“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.”