“No,” John said, lolling his head back and forth. “Please.”
“Your plane is headed for South America . . .”
“Turn the plane around!” John said. “Please! Mommy! Don’t let’s go there!” A moment later, he burst into tears.
When his subject had passed out cold again, L. Rob Piper straightened and announced to the others the completion of this phase of the project. He felt pleased with his work.
“Is Doctor Fosse here yet?” he asked Tom Mahorn.
“She’s waiting down the hall.”
“Go get her.”
Tom scurried from the room. Piper gazed down at the slack face of his beleaguered subject and chuckled to himself. The fiery oracle, the respiratory alkalosis, and four hours of guided imagery, hypnosis, and regression anti-therapy would soon seem to John like a pampered stay at a health spa. Now it was time for the main intervention.
Doctor Rebecca Fosse arrived, and she assisted Piper in releasing John from his leather restraints. Together, they removed John’s clothing, leaving him nude. While Rebecca began attaching a catheter to the penis, Piper refastened the leather restraints. Tom placed foam earplugs in John’s ears and Bob rolled in the electroencephalograph, or EEG, machine.
“Why does Rebecca get to insert the catheter?” Bob whispered. “I have just as much experience with penises.”
They all giggled. Piper hooked up John’s left wrist to an intravenous line that would provide liquid nutrition at regular intervals. Tom set the thermostat on the wall to precisely seventy-four degrees.
After Rebecca wired John’s scalp to the EEG machine, they filed out of the room, L. Rob Piper going last, turning off the lights as he closed the door, leaving his subject in complete and utter darkness.
Marilyn pushed an ancient, manually operated mower through the apple orchard, its curved and rusted steel blades mesmerizing her as they spun. The sun was at its apex, and she wore a sea blue bandanna to hold back the sweat beads from her eyes. Work gloves kept her hands from blistering against the wooden handle.
For the past two years, she’d recently learned, Earthbound had operated the farm without the benefit of motorized equipment. The official reason—reminiscent of the Amish—was a desire to farm in harmony with God and nature, but she suspected the truth was that rapid growth in the size of the cult had required The Wizard to create an elaborate system of make-work.
She abandoned her mower and walked fifty yards south to where her crew foreman, Jim Tate, crouched on one knee, nursing a sick Macintosh tree. She obtained from him a few squares of brown, biodegradable toilet paper, then made for the woods.
When she’d passed the last of her fellow crew members, she slipped into the next row over and began to jog, not toward the woods, but instead, the peach orchard. The jogging disturbed her stomach, thanks to the daily injections of hormones she’d begun receiving two days earlier, and she began to feel as green as all the little apples hanging from the branches.
Luckily, she found the peach orchard deserted. But it looked much different to her than it had at night, and she had to use the back fence by the road to orient herself in order to locate a particular peach tree she needed to find.
She found it, darted to it. At its base, she lifted a flat whitish stone with a ten-inch diameter. Beneath where the stone had been was a shallow hole, where a cellphone lay inside a resealable plastic bag. It was the phone Deputy Fry had provided, the one she and John had hidden here together in the middle of the night.
She shook dirt from the bag, opened it, and speed-dialed Deputy Fry’s cell phone number. She let it ring ten times before hanging up. She tried his home in the nearby city of Visalia. He picked up on the sixth ring, sounding groggy. She’d forgotten that he slept days and worked nights.
“Still no John,” she said. “It’s been two days now.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up okay. Like last time.”
“He wasn’t okay last time. I think the cult’s on to him. I think they’re breaking him down, brainwashing him, to find out who he works for, and what he knows.”
“Are you sure they’re on to him?”
“Yes. No. I guess I don’t know.”
“Captain Switzer won’t order John home, by the way. Says you’ve got to be wrong about a man like that losing perspective.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I was right or wrong
before
, if it’s true
now
that John’s fallen under suspicion by the cult. Not with a cult leader this sophisticated. One on one, L. Rob Piper could brainwash me without much trouble.”
“Let’s hope John’s not under any suspicion then.”
“I wish we could do more than hope.”
“Be careful, Marilyn. Call me back as soon as you can.”
“Wait, there’s more.” Her eyes swept the peach orchard, finding no one. “Remember The Wizard’s prophecy? The impending environmental catastrophe?”
“I remember. Earthbound is collecting vast quantities of human blood and sperm in order to, uh, help the survivors, the sterile survivors, repopulate the planet.”
“Don’t forget the female reproductive eggs. They’re filling me with hormones to get at mine.”
“Right,” Fry said. “Storing it all beneath a mountain in Colorado for safe-keeping.”
“Supposedly. But what if, instead of storing it, The Wizard is selling it?”
The telephone line went silent for three or four seconds before Fry spoke. “You can sell that stuff?”
“You bet,” she said. “And we’re not talking chump change either. There’s a fertility clinic, for example, that runs a daily advertisement in the classified section of the Cal student newspaper in Berkeley. The ad seeks young women between the ages of—What is it?—eighteen and thirty-two, I think. Healthy women willing to donate their reproductive eggs in exchange for . . . I believe the sum was five thousand dollars.”
“Wow!” Fry said.
“Now cut out the middle man.”
“Why?”
“Otherwise, The Wizard has to find a string of corrupt fertility clinic owners willing to distribute his ill-gotten goods for a hefty share of the profits.”
“Okay, The Wizard owns the clinics,” Fry said. “Now what does he make per egg?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I’d bet good money the profit from a single egg donation would exceed ten thousand dollars.”
“Holy hen fruit! Must be hundreds of women on that farm in their 20’s and early 30’s. What about the blood? The sperm?”
