by James Abel
I jammed a fresh magazine into the M4 and stumbled into a wall, the explosion of pain in my chest enormous. My shirt was soaked with blood. I’d smeared blood on the wall, too, and the freezer. Blood dripped as I moved. But dripped was better than sprayed. Dripped meant I had more time. The wasps beneath my skin were crawling around now, hotter and sharper, as if the insects dragged stingers across nerve endings. On the left side, in the hand, nerves deadened by illness designed by Harlan Maas. At the shoulder, nerves enflamed by a bullet fired by his guard.
I lurched out of the laboratory, and up the stairs, just as the hymns stopped and an alarm began blaring. At the top I moved into the old farmhouse. It seemed empty of people, but seeing what was on the walls, I halted for an instant, stunned. I was in a living room turned into a patchwork museum, staring at lepers through the ages: sepia photos of a leper colony in Louisiana, bungalows beneath cypresses, nurses standing like shrouds. A hand, half eaten, extended out from beneath a mesh mosquito net. I saw black-and-white shots of lepers from India. Lepers begging . . . a bowl balanced between two child hands that looked more like claws. Mexico. Indonesia. Cheap magazine cutouts hung beside good oil paintings hung beside amateurish drawings of Jesus curing lepers, as if someone had visited the National Cathedral and sketched the murals in that place. The room was a shrine to disease and obsession. It was also a prediction of a hundred million people’s future if Harlan blew this place up.
At the door, I looked outside. The common area was deserted. The festive lights swayed gently, and falling snow had stopped. The sky had the washed-out winter gray of New England. I saw puffs of smoke floating out from behind the lower corner of a building. No. Not smoke. Breathing. They were there, quiet, watching. They’d drilled for emergencies. They’d all had assignments of where to go if the FBI came, or police.
If I run out, they’ll shoot. If I stay here, they’ll come for me, or just blow the place up.
Harlan Maas had delayed destruction because he had to know if he was master of his own creation. He might be the Sixth Prophet but he’d fallen victim to the first deadly sin, pride. My old pastor in Smith Falls used to deliver an annual sermon on this just before Christmas. “Pride turned an angel into Lucifer,” he said.
I heard soft, running footsteps above me on the roof. The footsteps stopped, but then different ones were moving above the far side of the house. The breath rising across the compound was gone. People were moving around. I saw a curtain rise across the compound and a child’s white, frightened face looking out. The kid saw me. I raised my carbine but couldn’t shoot a child. The boy pulled back. He’d be telling them where I was.
I saw clouds scudding across the sky, west to east, the only natural pattern that seemed real in this upside-down place. I slid to the floor, my legs splayed outward. I tasted blood. If Harlan’s people took me, they’d carry me back downstairs, dead or alive. They’d strap me onto that table, and Harlan would come at me with sharp instruments and peer down at bits of my flesh and liver and brain through a microscope. He’d check the leprosy that I carried against the strain he had created. When he saw that I had lied to him, he’d resume the countdown on the barrels, I figured. Blow it all up.
No one was coming to stop them anyway.
In the end, some suicides don’t want to die alone. Some kill themselves to finish a rampage. A pilot flies into a mountain with the passengers in his plane. Hitler ordered the Germans to keep fighting while he ate cyanide. Harlan would carry out the biggest damn mass suicide in the world. Delusion challenged, he’d kill himself and take half the earth along.
Some prophet.
I still had the M4 loaded with a fresh clip that I’d jammed in downstairs.
I started singing.
I raised my voice as loud as I could. I really belted it out, or perhaps the volume was a product of my imagination. It was possible that my hearing was going mad along with my wavering vision.
