Wicked Seeds Read online

  Wicked Seeds

  Cameron ~ Sword

  This is a work of fiction. The events described are imaginary, and the characters are either fictitious or are used fictitiously and not intended to represent specific persons, living or deceased.

  Copyright © 2018 by Cameron ~ Sword

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reprinted, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Cameron ~ Sword

  [email protected]

  The text of this book was set in Cambria and Perpetua Titling Mt fonts.

  Book design, illustration and cover art Copyright © 2018 Sword

  Fonts used in cover art are Sell-Your-Soul and Requiem by Chris Hansen

  Published in the United States of America

  First year published, 2018

  ISBN 978-1-7310-6190-4

  To Kate, The Little Skater

  When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

  – John Muir –

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

  – Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax –

  The long-term study of GMO foods is going on in real time and in real life. Not in a lab.

  – Ziggy Marley –

  Wicked

  Seeds

  Dr. Nathan Cribbs drifted among a smattering of people at a rural fruit and vegetable stand, absentmindedly comparing small cartons of fresh strawberries, his mind wandering to a time when a naïve female high school student approached him at a biotech convention and flippantly asked if he wouldn’t mind detailing what it was that molecular biologists did when they weren’t fully absorbed with thwarting zombie pandemics. She was blindly considering microbiology as a potential career choice after becoming inspired by World War Z, her favorite movie in the world. Nathan indulged her, elaborating a little more than a casual Google search might have offered, because she was snacking on strawberries.

  Generally speaking, he explained, when molecular biologists weren’t preoccupied with saving humankind from widespread zombie contagion, many were busy working for food conglomerates and were responsible for identifying naturally occurring toxins in viruses that killed specific insects. Their job was to isolate those toxins and place them where millions of years of evolution never planned for them to be – directly into crops, genetically modifying them, rendering the new plants poisonous to the insects that normally fed on them.

  The student’s expression transformed from alarm to outright revulsion when Nathan pointed out that unlike traditional pesticides that are water soluble and wash off prior to consumption, these toxins were permanent. They’re forever part of the plant. Which meant, of course, that unless she was absolutely certain the strawberries she was enjoying were organically grown from uncorrupted seeds, she was probably ingesting about a dozen different toxin strains. Bugs love strawberries.

  Dispelling the widely held notion that all country folk are friendly and hold sunny dispositions, an irritated vendor yelled out in Nathan’s direction, snapping him out of his daydream. “Hey, nimrod! Stop bruising the fruit!”

  “These are non-GMO, right?” Nathan asked.

  “Can you read?” the vendor snarled back, pointing out an obvious placard, which read: Guaranteed 100% Organic. No GMOs, No Pesticides, No Nuttin’.

  The big business of genetically altering food was made possible by the law of unintended consequences extending from a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision which ruled 5-4 in Exxon’s favor that their genetically modified living bacterium meant to break down crude oil could be patented. This new settled law was later considered to naturally extend to other modified living organisms, like the seeds of genetically altered plants which very quickly became intellectual property equivalent to movies or inventive gadgets and could therefore be licensed, patented and sold.

  The U.S. Government approved the release of the first food-related genetically modified organism (GMO) in 1983, a bacteria that prevented frost on crops. In 1988, scientists created what would eventually become the most common GMO: glyphosate-tolerant soybeans. Essentially these new plants were resistant to herbicides and made it much easier and cheaper for farmers to control weeds in their fields. Herbicides killed virtually all other vegetation but the food crops thrived.

  In 1994 the Flavr Savr tomato, which was manipulated to resist rotting, therefore improving shelf life, was approved. Things really took off in 1996 however, with corn and soybeans after they were engineered to be poisonous to pests that normally fed on them.

  Today, virtually all processed foods contain genetically modified corn or soybeans, or their extracts. Many other cash crops have now also been tampered with and Americans remain largely unaware. The truth is, Americans have become part of an uncontrolled experiment where the long-term consequences to human and environmental health are unknown. And nobody signed a consent form.

  Nathan ate one of the strawberries he’d purchased as he motored along a desolate road. It was pure country out there, big skies, tall grasses and rustic homes separated by expansive fields and woodlands.

  From his first day on the job, he’d never felt completely comfortable about the science he was conducting, growing increasingly more concerned over time, but never concerned enough to do anything about it. His salary was lucrative and significantly more substantial than his previous job teaching freshmen classes at a state university. What was he supposed to do? Threaten that? For better or worse, genetically engineered food represented progress. The brave new world. He settled into his comfortable role as a drone on autopilot for well over a decade before a newly arrived Nepalese national drastically altered his life’s path.

