BogDeath

By F. J. Mackelroy

This saga of research, suspense, strangeness, and the occasional corpse is dripping with biology, frights, friendship, humor, great scenery, goofiness, rants, and more science than most people see in months.

We travel to hidden, sometimes wet, frequently scenic locales with biologist Kelly, assistant Jake, and Swampdog as they try to start a normal research season in the rapidly disappearing Northern Michigan bogs.

After a horrific morning, they return home to the Institute, where their small community is grappling with mysteries, lunch, dangerous secrets, conflicting theories, and plans about how to survive and comprehend the almost invisible and completely impassible fences have suddenly appeared all over the planet.

Then it really gets crazy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: F. J. Mackelroy
• Release date: Jun 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301262113

F. J. Mackelroy

F. J. Mackelroy is a science writer from Michigan.As Jim Loudon said, Sic resilire senex hali plumon!

Book preview

BogDeath

A saga of science, suspense, strangeness, and the occasional corpse

by

F. J. Mackelroy

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published by F. J. Mackelroy at Smashwords

BogDeath

Copyright 2013 by F. J. Mackelroy

Some of the habitats and organisms in this book are real, but sadly, all the rest of it, names, people, events, all of it, are entirely fiction.

Thanks to my northern Michigan friends, scientists from many quarters, Bill O’Hanlon and his crew and all their support, and the incomparable Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop. And thanks to you, Phil.

Expect wet feet.

Dr. Edward G. Voss

Monday Morning

Packing for the bog

The breeze was steady across Lake Michigan that spring morning, lifting the deep blue water into white crests which dissolved in the blue-green shallows.

Chris watched the lake across the low dunes and billowing dune grass.

It looked so beautiful, so normal. The spring air was sweet, the sky crystalline.

Except for the uneasy flutter of pink along the northern horizon.

Chris had planned for a solid summer to begin her scientific career, lots of data, a good working relationship with her new assistant, Jake, and no unpleasant surprises.

But with the sudden appearance of the fences, there were probably more unpleasant surprises to come.

The fences, what a strange development. Finally, the world economies had finally started to pull out of the second depression of the new millennium and people started to relax, then something else just had to go wrong. Really wrong. The trick was, how to keep going in the face of…well, nobody knew quite what, yet.

Jake walked out of South Lab carrying a bundle of blue flags and a water testing kit, and put them in the back of the truck with the other tools and vials and boots and calipers and clipboards and shovels and all the other scientific instruments they would need in the bogs for the research season.

He came around and stood beside Chris and watched the lake. Over the low surf, herring gulls flew, paralleling the shore, calling out, then dropping down to the water, where they rode the waves.

Nice place you got here, he said.

No kidding!

Then he looked north and gestured to the faint auroral dance. Except for that, you might think we just dreamed the about the fences and the last few days. Hard to believe it's all changed.

Chris shook her head. This reminds me of when I was a kid, on the morning of 9-11. It was peaceful like this. I was at school, and they wouldn't let us go home, or even leave the classroom, but we kept looking out the window, and it looked so normal.

Jake listened, interested in her flat accent. Down east?

He said, I was packing for a photo expedition to Hudson Bay, and then it happened. I watched it on TV, over and over, the planes crashing into the Space Needle, and all those people dying. I finally had to go outside. Everybody else came out of their houses, and we stood around talking. It was clear and quiet, and we could hardly believe that something so immense had happened. It should have been dark and thundering. Then we found out it was especially quiet because they'd grounded all the planes.

Chris looked around the sky. No airplanes—that's probably true now too, but for a different reason. How could you fly a plane, especially a jet, and not crash into the fences? I wouldn't even want to take a short local flight.

Jake shook his head. I don't get it. Humans try to go though the fences, they die. But other animals, at least birds, get through OK.

What creeps me out is that we don't know the mechanism—plus, you basically can't see the fences, or even sense them, until you get right up on them.

Two days before, on a spring Saturday afternoon, the world had changed, silently and dramatically. It had not been bright or loud or especially frightening at first. There was just the quiet appearance of the fences, nearly invisible barriers, which materialized slowly, almost naturally, hardly noticeable, unless you were trying to go through them. The only sign you could see were the two small ridges of soil on either side where the fences rose straight up from the ground. And they kept rising, apparently high into the sky, all over the planet. The whole process took a few hours. Then they stabilized. And they had stayed in place for the last two days.

