MIND VIRUS
Charles Kowalski
Literary Wanderlust | Denver, CO
Mind Virus is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination and have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2017 by Charles Kowalski
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published in the United States of America by Literary Wanderlust, Denver, CO.
www.literarywanderlust.com
ISBN print: 978-1-942856-18-4
ISBN digital: 978-1-942856-19-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938664
Cover design: Ruth M’Gonigle
For everyone who has ever been Emily
IN THE BEGINNING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
SUNDAY, MARCH 22
Everything was going according to plan.
The man with blue eyes blended in perfectly with his camouflage: blue jeans, a white T-shirt bearing an American flag with a cross in place of the stars, and just for a touch of extra realism, a “WWJD?” wristband. As he joined the crowd jostling its way into the Verizon Center, he drew no notice beyond a “Welcome, brother! God bless you!” from an usher. Of course, no one asked to inspect his backpack. Even if they had, they would have found nothing more suspicious than a 64-ounce water bottle in an insulating sleeve.
He strategically selected an aisle seat near the central stage. The folding chairs on the stadium floor around him, and then the bleachers, began to fill up with legions of the infected. The stadium could seat thirty thousand, and even this far before starting time, it was beginning to look as though it would be a capacity crowd. He noticed that his breathing had grown shallow, and he found himself wishing for a surgical mask and a bottle of the world’s strongest hand sanitizer.
Don’t be ridiculous, he admonished himself. It’s all in the mind. There’s nothing dangerous in the air here …yet.
“Brothers and sisters,” came the announcer’s voice, “welcome to Awaken America! This place is packed and the Spirit is ready for action! Glory, hallelujah! And now, may I present the man who made it all happen. Brothers and sisters, let’s hear it for the Reverend Isaiah Hill!”
To thunderous cheers, he made his grand entrance: Isaiah Hill, super vector, personally responsible for the infection of thousands. The spotlights shone blindingly off his white suit and the white teeth gleaming from his black face, magnified a hundredfold on the four giant screens suspended from the dome.
“Good morning, brothers and sisters!” he greeted the adoring crowd, his voice echoed faintly in Spanish by a simultaneous interpreter. “And do you know what comes in the morning? Joy! ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’ And the dawn we’ve all been waiting for is coming, brothers and sisters! It’s time to Awaken America!”
Right on the last word, clouds of confetti and columns of laser light shot up from the corners of the stage. The gospel choir burst into song, as dry ice vapor cascaded from the risers to make it look as though they were ascending to heaven. Yes, Hill had clearly gotten where he was because he knew how to play on the emotions like a virtuoso organist, while keeping the stops on the brain pushed firmly in.
As the crowd joined their voices to the choir, the man with blue eyes clapped and swayed along with the others, mouthing the words that scrolled across waterfalls and Rocky Mountain landscapes on the screens. As one speaker after another took the microphone, he added an occasional “Hallelujah!” or “Praise the Lord!” to the answering chorus. The words left a slimy, evil-tasting residue in his mouth, but he consoled himself with the thought that this was the last time he would ever be in a place like this. And it was an even greater consolation to be the only one who knew that the same was true for hundreds, hopefully even thousands, of the others here.
Then came the cue, exactly according to plan.
“Dear brothers and sisters,” came the Reverend Hill’s voice over the loudspeakers, “are any of you sick? Are any of you weary? Are any of you carrying heavy burdens? Come to one of our prayer stations, and our ministers will lay hands on you and pray for the healing of everything that harms you. Come unto Him, dear brothers and sisters! Come unto Him!”
A soprano soloist from the choir started to belt out a gospel-style rendition of “Come unto Him” from The Messiah, backed by an array of instruments that Handel could never have imagined. All around the stadium, people began to rise from their seats and make their way into the aisles.
That was the cue. He reached into his backpack, uncapped the drinking tube on the water bottle, and pressed the button in a pocket of the sleeve. He heard a muffled beep.
The countdown had begun.
He zipped the backpack closed, leaving the end of the drinking tube protruding from between the zipper tabs. He set the backpack on his chair, taking care to keep the bottle upright. And stepped into the aisle.
That was when things stopped going according to plan.
A few places in line ahead of him, one of the healing ministers was laying his hands on the head of a young woman kneeling before him. Suddenly, she let out a piercing scream, fell over backward, and began to shake as if she were in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
The people around her stood back, and one cushioned her head with a folded sweatshirt. “Oh, God! Oh, dear God!” she cried when she could speak again, tears streaming down her cheeks as she kicked her feet and clapped her hands. “Yes, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” To the blue-eyed observer, she looked as though she were simultaneously coming to a climax and watching her number come up for Mega Millions.