  Dr. Ashish Shrestha Bhairaja was hired by Nathan’s employer on a nonimmigrant H1-B visa and quickly became referred to as Dr. K2 because his real name was impossible to pronounce and presumably because his five-foot-four-inch frame didn’t warrant the nickname Dr. Everest. He was a rather meek and introverted man who always seemed intimidated around others. As an outsider, he was largely ignored and sometimes belittled because he often came across as dim-witted as a consequence of his poor English comprehension skills – which was the main reason Nathan befriended him. The misfit, the nerd, the misunderstood and underestimated… those were descriptives with which Nathan could easily relate.

  One day, roughly two years into his three-year work visa, Dr. K2 was suddenly and unceremoniously fired and harshly escorted out of the lab in which he was working without any time to gather his belongings. Moments before that occurred, a visibly troubled Dr. K2 approached Nathan with a thick manila folder, frantically hand-gesture-pleading for Nathan to take it, hide it, keep it safe. Nathan didn’t understand what it was that he was accepting, but he took it, furtively concealing it under a volume of his own paperwork mere seconds before security descended upon Dr. K2.

  Two days passed before Nathan got the occasion to examine the contents of the folder due to heightened security and FBI activity. Dr. K2 had been arrested and charged with corporate espionage. Stealing trade secrets for a foreign competitor or government. The charges were mysteriously dropped within days however, after Dr. K2’s assets were frozen and he was deported back to Nepal. He was completely bankrupted in a matter of weeks. Everything seemingly returned to normal, but Nathan had changed. He knew his employer was lying. Dr. K2 wasn’t a spy, he was an activist.

  Nathan discovered, in Dr. K2’s folder, that he had been performing secret experiments, hidden from their employer – and his experiments, or rather, his findings,
were rather shocking and controversial. It’s true that Nathan couldn’t understand the Nepalese notes in which the experiments themselves were written, but he understood math and common jargon. Careful scrutiny, and time, and a Nepalese-to-English language translator app, did the rest.

  To summarize, Dr. K2 alleged, based on reasonably compelling evidence, that his employer’s biotech corn was interfering with the homing instincts of honeybees, leading to widespread colony collapse. Dr. K2 also alleged that his employer’s biotech corn extract, which was widely used in processed foods, including baby formula, was linked to an increased incidence of early onset diabetes in children.

  Everything in the folder was meticulously described and catalogued. Dr. K2 tracked down a Nepalese family who were in the beekeeping business and asked if they wouldn’t mind allowing him to run blind experiments over time on their hives. He initially suspected that bees exposed to glyphosate were losing beneficial bacteria in their digestive systems making them more susceptible to infection and death from harmful microbes. While that hypothesis remained unsubstantiated, he found that bees that gathered pollen from his employer’s GMO corn were overwhelmingly more likely to experience difficulty finding their hives. Something in the corn pollen was interfering with their homing instincts. They simply kept flying, completely lost, until they became exhausted and died.

  When Dr. K2 read a translated article from a well-respected scientific journal describing an alarming rise in early onset childhood diabetes in American kids, especially those who lived in food deserts, he knew he had to investigate that too.

  Tens of millions of Americans live in food deserts, including 6.5 million children, mostly poor and mostly African American. These communities, quite simply, have little or no access to fresh food. It’s a bizarre condition to fathom, given that this was, and still is, occurring in the United States and not some third world country.

  The people who live in these communities survive mainly on processed varieties of nourishment due to the lack of local supermarkets. Food deserts tend to be dotted by corner stores – and corner stores generally sell processed foods – and virtually all processed foods contain genetically engineered corn extract – Dr. K2’s focus.

  These communities exist everywhere, especially in large urban centers, but Memphis, or more accurately, one specific neighborhood in Memphis, stood out as particularly interesting. It was categorized as the number one place for hunger in America, yet registered among the highest levels of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And it was an area serviced, almost exclusively, by a processed food manufacturer and distributor that only used his employer’s corn in their products.

  Dr. K2 performed blind experiments on adolescent rats, feeding every group only processed foods, some that contained no GMO corn extract and some that included his employer’s GMO corn extract. He found that rats that ingested foods containing his employer’s GMO corn extract were twelve times more likely to exhibit higher levels of obesity and diabetes. Something bad was going on with his employer’s corn. Dr. K2 finally decided to send a sample of the GMO corn to an independent lab for a comprehensive analysis but it was returned untouched. Independent parties are not allowed to test patented material. His employer, however, was contacted – and that’s when Dr. K2’s troubles began.

  Nathan’s troubles began several months later, and just a few days prior to the present time, when he was discovered to have been conducting secret experiments of his own, attempting to replicate and corroborate Dr. K2’s work. Although he’d been extremely careful to maintain a completely odorless scent trail along the way, his spoor eventually proved pungent, and was directly associated with having grown up in the analog age, guilelessly misunderstanding the intricacies surrounding the employer/employee privacy paradigm of digital-age cloud storage.

