by James Abel
The boy loves Dr. Maas and on Sundays the family attends church. Dr. Maas is deeply religious and takes Harlan to tent revivals, where they sing Bible songs and pray, kneel, throw their arms into the air, where, the preacher tells them, the angels live. Dr. Maas volunteers in Doctors Without Borders, disappearing for a month each year to less fortunate areas of the earth. He flies to Turkey after an earthquake. He volunteers at a rural clinic.
I want to be like him, the boy thinks.
By seventeen, the boy wins both a National Merit Scholarship and a Kellogg science scholarship to the college of his choosing. He picks premed at the State University of New York at Albany.
In the last class of high school, senior year, the teacher goes around the room, asks students what they plan to be when they grow up.
I want to design automobiles!
A criminal lawyer!
I’ll inherit the trucking company!
“I want to wipe out leprosy,” says Harlan Maas.
—
Thirty-two years later, Harlan Maas wept with emotion because in one hour he would reveal his mission to thousands of pilgrims who undoubtedly were gathering eight miles away. Cars were probably pulling into the lot now. Pilgrims would be climbing off freight trains. Others would have walked miles, through snow. Harlan envisioned a great packed mass of men, women, and children, sick and well, rapt, breath frosting, converging on the spot.
And the first thousand will be saved.
Many journalists had been invited as well.
He recalled his happy start at college and the way the special voice first came to him as a hard-to-hear whisper. The way he threw away his medicines at the voice’s urging. The voice soothing him when he was in torment, when Dr. Maas died, turning from friendly to demanding, finally revealing who it was.
By now, it has told Harlan what to do for years.
Weeping, Harlan saw a smaller, elongated version of himself distorted in a glass vial, like a tortured figure in an Edvard Munch painting. Hands flat on his face, cheeks concave. Tears leaving pink track marks. He would never cry in front of the others. But down here he was alone with the animals, the samples vault, the cure, and the oil drum fertilizer bomb that would destroy it all if the FBI came, as they had come to take Harlan’s father to prison almost forty years ago.
I do thy will.
The red phone had not rung in days, and as he’d received no new instructions, he knew he had done right.
Many will perish, but the core group will lead the world into a new era.
Harlan dried his tears. He felt the great burdening weight of being alone. But he remembered that Moses, the First Prophet, had been alone when he went up on Mount Sinai. Mohammed, the Third Prophet, was solo in the desert when he got the word. Christ rode into Jerusalem alone, and his first disciples numbered a mere dozen. Harlan had eighty. By tonight, eighty would be a thousand. By next week, ten thousand. By month’s end, with the disease ravaging unbelievers, the faithful would bring New Jerusalem to the world, the cure spreading out from Upstate New York.
Which is where Mormonism was started by Joseph Smith, the Fifth Great Prophet, last one before me.
There came a knock at the lab door. It was one of the security men. “It’s time to go, Harlan!”
“Any news I need to know in the Holy documents?”
Holy documents meant Wikileaks. Wikileaks kept him informed of doings in Washington. On Wikileaks, each day, he read minutes of secret meetings, speculations, strategy, and he tracked the Marine doctor named Joe Rush, the only one groping toward minimal knowledge of what had triggered the outbreak. Wikileaks proved what the voice had assured him, that several hundred dollars of equipment and the Internet, in the hands of the righteous, could bring the corrupt powers of the world to their knees, as the Bible’s Tower of Babel was destroyed in that era.
“Wikileaks says that troops will be attacking Islamic militia overseas within hours. It predicts wider war. It’s like you said, Harlan. Apocalypse.”
“Have they found Joe Rush?”
“He’s disappeared.”
“Any news from Orrin?”
“He can’t find Rush either. He says the police are looking to arrest Rush. He thinks Rush is powerless, stuck in D.C.”
Up top, some guards would remain here to blow the bombs if the FBI came. All others had been assigned jobs at the truck stop: as greeters, crowd control, press liaisons, and deliverers of the cure; first a shot, then pills to be taken for a few more weeks.
Harlan nodded at his driver and slipped into the backseat of the twenty-first-century’s version of Christ’s donkey in Jerusalem, a maroon 2009 Hyundai Sonata, which smelled of mint air freshener and fertilizer transported in the trunk.
“How many in the crowd so far?” Harlan asked, filled with anticipation.
The driver’s head turned. The man looked nervous. Something was wrong. At first the driver did not answer.
Harlan frowned. “How many did you say?”
“More are probably coming right now.”
“Of course, but tell me. Is it a thousand yet?”
The man looked mortified. “Twenty-six.”
Harlan gasped. He could not have heard right. The driver must have meant a thousand and twenty-six, or twenty-six thousand. The blood drained from Harlan’s face and he felt springs in the backseat jab him. The air drained from the car. Twenty-six was impossible. The call had gone out days ago. The Internet must have reached billions with his announcement. The voice had assured Harlan that many would come . . . so many that he’d have to cull out supplicants.
“Twenty . . . six?” he heard a small voice, his voice, say.
“I guess, with so many false cures out there, people are waiting for proof. Or bad weather kept them away.”
