​The blistered ribbon of highway simmered, and other than miles of resettlement convoys, there were no signs of life. Barren prairie stretched to the horizon, veined with desiccated trees; pocked with bleached, gutted ranch houses; and abandoned trailer parks overrun with kudzu vines. After days on the road, the hot, crowded Resettlement bus reeked of body odors strong enough to taste. Sweat trickled down Vee’s neck, her hair and clothes were matted with it. They had crossed into what used to be Colorado, and this burnt moonscape felt like the maw of oblivion. 

​

Vee was from Manhattan and had never been west of the Mississippi River. Like other Resettlers, she had subsisted on warm, bottled water and prepackaged rations. Her mouth was dry and sour, and she tipped her water bottle, swallowing the last drops. Her head throbbed, and the world shimmered in her peripheral vision. Was it the fever and hallucinations returning, or dehydration that made her woozy?

​

She shared a cramped seat with Casper, a stout trucker, who was returning to his family home in Flat Iron, a territory of the Renewal Zone. He snored under his cowboy hat, and when he shifted, his sweaty arm slid against hers. Casper was a prodigious talker, and Vee had taken to feigning sleep to avoid his incessant narrative. He smelled of body odor and synthetic pine cologne. He spoke with a drawl, a caricature of a cowboy with his Stetson and scuffed boots. It was a mercy when he slept.

​

For miles, the undulating sliver of the Rocky Mountains had been a marker as the resettlement convoy drove west, and now that they were heading north, the snowless, denuded peaks defined the western horizon. The climate apocalypse had come after decades of global warming. Massive ice melts caused by endless summer had swelled oceans until the earth’s tectonic plates rocked under the shifting burden. Seas erupted into tsunamis worldwide, and coastal residents who survived fled inland. Now Vee saw how the interior regions of the former United States had been decimated over time, drought-stricken and ravaged by fires. Her despair felt boundless, and she tried to imagine life in this godforsaken place. Out of habit, she pressed the tip of her thumb into the groove at the base of her left ring finger, but her wedding band was long gone. She had traded it for passage to the Renewal Zone.

​

The bus lumbered on, belching diesel; and they passed a faded sign that read Flat Iron, 5 miles - Home of the World’s Biggest Rodeo. A noxious, biochemical odor churned the air, as if the chemical toilet at the back of the bus had overflowed. “Oh my God,” Vee choked, “what the hell is that?”

​

“Stockyards full of cattle,” Casper yawned and stretched. Vee got a tart whiff of him and recoiled. He pointed ahead to a fence lining the highway, and beyond it, acres of undulating brown and sepia heads and backs, packed side by side, head to tail.

​

Vee stared at the penned animals, and as the acrid smell lapped the back of her throat, she felt a tremor, a vibration in her bones. This reality of thousands of cattle trapped under the hot sun shocked her, these were the cattle of her fevered hallucinations, a hallmark of VIROX-02. She pulled the stiff rag from her pocket and mopped the scrim of sweat and grit from her face, then covered her nose and stared at the acres of mangy animals, their spines straining from their own weight.

​

At the height of her infection with VIROX-02, hallucinations of tormented cattle had driven her to near madness. Now, she stared at the animals, trapped in sweltering heat and remembered Sandrine’s words, “There are consequences for brutalizing living beings. This virus is a reckoning.”

​

Vee had worked for Sandrine in a psychiatric clinic treating patients with the psychosis caused by VIROX-02. Sandrine was a gifted clinician and mentor, often at odds with her colleagues due to her unconventional ideologies and practices. Sandrine travelled to a remote village in South America for months at a time, where she studied alternative healing practices and herbal remedies. She always returned with new herbs and incantations and might as well have spoken a foreign language when she tried to explain to Vee what she learned. The scent of burnt sage and patchouli wafted from her office and emanated with a whisper of the occult from her clothing and hair. During the pandemic Sandrine was outspoken about the limitations of allopathic medicine, and she was the only person Vee knew recovered from the virus. Everyone else was taking UpTabs to stay alive.

​

A hot, acidic stench blasted through the bus window, and Vee coughed spasmodically.

​

“That’s the smell of money,” Casper said.