Sporadic word came through, those moments when the internet or phone calls were working. Like an irregular honeycomb, the fences formed cells that were 200 to 250 miles in diameter, and they had appeared all over the world at once. Across city and wilderness, tropics and arctic, through houses and coal mines, across land and swamps and lakes and oceans.

Jake started to speak, then paused as Chris waved at a red-haired young man walking across the dunes toward the boat docks. She said, That's Gus, one of my best friends here. He wrangles the resorters. You started to say something?

I was thinking, the big difference on 9-11 was that we knew we’d been attacked. By people. The uncertainty was who, and if there would be more attacks. But this, who knows? It’s all uncertainty. We don’t even know what it's made of. Or anything.

Chris glanced at him. Well, being a scientific type, I'm usually extremely curious, but I find it hard to wrap my mind around this. It's just so strange. I'm glad there are a people researching it already.

A lot of danger to comprehend.

Sometimes the danger was tangible, sometimes not. People got close to the fences, a few feet away, and started to feel bad. The closer you got, the worse you felt, a sort of deep inner horror. If you were not moving too fast, if you could stop in time, that bad feeling was enough to keep almost anyone away from the fences. A few feet, that was the closest you could get before being overcome.

But it was almost the only warning. The fences were silent, no humming or crackling. They had no obvious odor. They were almost transparent, just slight ripples at the edge of vision, like looking through a sheer wall of water, only clearer than walls of water usually were, with little refraction or reflection.

I'm just trying to focus on my work, and get us started for the season, Chris said. I'm actually glad we have so much to do today.

OK, we focus. Got it, boss, Jake said, grinning up at her. She was a striking sight, an extremely tall, bony young woman with spiky white hair, a rumpled Ziggy Stardust look. She was almost a foot taller than he was, not that he broke any height records himself, a short, stocky, limping, crew-cut 45 year-old ex-nature photographer and sometime photo-journalist.

Chris blinked. It was the first time she had ever been called boss. This was her first official research summer, and Jake was her first official employee. It would take some getting used to. Like being called Dr. Wallingham. After all this time, and work, finally, a PhD! She looked down at Jake. She had to smile. They certainly could not look more different.

The two of them stood there looking at each other for a moment, then they both started to laugh.

Mutt and Jeff, he said.

Oh man, I bet we’ll hear a lot of jokes.

She had the iciest blue eyes he had even seen, almost white eyes that made you want to look, then made your gaze want to slide off somewhere else. Interesting and intimidating. Until she smiled.

Didn’t you think to check out my job qualifications, like—height?

She laughed again. Wow, that would be so illegal! We’ll just have to make do. She shook her head, OK, we’ll begin in Eggshell bog today, and set up our research plot there. I'll get the last of the equipment and we can head out.

They both relaxed. They would be spending a lot of time together, and any indication that they would get along was welcome.

Eggshell it is. Jake stood looking over her truck as he waited, thinking with admiration that it was the worst looking old blue Ford he had ever seen, even in a region of remarkably battered old trucks. It was so old the blue was an iridescent purple in the more exposed areas. He thought back to his younger days, before the first crash, when ordinary people could afford new vehicles.

Funny how that change, the austerity after the second crash, had not actually been the hardest to handle. Getting off the treadmill of the newest and brightest and learning to keep the old stuff going—there was a kind of honor in it, almost respect. He got in the truck. Plenty of other things had been harder and more miserable these past few years.

Chris came out of the lab with the pack containing thermometers and other small research equipment, closed the camper on the back of the truck, and they went to get her dog, Swamper.

She said, My biggest concern personally is about my friends Chaka and Martin, they were both supposed to be on their way here by now, but I haven’t been heard from either of them for a couple of days.

Where were they coming from?

"Chaka was coming from Detroit, Martin was finishing some work in Ann Arbor. So it seems like they would have been here by now. There's a fence between here and there, down near Claire. That's my worry.

My daughter is in Europe, and Susan is downstate, but they're both OK. In safe places, so far. Not like a lot of people.

There must be millions of people in trouble. It's hard to comprehend.

