else?
In the old days, we held to the Rule of Rome—kill everyone; leave nothing behind—but in the last few hundred years, as a general policy “salting the earth” has become less viable. It was easier to be invisible; to hide in the shadows and prey upon their fear of the dark. They welcomed any excuse to look away.
But we got lazy; we forgot our mission. We convinced ourselves that we didn't need to know, and like a field untended and unwatched, weeds grew. After several generations, they became strong and entrenched. Like clover with thousands of runners beneath the surface, binding everything together. Choking the life out of the native grasses.
It is easy to remain unseen when I follow Mere. I know her mannerisms: the way she tucks her hair behind her left ear when she stops at a street corner and looks both ways; how she makes tiny popping motions with her lips when she is reading and thinking; her quick, distance-devouring stride; she plays chicken with anyone walking in the opposite direction, unconsciously—oblivious, even—waiting for them to side-step first. Without her knowing, we fall into the same routine we had two years ago.
She was an up-and-coming investigative reporter for one of the network affiliates in Boston. Too brash for an anchor job, she preferred the deep research, investigative exposé—building a story, chasing down witnesses, and packaging it all together in five-minute segments that would be doled out over successive nights in the heart of the prime time news slot. The New York and Los Angeles markets were already sniffing around, and she was on the shit-list of more than one lobbyist group in D.C. Meredith Vanderhaven was going places; it was just a matter of time. Organized crime and double-speaking politicos in the Boston area could not wait for her to move on.
It didn't matter if she was chasing the money trail of city-wide construction contracts gone horribly over-budget, or the social media scandals of city government candidates who didn't understand the first rule of texting sexually explicit pictures, or the byzantine backroom dealings of the fulsomely corrupt city government, she dug into it all with the same tenacity. But Big Ag could turn her head quicker than anything else, and it had been her story about the cattle conditions at Hachette Falls that had caught Arcadia's attention.
A family-owned cattle ranch, Hachette Falls was two generations past its sell-date. The current operator was half again as unconcerned about the quality of the meat coming out of the Hachette slaughterhouse as his father had been, and as a result, the stockyards were beyond inhumane. Downer cows and electric prods were the order of the day, and the workers were masters at spotting the signs of brain damage and virulent distress in the herd. They knew how to shock the sluggish cows right into the chute.
Mere got a video camera on site and her clandestine video footage was story enough, but what made her story pop was the arrogant indifference of Hachette senior management, especially in light of government subsidies the company was receiving for being a test farm for a new GMO-based additive in the feed. The product was made by a miniscule biotech that was getting inordinate handouts from the same government program—collusion of the most scandalous sort. The biotech company disappeared within days of Mere's footage finding its way onto the Internet. No mere trick there.
It was as if, having seen the presence of the Devil, Mere was now a true believer, a crusading convert, who would face any hardship in her relentless quest to hunt Old Scratch down, to purge his influence off the surface of the planet. Hachette's BSE haven was almost forgotten in her zeal to track the influence. The money was easy—right out of D.C.—what was harder was finding out who pulled strings to get the cash flowing the way it had been. And who had the power to make a company of twelve suddenly disappear.
Her search led her to Beering Foods, a subsidiary of a subsidiary who made patties from the ground chuck that came out of Hachette Falls. They were part of a resurgence on a community level to buy and eat local, though the community was clearly oblivious to the corporate chain behind Beering. They were equally oblivious—for different reasons—to Beering's black market channel of organ trafficking. This channel was run by a bunch of Chechens who had been schooled in modern international business by “retired” officers of the pre-Glasnost