Free What Came After by Sam Winston

against some mental list and asked about a few things that were missing. Things she needed. The men didn’t have them but they had plenty of excuses instead. Places they hadn’t been able to get to and people they hadn’t been able to see. Short supplies and bounty hunters. She said never mind. She’d go to some other source. They didn’t argue. She counted out a little money and said there would have been twice that much if they’d gotten everything she needed and they didn’t seem to feel any regret over it. They just shrugged, as if to say let somebody else take care of the details. They had troubles enough of their own.
    At the far end of the table they had left some burlap sacks and bundles, rough fabric tied up roughly. When Patel was finished with everything else she turned her attention to these. Took a scalpel and slit the packages open one after another. Vegetable material packed solid inside each one of them. Weller was no expert. It was all just leaves to him. Leaves and pods and fibrous stalks in various stages of drying or decay. Everything labeled on little paper cards half rotted themselves. Smaller bundles inside the bigger bundles with seeds and seedlings separated out, clumps of delicate threadlike roots wrapped in some kind of moss and kept damp. The way Patel looked at them, Weller could see that the rest of the world had fallen away from her. She was beyond happiness or astonishment or delight or any other ordinary reaction. Picking up the labels and holding them out at arm’s length where she could read them and putting them back down again. Fingers flying from one sample to the next and lingering there for no more than a few seconds before passing on. Ideas forming in her mind. He could see them coming together. She raised her head and noticed that the runners were still there and she dismissed them. The only word for it. Dismissed them like subordinates who’d been waiting upon her word. They left. Weller stayed.
    She took a bundle of glassine envelopes from a drawer and began parceling out some of the samples into them. Writing on the envelopes with the nub of a crayon. Rapid little flicks. Weller looking over her shoulder and after a few minutes hazarding a question. “So it’s not only wheat, then?”
    No. It wasn’t only wheat. And this little compound in the tobacco fields wasn’t unique, either. There were others elsewhere. The Midwest. The West. The South. Hidden places like this one set back from the roads, and even more deeply hidden places where there were no roads at all. Isolated outposts where research and development went on night and day, season after season, research and development whose goal was to recover the world as it had once been. To reverse time and bring back the dead.
    “These runners, then. They’re all right.”
    “I suppose. They’re only in it for the money. They don’t care what they carry. It is risky, though. These samples are worth a whole lot more to my old employer than every single leaf of tobacco we’ll harvest this year. They’re world-changers. Fortunately, there isn’t a market for them. If one of those fellows got caught, though, or turned them over to PharmAgra, it wouldn’t be pretty.”
    “There wouldn’t be a reward?” Thinking of the bounty hunter.
    She laughed. It struck him that he’d never heard her laugh before. “They’d take him to pieces,” she said. “They’d move heaven and earth to find out where he’d gotten this stuff. Waterboarding, the whole works. And once he confessed, they’d kill him. I know these people.”
    “Cheney all over again.”
    “Nobody forgets the good old days, do they.” She was holding up a glassine envelope to the light that came streaming down the ramp. Everything else having fallen away.
    “You do all of the lab work right there?”
    “Most of it.” The envelope held a damp tangle of sprouted seeds. “Soy beans from Pennsylvania,” she said, tapping on the glassine with a finger.