“Bad weather? A cure is here and bad weather kept them away?”
In the vast and terrible silence, the number seemed to reverberate in his skull, with each bump of the chassis. Twenty . . . six . . . twenty . . . six. It was worse than mockery. It was not even a fraction of a fraction of the vast crowds he’d been assured would come. Into the shock came the thinnest twinge of logic, from a time when his brain had functioned better. Because twenty-six was inconsequential. Twenty-six meant he led not a movement but a pathetic group of misfits and losers who had unleashed a scourge upon the earth.
Have I made a mistake?
“What about the press?” he asked weakly. Harlan had ordered reporters invited, from Albany radio and newspapers. PBS and Fox. CBS. The New York Times.
“I e-mailed them and sent the video. None here so far.”
Harlan fell back with the taste of dead things in his mouth. The pounding in his skull grew worse. He did not hear the screech of the red phone on the rear parcel shelf. When he did, he turned to it in dread.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered when he picked up.
“What did you do wrong, Harlan?”
“I did everything you said.”
“YOU’RE BLAMING ME? DON’T YOU DARE! YOU MADE A MISTAKE! YOU CAUSED THIS TO HAPPEN! THE ONLY MISTAKE I MADE WAS IN CHOOSING YOU!”
“That’s not true.”
The driver had heard Harlan talk into the red phone before, so he kept going, but Harlan’s whimpering frightened him. He was a washed-out ex–grad student at Williams College, a chemistry major. A shy, pimply lost soul when he came here. He’d been recruited by one of the girls at a bar where they trolled for students. With Tahir Khan, he had helped Harlan design the combo-therapy to beat the disease. All the medicines involved already existed. But they had to be administered in correct doses, the right way. Probably scientists would stumble on the mix sooner or later. But many would die before that occurred.
The car passed out of the front gate and into third-growth state forest; rumpled hills folded over on themselves, Welsh style, f
linty soil sprouting ash and maple, oak and a few towering pines that had not been knocked over in the last ice storm. Next came a local land trust property, a former granite quarry, with a deep green lake that covered discarded century-old equipment, engines, saws, and chained-down bodies of people—hoboes, hikers, bums—who had been infected with the hybrid disease in the lab.
The water was so thick with silt that divers would never find all the corpses down there.
State Route 20 meandered past a Shaker village museum and a four-corner general store that still sold individual hard candies and John Deere snow plows and locally made greeting cards and locally grown corn. Billboards begged tourists to visit: the Blue Caverns, Shakespeare on the Mount summer theater, Tanglewood symphony grounds across the Massachusetts line.
“You failed. You failed all along. In penance, this is what you must do,” the voice said.
Harlan gasped.
“This is what they deserve,” the voice said.
Harlan didn’t know which was worse, the number twenty-six. Or this. He sputtered. “You can’t want that. You never told me that. You never said anything about this.”
He was in shock. This new order was diametrically contrary to everything he’d been instructed to do so far. It was, he saw quite plainly, monstrous.
“I won’t do it.”
The voice responded mildly, usually a sign it was getting angry. “Oh?”
“There is no way you can make me do that. You never said anything before about that.”
“You refuse ME?”
Harlan said with venom, “If only twenty-six come, I’ll talk to twenty-six. They will bring more people. In the end we’ll have a thousand. I promise. You’ll see.”
No answer.
“Are you there? I don’t care if you are or not!”
For one second of almost-clarity, he vaguely glimpsed what he’d become: a Jim Jones, a deluded madman who’d convinced a handful of gullible followers that they could be kings of the world. But the realization couldn’t last. It was too horrible to allow it to fully surface. He was unaware of pushing it away, only of exhaustion. He realized that he had, for the first time, hung up on the voice.
How did it feel? He sat up in wonder. Was the emotion inside freedom? Yes! Strength? Yes! It was a wild, surging sense of rightness and exhilaration.
I’ll save people with the cure, not do what he said.
But then suddenly the voice erupted in the car, not just over the phone, in the actual air, so loud that it was a wonder that the driver kept his hands steady and on the wheel, as if no voice were there at all.
“YOU ARE TELLING ME WHAT TO DO? YOU ARE THE SERVANT! THEY HAVE IGNORED YOU! YOU HAVE FAILED AS MY PROPHET!”
Harlan wept. He gasped, “No, I won’t do it!” he argued. The driver hunched over and looked frightened but kept going.
The pain in Harlan’s head grew hideous, enormous.
In the end, as always, he gave in.
—
The Hyundai pulled into the parking area at the truck stop off I-80. Harlan’s people had set up a podium in one corner of the lot. There were long folding tables from which they dispensed hot coffee and buttered rolls to three dozen people who stood stamping in the cold. Snow clung to the top of the EXXON and HOT SHOP signs. The snack shop was boarded up. In the distance, winter pasture, a clapboard farmhouse, a thin line of gray rock wall.
The voice had instructed him, “You will make the speech. You will administer the cure to those who came because they have been faithful. But others laugh at you. You will return to the compound and blow it up; the medicine, the cure, the grounds, yourselves. It will not be death, but transition. You will return to Earth as saviors, all evil wiped away.”