One by one six prophets
Last one here and now
Joyous song and loving
God touches his brow
They were coming at me now across the clearing. They were coming down from the roof and from two directions across the main yard. The kid must have told them where I was. Or maybe they just knew. They were firing as they came. The wooden door frame splintered behind me. The bullets tore up the leprosy pictures and paintings and ripped chairs, and made stuffing fly. Wood took to the air. Glass flew like snow. I had the M4 on spray. I put a big man down as he ran straight at me, like one of those Chinese Boxer Rebellion fanatics who believed, charging Marine guns in 1900, that bullets could not hurt them. Delusion atop delusion. I saw a woman go down. I saw a man on his knees, fumbling with a pistol. I shot him through the throat.
Clickclickclick.
The carbine was out of bullets.
It took a couple of moments, but then more men and women, in the silence, rose out of their hiding places. I groped for another magazine, tried to jam it in.
People coming toward me now, converging.
“I’ll kill the first ones,” I croaked out.
They stopped. Had they heard me? They were all looking up, into the sky.
Choppers.
—
The Marines hit the fence points as gunships raked the grounds. The little guardhouse blew apart. The strung-up Christmas lights bounced, their wires shot to pieces, with the loudspeakers. Now the chorus was one of terror and confusion. Heaven had come all right, the sky had spewed forth messengers, but not in the way Harlan had predicted.
A fire started up in one of the buildings and flames shot out. I tried to stand. I couldn’t. I needed to reach the cluster of barrels and stop the timer and pull out the wires. His people had forgotten about me. They were running and screaming and trying to hide. And then I saw Harlan Maas lurching across the yard.
Alone, he headed straight for the barrel bombs. He was going to set them off. The ground burst around him, bullets whining and missing and spraying off. To the Marines, Harlan was just one more person here, no more dangerous than the others. In fact, he was older, so maybe less dangerous to them. He did not carry a firearm. He looked like a frightened guy running for shelter. He wove through their fire as if protected by heaven. He sped up with only twenty yards to go. He was fast crabbing toward those fertilizer bombs like a tropism of destruction, fifteen yards, ten, then only twenty feet separated him from carrying out his plan.
I forced myself to my feet. “Harlan!”
His legs kept pumping but his head cocked and I knew he’d heard me. Rather than slowing him, that seemed to propel him forward.
“Harlan! I don’t want to shoot!”
I hit him with two shots. They seemed to be absorbed into him and propelled him forward. Like I’d added jet propulsion to his momentum. Four feet to go. His hands reached out. His head strained forward like he was an Olympic runner trying to stumble across the finish line. His whole body tilted toward whatever switch would set things off, blow the whole compound, buildings, lab, cure, us.
Harlan’s legs tangled and he crumbled. Marines were on the grounds. They’d poured through a gap in the fence. They were taking control, the choppers lowering and snow flying up, not down, and troops shouting instructions and surviving men, women, and children on their knees.
“You!” a Marine shouted at me. “Hands up!”
But Harlan was still moving. The Marine didn’t understand what I saw. I must have looked like one of Harlan’s people. Harlan was crawling toward the barrels. Reaching the barrels. Pulling himself up.
“DROP THAT GUN!” the Marine yelled at me.
I heard firing as I pulled the trigger.
A sledgehammer hit me and drove me back and down. The sky went in circles as I waited for the immense blast.
The pain ballooned inside me, white hot. The ground was as hard and cold as it had been in Jerusale
m, two thousand years ago, when snow coated Christ in the high hills in April, when he mounted his donkey, when denizens of that time believed that the Messiah had come to Earth.
TWENTY-TWO
It was white, clean, and quiet in the hospital, even the soft beeping of the heart machine a soothing cadence through twilight sleep. The doctors bending over me did not wear masks. Odd, I thought since they knew I was infected. Over the last few days, hospitals had lost their quiet. It had been replaced by pandemonium in hallways. A constant stream of sirens. Exhausted staffers losing tempers and screaming, panicked patients who knew that they were doomed from a mutated, resurgent disease.
“Colonel Rush? I think I saw his eyes move!” a voice said.
A second voice. “How long has he been unconscious?”
“Four days.”
I fell back into dreamless sleep.