We were finally starting to recover from all the deadly storms, then St. Louis, that horrible earthquake, and now this.

I think a lot of people are exhausted. Just plodding along. Maybe I am too.

Fetch Swamper

They stopped at her cabin, and she went in and got Swamper, her little tan terrier-retriever mutt, who ran out and jumped into his travel box behind the seat.

Jake, this is Swampdog, Swamper, this is Jake.

They greeted each other, with various sniffing and patting and tail wagging.

As Chris was bringing out a pair of waders, a big brightly polished green truck driven by a large dark haired man stopped next to them on the street, and Chris called a greeting. Hey, Hank! Meet Jake, my new assistant. Hank keeps everything running around here. They said hello, Hank drove off, and Chris climbed in and handed Jake an extra set of truck keys.

This is so we’ll each have a set, in case one of us falls in.

Jake looked at her, at her neutral expression. Was this a joke? A dare? A promise? He could not read her yet.

He finally said, Well, I hope that doesn’t happen!

She smiled then, and started the truck.

Jake said, The creepiest thing I heard so far was about a cruise ship that was under way when the fences materialized, and everybody got mashed to death as they sailed through a fence. Another boat found them drifting in the water like a ghost ship, nobody alive.

It's odd what gets to you, one particular part of a tragedy, even though there's carnage everywhere, all the airplanes and cars and buses where people got crushed. The only saving grace was that the fences came up slowly, and it feels so bad to get near them, that kept some people safe.

It was hard to pull myself away from the TV this morning, watching the news come in from around the world, even with so many lines down and people cut off. There must have been 50 others in the cafeteria watching. I’m glad they set up the TV there.

Wow, I didn't think there were that many people here for the summer yet.

I just want to keep watching. Everybody was like that at breakfast.

I know. It's seductive. But it's also important to keep on living as normally as we can, and doing our work. There must be unimaginable damage that we haven’t heard about yet.

He was silent a moment. Sometimes his head got too full of everything that had happened. Will this interfere with your work?

Well, so far there don't seem to be insurmountable issues, but I did lose two research plots. I’d already surveyed them, and now they’re on the other side of the closest fence.

That’s enough to give you the creeps.

What if I had been out there when the fences appeared? She shuddered. And I was planning a trip tomorrow to Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula, then over to the acid lakes. As far as I can tell, we can only do the first part of the trip, because the fence cuts through near Seney. There's also the bigger picture. Is my work pointless now? Should I be doing something else?

That's the trouble with a slow-moving disaster. You have time for second thoughts.

I'm trying to just stay focused and keep going right now.

Well, as Fritz Perls said, 'Emergencies emerge.'

Fritz Perls? The psychologist?

Err, I'm a man of many knowledges. Maybe too many. It's a reporter thing.

Chris glanced at him, simultaneously smiling and frowning, then they turned onto the road leading out of the Golden Harbor Institute

Just beyond the cabins they passed a woman on a tractor. At first she glared at them, then suddenly she smiled. Even from a distance Jake could see that she was a knockout—tall, dark hair, dark eyes, either wearing makeup, or with naturally vivid features.

Chris grunted and Jake turned back to look at her, then looked more closely. Her jaw was clenched.

He said, Uh, who was that?

Janice. A complete jerk. Now, suddenly she’s acting friendly, these big smiles. Another thing to make me edgy. She’s the properties director, deals with rentals and the resorters. Sometimes she fills in for Hank, the grounds manager, so everyone has to deal with her. And pretty much everyone hates her.

I’ve rarely seen a workplace without at least one person like that. I was lucky, mostly self-employed in the last decade. You just hope they’re not in management.

Is that a fluke, or a natural function of groups? Maybe there’s a specific habitat for them, some ecosystemic niche that begs to be filled, especially in work ecosystems. The a-hole niche.

Jake smiled to himself. His employer was alive in there.

Spring hillsides

As they drove over the hill toward the highway, the forest spread out before them, new leaves just starting to appear, aspens bright with white buds, some maples vivid green, others with smaller leaves, still tightly curled, purple with anthocyanin pigments protecting them from sunburn. Seen from a distance, the hillsides were green, white, red, and purple, grading into each other, rowdy with song from the newly arrived migratory birds who were ready for love.

