Mad Cow Nightmare Read Free Page A

they bundled up among her trees? Sleeping with the cows? What would she find in the morning? Her trees trampled, her pasture littered with bottles, jars, paper cups, burger wrappers?
    She had to have her sleep. She had to be up at four-fifteen. The cows wouldn’t wait. She stumbled back to the house. Colm was there at her elbow, all sweet talk and hands stroking her butt. Not a single apology for this mayhem in her life, this loss of sleep. She loved him: he was good, loyal, engaging, compassionate. He had a great sense of humor. But there were times he went too far.
    “They would’ve sneaked over the border, I expect,” Colm said. “I suppose we should call that hospital, but I don’t want them in trouble.”
    “What hospital? Why would we call them? What about?”
    “Why, that woman who died of variant CJD—you didn’t hear it on the radio? They did an autopsy after she had surgery in a Canadian hospital and that’s what it was, CJD, Creuztfeld-Jakob disease—the human form of Mad Cow.”
    Yes, she’d read about it, but oh, he was maddening, using those foolish initials. As if you could reduce pain, death, and disease to mere initials.
    He went on with an ingratiating smile as though she were some kind of idiot, wholly out of the mainstream. “Comes from eating the meat of animals tainted with Mad Cow. They’re making a call for a hundred patients who might’ve been infected from the surgical instruments after some young woman died of CJD. Or from a patch of brain sheathing they closed the incision with. And worse, a couple of them donated blood, might’ve lied about where they’d been—like in farms where they’d had Mad Cow. The hospital’s closed down for now. They need those folks back for testing. For quarantining, I’d expect.”
    Slowly she put it together—her brain wasn’t working too well at this hour of the night, especially after the rude interruption out in the pasture. Some young woman up in Canada had that incurable disease, and this woman in her tent, here in the Willmarth pasture, who’d been in that hospital and might be infected herself . . .
    “Oh! Do you think it’s contagious?”
    “Contagious? Well, I don’t know about that. Could be, I guess. But over a hundred deaths in Britain and Ireland in the nineties— you read the papers, right? It attacks the whole brain, makes it look like a sponge, full of holes. Brings on depression, paranoia. You start seeing things upside down. You see things in surreal colors, you hallucinate—see bugs crawling all over the place. It eats away speech, memory. You turn into a vegetable. The worst, they say, is if you’re infected it can sleep inside you for up to forty years—tens of thousands could already have it. And when it wakes up— bango!” Colm clapped his hands together. He was clearly enjoying the effect his words had on her. “Dead in seven days.”
    Outside, the accordion made a last trill, and was silent. The night beyond the bedroom window was black, the moon eclipsed by racing clouds. She imagined waking to a pasture empty of cows, like the sheep farmers up in East Warren who only three years before had their herd quarantined and then slaughtered because two animals had allegedly tested positive for a form of Mad Cow that could take years to prove. A livelihood removed, dreams destroyed. She’d felt sick for them.
    “It could happen to me,” she said, struck with the magnitude of it, the horror. “Oh, my God, it could.” She flung her arms around
    her lover’s neck. “Colm, we’ve got to get the woman out of that tent, back to that Canadian hospital!”
    “Even then it could be too late for us,” he said. “People will hear about it. Panic. Jump to false conclusions—you know.”
    She knew. She knew only too well. She felt the panic herself. She held on to him, needing solace. But he was already asleep.
     

Chapter Three
     
    Deep in the night Nola heard voices. She reached for Ritchie but discovered only the