by Jon Land
His mother would likely live out the rest of her life here, among hundreds of other residents with varying degrees of mental illness, all of whom wore the same white, shapeless smock-like clothing. Beyond their corner table against a grated window, the rec room was a portrait of normalcy for Creedmoor. There was a Ping-Pong table where a man wearing sunglasses was playing an imaginary game against an invisible opponent, wielding a paddle absent a ball. Another man, meanwhile, was tapping the missing ball over and over again against a wall and never missing. He could’ve been at it for five minutes, five hours, or since yesterday for all Max knew. A number of residents were gathered around a television, either entranced by what was playing on the screen or paying no attention to it at all.
As a SEAL, Max could never recall a time when he wasn’t on guard. But this was different, his defenses ill-equipped to deal with these surroundings. He felt himself tense, his muscles tightening into bonded steel bands beneath his skin, as he swept his gaze further about the room.
A woman had her ear pressed against the television set’s front-firing speaker. Six other women were squeezed around a table playing a card game under the watchful eye of an attendant, there to mitigate disputes that seemed to occur every other minute. More residents clustered before the rec room’s other windows, looking out as if they were watching a movie, reacting to things no one else was seeing. Max hated the fact that his mother lived among them, hated even more that this was where she belonged.
“Where’s your father, Max?” his mother asked suddenly.
“Working.”
“He’s always working. Works too hard, pushes himself too hard. Who do you think you take after? The two of you are exactly alike. Sometimes I look at you and think I’m looking at him.”
Max wanted to tell his mother that his father was gone and had been for almost ten years now. He wouldn’t be coming to visit, and she was in here because of how it had all ended. Max was already gone when it had all transpired, out of necessity rather than choice. Had abandoned the family name and started a new life under a new identity, also out of necessity. He had buried the boy he had been to be reborn at the age of seventeen as a man, day one in that process after he’d killed for the first time.
Maybe if I’d been there for her, this never would’ve happened.…
“Your father doesn’t come as much as he used to, Max.”
Max felt a clog fill his throat, so thick he couldn’t swallow. “He’s been busy, like you said.”
“Every day I wake up, you know my first thought? Maybe this is the day he’s going to come and take me home. I warned him, you know.”
“About what, Mom?”
“What was coming. All the tribulations. She told me all about them.”
This was different, a new subject broached, Max thought, unsure whether that was a good thing or a bad.
“Who told you?” he asked, trying not to push too hard.
“The little girl,” she repeated, lips starting to quiver. “You know—Lilith.”
“What little girl?” Max asked her, a chill passing through him, accompanied by a distant memory shrouded in haze. “Who’s Lilith?”
His mother scolded him with her eyes. “Come on, silly. You used to play with her when you were a little boy.” His mother lowered her voice. “Nobody else knows about Lilith here. You’re the first person I’ve told, because you used to play with her when you were very young. Sometimes she scares me; she’s blind and yet she seems to see everything. Lilith’s coming has to stay a secret. Promise me, you won’t tell anyone, not a soul. Promise me!”
“I promise, Mom,” Max said, starting to recall an imaginary friend from his childhood who’d indeed been a little girl. “Is she here now?”
His mother patted his forearm, grinning. “No, silly. If Lilith were here, you’d see her too. She only comes when I’m alone, loves to surprise me. But I’m not alone now; you’re here.” She leaned closer to him, lowered her voice. “Promise me, you won’t tell anyone about her, not a soul. Promise me!”
“I promise, Mom.”
“Because I’d miss Lilith so much if she stopped coming. She tells me things.”
The way his mother said that made Max lean more forward, not able to leave things there. “Like what?”
“When people are going to die. She’ll point someone out and shake her head. Then the next day…” Max’s mother let that thought dangle. “Anyway, she’s never wrong. She was even right about you coming today.”
“Lilith told you I was coming to visit?”
Melissa Younger nodded. “This morning, right after she wished me happy birthday. She said you were coming. She told me some men were coming to hurt you.”
“When?”
“Today.”
TWENTY-ONE
New York City
She told me some men were coming to hurt you.…
The words stuck in Max’s head, but he didn’t want to press the subject any further, didn’t want to risk agitating his mother. He took her hand in his left, turning his right palm over to reveal the birthmark, dry of blood now, thankfully.
“How did I get this, Mom?”
His mother’s smile vanished. “You, you were born with it, of course. It’s, it’s a birthmark. Good luck, many say.”
A slight ooze of blood had once more begun to trace the impression’s outline.
“Dad has one too, you know, Mom. Identical in all respects.”
“Then you should ask him, Max,” his mother said, turning away again. “You should ask your father.”
“He told me to ask you.”
“Lilith told me you’d ask that question, warned me not to tell you. She’s going to be mad that I even mentioned her to you.” His mother turned her head back toward him. “How can she see me, if she’s blind? How can that be, Max, how can that be?” His mother leaned further across the table and snatched Max’s right hand in a boney grip. “How’s your girlfriend?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, Mom,” he said, knowing exactly to whom she was referring.