“I am so happy to see you all,” he said, watching his words curl away in the cold as smoke, gazing down at strangers’ faces; desperate, curious, black and white and Latino.
“You have heeded the call and now you will be rewarded. You will be cured.”
It was obvious which cases were the most severe. One or two people moved closer, to see or hear better, but a cordon of security men blocked them off. The sound system filled with static. Harlan watched a man step from the front line and stare at him. This man did not look ill.
He looked, in fact, vaguely familiar.
“The cure is painless,” Harlan said. “Take the shot today, then one pill a week for three weeks.”
Suddenly Harlan recognized the man, and with that came the great flood of relief. It was Rush. It was actually Joe Rush, standing there, his face as clear as in the Wikileaks photo, fifteen feet away. Rush had been delivered to Harlan. The voice had given him this gift. Harlan saw with vast calm that he was doing the right thing. He saw that even Jesus had suffered doubts on the cross, crying out, “God, why have you forsaken me?”
Now his words came more easily, the pace picking up. The appearance of Joe Rush here had killed any last shred of doubt. It was the sign that Harlan had needed. There was no question now that he would do as he had been instructed!
You will destroy the compound, yourselves, the cure.
Harlan Maas gave the security man behind him the clenched hand signal behind his back. This was an alert that there was a problem needing attention in the crowd.
“My friends, let me tell you about your glorious future,” announced the Sixth Prophet to those below.
NINETEEN
That night they gathered in Chris Vekey’s dorm suite on the Georgetown Hospital campus, to fill each other in on the state of treatment at the hospital, city, and nation. They missed their old missions, even though their new jobs kept them occupied sixteen hours a day. They hoped that Joe Rush was all right.
“The White House is fixed on overseas,” Galli said. “They won’t seriously consider a domestic source for the outbreak.”
“No word from Ray,” said Chris. “Ray thinks maybe Joe is hurt. Ray promised to tell us if he heard something.”
“Joe could be in one of those police detention centers and nobody would know it,” grouched Eddie.
“There’s no central list of names,” said Chris.
The light flickered—that had started happening over the past few hours—and out the window, a wavering glow in the distance that had not been there the night before. Fire. There were more sirens; ambulances or police; the whooping wail from the Humvees, the low, hollow symphony of bullhorn announcements, from beyond the wire. The lines outside were growing. Even healthy people were trying to enter now, for the food, or protection. News reports indicated that the initial estimates of sick had been underreported. New statistics were now coming in from all over the city. Double the amounts.
Eddie went first tonight.
“The holding area for bodies is filled up.”
Chris looked exhausted and overwhelmed. “We’re out of room. Every bed is occupied. We’ve got people coming in faster than we can handle them.”
The admiral nodded. “I know. We’re rushing to open more facilities. The Kennedy Center. RFK Stadium. There’s talk of using Metro stations, too.”
“Aya read on the Web that people have been getting out of D.C. by hopping freight trains. She said that the Army just shut down the yard.”
“The President wants to make a statement, give people something positive. They’re asking for anyone who has anything positive, call an 800 number.”
No one said anything.
“The new plan is, mass graves,” Eddie said.
Exhaustion was plain on all their faces. Just to move around inside the complex, take a stroll, get fresh air, required protective clothing. Friends did not shake hands with each other anymore. The cafeteria was closed. Once you got food, you took it back to your room. Disinfectant was available in wall dispensers in hallways. You carried your own utensils.
Eddie sighed. “Remember that old Edgar Al
lan Poe story, ‘Masque of the Red Death’? A plague is ravaging Europe. The rich take refuge in a castle. They hold a masquerade ball. They think they’re safe until Death appears, dressed as a plague victim.”
“Cheery,” said Chris.
“I should have gone to the cathedral with Joe,” Eddie said.
“He didn’t let you.”
“I should have gone anyway.”
The TV offered only one working channel as of three hours ago and, at the moment, showed a briefing room under Virginia, where a White House spokesman pointed to a map of the Mideast and North Africa on the wall. X marks delineated terrorist camps. Red denoted countries that “harbored enemy combatants.” Arrows in the Atlantic showed the direction in which Naval warships were steaming. Headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen conveyed warnings from leaders of friendly countries, or of terrorist groups, cautioning the United States against attacks.
“Mom?”
Aya stood in the doorway hesitantly. She’d been barred from the gathering because Chris thought she’d be frightened by it. She’d been in her room, doing homework on her computer, texting friends, or whatever else she did on the Net. The girl looked smaller than usual in white flannel pajamas with a doggy motif, Labradors in sunglasses, basset hounds in reading glasses, beagles in thick-lensed black-framed glasses. The pattern shrieked of innocence and vulnerability. Chris fought off the urge to cry.
“Are you all right, Aya?”
Aya said nothing. Her face seemed to be breaking into pieces, as if the muscles warred with each other in there. Chris recognized the expression. Whatever bothered her daughter had been growing and was about to peak.
“I have to tell you something,” Aya said.
