TRIGGER
1562 4D
Andrew left the barn, walked to the side of the watering pool and squatted down, dabbling his fingers in the water. It was late summer. Two of his cattle had sickened, staggering in their stalls and lying down heavily, eyes lidded.
The surface of the water looked no worse than last time, maybe a little better. But when he pulled his hand out, a long string of bluish-green slime trailed from his fingertips. He tried to shake it free; it clung and strung out in the air, the obscene drool of some organo-robotic appetite, straight from ArCorp‘s mines.
How had this poison gotten in here? He’d done what his brothers had done, and rerouted the spillage around the farm. This had to be from the ground water.
After all the work to get this farm going, to be played with this way. The fury surged up in him; he flung the gooey toxins aside and swung around, looking for a rag or a piece of waste he could use to scrape off the rest.
He raged around the farmhouse. The children watched with large wary eyes as he savagely dug through cabinets to find his beam rifle and its ammunition. Leil followed closely behind him, even when he pushed her roughly away.
He thumbed several cartridges, tossed them aside into a box, dug out some more from their battered canister.
“Andrew. Stop.” Her arms came around him.
His fingers trembled and he dropped the cartridge he was trying to load into the rifle’s magazine. “Rotcock,” he said, bending to retrieve it.
“Andrew. That’s not the way. We need to take some time.”
He stood shaking at his door, gun in hand, not knowing how to stay or how to go further. She put her brown face close to his, a few soft lines touching the corners of her eyes and mouth, a few curls of her hair reaching out in a weak breeze to his lowered forehead. “Andrew,” she said once more. That day he stayed. And the next.