The researchers, on the other hand, were ready for work. Chris was almost shaking with nervous energy, pumped up even more now by the strange goings on, and eager to apply her plant ecology knowledge from all those years of studying to real life.

She said, We'll be staking out defined sections of different bogs, recording what organisms are there, and measuring how they change over the season. You saw something like this with Dr. Wise?

Yes, I was writing an article about her, and did several photo shoots. She showed me the work she was doing.

That's pretty much what our work will be, setting up the baselines, then coming back each week, making precise measurements, seeing what has changed and stayed the same.

As they crossed a small bridge, she pointed out Golden Creek.

I it's called Golden Creek because the water is so clear you see right to the golden sand on the bottom, like there's no water at all. The rocks may also be stained slightly with tannins from the cedar swamps upstream. Probably not from any bogs, since around here they tend to be isolated from streams.

It was all so interesting—she couldn't get enough of how things worked in nature. After a winter of reading what other scientists had learned about how the changing climate impacted the timing of the development of plants and animals across the seasons in the bogs, Chris was interested in seeing what this year would show.

The climate had already changed so much that scientists were struggling to keep up, to record the changes and effects. It was significantly impacting human lives, both the long-term effects, like rising sea levels, and the impact on weather, which had become crazy and unpredictable in the last few years, including the horrible Christmas tornadoes in New York and the floods in the southwestern deserts.

It also impacted Chris's work, by providing a significant influx of new research funds flowing from big energy companies into ecosystem and climate research.

Although the cynics noted that this had happened after the oil and coal corporations had bought up all the alternative power companies, Chris was just glad she could finally do the work that was increasingly important.

The growing season was beginning here weeks earlier than just a few years ago. Researchers had to start earlier in the season to track their plants and animals. And from what the neighbors said, gardening and farming were changing noticeably. As well as the longer growing season, several weeks in the summer were unbearably hot, even here in northwestern Michigan. Unexpectedly heavy rains at the beginning and end of the season had rotted crops in the field twice in the last decade. The local fishermen and farmers had started asking the biologists what was going on, and what to expect.

In turn, the scientists asked back. One grad student had spent the past winter gathering stories and recollections from people who lived in the area, and putting them in a database so they could be easily compared with data collected at the Institute.

One old farmer had kept a log for decades of every farming event, when he planted crops, rainfall, major storms, harvest times and amounts. It was a significant addition to the scientific data collections over the years, so much that they named the collected archives after the man, the Mackey collection, which had tickled him no end. Chris had gone back to it repeatedly during her winter of research, trying to understand the interactions of long-term climate trends and short-term weather events.

The dual data-stream from scientists and farmers had also become one of their most popular community outreach programs, and people often came over to discuss what the weather was doing. Talking about the weather—in many places that was a joke. Around here, it was one of the more active aspects of their work.

Now it was Chris’s turn to measure and record exactly what was happening, do her fieldwork this year, play a part in the bigger understanding.

Jake was just happy to be outdoors.

Eggshell will be the first of five bogs we will study. Our primary focus is on indicator plants in the bogs, plus one fen for comparison. The fen is similar to a bog, but with alkaline water instead of acid water. Chris said, as they drove through another aspen grove, this one with small pale new leaves flickering in the breeze against the green-white bark of the trees. Now I have to find two new bogs to replace the unreachable ones. She hesitated. I mean, assuming this lasts. She shook her head. Well, I have to assume it will. I’d like to get everything set up in Eggshell, and then maybe we’ll have time after lunch to go to another one today. They turned onto the highway.

She continued, in addition to recording the characteristics of the habitats, such as temperature and alkalinity over the season, we are doing a longitudinal study of the bog indicator plants, including leatherleaf, bog rosemary, bog laurel, and huckleberry, and making a note of bog animals, such as pollinators. This will be set up so it can run for a number of years. People are doing similar things all over the world, so we can compare what is happening. It looks like many of the bogs around here are already dying from the overall warming, so it's critical to record exactly what happens now. We’re looking to see if these are temporary changes, or steps on the way to bog death all over the Lower Peninsula.

That sounds depressing—bogs dying?

Yes, literally. It's been happening in the southern Lower Peninsula for quite a while, then we began to notice it up here in the northern part, that bogs are filling in with increasing speed, getting more water lilies and sedges, and less open water. But, with the fences, who knows how that will change things. So we'll measure that too.

