Cold Silence (29 page)

“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 Jerusalem, 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.

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 It had been replaced by pandemonium in hallways.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 agitating 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!”

She was a kid but also an adult. She was, like Eddie, my partner. She was the only one who had believed me during the dark time. She had risked jail to help me. She would, I knew, receive a Presidential Medal, too.

“Guess what, Joe? A bunch of colleges called,” she said. “And offered scholarships to any one; for after I'm a senior, even in two years. Eddie made a joke about it. He said some kids will do anything to get into the right school.”

It was a pleasure to talk about something normal. “Which colleges are you thinking about, Aya?”

“I don't know. Princeton has a good chemistry program and it's not too far from Mom. Yale called, like, four times. But they're further away from Mom, and I worry,” she said meaningfully, “about leaving Mom alone.”

“Don't go there, Aya.”

“She just wanted to protect me!”

“Just let this stuff stay between the adults.”

She bristled. “You didn't mind that I was fifteen when you wanted help! You know what I learned in English class, Joe? I learned that a writer once asked a priest what he learned from all his years of taking confession, and the priest said there's no such thing as an adult, and
no one is as happy as they seem. You know why I think that is? It's because
some
people like
other
people but pretend they don't!”

“Interesting point,” I said, and smiled.

“Mom said you were engaged to get married last year and your fiancée got killed.”

“You're worse than Eddie. But, yes, that happened.”

Chris walked in and, seeing me awake, almost dropped the bag of sandwiches. She looked from my face to Aya's. But she addressed me. “Aya wanted to visit.” Meaning, I took it, that she wouldn't have come otherwise. That she knew I did not want her here.

“I'm glad you both came.” But I said it for Aya's benefit, to let Chris know that her daughter was welcome, but not her. Seeing her irritated me. She'd stabbed Galli in the back to steal his job. She'd told Burke that I'd gone AWOL. Some voice inside, my own voice, was asking me why I could forgive a Marine stranger for shooting me, but I couldn't forgive a kindhearted mother for trying to protect her kid.

“Aya and I have to go now,” she said. “The high school is open again. They want Aya to give a talk about what happened, to the whole school. She's nervous about it.”

“Three,” I said, addressing Aya by her new nickname. Eddie was Two. “Three, you saved the world. Who cares about giving a little speech?”

Aya blushed. “Me.”

—

The Very Reverend Nadine Huxley of the National Cathedral was considerate enough to have a nurse ask if I would care to see her before entering my room. She brought along a meatball hoagie from Curtis and Jody's Deli on Wisconsin. Curtis and Jody were from Alaska and their Tundra Special included elk and caribou meatballs. Extra peppers. Extra onions. Extra tomato sauce. Extra cheese.