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.
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.