Future Farming Ch. 03

So, Sarah had been colluding too. Did it make her more - or less - culpable?

We heard a vehicle approaching from above. "Get up," he told me. "Face the stairs."

I did as he said, but I realized that he'd already told me that he didn't want me dead. I figured it was a good time to try and put him off balance.

"You're going to pay for this," I spat. "I'll never help you. The first chance I get, mark my words."

A man appeared at the exit to the shelter, as Noxworthy laughed. "You'll be doing exactly what we want you to until you're of no further use. Now, get moving."

The other goon motioned for me to climb out, as he waved his gun at me too. I was in big trouble. I was surprised to see Brian climb out behind me. He'd left Tom to die, but he hadn't killed him. We walked to the vehicle, and I was placed in the back, with Noxworthy next to me.

There was another man already in the passenger seat and the other fellow got into the driver's seat. No sooner was he settled, and ready to drive away, when all hell broke loose.

The passenger side window exploded in an instant, and simultaneously the passenger's left temple blew out all over the driver. The driver didn't seem to care, as his right hand and arm were shaking, and blood began pouring from his ear. By the time Noxworthy and I both regained our composure, I saw him reaching for the gun in his lap. Reaching over I grabbed his hands with mine, and tried to keep the weapon pointing forward. Noxworthy was a strong son-of-a-bitch, as I wrestled for control.

Suddenly, his door flew open, and a familiar voice ordered him to drop the gun. She calmly told me to let go, as her gun pressed against Noxworthy's head. He let it fall to the floor and put his hands up. Another agent pulled him from the car, and he was ordered face down. Once he was detained, Gabby came around my side of the car and wrapped me in a bear hug as I stepped forth.

"I thought I'd lost you," she cried as I held her. I blanked out for a moment, then as I got my bearings, remembering the gory scene in the storm shelter. I pulled back looking at her.

"Gabby," I said with urgency, "Tom is in there. He's in bad shape."

She looked towards the open door. "That's not all," I said sternly and somberly. "Your dad... he's..."

Gabriela tried to run, but I held her tight. "Let go of me!" she screamed. But I wouldn't.

"No, Gabby," I said calmly. "You won't be able to unsee that. Let someone else."

An hour later, I was holding and rocking Gabby on the porch swing as she sobbed. The others had attended to Tom and also to Raul's corpse. Noxworthy was bound and gagged inside our living room. Finally, she settled down and looked up into my face.

"Thank you for saving me," I said sincerely. "I'm so sorry about your father." She nodded, and behind her eyes, I saw more that needed to be said.

"Steve, your wife is down at the bunkhouse," she said. "She's sick. Stage one ENDO. Tom brought her here after Papa told me what you'd discovered in Yuma. That's how these bastards found us. They'd been surveilling Tom. We were smart enough to hide her, just in case. Sadly, that wasn't enough. You need to help her, Steve. We need to balance things and I need to figure out what to do with Noxworthy. Someone... or more likely a bunch of them will be along shortly to cause more damage."

I sat with her in my arms, processing. "I'm not leaving you until we figure out how to deal with him," I motioned to our door, "and how to keep everyone safe."

"We lost a lot of men out there, Steve," she added. "These guys aren't FBI. More likely BlackRock, or Mercs." I knew she meant mercenaries. "I think I need to make some calls to the big guns."

"What big guns?" I asked. "Who's bigger than them?"

She smiled at me. "Go see to your wife. I'm gonna make a call and then sit with Papa for a bit. Say my goodbyes."

There were doctors and a nurse in the makeshift room where Sarah lay in bed. She looked tired, but not too sick. She saw me as I stepped through the curtain.

"Steven," she said weakly. "Thank God, you're okay. I was so worried."

I walked over and held her hand. "If that fucking Brian Noxworthy would have succeeded, I wouldn't be here now." I was lost for words then. "I take it you've met Gabriela?"

Sarah nodded. I looked at the IVs in her arms. "What have the doctors said?"

"They don't have much, right now," she responded. "Gabriela said that you may have found something - something related to soils. I don't understand."