Jake said, I’ve been up here before on photo shoots, but I haven’t studied any of the biology of the area. So I don't know the names of things, or how they work.

Chris glanced over at him with a big grin, and said, You mean I’ll have to talk about science? When she smiled she was not intimidating at all.

She laughed and said, The hard part will be getting me to stop talking.

Well then, maybe I’ll learn something.

As they rode along, Chris's mind was a jumble, as she thought about her bogs, the work to be done, and grappled with the new reality of the fences and what might happen. And what had already happened.

Where was Martin? Had he gotten hurt? Or killed? She tried not to think that, but it didn't do much good. She wondered about her father and sister. She had talked with them both on the phone last night, but it was hard to tell exactly how they were. Neither of them could quit being business professionals for very long, even with her, so it was often a guessing game. She wondered about Chaka, who hadn’t sent any emails for almost a week.

She tried not to stray too far into the implications of the fences, but it was inevitable. What if everybody was trapped? What if food could not get through? Or medicine? People had tried rolling and sailing and throwing things across, even moving animals, and they seemed to come through OK. Humans, on the other hand, turned to pulp.

But what about dead humans? Would they get smashed too? Could doctors send blood? Organs? Would the fences stay? Or change? That seemed especially scary to her. The idea that the fences could change again. It was a thought that made almost everything that had happened before in her life, even the bad stuff, seem normal by comparison. She wondered if there was some characteristic mental mechanism: I can stand this, even this, but not that tiny one thing more.

She glanced over at Jake. It was good to have someone working with her. Like a lab partner in class. They could compare notes, and not just on the work. Maybe even stabilize each other. Because simple things were starting to feel unpredictable. Not only were plans and goals suddenly trickier, her understanding of the basic workings of the physical world was no longer quite as clear. And for a scientist, that was non-trivial.

Nobody knew what caused the fences.

Nobody knew how they worked.

Nobody knew if they would go away as fast as they had appeared. Or would ever go away at all.

And as naturally as she had become preoccupied, her attention was pulled back by the beauty of northern spring, the fragrance drifting in the windows from an old farm on a warm hillside, where pink and white apple blossoms were just starting. Swamper had his head between the front seats, nose up, sniffing rapidly back and forth. She glanced down at him, his eyes half closed in that dreamy dog way, lost in the world of scent.

It was a fine time of the year to be working outdoors, still fresh and cool. Apple-blossom time.

Then she wondered. Were aspens and maples usually leafing out when the apples blossomed? Did they follow different cues for bud burst or blooming? Maybe temperature? Time since frost? Maybe the amount of daylight? It was the kind of puzzle she loved, because she could investigate it, find answers, or figure out ways to do the research. Not like social things, which were very complicated. Or this fences stuff, too unknowable, unless it was based in physics. She had to assume it was based in physics.

She glanced over at Jake, who was looking around with interest at the scenery. She wondered what he was seeing, the photographer's eye. Maybe he could teach her some of that. It had been funny to finally meet him in person the prior evening, after hiring him long-distance through a series of email interviews and the recommendation from her doctoral advisor.

She was glad to find a summer assistant with experience in fieldwork, even if it was in a different occupation. Jake was at the end of his old job as a nature photographer, forced out by bad knees, now in the middle of a career-change. He had just finished a med-tech degree, and had a job lined up in an Ann Arbor hospital in the fall. He wanted, as he said, to spend these last few glorious months of freedom in the field.

Of course, that had been the plan, before the world changed. Now it was no longer clear when he would get back to the city and his job. Or to his girlfriend. Or his daughter. In this new world.

Have you seen the fences yet? Jake asked.

No. The nearest one is just a few miles away, down by Empire. It goes northwest out into Lake Michigan near the entrance to the town beach. Some people from the Institute went down yesterday. They said the most striking thing was how ordinary the fence seemed. But also, there were people standing around, then you realized some were on the other side of the fence, family members, looking across and crying, because they couldn't be together. That sounded awful.

Can they yell back and forth or anything?

Yes, they said people could even talk, if they spoke loudly. The fences don’t block sound, and don’t make noise. But it’s like talking across a two lane highway, about that far, that’s as close as you want to get.