  He was fired on the spot, of course. No arrest, but he was quickly served with legal papers before he could collect his personal belongings, and civil litigation loomed. Very serious, freeze-every-asset, bankrupting-type litigation. Like Dr. K2, Nathan had clearly violated a variety of nondisclosure agreements that he was made to sign as condition of employment.

  Nathan ate the last of the strawberries as he pulled into a country driveway belonging to a modest house with a sprawling flower garden where his younger sister, Kate, lolled on a porch, sipping a margarita, awaiting his arrival. He didn’t see her as often as he used to ever since she moved out to the country.

  “Quite the jungle you have growing.” Nathan said, pointing out the obvious.

  “They have this thing called ‘Field in a Bag’, and it’s a bunch of random flowers, like thousands of them, and they reseed themselves and grow without cultivation. I love it. Makes me smile.” Kate explained.

  “Is that a pitcher of margaritas?” Nathan asked.

  “Just like Mom used to make.”

  She approached, delighted, hugging him as he exited. “Get over here. Look at you. So obvious there’s still no special woman in your life.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Do you even own a grooming kit?”

  “I groom.”

  “You shave, you don’t groom. And you’re well beyond that age men reach when hair begins to sprout up in weird places. Like ears. And what’s up with the eyebrows?”

  “What’s wrong with my eyebrows?”

  “They’re vineyards, grapes are ready for harvest. I don’t even want to contemplate what’s going on down there under those boxer shorts, probably a jungle even napalm couldn’t defoliate. That’s not a good look, brother man.”

  “That was a long drive, pour me a margarita already.”

  They climbed onto the porch where Nathan noticed three glasses.

  “You’re expecting someone else?” Nathan asked, confused.

  “Christa. She just left.”

  “I thought you were done with that woman.”

  “I am.”

  Nathan threw her a crooked glance.

  “It was just this once. To help celebrate my great news. No drugs either, we’re both clean.” Kate explained.

  Nathan’s glance grew increasingly more crooked.

  “Hey, it’s the country out here, everybody attends church. It’s not easy to find… a replacement.” Kate explained further, growing more defensive as she added… “One time. No drugs.”

  Like many Americans, Kate had fallen victim to recreational prescription painkiller addiction in her past, an addiction so ubiquitous, it effectively derailed her career. Nathan believed she had overcome her dependency. It was Christa who worried him, and not just because she was a bad influence and had her own dependency issues, but because she was the mistress, or more accurately, the property of a local, and very married, drug cartel gangster. The gangster had threatened Kate’s life and beaten Christa up pretty badly when he found out the women had been having regular sexual trysts. Christa, quite simply, was bad news.

  Beyond the potential for physical danger, any drama that led to bad press would also certainly jeopardize Kate’s great news. After years of being shunned by her industry, she had managed to land a role as a host for an exciting new family-friendly documentary series that focused on raising awareness of animal welfare groups around the globe and the amazing work they were doing. It was the type of role for which his sister had been born.

  Nathan was about to verbally communicate some of what he’d been thinking but Kate stopped him before he uttered a word, handing him a margarita.

  “Shut up, I’m about to make a toast. To Mom.”

  Glasses clinked. Nathan took a sip, suddenly completely impressed.

  “Wow. Exactly like Mom used to make.”

  “Secret recipe.”

  “Why didn’t she ever pass it along to me?”

  “I’m the alcoholic in the family. It served as my inheritance. So… what’s this about you getting fired? What did you do?”

  Nathan produced Dr. K2’s folder and offered it up to her.

  “Put th
is somewhere safe.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just hide it. Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Okay, now you’re creeping me out. Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  But before he could respond, the margarita pitcher exploded as muffled gunshots rang out. Kate dropped. Nathan glanced down at her, involuntary muscles jumping in his face, horrified eyes fixated on her bullet-riddled body. He drew one final long breath, astonished to find himself pitching over.

  A pair of size 14½ EEE loafers stepped up onto the porch – belonging to Alphonse, 35, bone structure of a bear. Kent, 29, and his size 9 sneakers, followed right behind. Nathan recognized them as they approached. They weren’t drug cartel gangsters, these men were associated with his former employer.

  Kent grabbed the folder and checked its contents to find Dr. K2’s research material along with some of Nathan’s own corroborating studies. He and Alphonse exchanged glances – their suspicions were valid – in their minds, Nathan, almost certainly, was about to become a whistleblower. Killing him was the right thing to do.

  “I’ll pull up the truck.” Alphonse stated, no emotion, before disappearing.

  Kent produced a bottle of whiskey and took a swig as he stared into Nathan’s face. He saw what we’d see – a face of death – even though Nathan was still very much alive and merely playing dead. And as collected and emotionless as his cohort seemed, Kent found Kate’s frozen open-eyed stare… and frowned… growing increasingly more excited along the way.

  “Holy crap, for real? Are you kidding me? No way. No way.”

  Alphonse pulled up in a black SUV.

  “Alphonse, come here, take a look at this chick. You recognize her?”

  “No.”