The old woman's name was Elizabeth Cummings, and her dog was a fifteen-year-old basset hound named Charley. Hawk had to take Elizabeth's word on this, and on her comments about the dog's temperament. The dog seemed to be eighty percent open sores. Under normal circumstances, Hawk would be horrified at this sign of bad animal husbandry, because a casual glance would assume mange, and sanity would prevent someone from getting any closer. But she had the dead squirrel in her bag. She'd handled its crisping fur and brittle skin, and she saw the same thing happening to the dog.

Happening. It was an ongoing process.

The dog was still alive. His chest rose and fell, and his owner sat beside him. At the start of the drive, she'd made noises about sitting beside him so she could put his head in her lap and tell him he was a good boy. But the dog's every movement cracked open yet another wound in its pelt of brittle skin, and a touch was an unthinkable assault to something so frail. At the start of the drive, though, the dog was still trying. He'd pick his head up, and lymph had oozed a stain where his cheek had rested, and he'd lick his owner's fingers with a rapidly degrading tongue. After about five minutes of driving, the dog stopped responding to Elizabeth's words. His chest rose and fell, first with increasing distress, and then with a more distressing shift. Agonal, that was how doctors would describe it. Funny. Usually medical names were safely incomprehensible, as if our brains insist we cannot be killed by a thing that sounds like pretentious onomatopoeia. You could call it glioblastoma and imagine the shapeless enemy curdling within your skull as some odd species of ferret. But agonal breathing perfectly captured that moment when the gentle slope downward becomes irreversible.

He breathed maybe another two minutes like that. A rise of the chest more mechanical than willed, and an immediate fall. The last sparks of a doomed brain. When he stopped, it was with the strangest rustle, like the crackling snap of frost. Elizabeth made a truly awful sound, and her daughter began brushing her mother's white hair back from weeping eyes.

"Okay, Mom. Mom. He's gone. Charley's gone.” The daughter said, exhaustion clear in her words and posture. “We need to get you to the hospital, now."

The daughter did not seem to reach Elizabeth, and she turned in desperation to the strangers. Her mother did not to seem in much better shape than her dog. She was still moving and her skin did not seem to be crisping as the dog and the squirrel and the grass all had. But her hands had a strange sheen to them, something part of Hawk wanted to call dry, and another part, shiny. Hawk had just enough insight left to understand, she really saw neither; there was something else going on here, something more horrible that her brain was struggling to domesticate. The rest of her consciousness seemed to be eaten alive by fear, devoured to the rind.

Alex reached across from the driver's seat and grabbed her hand. He gave her a tight squeeze and met her gaze through the rear-view mirror. His focus was steady. She knew the glint in his eye. He was about to lie his ass off to someone who didn't deserve it at all.

"Hey, Liz? I know you think Charley's vet can get him the best help, but I know somebody up at the main hospital. Somebody who is..." He hesitated. Alex had come to Sedona as an up-and-coming con-artist recognizing a target-rich environment, which meant as a gainfully employed human who cared for his fellow man quite a bit, he regarded most of Sedona's New Age community as a sack full of his ex-colleagues, with a few lost islands of people who really do mean it. Hawk didn't know why Alex had Liz filed in the "really means it" category. Maybe it was something he'd seen in her house, or yard; he could hang an entire man's life on a nail over their door.

"He does things with Crystals," Hawk said. Crystals were a safe bet. Everybody did things with crystals.

"Oh." A pause. "But...he's a medical doctor?" Liz said.

Alex smiled conspiratorially and gave Liz a wink. "Get 'em from the inside. That's what my friend says."

There was no friend. This was a con, and a cheap one. From the increasingly worried looks Liz's daughter was giving them all, she wasn't fooled, and was now probably quite worried about these strangers gripping her mother's life in their hand. Alex would take no time to reassure the daughter; the things that would make her feel better would make Mom insist on going home.

Hawk hesitated, because she was afraid her own hands were now lethally radioactive. Then she sighed—he was as close to this whatever-it-was as she'd been—and reached over to take the hand touching hers. She imagined their skin burning together on contact, and forced her mind to think about any other possible thing. How sick Alex felt right now, that was a safe thing to think about. The world wouldn't melt down if her husband had a solid guilt trip about his ability to talk another human being out of anything short of a kidney, but she didn't like watching it. One squeeze of his hand, sitting atop their gear shift, and then she could go back to thinking she was going to die.