I sat down and explained what we'd found in Arizona and how it pertained to ENDO. I told her if she had a positive reaction to the medical cocktail that Phil was synthesizing, then I'd develop a delivery system to administer it. Sarah seemed shocked the further I went, but then she seemed to find a level of understanding.

"Steve, I'm..." she tried to stifle a sob. "I'm so sorry. I caused all of this. I've ruined your life. I've..."

"No, Sarah," I said squeezing her hand. "Noxworthy told me how hard he worked on convincing you to get me on that island. You didn't ruin my life - the government and Stratagem did. And besides, if it wasn't for that chain of events, I wouldn't have ended up on Raul's team, saving our food supply."

"Well, then," she replied. "I'm sorry for what I did to us." She smiled hopefully then. I didn't like that look. She wasn't forgiven, and probably would never be. But I smiled back. Right then she needed hope. The rest could be dealt with later.

>>>>

Phil and I worked with the doctors and chemists, tweaking the formula many times before Sarah was given the first experimental dose. It wasn't lost on me that we were breaking just about every law on the books. But laws and science rarely play well together, and we knew who was at fault, for the cancer and the food supply.

Gabby and I spent our nights together, but she was broken up over the loss of her father, and I think she felt a twinge of guilt about making love with my wife just a mile and a half down the road in a debilitated condition. We held each other, and I felt the love radiating from her, so I was biding my time. It was weird to have so many people on the ranch, and the flurry of activity had us all on edge.

Gabby had made the call. Her call was to the Texas True States Guard. We now had over two hundred armed men on the ranch, which I'm sure was unsettling even to the Native Americans. They had taken Noxworthy to their base in West Texas.

While my life was dedicated to science, and Sarah before everything went off the rails, I cared less for politics, except for how it impacted me personally. I had no idea that the lower forty-eight's true guard or militia had swelled to such formidable numbers over the past decade. I knew the military had been depleted in the early twenties, but that came as a shock. Gabby told me that the entire FBI - in fact, every active member of all three-letter agencies, had been under militia surveillance since 2017. They did what they could to keep track of the state's Guard members too, but they were hopelessly outnumbered.

Holding Noxworthy and knowing the truth about the farms Yates had almost destroyed, gave the guard an invaluable negotiating tool with the President and Congress. Yates idea wasn't criminal, but his zeal to move forward without proper testing proved to be negligent. Precluding a viable treatment for ENDO, they also held the upper hand in that regard as well. No one would try to overtake the reservation with a possible reset of our Federal Government looming, was how Gabby explained it. She told me if that happened, it would simply be a forty-eight-hour total blackout for most Americans, with very few shots fired. Nobody on either side wanted things to go that far.

Raul's funeral was sadder for me than I anticipated. I'd come to like and respect that wise man. I held Gabby tight in my arms that night, on a lounge chair on the back deck of our humble cottage, watching the stars.

Two weeks and three days after the assault on the ranch, all of us involved with the ENDO treatment were being significantly pressured by the state's guard to get moving. I wasn't about to make the same mistakes that had been made for the past dozen years, especially not with the woman I'd loved for so long. In those thoughts, pressure or not, I found solace. I was in love with Gabby - I'd loved Sarah. Just before her first treatment, Sarah asked for some privacy and had me sit on her bed.

"I want to talk to you, Steven," she said sadly. "I want you to know about everything, in case things don't get better for me. It's not a confession I need to make, but rather for you - for you to compartmentalize all that's happened so you can box it up and get on with your life with Gabriela."

I... well..." I had no idea why I was stammering like an idiot.

"I've seen how you look at her, Steve," she interrupted. "When she comes down here to talk or see you. I know that look. It's the one you gave me in the beginning."

What could I have said to that? I nodded and she began.

"Noxworthy indeed worked on me to join the trials, but I knew what I was doing. That was beyond disrespectful to you. I underestimated your work and your job, and finally, I disrespected you as a partner. I still can't say how that came to be, but I'll be eternally regretful. In the end, I really believed he and Ling would have you accept what I was doing."

"What about Dr. Prescott?" I had to know.