“Yes, she is, but she shouldn’t be. She’s bad for you, Max, she’s bad for you,” his mother continued. Her hand dug into his forearm, her eyes catching fire as her words speeded up, blurring into each other. “She’s very bad for you—a whore, that’s what she is!”
“Mom—”
“No good! Dangerous, just like her father. You got your father’s mark; she got her father’s nasty soul. That’s the way it is with parents and children. Stay away from her, Max, promise me you’ll stay away for your own good!”
“I’ll stay away from her,” Max soothed, trying to restore order to his mother’s fractured mind.
“Promise!”
“I promise.”
His mother’s breathing started to slow, the episode over. “You have a great life ahead of you, Max. The sky’s the limit. You’re going to be a great leader, the kind of leader people would die for. And many are going to die for you—Lilith told me that too.”
“I should talk to Lilith myself,” Max said, having no idea why.
“She says you’ll be seeing her again soon.”
“I will?”
His mother nodded. “Uh-huh. She told me she misses you.”
Something about the way his mother said that left Max cold, the madness receding from her tone in that brief instant.
She misses you.
He felt his breaths growing shorter and shallower, the rec room seeming to shrink around him. Everything was still in place, just more compacted, the other residents on this floor of Creedmoor pressing in so close he could smell the stale perspiration rising through their clothes. The card table occupied by a quartet of drooling fifty-year-olds was the size of a postage stamp and the players themselves elongated to the point they were as tall as the ceiling but pressed as thin as stick figures.
Max shook himself alert, the rec room back to what it should have been.
“Your real father’s very proud of you, Max,
” his mother said, squeezing his hand even harder and looking like the version of her he’d met in his vision, all of a sudden.
“What do you mean my real father?”
“You’re going to make him proud. Lilith told me.”
“What else, Mom, what else did she tell you?”
Melissa Younger seemed to notice something awry with the other residents and turned away from him, looking distressed. Max watched the attendants on duty in the rec room shuffling about, tentatively at first, then with a bit more bounce in their measured steps. One had just raised a walkie-talkie to his lips to report and probably summon reinforcements. Another was trying to comfort a woman in a wheelchair who kept trying to roll away from him.
Max realized his mother was squeezing his hand so tight, her own gnarled fingers were quivering. “Your real father’s very proud of you, Max,” she repeated. “I know he is.”
She got that way sometimes, stuck in a loop. But this was different, as if someone had hit REWIND and then PLAY again. Time skewed and running in random order.
Things seemed to be calming down in the rec room, the attendants managing to quell whatever collective angst had struck the residents and restore order.
“Tell me more about what you meant by my real father, Mom,” Max said, hoping his mother didn’t notice the discomfort in his voice.
Before she could respond, though, a cadence of voices singing in tune broke her train of thought.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.…”
Max hadn’t noticed the trio of nurses enter the rec room, the one in the center holding a lavish birthday cake that looked like coconut cream, his mother’s favorite.
“Happy birthday, dear Melissa, happy birthday to you!”
The residents gathered in the rec room applauded, as the nurse set the cake down between Max and his mother, a single candle sparkling in its center amid a heart made of gooey red frosting and the distinct aroma of coconut reaching him.
“Come on, Mom,” Max prodded, “blow out the candle, but don’t forget to make a wish.”
His mother, what was left of her anyway, squeezed her eyes closed and mumbled something under her breath. Then she opened them, smiled serenely, and blew out the lone candle.
The residents clapped, some of them approaching now.
“Would you like to know what I wished for, Max?” his mother asked him.
“You can’t tell me, or it won’t come true, Mom.”
His mother ignored him. “I wished for things to go back to the way they used to be.”
Max reached across the table and touched her hand. “A tough wish to come true.”
Another of the nurses laid some paper plates down on the table. “Make for a nice dessert,” she said to him. “If you don’t mind, of course.”
Max noticed a pair of orderlies in white scrubs had entered the rec room wheeling a cart that reminded him of the kind flight attendants once used, with the meals preloaded on trays sized to the multiple slots inside. The wheels squeaked and left a thin jagged scratch along the linoleum in their wake, like a car leaking fluid. The orderlies began passing the trays out to the rec room’s occupants, trays containing a thin sandwich sealed in plastic wrap, a side of what looked like some kind of macaroni salad, and a truly sad-looking chocolate chip cookie.
His mother’s birthday cake would make for quite the treat indeed, Max thought, as his eyes met one of the orderly’s. Something was all wrong about them, as if they’d been looking his way the whole time.
“So, so,” his mother was saying, caught in one of her mind loops where her brain seemed to seize up. “So…”
Before him, the nurse was slicing his mother’s birthday cake into the thinnest slices he’d ever seen to make sure there was enough to go around for everyone. This as, across the room, one of the elderly residents of Creedmoor tossed his wrapped sandwich to the floor.
“Peddle this crap to someone else, Barney Fife,” he snapped.