“There’s a worldwide market for both products, but I don’t know the going rates.”
“That explains it,” Fry said. “I’ve been trying to make sense of these account ledgers I came across.”
“Account ledgers?”
“From the computer we tapped into, the one inside the red farmhouse. Some of the records are in code, but the numbers aren’t, and we’re dealing with huge numbers here, tens of millions of dollars in revenues, annually.”
“Nice,” she said. “Now all we have to do is prove the scheme is genuine. We need to find the companies owned by the cult, or by L. Rob Piper himself. Fertility clinics, commercial blood banks, sperm banks.”
“I’ll let Earthbound lead me right to them. How do they ship the goods?”
“By refrigerated truck,” Marilyn said. “They use a steel gray eighteen wheeler. It’s disguised to look like a typical produce hauler.”
“But produce haulers go in and out of there all day long.”
“I know.” She ran a frustrated hand through her tresses. “That’s a problem.” Not two hundred feet away, she caught a glimpse of a man in a white straw hat meandering through the orchard on the back of a palomino quarter horse. Her foreman.
“Well, if I can’t follow the truck,” Fry said, “what I can do is check the ownership records of fertility clinics and blood and sperm banks. I’ll start with a California-wide search.”
“Good idea.”
“It may take some time . . .”
“Remember, The Wizard came to power in this cult four years ago. So you can limit your search to new businesses begun during that time period.”
“As well as businesses sold since then.”
“Right, of course.”
“You know, Marilyn, if it turns out that you’re right about this scheme, we’ll have enough fraud charges to put The Wizard behind bars for years to come.”
“Great!”
“There’ll be several other types of criminal charges as well. We could get him on battery and—”
“I’ve got to go, Deputy—get back to my station before I’m missed.” After ending her call, she dropped the phone back into its plastic pouch, sealed it, and re-hid it beneath the white stone. With an eye out for the palomino and its rider, she jogged back toward the apple orchard, one hand holding onto her queasy stomach.
John blinked. Blinked again. Again. He blinked ten times more, and yet, whether his eyelids were open or shut made no difference whatsoever. Either way, he could see nothing but total darkness. A deep anal blackness that terrified.
He switched his attention to sounds. His ears, he knew, were plugged up by soft material of some kind, but he listened anyway, listened desperately, for nearby sounds, distant sounds, any sounds at all. He listened with his body perfectly still and yet he could hear nothing, no noises at all, save for a faint, high-pitched buzz generated by his ears themselves, because he had a mild case of tinnitus. He shouted “Hey!” a few times, his voice sounding heavily muffled.
It had been this way—exactly this way—for a very long time. How long, he really had no idea anymore. And it was driving him out of his fucking gourd!
At some point, he’d begun to hallucinate. The first time, he’d been frightened by a stampede of wild mustang horses, white ones, galloping toward him from out of the blackness, galloping, but never arriving. Later, extra-terrestrials with insect-like heads and human-like bodies had probed him painfully in every orifice with a shiny dildo coated in hot liquid chrome.
After that the bats had come. Legions of them. All with glowing red eyes and pinpoint yellow pupils. They’d strafed him for hours, or so it’d seemed, their wings flapping at his ears and fanning him, their sharp little teeth taking bites of skin.
Not long ago, he’d heard his dead mother speak to him from the dark, telling him in her husky voice that she forgave him for not committing suicide with her and Jim Jones and the rest of the People’s Temple. “I blame your father for that, of course.”
She’d kept insisting that John had finally died, “Thirty some odd years too late,” and after realizing that she’d upset him with the news, added, “Don’t worry, son, it’s not so bad being dead. You’ll get used to the blackness.”
Well, he couldn’t get used to the blackness. Nor could he admit that he’d actually died, even though his present condition bore little resemblance to life.
He could see nothing. He could hear almost nothing. His arms and legs were virtually immobile. He felt neither hot nor cold, and he hadn’t eaten food or drank anything in ever so long.
For the umpteenth time, John assured himself that he was alive. That he was a Homicide inspector with the San Francisco Police Department. That he was working undercover in a murder investigation. That he was posing as a cult member. And that he’d been placed in yet another unnerving predicament by the cult in an effort to steal his mind.
Or was he simply dead after all? In purgatory perhaps? Lapsed Catholic that he was.
He focused on his sense of touch, not for the first time, more like the fiftieth. He sensed straps at his arms, wrists, legs, and ankles. He wiggled his fingers and forced tiny, yet reassuring movements of his limbs. He felt a slight irritation on the back of his left wrist. Something thin and sharp penetrated his skin there.
He raised his eyebrows, helping him to feel the small, circular-shaped sticky things spread evenly across his forehead. He released control of his bladder and felt the odd sensation of vibrating rubber or plastic at the tip of his penis as a trickle of urine mysteriously disappeared. He farted.
No, he wasn’t dead. He was a prisoner being tortured in a truly odd, but truly cruel fashion. The cult had immobilized him in a soundless, lightless vacuum.
“Help!” he cried as loudly as he could. “Help!”
No response. But he found the muffled sound of his own voice enormously comforting. So he decided to sing. He chose a Mexican song Teresa had taught him. The band had played it on their wedding day.
“
Para bailar la bamba, para bailar la bamba,
Se necesita una poca de gracia,
Una poca de gracia para me para ti,
Arriba y arriba . . .”
John sang loudly, joyfully, defiantly, quite terribly. Then he remembered. How could he have ever forgotten?
Teresa had left him for another. She would soon be his ex-wife.
He stopped singing. He stopped and lay there silently, the color of his thoughts all around him.