—
At a flash of light I opened my eyes and focused. Homeland Assistant Secretary Burke was standing by my bed. So were a half dozen photographers, who kept shooting photos as my vision cleared. Galli stood beside Burke. So did Eva Mendes from the White House. She should have been underground, in Virginia. Why wasn’t she there? Mendes looked proud and happy. Beyond her, a cluster of nurses stood out in the hall, looking in.
My lips formed a word. “Burke.”
He swung a chair around and sat, arms over the top just like Harlan Maas in his lab. His aftershave seemed effeminate against the disinfectant and all the flowers. He was shiny shaved, his gray suit immaculate. String tie. Dress boots. Burke.
“The President’s going to give you a medal,” he said. “But while you slept, I saw your other medals.” His eyes moved down the blanket to where my foot was visible, and the two amputated toes, which I’d lost in Alaska. “The chest,” he said. That meant the bandages. “The hand.” He meant the leprosy. “Those are the real medals.”
I had to give him credit. He wasn’t going to be phony and pretend we were friends, or even that we liked each other. He wasn’t going to say things that made him look good for the press. I liked him better for that.
He told the cameramen, “You can go.” Which meant, Get out of here. He told me, after they did, “You did good.” This meant, No thanks to me.
I closed my eyes. The pain in my chest was a deep thrumming, and there was heat in my skull and a kind of cool hard tingle midway up my left wrist. I held up a finger. My hand was wrapped up, but it was all there.
“I’d hold a grudge, too, if I were you,” he said.
“I don’t, Burke. Everything you said about me is true.”
He nodded, appreciating that. “It is. But it blinded me to the other part. Ten more minutes, Colonel, and the Marines would have found a smoking pit instead of a laboratory. Ten million more people would have died, and we’d be at war and that nut would have gotten what he wanted. Annihilation. Every step of the way, Colonel,” he said softly. “Every step, I tried to stop you.”
He added, “We found you because Aya Vekey tracked the place down. Chris bulled her way into my office.”
“Your regrets aren’t my problem, Mr. Secretary.”
“Well, the thing is, knowing what I know now, I would have done the same thing,” he said. “Guys like you, sooner or later they drag everyone else into a disaster.” I liked him more for that, too, but candor only goes so far. He asked, “Need anything, Colonel?”
“No.”
“Small point,” he said, “but you’ve been reinstated.”
Grinning hurt. “Into where? Leavenworth?”
He had a boomer laugh, hearty. Texas. “Now I know you’re getting better. Good-bye, Colonel. I didn’t think you’d take me up on the offer. You are, of course, released from your contract. You’ve got some rehab time coming up. On us. If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate.”
“I usually don’t.”
He turned and left, his cowboy boots clomping on the linoleum. Mendes followed him. Nurses shooed away reporters in the hallway. I turned my head. Out the window, Washington. Still the same.
The nurse who came to check my vitals told me what I’d surmised from the lack of masks, and the topics that Burke and I had discussed. There was no panic here. Only mop-up. Harlan’s cure worked.
Another nurse, waving off the reporters, sounded annoyed with them.
Colonel Rush needs to sleep.
—
Eddie stood at my bedside, and so did the admiral. Chris Vekey was at the foot of the bed, beside Aya, who clutched a gigantic bunch of bright yellow flowers. She’d been crying. But she was also smiling. She looked between my face and her mother’s like a kid hoping her parents would make up after a bad fight.
“Shot twice. He’s not a man,” Eddie said in a mock radio voice, like some quavery 1930s horror show announcer. “He’s a super-steroid-driven animal!”
“What happened to Harlan?” I asked.
“You nailed the bastard.”
“The bomb?”
“Dismantled,” Galli said. “By the way, all charges against you in Washington were dropped. Turns out some kid—a neighbor—recorded the whole thing. The name of the cult member who tried to kill you is Orrin Sykes. Havlicek’s got a net out for him. And some pretty good leads. The Marine who shot you thought you were a member of the cult.”
“Is he all right?”
Chris’s eyes widened. “You’re asking if the man who shot you is all right?”
“I would have done the same thing,” I said.
