Cold Silence (28 page)

“Those two were in as bad a shape as the others . . . look . . . Maybe your strain mutated. It happens. The point is—”

He stepped closer, but not close enough. He was breathing hard. His eyes had gone small. He barked out, “They took the cure so they weren't sick!”

I backed up a step. “Well! You know this thing better than I do. But the rashes on their inside thighs and scrotum . . . those triangular purple marks, they're the same on me.”

“On your scrotum? What rashes?”

“They cleared up now but the skin's all tough, and under the microscope that scaly purple pattern looks exactly the same as what we saw on them.”

He said nothing, but he was breathing more audibly.

Come on. Don't you want to take a look at a symptom you've not seen before? Don't you want to check whether your strain has morphed into something else?

I said, “Maybe the cure doesn't work all the time. Maybe it just works on some people, not others.”

His face twisted. His head jerked up. He stared at the red telephone on the lab table as if frightened of it. I'd heard nothing, but he
tilted his head as if he did. And then he went over to the phone, and picked up the receiver, and listened, and his hand began to shake.

“No,” he said into the phone. “I can't understand it. No, it's impossible. Yes, yes, find out! Yes, I will.”

Harlan ran to the barrel and did something to the switch. Then he ran to the door and cried out for help in a wavery voice. After a moment the guards were back.

I'd stopped the countdown. At least for the moment.

He told them to unlock the cage door and strap me onto the table and peel my clothes off.
Now.

There was only one way for them to get those manacles on the exam table on me, and that was to take off my cuffs. The two guards ordered me out of the cell, telling me to stand still, arms out, eyes forward. Harlan waited across the room as the tall man aimed his carbine at me and the Asian moved close with a key. Harlan turned away to select sharp-looking instruments from a table.

“I won't hurt you, Colonel. I just want to run some tests,” Harlan said. “It's better that you don't move.”

In the brief moment when they'd opened the lab door, before they'd shut it, I'd heard hymns coming from above, over their sound system. The same song as in Africa. Now the key, moving toward my handcuffs, seemed to shake slightly.

The guard was not so confident as he wanted me to think.

“Hold your hands straighter!”

I kept my face blank. I could not show intent in my eyes. The Asian man lay his pistol on a table before approaching, and the man
with the carbine watched my face, stepping to the side to let the Asian get close.
But he didn't move far enough to the side.
It was possible that if I hit the small man at the right angle, I'd spin him into the other man's line of fire.

“Don't move, Colonel!”

I kept my wrists easy. Rigid would be a signal. The Asian man's eyes flinched to his key, off my face. Otherwise he'd never get the key in the slot. The key glinted. His nails were clean and evenly cut. I heard the smallest scrape of metal touching metal and moved fast at the exact second that the click sounded. Both men had been looking at my wrists, not at my knees, which I used to launch myself sideways, still keeping my face straight.

The shot seemed thunderous and I felt the air pressure when the bullet skimmed my ear. I felt my shoulder drive into the Asian man, driving him back, spinning him around.

With the loudspeakers going up top and the singing, maybe no one had heard the shot. The Asian man's skull was spraying blood on the left side. He toppled like a truncated statue. The gunman was stunned and that slowed him, and by the time he swung the carbine, I'd reached the pistol on the table. I had the gun in my right hand, the one in which I had full sensation in the fingers.

Something hard punched into my left side, spinning me back against the wall.
Shot.
But I kept moving, dropping, as wood shavings and glass splinters flew off tables and beakers shattered and animals screamed. I half fell, half ducked behind one of those blocky lab tables. There was no pain yet. There was adrenaline. M4 carbines fire .223 bullets. They tumble and chew up tissue inside. I'd been hit in the lower left chest, away from the midline but in the rib cage.

The area under my shoulder was pulsing and sticky and there was a feeling like wasps crawling under the skin. The whole left arm didn't seem to be working.

I heard a great rush of loud hymn singing. Someone must have opened the steel door. But when I glanced up, I saw it was Harlan leaving, not someone coming in. Harlan was running. I fired at him and missed and ducked down as more bullets came my way. I crawled behind the side of a freezer as the metal side thudded with pings and whines. I kept away from the oil drum. I didn't think a fertilizer bomb could be set off by bullets, but what if I was wrong?

Crackcrack.

I popped up and fired and glimpsed two guards there.
Double vision.
He'd split in two. I had no extra ammunition and there was no way to tell how many bullets remained in my magazine. I heard a
snap
across the room. The guard had fed fresh ammo into his carbine. Up top, I could imagine the scene. Harlan running into the compound. Harlan shouting for the singers to stop. Some ticking cosmic clock moving a second hand toward his timer.

I called out to the guard, “He's crazy, you know.”

No answer. As if this would have worked. Then I heard a slight shuffling sound from the left, barely audible over the frightened whimpering of the armadillos. The guard was moving.

“He's not a prophet,” I called out. But I was as effective as a Roman centurion telling an early Christian that Christ was no more a messiah than the donkey on which he rode. “He's sick,” I called out. “Don't destroy the cure. You can save millions of people.”

The top of the table blew apart above me. I crawled left.

Ahead, on the floor, I saw a sideways mesh rack for test tubes, half smashed and knocked to the ground by firing. I reached for it and tossed it, below tabletop level, six feet to the left. The moment it struck the ground, the table above it splintered. CRACKCRACKCRACK. I was already rising. He had no chance to turn. My shots took him full in the chest before I ran out of bullets. But I did not need them anymore, at least not here. Not under the ground.

—

The red digits on the blast timer read 19. They didn't move. They didn't blink. They were jammed or not running. Was it possible that Harlan had not started the timer again? Then I remembered that remote activation was possible from aboveground.

Maybe he's waiting to see who comes out of the lab before he starts it up again. Maybe he's hoping the guard will be the one to survive, and then he can take blood samples from me, see if I was really sick, confirm or disprove that I've got the same strain he released, or one that morphed from it.

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.