She showed no sign of stopping, and the people around her, either staring at her or with eyes turned heavenward in prayer, kept him from moving forward. He turned around to look for another escape route. Behind him was another young woman, in a wheelchair. Her parents stood behind her, diverting their gaze from the spectacle in front of them just long enough to exchange a glance that said, Dare we hope? They filled the aisle, there was no getting around them.
Trying to pass through the row of seats across the aisle would only take him farther from his goal of the exit. The only remaining option was to go back through the row he had just left. He tried to squeeze past the young couple next to him, but the woman stopped him with a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“It’s all right, brother!” she said with a reassuring smile. “You’ve never seen anyone slain in the Spirit before? I know, it’s a little unnerving the first time. But there’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s a great blessing, to be touched by the Holy Spirit. If you like, I’ll pray with you, so that the Spirit can touch you and heal you too. Can I?”
He shook his head, and tried even more urgently to squeeze past. He took an involuntary glance at the backpack he had left on his seat.
The woman’s eyes followed his. “Aren’t you forgetting your bag?”
Now he was in a full state of panic. His heart cried out for oxygen, no matter how sternly his brain ordered his body to hold its breath. He gave her a shove that sent her tumbling over the folding chairs into the row behind her. He tried to run, but her boyfriend blocked him and tackled him to the floor.
“Security! We need security here!”
THE FIRST BOOK
1
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY, MARCH 26
Professor Robin Fox projected three pictures onto the screen, and aimed his laser pointer at the first. “Number one?” This was of a black-clad militant glaring menacingly through a ski mask, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder.
“Number two?” An old man kneeling on a prayer rug, poring over a well-worn Qur’an.
“Number three?” A suicide bomber in an explosive-laden vest, photographed just before setting off on his final mission.
The show of hands was fairly evenly divided between numbers one and three, except for a few who were correctly anticipating a curve ball.
“Now, if I were to put the same question to Mohammed, may peace be upon him, here’s how he would probably answer.” He highlighted the first picture. “This one—well, maybe, as long as he was following the law: ‘Defend yourselves against those who fight you, but commit not aggression, for Allah loves not the aggressor.’ ”
Fox highlighted the old man. “This one—definitely. According to one hadith, when Mohammed’s troops came home after a victory on the battlefield, he said to them: ‘Now that we’ve returned from the lesser jihad, we can go back to the greater jihad.’ By which he meant the daily struggle to learn, to grow in the faith, to be a better person. And he might add that anyone engaged in the pursuit of knowledge has a greater reward than a martyr.”
He highlighted the suicide bomber. “This one—definitely not. All the hadith agree that Mohammed always condemned suicide in the strongest terms. According to one story, a group of soldiers in his army once made their commander so angry that he ordered them to kindle a fire and burn themselves in it. They refused, and when Mohammed heard about it, he said, ‘If they had gone into the fire, they would have continued to burn in it until the Day of Judgment. Obedience to your commander is no virtue if it means disobedience to Allah.’ ”
A murmur ran through the room, and he allowed it a moment to run its course. “Maybe this misguided soul sees himself as a martyr,” he continued when it was quiet again, “but I would guess that if Mohammed could have imagined such a thing as suicide bombing, he would probably have seen it as the spiritual equivalent of burning down your own house to collect insurance money.”
A muttered comment reached his ears. “I wonder how many people know that story.”
He didn’t have to look to know that the voice came from Arnie. Fox had never quite understood what he was doing in a seminar in Religion and Peace. If he was looking for an audience for his belief that the United States was God’s chosen nation, and the only path to peace was for its armed forces to intimidate the rest of the world into submission, he should have figured out long ago that he was in the wrong class.
“You’re quite right,” Fox said. “These stories need to be more widely known. That’s why I tell them, and…” he turned around and spread his hands to include everyone in the room, “…that’s why I count on you to pass them on.”
He was willing to let that be his exit line, but Arnie spoke up again, in a louder voice. “I mean, you should go over there and tell them,” he said, waving a hand in a vaguely eastward direction. “To all those people hell-bent on making the whole world into one big caliphate.”
The rest of the class was oddly still. Usually, when Arnie started one of his diatribes, it was the cue for a few sighs and rolled eyes from the others. But in the wake of the Verizon Center attack, the tension in the air all over Washington had pervaded the George Washington University campus as well. No one knew anything yet about the attacker or his motivation, but speculation was already rife, and most of the accusing fingers were pointing toward Mecca.
Fox toyed with a card in his hand, debating whether to play it. It was something he usually kept very quiet, a chapter in his life on which he devoutly hoped he had turned the final page. But for some people, it was the only thing that gave him any credibility, and he was sure that Arnie was one of those.
“They probably wouldn’t listen to me,” he said. “But they might be more receptive to people like the one who first told me these stories—an imam in Iraq.”