Eddie answered the question. “He’s been here four times, One. He keeps calling to see how you are. He went a little nuts when he found out who he shot.”
I was growing tired. My eyes wanted to close. But I asked, through pain, “Who were all those people on that farm?”
“It’s incredible, One! Couple of Ph.D.s! A chemist. Straight-A grad students. I always figured, a cult, you’ll get low-IQ losers. What the hell did they see in Harlan Maas? Maas never even finished college. Brilliant IQ but flunked out, went skitzy in his twenties and thought he was smarter than everyone else! Those sheep threw away their lives for him!”
I remembered the cult guards in the basement. Harlan said this or Harlan said that. Like Harlan had carried the original Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. I remembered the armored animals screeching and clawing in their caged-up worlds.
I was growing exhausted. I only vaguely heard my visitors talking among themselves as I drifted off. Eddie saying, “What the hell is it about people that makes them believe this shit?”
“Faith,” said Galli.
“You call that faith?”
“What do you call it?”
“Nutcases,” said Eddie. “Or evil. Plain and simple. Why do we excuse evil just because people can’t accept that it exists?”
Galli disagreed. “People want to believe in something. They hit a low point. They’re vulnerable. They believe miracles are possible to start with, so they believe they’ve seen one themselves. They’re drowning and a man like Harlan Maas becomes the lifeline.”
Eddie shook his head vigorously, not buying it. “Anybody could end up like them, you mean?”
“Hitler did it to eighty million people. Jim Jones did it to a thousand. Harlan Maas with eighty.”
As my eyes closed, Eddie retorted, “The trials will start soon. Death penalty is too good for them. Let them burn in hell. Say what you want about understanding. What I understand is, people have responsibilities. People have choice.”
—
“I owe you a couple of cars,” I told the admiral, next time we talked, the next day.
“The 4Runner is okay, Joe. I found it on the street and put on new tires. The Prius? Call that my contribution.”
“I insist on paying for it.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“You’re agitati
ng a sick man.”
“Let’s see!” The admiral grinned, holding up two empty hands, palms up, as if measuring options. “Lose a ten-year-old Prius and save the world? Or lose the world but keep the Prius?”
“Never mind grand announcements,” said Cindy. “Joe! You left dirty dishes in the sink!”
That made me feel more at home.
—
Harlan Maas and Karen and I were walking across a green New England meadow. Then suddenly we were on a tundra, covered with snow. I saw a truck stop in the distance, and a neon sign above it, COFFEE AND LEPROSY. Above that, the lights of the aurora borealis shone in the sky. They dripped like lava, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across the dark, and caused heaven to bleed iridescent green.
Karen said, “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
Harlan said, “I could have reunited you.”
I said, “Not in that way, thanks.”
Karen linked her arm in mine and Harlan vanished, and in the dream we drove sled dogs under the aurora borealis. My favorite dream. I had it every few months. It was a dream from which I hated waking. Waking from that dream left me empty and drained, even before the outbreak had begun.
But this time the last image was of Harlan Maas reappearing on the tundra behind us. His face morphed into the man who had tried to kill me in Washington. Orrin Sykes.
“Don’t forget me,” he said in the voice of Harlan Maas.
—
Aya sat on the side of my bed reading a book on chemical reagents and diseases as I awoke. There was a stack of Entertainment Weekly magazines there, too.
“Mom went downstairs to get lunch,” she said.
“You need to wear a mask, Aya. Until they’re sure that the medicine works.”
She held out her arm. I saw the Band-Aid.
“I got the shot,” she said. “And they’re sure. There were laptops in that compound with all the information in them. Harlan Maas was smart, Joe! Turned out they busted up all their old records and put them into new machines, so everyone would think they invented the cure after the outbreak started. Six-drug combination! They stop the microbe right away!” She nodded toward one of the liquid-filled pouches hanging from a stand beside my bedside, and the tube running into my left arm. “The medicines are common and easy to manufacture. Within a few weeks the cure will be available, like, for everybody!”