He lifted his own fingers—one of them, at least—in acknowledgement, then looked back to Liz in the rear view, fretting over the dead dog. "We're going to the ER," and he named the nearest, looking to the daughter expectantly. After a moment of hesitation, she nodded. Hawk couldn't read her, save for the most obvious of worry and fear.

Her mother was in bad shape. There were large, scaled patches on her arms, like a severe outbreak of psoriasis. Large, wide, white drifts of plaque on each arm with the texture of cheap parmesan cheese. Hawk was pretty sure there were bald patches in the old woman's hair and her eyes had a frightening yellow tint that Hawk hoped was a collection of dried goo in and not the first hint of bilirubin turning the whites of her eyes to butter. She was thin, which could have just been old woman, except it just...didn't look right. Weight lost too fast has a look to it. It lies in the sag of skin against muscle, lank hair, hopeless eyes. Starvation. Even purposeful, the body screams with it. That's what this woman was; a scream that had not yet been voiced. That would have been tomorrow, when the daughter came to check and found her mother curled and dead around the body of her dog.

And where would the line be? The line of death in the yard, making grass brittle as glass?

Or maybe we need to ask...where will it be, tomorrow?

"What's your name?" Hawk asked the daughter, who turned on her like the poor girl was drowning.

"Rebecca. Becky."

"Alright, Becky. How long has your mom's garden been poisoned?" she said.

Rebecca's expression shuttered like a switch flipped. "My mom's garden—"

"Here," Hawk shoved her bag at the girl. "I'd like you to see what I found in your mother's neighbor's yard while you were getting the dog in the car. It's in the cotton balls."

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Fortunately the girl was too scared to be perplexed by sixty test tubes. She gagged slightly at the sight, which made Hawk really curious about what, exactly, was still in her bag. But the girl looked up with a much more existential terror. Before she looked in the bag, she'd been worried about her mother. Now she had a better sense of scale. "So...the garden—"

This seemed to wake the old woman up a bit. "Yes. Someone is poisoning my garden."

"When did this start?" Hawk said.

"Um," said the old woman. "Hmmm. Yesterday, I think."

Hawk nearly threw up at the thought of that line advancing a hundred yards every day.

"No, Liz. You called me last week, and it was just a few of your tomato plants, then," Alex said.

"Two of them," Becky agreed. She wrapped fingers tight around the old woman's hands. "They withered and died on us."

"The tomatoes were crunchy," the old woman said. "They fell apart."

Hawk took her bag back from the daughter and decided to open the bag. Alex was asking other questions that Hawk heard with half an ear. They all amounted to progression, and it sounded as if it moved from two tomato plants, to the whole bed of tomatoes, to the next two beds of plants, to the whole of it , rear door to back fence, over the course of a week. She unzipped the bag as the daughter began describing the old woman's decline. It was just a black bag, but had gained a coppery smell in the last few moments that didn't bode well for the condition of Hawk's Anting kit. She peered inside.

She blanked at first, her mind insisting on ketchup and red paint and pepper flakes. But that was where her subconscious failed her, because...pepper flakes? That made no sense. It demanded that she truly see what was in front of her.

The process that had killed the squirrel had continued. Its paws had broken off entirely. They sat atop a pair of blood-soaked cotton balls, the flaked-off remains of fur a beige dust on the same. The head had also broken off, and some of the blood in the small body was still liquid enough to paint everything around it red. Hawk looked down the cross-section of dead squirrel, which was halfway colorless. In a way, it reminded her of burning steel wool. The flesh stiffened as this process traversed through it, cells losing integrity—or maybe they were gaining it, brittle as new wood, and that was why the body was starting to break apart. The flakes were bits of blood, hardening or crystalizing or...or cooking, if that was what this was like. Applying any familiar process made her mind want to scream at how...how not-right this was. It was screaming through language, evaporating definitions save for the most important pair: Danger, and run.

And the blood was clear, like ruby-colored glass.

It hadn't been that bad when she put it in the bag.

"Hey, Elizabeth?" She said. "Can I see your hand, please?"

The old woman obeyed. Her movements and words gained a vagueness Hawk didn't like much. It was like watching sugar dissolve in milk. "My fingers maybe feel a little funny. Like I slept on my arm wrong."

"Mom!" Rebecca said. "You didn't tell me that." And she began berating her mother. Apparently among other things, Elizabeth was at high risk for stroke and had type two diabetes.

