squeezed the photograph.

"Will you petition the Lord?" he asked, stepping forward. "Please?"

I closed my eyes. "Yes." And opened them. "I will."

Abram slouched in obvious relief. We listened to the unearthly crackle of the corn fire, smelling the smoke. After many minutes, I reached into my cargos and pulled out the box of antitoxins. "If you will further please the Lord, Abram, swallow one of these each day."

He nodded, accepting the box.

I turned to the fire, with further inoculations for myself. I threw my kit to the flames. I crumpled my ex-wife's picture and tossed it after.

"We live in a swamp," I said bitterly.

"God willing," said Abram.

The kit sizzled and smoked, but the picture burned instantly.

A.M. Arruin lives in the Porcupine Hills of Canada, in an abandoned hotel. On rare occasions he has running water.