There are also telephones in the house, which the boy learns to use, learns which numbers will bring his adoptive father’s voice to him from Dr. Maas’s office. One day the phone rings and he answers and hears his real father’s voice, just as if Brother Agabus stood beside him.
“They think I’m calling my lawyer, but I called you. I miss you. I can always find you. I love you,” Agabus says.
The boy is frozen with love, terror, confusion.
“Don’t tell them what we did or HE will punish you,” Agabus says. “You will sicken and rot and die.”
Another voice in the background tells Agabus that his phone time is up. Men are arguing. Give me that phone! Suddenly all the voices cut off, leaving the boy shaking, the receiver buzzing in his hand. After that, he starts whenever the phone rings. In his dreams Agabus calls him, and whispers and threatens, and one time, in a nightmare, a hand even comes out of a telephone.
The boy wakes, wet from sweat.
But Brother Agabus never calls again.
By age twelve, four years later, the bedroom feels like his own room, and he’s happy with the pennant, and with playing in the town softball league. He’s a pretty good left fielder. By fourteen, he’s a straight-A student, with a special interest in science, atoms, and disease. By sixteen, he’s got a girlfriend. He’s a happy kid. He has friends. He loves biology class. He is president of the debating club.
“You can convince anyone of anything,” a teacher admiringly tells the boy after a big win.
He never speaks of what happened when he was younger, even to the doctor. The boy blocks it out. Sometimes he wakes up sweating, and cannot remember a nightmare. He reads in a newspaper that his biological father died in prison, knifed by another inmate.
“DeGraves was a child molester and pornographer,” the newspaper says, “sentenced to life without parole.”
He feels nothing at this news. He’s never spoken of the cult, or of that phone call from Agabus. Never has. Never will. He gets a letter from his birth mother. She’s in a hospital in Baton Rouge. He rips it up without reading it. His real father now is Dr. Robert Maas. His new family — cousins, aunts, and uncles — visit at Christmas. They give presents. They phone him on his birthday. They’re not perfect, they squabble sometimes, but to Harlan, they’re as close as you can get to what he wants life to be.
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.