​

“What kind of monster says a thing like that?” Vee glared at him and reached for the blister pack of UpTabs in her pocket, fumbling with the packaging. “Those animals are being tortured.” Her hand shook as she popped an UpTab under her tongue. There was no known cure for VIROX-02. UpTabs controlled the symptoms but eventually lost their effectiveness. Vee guessed that everyone in this Resettlement convoy, like Vee, had a stockpile of UpTabs to keep them from losing their minds.

​

“Folks gotta’ eat,” Casper said, “The beef business is what keeps Flat Iron and the Renewal Zone thrivin’ even in times like these. You’ll get used to the smell.”

“Impossible,” Vee said. A dark memory stirred in her as she stared at the expanse of cattle, and Vee shifted in her seat, trying to stretch away the ache in her back. The bus rocked and groaned on the buckled highway.

​

“You’re lookin’ mighty peakid,” Casper said, “No need to get worked up. They’re just animals. They don’t know nothin’ better.”

​

“Do you even hear yourself?” Vee snapped, turning away from Casper to the sight outside the window. “You can’t tell me those animals aren’t suffering.” When there was still an internet Vee had searched: cattle and factory farms. Flat Iron topped the search list; a town surrounded by feedlots and slaughterhouses. Ground zero for the pandemic. She read about the anguish of cows separated from their calves, and calves who cried for days and had to be force-fed. Slaughterhouse workers reported seeing cattle weep and tremble with fear as they were forced through narrow chutes onto the kill floor. Vee stopped eating beef.

​

“Anyone who’s handled those animals knows they’re driven by instinct,” Casper said, “and they’re dangerous. Wait till you see what bulls do in the rodeo. Those cattle out there probly’ don’t hardly notice where they are, so long as they have food and water,” he sighed. “Water gets pumped in through those pipes. They’re doin’ ok by my sights. Better n’ most people nowadays. Who do you know has that kind of access to water? Most of us are on rations.” Casper sighed, “That’s the life. Nothin’ to do but eat. They’ll fatten up in no time. Once they come from the breeders, it takes about six months till they’re ready for processing. See those troughs, that’s their feed. Kind of like room service.”

​

“They’re knee deep in mud.” Vee said.

​

“Well, that ain’t all mud,” he shook his head. “What you smell is ammonia and methane generated by acres of piss and manure. Cattle are dirty animals.” He settled back in his seat and spread his knees, his thick leg, in unwashed denim pushing against her, his hot, damp arm pressing hers.

​

“Get away from me,” Vee shoved him. She was having trouble breathing.

​

“I can’t help it if I’m big,” Casper said, rubbing his fleshy arm, “We been over this. Anyway, when antibiotics don’t control infection, that’s what they have the pen riders for – those men ride around on horses and shoot any animals that are injured or sick.”

​

“That’s enough,” Vee snapped, “everything you tell me is worse than the last thing you said.”

​

“Keeps the population healthy so they don’t infect the food chain.” Casper mopped his brow with the back of his arm.

​

“Stop it,” Vee snapped. It felt like the air, saturated with the feedlot stench, could cook her from the inside. A tremor, intimate as death, shimmied up her spine. In that unnerving instant Vee felt the cattle understood they were destined for slaughter, “Cows are sacred in some cultures.” The futility of her words depressed her.

​

“Sacred here too,” Casper said, “Shiloh Industries is the biggest provider of grade A beef in Renewal Zone. They process up to 6,000 cattle per day – that’s about two million a year.” Casper nodded with satisfaction, as if he had accomplished this himself.

​

“Factory farms torture millions of animals to package them for food.” Vee’s voice raised a notch. She felt hysterical and she knew she should stop there, but she didn’t, “We’re all having hallucinations of tortured cattle. Did you ever think about why?” her voice crescendoed and she sensed other passengers shifting in their seats to locate the disruption.

​

“I try not to think about it,” Casper said, looking at her warily, as if she might burst into flame, “maybe you shouldn’t either.”

​

Vee tried to slow her breathing.

​

“Anyway. There’s an explanation for everything,” Casper said, and tentatively took her empty bottle from the seat pocket in front of her, poured some of his water into the spout and handed it to her, “here. You’re dehydrated.”

