Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Ten: Dirt is Dead

"You think it's going to keep going?" Alex said. He could see the gas station where they'd parked their car, waiting like a fever dream built out of nationalistic poetry. The neon had once been red, white, blue, chosen by some design team to evoke the most positive possible reaction, One if by air, by corporate approval. Not the first time one charts a course mascot by mascot.

Hawk shrugged.

"Because after that explosion...or...you know. Whatever it was. It felt..." He trailed off, searching the (mercifully living) grass beneath his feet for the words he needed.

"Safe," Hawk said. "You felt safe. You felt like it was over."

"Yeah...but...is it?" he said.

"I don't know. But...this has to be something that stops. Right?" her words shivered towards the ground like someone's discarded skin. "I know the logic doesn't pan, but...it has to stop."

Alex didn't need Hawk to tell him that was a horrible assumption to make. "Talk me into believing that, Hawk."

"I mean..." She trailed off. She could see the gas station up ahead. They were almost to the car. "It's happened in other places. If this stuff didn't stop, we'd be talking about the giant dead zones in California or Illinois or something. So it has to stop."

He felt the logical fallacy like a migraine. "Hawk..."

"Then we come back tomorrow. If they haven't moved miles away by then, it stops."

"So why are you still scared?" Alex said. "Why am I still scared?"

"Because the damage is done. The only question is, how long. How long before we can consider something safe for life?"

"Human life?"

"No. Life. You know. The springtails and ferns and moss and grass. The ground is dead, Alex. It's supposed to be hugely bioactive and now it's not. The bacteria and microscopic stuff is gone."

"According to what Willheim said. I didn't think that was anything big, anything worth lying about." He paused, feeling a bit like maybe he was spotting that proverbial cloud-like-a-hand on the horizon. Or maybe biblical metaphors didn't reach the kind of murky dark horror twisting in his subconscious analysis. His mind assembling a Kraken. "Is it a big deal, Hawk?"

"Right here? Right now? In this situation? No. Because I can just...pick up a couple tons of local soil and move it over. And if I can't...we can wall this off. We can afford to tell people that this part of the world might as well just be gone. But what about a dead zone the size of a county? Or a state? How do we fix that?"

"Go one state over. Get dirt. Bring dirt back to this state. Dirt goes in ground."

"If you say 'profit', I'm going to..." she stopped. "God. You'd make a mint if you did it right."

"Yeah," Alex said. "Because I've been thinking exactly that for a while now."

"You think Willheim would do that?"

"I think that we have a real tendency to think a billion dollars comes with a science degree that isn't honorary. And I take it there's a problem with that response? Not the profiting off the moving of dirt, but moving the dirt."

"It's called 'this is how you get invasive species'."

"They don't seem to worry about that much with your ants. You're always mail ordering the damn things." Alex said. They'd reached the gas station and the car.