You and half the country, Hawk thought. She was more worried about the woman's fingers. She took them in her own. The old woman's skin still felt supple. Flaked and dry, but that could have just been old skin and neglect. This woman was very clearly on that cusp between independence and the next step down. A painful transformation in itself, and Hawk's heart could ache for her, even in its fear. Hawk didn't see much hair on the woman's upper arm. There was a gold-plated wrist-watch, the band worn silver in places, with a mother-of-pearl face and analog hands, and that seemed fine—wouldn't radiation stop a watch?—and Hawk almost relaxed...and then she looked at the old woman's nails.

They had an odd tan tone to them. Something very beige. Very much like the dust around the dead squirrel and the blades of grass in the dying yards. But maybe that was just...old woman fingernails. She wasn't an expert in geriatric medicine. Her only memories were of a vague grandmother, dead before Hawk was old enough to understand why nicknames were good things, and her impressive nails. Thick and yellowed by age and work and reduced immune system...that was all it was. It had to be all this was. And still, like the final girl invoking the monster, Hawk reached with one gentle finger and, as gently as possible, touched the tip of Elizabeth's fingernail.

It crumbled with the same high, sharp fragmentation she'd seen in the squirrel and the basset hound.

She forced herself to smile. It felt like expressions at gunpoint.

"You're going to be fine," she said, and wished she could lie like Alex.

She didn't want this old woman dying afraid.

***

The hospital whisked Elizabeth and her worried looking daughter away. Hawk and Alex were left alone at the entrance with an empty car and a wreckage of dead canine. They weren't family. They weren't police. They weren't supposed to find out how this ended.

And, Alex thought, if he shouted that at himself enough, he might actually believe that.

"Maybe they won't have any problem stabilizing her," Hawk said, from beside the open passenger seat. She'd dragged the dog's body down to the floorboards. By then the strange stiffening had begun. His torso had cracked almost in half at the spine. Lengthwise. As if the dog were some sort of fossel meant for display.

"Who the hell do we call about this?" Alex said. He looked to Hawk. She was the scientist. She was the one with the education, doctorate, multiple papers in varying magazines. She was supposed to be the modern day wizard with the incantations to summon varying secular deities. Doctors, whisper the hushed voices at the march of white coats. Justices, at the army in black, meant to stand against the darkness. Experts, and the lines of red ink move like cavalry as things are measured and counted in tally. You know what I don't, is what modern faith says. You know how to say "it will all be okay".

"I don't know," Hawk said, in denial of deity.

"Hawk," He said.

"The CDC? Maybe?" She shrugged, her face scrunched in thought. He hoped she was discovering the solution, and that it would be something they could accomplish with the contents of a Jeep and an ant-hunting kit. He waited. She kept scrunching.

"Come on, Babe. You gotta know more than that." He said.

"You asked me to come with you because you thought an old woman had a mite infestation on her tomatoes. Not because radiation is turning her grass into—"

"Woah, okay, Hawk. Throw the breaks on. Radiation?" He said.

She blinked at him.

"No way, honey. It's not that bad."

Without saying a word, she reached over to Elizabeth Cummings' dead dog, and snapped the ear off. And it did snap. Not even with a proper crunch. Now that something with substance had broken, it reverberated within its own matter, almost ringing as it cracked apart. It had very little color. He'd assumed the basset was just light-colored, but the fur was...it was dissolving.

Hawk peered curiously at the burgundy end that should have been gushing animal blood. Or at least oozing with it, seeing as how the dog was dead. But it didn't. It was curiously smooth, an expanse of obsidian made disturbingly red. Even frozen blood would not look or act like this.

"So. What kind of bad is this, if it's not 'that' bad?" Hawk had a way of pitching her words when she was especially pissed, that made one feel as if she were flinging things at you. Today, that pitch had the weight of Titanic, of continental plates, and the ink drying on divorce papers.

"The kind I don't understand. And you know how I get, Babe." Alex took the fragmented dog ear away from his wife and made to set it on the car seat. He stopped. It was light. That was the most troubling part. It was so light in his hand. There was a weight to the living, or maybe just to the moisture that was life's carrier. This thing wasn't just dead. There was no possibility of life left here. Not even bacteria. Not even mold.

He let it go. The dog's ear was the color of bleached cardboard. The last traces of red vanished in mid-air. It hit the ground with a high ringing sound, a soprano clarity that should have been beautiful. This was not beautiful. It was an auditory abscess curdling through sound-waves, something snarled up against the ear drum, so hot with infection your pulse was just the sound of it dripping. The dulled obsidian substance that had once been blood and sinew sped away from the impact. And the silence after that impact just seemed to reel out, forever.

"Alright. Yeah. It's that bad. Who the hell do we call about this?" He said.

"I don't know," Hawk said, and shivered.