"He was a distraction." She looked away for a moment. "Noxworthy was laying it on hard. I knew what he wanted after you'd left. He made plenty of excuses about keeping me happy on the days we weren't in the trials, but I knew. Finally, I told him, that if he didn't back off, I'd do whatever I could to sabotage the trials. I told him since he'd blown up my marriage, I'd do the same to him, and they'd have to start all over. But the truth was, I blew up our marriage.

"Then he asked me if he could call someone. Anyone I was close to, a friend or co-worker. To be honest, I thought about Prescott, and how he'd chatted me up at work, and I was so damned angry at you for leaving me there. We had sex three times, so you know, but mostly he just listened to me complain and did island activities with me. When I came home, I saw the writing on the wall, and moved into his condo, until I could get a place. Then you left, so I moved back to our house. Noxworthy had lied to me to get what he wanted. Everything he promised me fell apart. His big excuse was your damned stubbornness. But I knew you. I should have known how it would go."

Sarah needed a break but there wasn't any more to say. She'd done a good job and gotten it off her chest, I supposed.

"Sarah, I forgive you," I squeezed her hand. "I'll always love you, and I plan to help you beat this. Thank you for that talk."

Just a few days later, a reformulation had a positive effect on the lab rats, and we waited and crossed our fingers. Several days after that, we started to see the results, and all of us became emotionally optimistic.

Epilogue:

Sarah responded to the treatment in ways beyond our wildest dreams. She wasn't only my wife, and the link to corruption between the fed and Stratagem, she was also 'patient number one.' As she began to feel better, she and Gabby started talking. I didn't mind that and had nothing to hide. I hoped that Gabby would help provide the same kind of closure that Sarah had given me that day she told me the whole story.

Noxworthy was kept in a secret location until the government and the state's guard could reach an agreement with the fed. I knew the Guard gave them an out to save face because the story that was reported was a far cry from how things went down. I didn't care about that either. Those kinds of deals had been happening since long before I'd been born. Brian Noxworthy was convicted of extortion, bribing public officials, conspiracy to commit murder, and attempted murder on me. He died in federal prison almost one year to the day he was sent there. Dr. Ling fled to his native homeland - China.

The FBI was completely disbanded six months after the story about Stratagem and the government went public. It was replaced by a DHS with a complete upgrade to its tactics, processes, and protocols.

That worked out well for me and Gabby since another change was the collapse of Stratagem and the deregulation of the drug industry. Fourteen new companies sprouted up, to fill the void, much like the cell companies of the early twenties. A more robust and competitive market caused lifesaving medicines to rapidly drop in price and offered even more transparency. I had so many job offers, I almost went cross-eyed.

Gabby went on the media circuit with Raul's number-two man, explaining the science to the layman. Tom made a full recovery and retired with top honors and a fat compensation package. Gabby and I join him and his wife, sailing on his yacht every September.

The ENDO crisis ended just as quickly as it had begun. Within a year after Sarah's treatment, the levels of affected humans with ENDO shrank to almost zero. Sarah went on to become a secretary of Drug and Chemical Reactions, a new cabinet position in the executive branch. We divorced quietly, shortly after her recovery.

Then in year three, after everything went down, I came home to a wonderful candlelit dinner and a smiling Gabby. After dinner, she handed me an envelope. It was an invitation to Sarah's wedding. I knew she'd met a doctor - a man who looked and acted a lot like me - nine months previously. That was only because She and Gabby corresponded a few times each year.

"I think we should go," Gabby announced as she held my hand.

"And I think it was just a nice gesture," I quickly replied. "Besides, don't you think it would ruin her special day?"

"She said it wouldn't," Gabby said, "when I called her."

"You have her number?" I was surprised.

"No," she answered immediately, "she included a note with the invitation. The number was on there. Sarah claims that enough time has passed, and you've both moved on. Without her parents, she has no actual family to share her wedding day with, and she told me we - you and I - are the closest thing to family she has."

That made me suddenly emotional. For all that Sarah and I had been through - that she'd put me through - we still had a special ten years together. It dawned on me that I thought about her less and less and that with Gabby in my life, I didn't resent Sarah anymore.

"Maybe, you're right," I responded. "But we are NOT becoming friends with her!"

"You bet your sweet ass, we're not, Mr. Boswell!" Gabby squeezed my crotch and we retired early to our bedroom.