Harlan frowned. “How many did you say?”
“More are probably coming right now.”
“Of course, but tell me. Is it a thousand yet?”
The man looked mortified. “Twenty-six.”
Harlan gasped. He could not have heard right. The driver must have meant a thousand and twenty-six, or twenty-six thousand. The blood drained from Harlan’s face and he felt springs in the backseat jab him. The air drained from the car. Twenty-six was impossible. The call had gone out days ago. The Internet must have reached billions with his announcement. The voice had assured Harlan that many would come… so many that he’d have to cull out supplicants.
“Twenty… six?” he heard a small voice, his voice, say.
“I guess, with so many false cures out there, people are waiting for proof. Or bad weather kept them away.”
“Bad weather? A cure is here and bad weather kept them away?”
In the vast and terrible silence, the number seemed to reverberate in his skull, with each bump of the chassis. Twenty… six… twenty… six. It was worse than mockery. It was not even a fraction of a fraction of the vast crowds he’d been assured would come. Into the shock came the thinnest twinge of logic, from a time when his brain had functioned better. Because twenty-six was inconsequential. Twenty-six meant he led not a movement but a pathetic group of misfits and losers who had unleashed a scourge upon the earth.
Have I made a mistake?
“What about the press?” he asked weakly. Harlan had ordered reporters invited, from Albany radio and newspapers. PBS and Fox. CBS. The New York Times.
“I e-mailed them and sent the video. None here so far.”
Harlan fell back with the taste of dead things in his mouth. The pounding in his skull grew worse. He did not hear the screech of the red phone on the rear parcel shelf. When he did, he turned to it in dread.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered when he picked up.
“What did you do wrong, Harlan?”
“I did everything you said.”
“YOU’RE BLAMING ME? DON’T YOU DARE! YOU MADE A MISTAKE! YOU CAUSED THIS TO HAPPEN! THE ONLY MISTAKE I MADE WAS IN CHOOSING YOU!”
“That’s not true.”
The driver had heard Harlan talk into the red phone before, so he kept going, but Harlan’s whimpering frightened him. He was a washed-out ex — grad student at Williams College, a chemistry major. A shy, pimply lost soul when he came here. He’d been recruited by one of the girls at a bar where they trolled for students. With Tahir Khan, he had helped Harlan design the combo-therapy to beat the disease. All the medicines involved already existed. But they had to be administered in correct doses, the right way. Probably scientists would stumble on the mix sooner or later. But many would die before that occurred.
The car passed out of the front gate and into third-growth state forest; rumpled hills folded over on themselves, Welsh style, flinty soil sprouting ash and maple, oak and a few towering pines that had not been knocked over in the last ice storm. Next came a local land trust property, a former granite quarry, with a deep green lake that covered discarded century-old equipment, engines, saws, and chained-down bodies of people — hoboes, hikers, bums — who had been infected with the hybrid disease in the lab.
The water was so thick with silt that divers would never find all the corpses down there.
State Route 20 meandered past a Shaker village museum and a four-corner general store that still sold individual hard candies and John Deere snow plows and locally made greeting cards and locally grown corn. Billboards begged tourists to visit: the Blue Caverns, Shakespeare on the Mount summer theater, Tanglewood symphony grounds across the Massachusetts line.
“You failed. You failed all along. In penance, this is what you must do,” the voice said.
Harlan gasped.
“This is what they deserve,” the voice said.
Harlan didn’t know which was worse, the number twenty-six. Or this. He sputtered. “You can’t want that. You never told me that. You never said anything about this.”
He was in shock. This new order was diametrically contrary to everything he’d been instructed to do so far. It was, he saw quite plainly, monstrous.
“I won’t do it.”
The voice responded mildly, usually a sign it was getting angry. “Oh?”
“There is no way you can make me do that. You never said anything before about that.”
“You refuse ME?”
Harlan said with venom, “If only twenty-six come, I’ll talk to twenty-six. They will bring more people. In the end we’ll have a thousand. I promise. You’ll see.”
No answer.
“Are you there? I don’t care if you are or not!”
For one second of almost-clarity, he vaguely glimpsed what he’d become: a Jim Jones, a deluded madman who’d convinced a handful of gullible followers that they could be kings of the world. But the realization couldn’t last. It was too horrible to allow it to fully surface. He was unaware of pushing it away, only of exhaustion. He realized that he had, for the first time, hung up on the voice.
How did it feel? He sat up in wonder. Was the emotion inside freedom? Yes! Strength? Yes! It was a wild, surging sense of rightness and exhilaration.
I’ll save people with the cure, not do what he said.
But then suddenly the voice erupted in the car, not just over the phone, in the actual air, so loud that it was a wonder that the driver kept his hands steady and on the wheel, as if no voice were there at all.
“YOU ARE TELLING ME WHAT TO DO? YOU ARE THE SERVANT! THEY HAVE IGNORED YOU! YOU HAVE FAILED AS MY PROPHET!”
Harlan wept. He gasped, “No, I won’t do it!” he argued. The driver hunched over and looked frightened but kept going.
The pain in Harlan’s head grew hideous, enormous.
In the end, as always, he gave in.
The Hyundai pulled into the parking area at the truck stop off I-80. Harlan’s people had set up a podium in one corner of the lot. There were long folding tables from which they dispensed hot coffee and buttered rolls to three dozen people who stood stamping in the cold. Snow clung to the top of the EXXON and HOT SHOP signs. The snack shop was boarded up. In the distance, winter pasture, a clapboard farmhouse, a thin line of gray rock wall.
The voice had instructed him, “You will make the speech. You will administer the cure to those who came because they have been faithful. But others laugh at you. You will return to the compound and blow it up; the medicine, the cure, the grounds, yourselves. It will not be death, but transition. You will return to Earth as saviors, all evil wiped away.”
“I am so happy to see you all,” he said, watching his words curl away in the cold as smoke, gazing down at strangers’ faces; desperate, curious, black and white and Latino.
“You have heeded the call and now you will be rewarded. You will be cured.”
It was obvious which cases were the most severe. One or two people moved closer, to see or hear better, but a cordon of security men blocked them off. The sound system filled with static. Harlan watched a man step from the front line and stare at him. This man did not look ill.
He looked, in fact, vaguely familiar.
“The cure is painless,” Harlan said. “Take the shot today, then one pill a week for three weeks.”
Suddenly Harlan recognized the man, and with that came the great flood of relief. It was Rush. It was actually Joe Rush, standing there, his face as clear as in the Wikileaks photo, fifteen feet away. Rush had been delivered to Harlan. The voice had given him this gift. Harlan saw with vast calm that he was doing the right thing. He saw that even Jesus had suffered doubts on the cross, crying out, “God, why have you forsaken me?”