​

Casper’s unexpected kindness rattled her. Vee took a gulp of water, suppressing the panic and fury she had outrun for months. Her thumb found the absence of the ring. Her grief for Daniel was stubborn and so complicated.

​

“Those hallucinations,” Casper said tentatively, “they say it’s because your unconscious hears things without you knowing it. It’s called -” he squinted, trying to remember, “what do they call it?”

​

“Power of suggestion.” Vee said flatly as she drank the rest of the water and closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the seat rest. Her heart wouldn’t stop racing.

​

“Yeah,” Casper said, “that. What with everyone talkin’ about tortured cattle, how are we not supposed to be dreaming about tortured cattle?”

​

“Sure.” Vee said, without opening her eyes. “Whatever.”

​

“Like what happens sometimes when people get organ donations. In surgery they hear the docs talk about the donor. Like, that teenager who never heard classical music, who got a transplant and suddenly wanted to listen to…” he snapped his fingers, as if trying to think of a name. “One of those foreign, old-time composers.”

​

“Beethoven?” Vee mumbled, it felt comforting to say the name of a composer from another lifetime. Before the climate crisis. Before the pandemic. Before the death, “Mozart?” She and Daniel used to listen together. In their living room that was now underwater.

​

“Probably,” Casper said. “You feel a little better?”

​

“Yes,” Vee lied, “thanks for the water.” She trembled. Instead of Daniel, she turned her thoughts to Sandrine, remembering the last time she saw her.

 

They were in a staff meeting. Vee had looked around at her colleagues, whose unkempt hair and rumpled clothes, like hers, gave them a desperate, end-of-the-world look, their skin sallow under the flickering tubes of fluorescent ceiling lights. What little sleep they got was riddled with lurid hallucinations of mutilated cattle.

 

Sandrine’s words still haunted Vee: “These aren’t hallucinations. They’re memories.”

 

The lime green walls and pitted linoleum floors of the conference room amplified Vee’s horror. Everyone but Sandrine was taking UpTabs. Sandrine wasn’t sick.

 

Someone muttered, “What the fuck?”

​

Now, the bus left the stockyards behind, and they were surrounded by crop fields. After a few miles, up ahead Vee saw what looked like a charcoal rendering of a fist pushing across the prairie toward the skyline of a town. Beneath it, dark bristles of rain slanted into the ground, pleating the sky.

​

“Another one,” she muttered, too exhausted to care. Tornados and rogue storms had become so frequent, there had been several already on this trip. How many times had she wondered what it would be like to die hurtling through the air? Daniel would have known if it was velocity or impact that would kill them. He had a way of reducing almost any horror into a clinical calculation.

​

“Heading straight for Flat Iron,” Casper said.

​

The driver decelerated into the breakdown lane, and the bus shuddered as the engine quit. Without its diesel howl, the hum of voices inside became audible as everyone stood and lined up in the aisle, fanning themselves in the stifling heat. 

​

The driver opened the doors, and Vee hurried out with the others, ragged and unwashed, her stiff legs unused to standing or walking. As they huddled in the drainage ditch alongside the highway, the burnt umber sky bore down, compressing and chilling the air, raising goosebumps on Vee’s arms. Her heart raced as she crouched with the others to watch and wait.

​

The storm advanced on the town, a dark smudge traversing the plains, bending trees, stirring a lacy trail of debris as it gained momentum.  The wind howled, and as it bore down, the sharp odor of stockyards snapped through the trench. The wind unmoored trees and rooftops, kicked up cars and tool sheds, and Vee hunched her shoulders, covering her ears.

 

Then, the drum of rocks dropping from the sky, as hail pummeled the metal skin of the bus. The roar was deafening, and Vee screamed with it into the void, feeling a monstrous darkness coil into her lungs. Hail stung her skin, and she sheltered her head with crisscrossed arms as the trench amassed a rising tide of ice. Time seemed to strain against the looming void, and Vee tried to count the minutes, but she couldn’t. Then an eerie, suffocating silence. The sun burnt away the clouds, the heat of the earth rose up through tar and dirt, and the hail began to dissolve.

​

Vee closed her eyes, leaning her head on her folded arms while they waited. If this was a twin storm, another funnel would form. She wondered how long she would survive on this gutted earth.