“Yeah, yeah,” a woman seated near him chimed in, tossing her sandwich aside too. “You’re not Bubba. Bubba wouldn’t call this a lunch. Where’s Bubba?”
The orderlies swung back to the game table, toward the cake, Max, or both.
Max couldn’t see their hands, lost inside the cart with the squeaky wheels that had left scratches on the linoleum floor.
She told me some men were coming to hurt you.
Max was halfway out of his chair by the time he caught steel glinting in the rec room’s fluorescent lighting, as the hands of the two orderlies emerged from the cart, matching glares focused intently on him. The nurse was cutting the cake, and then she wasn’t because Max had stripped the knife from her grasp, his motion so fluid that she continued the slicing motion, as if she still held it.
The knife had barely found his grasp when he hurled it in the same moment the first man’s pistol cleared the cart, glistening even more. The blade found the man’s throat, digging in all the way to the hilt and twisting him backward into the second fake orderly.
Impact stole that man’s grasp on the ugly, squat pistol from him and the gun went flying. He was seasoned enough to go for the now dead man’s because it was closer, failing to anticipate the difficulties of prying an object free of a death grip. That gave Max enough time to close the gap between them in the length of a breath, upon the man just as his hand jerked the dead orderly’s pistol level.
BANG!
Max felt the bullet whiz over the center of his scalp, close enough to register the heat even as he recorded, absurdly, a few Creedmoor residents never breaking their gazes from the television tuned to the golden oldies station—Bonanza, he thought.
By then he’d lashed a kick that caught the second gunman under the chin, surprised when the man maintained enough presence of mind to re-steady the pistol. Max caught the man’s wrist in mid-motion and jerked it downward with one hand, while the other smashed into his windpipe with curled knuckles leading. He felt the cartilage crack, seeming to break away. Heard the man’s breath catch in his throat with a wheeze that sounded like a clogged vacuum cleaner winding down.
Only when the man dropped to his knees, did Max realize he was holding the pistol now, while standing between the bodies of the two men he’d just killed.
“Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeee,” his mother sang behind him, amid the chaos spreading through the rec room, “happy birthday to me!”
One of the residents watching Bonanza clutched the remote like it was his favorite toy and turned up the volume on the television.
“Change the channel, change the channel!” another implored.
His words aimed at Max, as an emergency alarm began to wail and more orderlies, a veritable army of them, burst into the rec room to restore order.
Max swung back to his mother to find her eating the cake with her hands, her face dribbled with specks of the red heart, which looked too much like blood.
TWENTY-TWO
Sinai Peninsula, Egypt
“Are there any updates, anything new?” Vicky asked Neal Van Royce, as their Land Rover thumped over the uneven road that cut through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
“Before I lost cell service an hour ago, there was more confirmation of cases in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.” His expression grew dour as he pocketed his Samsung phone. “It’s spreading, Vicky.”
Vicky checked her iPhone and found she had no service either. She hadn’t said two words to either their driver or the other two heavily armed soldiers assigned as their escorts, all members of the Egyptian Special Forces.
Decades before, Egypt had divided the Sinai into two separate governorates. The more metropolitan south Sinai and the desolate north where they were headed now. Specifically a clinic in a remote village not far from this governorate’s capital of Al Arish where all indications pointed to another outbreak that had begun prior to the one they’d viewed in Jordan the day before.
Their destination, the town of Ashkar, turn
ed out to be located well out from Al Arish, twenty miles at least. The day was so clear and bright, they could see the structures of Al Arish in the distance as the only break in the ribbon of sand that stretched the entire distance to the city.
A modern professional clinic, courtesy of the United Nations, was located on the outskirts of Ashkar. As they drew closer, it stood out in its modernity compared to the buildings that rimmed as flat a stretch of land as Vicky had ever seen. There was a paved parking lot, ambulances, and signs in both English and Arabic directing patients and visitors to the proper entrance. But what was missing stood out more: traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian. No signs of life in view anywhere.
“That’s strange,” said Van Royce.
“What?”
“There were supposed to be representatives from the Egyptian government and army here to meet us,” he told her, checking his phone again, as if service had miraculously been restored.
Their vehicle was equipped with a military radio mounted on the dash. The driver raised the mic to his mouth and tried again to raise someone in Cairo, but got only static in response, before giving up and returning the mic to its stand.
“Maybe they’re waiting inside,” Vicky said.
They parked next to an ambulance in the lot, the driver to remain with the vehicle while the other two Egyptian soldiers accompanied them inside.
They entered the clinic to find no Egyptian government or military officials there either; in fact, nobody was there. The front reception desk had been abandoned, the waiting room empty and soundless. No visible signs of life at all, save for an ancient wall-mounted television broadcasting a silent picture that jumped in and out of focus.
“What the hell, Neal?”
“I don’t know,” Van Royce stammered. He started to reach for his phone again, then stopped. “I don’t know.”
“How many patients?”
“A dozen at the last report, a few hours ago.”
Vicky started toward the double doors that led to the examination rooms and admittance area.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Van Royce said, trying to position himself before her.
