Chapter 2

The sun beat down on me the whole way as I walked back to the town veterinary clinic.

I hadn't even reached the door when the stench hit me.

Someone had dumped a whole bucket of watery pig manure over the clinic's old roller door. Yellow-green filth was oozing through the cracks and pooling all over the ground, and a swarm of green flies buzzed over it.

At the little shop next door, Mrs. Li was cracking sunflower seeds. When she saw me come back, she rolled her eyes, turned, and shut her door.

A few steps off, a couple of idle men stood pointing and muttering at me.

I pulled out my phone and opened the ranchers' group chat.

Pinned at the top was a video Meg Lawrence had posted.

In it, she was holding those five hundred dollars in her hand, red-faced and gloating straight into the camera.

"Everybody take a good look at this man.

"This is the con artist who takes healthy pigs and ruins them!

"Used the wrong drug, and on top of that tried to steal my equipment.

"My husband caught him red-handed and made him pay five hundred dollars in nutrition compensation!"

Below it, every single reply was piling on.

Then my phone started buzzing.

It was Dudley Finch, the big cattle rancher on the west side of the village. Just yesterday I'd cured his little calf of acute gastroenteritis.

"Bertram, don't come around my cattle barn anymore. I heard all about what you did."

Before I could explain, Uncle Dudley hung up on me.

Right after that, the woman who raised sheep and old man Wang who kept chickens both called. Every one of them, without exception, wanted to cancel their orders.

The sheep rancher didn't just cancel. She cursed me out over the phone for having no conscience, and demanded I pay her for the emotional distress she'd suffered the last couple of days.

I tossed my phone on the table and took a deep breath.

Not far off, Darrell Perry—the old vet who ran this town like his own turf—came ambling over with his hands behind his back. He wore a yellowed white undershirt, half a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth.

"Kid, I told you a long time ago. Outsiders who come to our town have to know the rules."

Darrell jabbed his cigarette holder at the manure on the door.

"Every animal for miles around only drinks the medicine Darrell Perry boils up.

"You want to come steal my rice bowl? Then you'd better hope you've got the luck for it.

"Boss Lawrence has spoken. Everybody's getting together, and tomorrow we run you out of town."

I looked at his weathered old face and didn't say a word back.

Holding my breath against the stench, I locked the reeking door tight, shutting out every last jeer from the world outside.

I didn't bother washing the sweat off me. I opened my medical kit and took out a sealed little glass vial.

Back when I was leaving Meg Lawrence's pigpen, I'd secretly scraped a bit of skin flakes from behind the sow's ear.

I opened up the microscope, mounted the sample onto a slide, and carefully dripped on the stain.

I looked through the eyepiece, and what was under the lens made me suck in a cold breath.

Dark-purple clusters of virus were splitting apart in a mad geometric multiplication, devouring the healthy cells around them.

This was absolutely no ordinary swine plague.

This was a highly contagious, extremely short-incubation, virulent mutant swine plague virus.

A full-blown outbreak was only a heartbeat away.