Arnie’s confrontational look gave way to surprise. “What were you doing in Iraq?”
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to…do something that might cost me my job in the Peace Studies program.”
Arnie’s eyes widened even further. “Intelligence?”
“Military intelligence, to be exact. And if anyone wants to make the old wisecrack about that being an oxymoron, you’ll get no argument from me.”
Arnie straightened up in his seat. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fox. I didn’t know.”
“There was no reason why you should. And just so we’re clear, anyone I catch saluting or calling me ‘sir’ fails the course.”
He turned to address the whole class. “That’s all for today. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, and…” he pressed his palms together and inclined his head, “…peace be with you.”
They returned his signature greeting and made their way out, shouldering their backpacks and chatting about their weekend plans. Fox was left alone in the room, surrounded by the ghosts that the mention of Iraq had conjured from their graves across the sea.
Another day, he told them. Another day teaching peace, in the heart of the country that sent us to kill you. How many more will it take, before you consider my debt paid? Before you can finally rest?
The ghosts didn’t answer, of course. They never did.
...
Fox headed out of Corcoran Hall into a glorious spring afternoon. The fabled Washington cherry trees had mostly traded their blossoms for leaves by now, although there were a few branches where some puffs of pink still held their own against the steadily encroaching green. In Japanese, a cherry tree in this transitional state could be described by a single word, hazakura. For Fox, the sight of cherry trees in bloom always brought on a wave of nostalgia for Japan, a touch of homesickness for one of the half-dozen countries he had called “home” over the course of a childhood spent following his father to diplomatic postings around the globe.
University Yard was eerily deserted for such a beautiful day. Ordinarily, he would have expected to see all the cheerful signs of spring on a college campus: picnics, outdoor study sessions, half-naked frat boys raising funds by inviting passersby to slather them with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Today, though, everyone was moving briskly from one building to another, spending as little time in the open air as possible. Some of them were wearing surgical masks. The Verizon Center attack had been quickly stopped, and there was nothing to suggest that any contamination had escaped, but fear had infected the air as effectively as any virus.
Fox had to hurry, too, but for a different reason. He was scheduled to meet someone who had called earlier that morning, asking urgently for an appointment—a John Adler, from NBC. Fox had already been approached once by the National Geographic Channel about serving as a consultant for a miniseries they were planning about sacred sites around the world, and he was curious about what interest a mainstream network could have in him.
He arrived at the red-brick building on G Street that housed his office. The mulberry tree beside the entrance was faithfully performing its self-appointed duty of marking the liturgical seasons, its branches decked with flowers in the deep purple of Lent. In a few weeks, it would trade them for the green leaves of Ordinary Time.
Once inside, he stuck his head into the department office, and greeted the administrative assistant. “Hi, Mirage.” Her name was actually Maya, but the name her Indian father and American Jewish mother had settled on meant “wellspring” in Hebrew and “illusion” in Sanskrit, leaving her an easy mark for the nickname.
She returned the greeting with a good-humored smile. “Hi, Mr. Fox.”
“Mr. Adler hasn’t arrived yet, has he?”
“Not yet.” She glanced at the clock. “You made it with five minutes to spare. Oh, and while I’ve got you, do you know whether you c
an make it to the Passover seder next week?”
“If you’re bringing something, I sure hope so.” Fox knew that the blend of cultures and religions in her family was not always smooth, but it had its compensations, one of which was the invention of chocolate macaroons with a touch of cardamom.
The study of other religions, Fox always told his students, requires you to examine the world from new angles. Whether by design or simply age, this building lent architectural credence to his point. After a glance at his mailbox, he climbed stairs not quite straight, with a tread not quite even, to a door not quite flush with jambs not quite plumb under a lintel not quite level. It bore a wooden plaque, a gift from a former student, with a cartoon fox and the inscription, “The Fox Hole.”
He barely had time to sit down and catch his breath before the knock on the door came. In walked a man in gray slacks and a blue blazer, with less hair than he had once had, and the bulk of someone who had once been muscular but had let himself go in recent years—specifically, since getting married, judging from the way the flesh of his finger bulged around his wedding band.
“Robin Fox, I presume?”
“Mr. Adler, thank you for coming.” Fox rose to greet him, and the visitor extended his hand. At shoulder height, palm down, so that Fox had to turn his up to meet it—a less than subtle way of trying to establish yourself as the dominant, and the other as the submissive partner. Fox took a step closer to him, and turned his hand vertically as he shook it, restoring things to an equal footing.
“Please, have a seat. What can I offer you? Coffee, tea, espresso, cappuccino, hot chocolate?”
Adler directed a slightly amused glance at the Barista machine perched atop a dorm fridge in the corner. “Are you running a Starbucks here, or what?”
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