Jake said, I really want to go and see one of the fences for myself.

Maybe we can go over tonight. I haven't gone yet either. It's not far at all. Of course, that's unnerving in itself. Too close.

On the other side

Jake thought about it. I don’t know if that would be better or worse, having your family right over there, so you can see them, but not go to over them. I can still talk with Adele, my daughter, on the phone. She's in Italy, so right now it’s not much different than the last few months. He shook his head. I worry most about her. And Susan, of course. I suppose I could meet Susan over near Grayling or someplace, and talk across the fence. But that sounds awful, now that I think about it.

Susan was Jake’s girlfriend, the nurse who had encouraged him to get into med-tech when his knee trouble became obvious. After spending a short while with him yesterday and this morning, Chris knew about Susan and Adele and a number of other personal things that would usually be revealed only gradually in the course of normal work conversations. The fences seemed to accelerate a lot of things.

Life definitely did not feel normal, even though the fences were not yet noticeably interfering with their everyday habits. There was a pervasive uneasiness, as if the fabric of things could unravel quite rapidly, given the strange changes already in place.

As far as Chris was concerned, that made the effort to carry on business as usual even more important. When they got to the bog they would do the set-up, map things out, get the whole research project going, interact normally, compare notes, carry on conversations. She hoped.

How’s your daughter doing? Will she still be taking classes?

Jake brightened. Well, you know kids—she seems to think it’s some kind of big adventure. An interesting addition to her year abroad in Florence. God, I hope it’s only a year! I can’t even think about that.

Chris sighed, I called or emailed a lot of the people I know, and checked the web, although it was almost always down, and watched TV most of Sunday—I guess that was just yesterday—until it got too depressing. I bet that’s all people will talk about at lunch.

From what I hear, Jake said, If nothing changes, we can probably survive, physically—if the fences stay like they are. At least we can ship food and water through—push or sail them or deadhead them through with no drivers, so that’s not the problem it might have been. Some medical things may be more difficult. We can ship medicines, but not surgeons. We can’t send people across a fence to a treatment center.

But what's the mechanism?

The what?

What's the mechanism, what makes the fences work?

Space aliens?

She had to look twice to see the smile.

Right, she finally said, So let's say that's possibility number one. Extraterrestrial origin.

It was Jake's turn to look surprised. A scientist talking about space aliens?

She continued, Another is human activity.

Really really large-scale human activity.

Yes, the fences appear to be distributed all over the planet. Even across the oceans. And third, natural origins.

And God. There was a lot of talk about God’s punishment or reward or warnings on the radio when I was driving here.

Well, I guess you could include that in extraterrestrials—someone out there more powerful than us. As well as natural origins. I hope that doesn't sound offensive or anything.

Jake was quiet for a while. I keep thinking there must be people in isolated areas who got trapped alone. Or in trouble. He shook his head. You said you have people missing, who might be stuck somewhere? If that’s not too personal a question to ask the boss.

Chris frowned. Who knows what’s too personal now? I told you about Martin and Chaka. I’m worried about several other people I haven't heard from who were planning on being here this summer. And I mentioned my father and sister back in Boston, but both of them are fine, at least in practical terms.

Ah, he thought, Boston! That was the accent.

They have each other, she continued, and their work and lives too. I don’t see them often, since I moved out here. I have lot of friends, but nobody else I'm worried about, on the other side.

She shook herself. Wow, ‘on the other side,’ that sounds like across the river Styx or something, like they’re dead.

That has a bad feel to it.

This sounds selfish, but what would drive me crazy, if this lasts, would be the lack of opportunities—I don’t even know what kind—just having this new limit. What if it lasts forever?

He shook his head. No, no, don’t even say that. None of this forever talk. I will see my daughter again—before long. I think Susan’s job in nursing makes it easier for her, because whenever there’s an emergency, the work becomes even more focused and important. I think she's mostly worried about me.

That actually sounds nice.

Jake laughed. Yeah. It’s been a long time since somebody worried about me, other than my daughter. My plan with Susan was that I’d go back every weekend, or she would come up here. I even came up a few days early last week, thought nothing of it, and went camping and exploring along the Jordan River, and now I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. Christ, I sound whiney.

It’s the uncertainty, it drains you. Chris said, "And what