John’s mind began to wander. He recalled the probing aliens, the awful bats, his dead mother’s voice.
His mind shot back to the present when splashes of vibrant color suddenly and inexplicably cloaked his vision. First green, then red, then yellow, then purple, then orange. The colors exploded in the air like a series of thrown paint balloons. The sequence repeated.
“Purty,” John said. His lips felt over-inflated.
A new voice called him by name, called him several times before John managed to respond. It was a man’s voice. Familiar.
“Yes?”
“What do you, see? Describe it for me.”
“Bright, bright colors,” John said, his words slurring like he was stoned or drunk.
“What colors?”
“Green, red, yellow, purple, orange. Here they come, rat-a-tat-tat, one after the other. Rat-a-tat-tat.”
“How about now?” asked the voice.
A soft pink hue instantly bathed the room, as if John had slipped on a pair of funky sunglasses. When Nurse Karen, in surgical greens and a surgical mask, stepped into view he saw a shimmering white saucer hovering inches above her head, following her slightest movement.
“Halo,” John said. “She wear halo.”
Marilyn lay on her stomach, her assigned reading in front of her. Because she had a lower bunk, finding adequate light to read by was difficult. She balanced her heavy three-ring binder on top of a metal rail at the foot of the bed, catching light from a naked bulb hanging down from the wooden rafters. Turning the page, she came to the drills.
There were seven. They were known as the Sacred Seven. She was to learn them all by heart.
The first drill was called: The Pig Alert. It was designed to thwart any law enforcement investigation on the premises.
The Pig Alert drill was to commence via word-of-mouth and through a coded public address system announcement:
Mister Muir, please report to the red barn
.
The drill called for every single member of Earthbound to pretend not to see the invading law enforcement officials. Each would go about his or her chores and duties as if nothing unusual was happening. A key directive was centered on the page:
Under no circumstances is anyone to speak
with a law enforcement official without being granted
special permission by one of the Leadership Council members
!
Marilyn gazed up from her reading. Only days earlier, she would have concluded that the Pig Alert drill was an expression of The Wizard’s paranoia. Now she considered it a shrewd safety precaution for a businessman engaged in illicit trade.
John’s hallucinations resumed. They were even more vivid than before. He felt transported. He was now in a child’s bedroom, making choo-choo sounds with a toy train as he pushed it across the floor. A gigantic teddy bear with a yellow bow tie loomed overhead in a gigantic chair. Everything seemed gigantic. The bed. The dresser. The door. The window.
A gigantic young woman with raven black hair swept him up in her arms and kissed him on the cheek. She was beautiful. Familiar too. He’d seen her face before, in old photos. But he’d never seen her move and breathe before, never recollected her before, not looking like this.
“What is it, John?” asked a voice far off in the distance, beyond the room. “What do you see?”
“It’s Mother!” he said. “So young, so beautiful . . .”
John felt very sad when the scene vanished. Instantly, another scene took its place.
“Teresa,” he said. She stood by the rails of a ferry, its bow pointing toward Alcatraz, the summer wind whipping her hair. She wore cut-off blue jeans and a white tank top beneath a blue windbreaker she’d taken along for the chilly crossing.
Hey, this was no hallucination! This was a memory! He’d just met Teresa, just begun dating her. They were taking the Alcatraz tour.
She turned to him and smiled. John kissed her, tasting sea salt on her lips.
In a flash she was gone. John found himself in a large classroom with stadium style seating. He was a police cadet again, in uniform, seated among many other cadets, listening to old Captain Raff lecture. The blackboard behind Raff revealed the lecture topic. John frowned.
“What is it, John?” asked a man’s voice, the familiar one he’d been hearing from time to time. A voice nearby and yet far away too. The Wizard’s.
“Boring,” John said. “Traffic law. I hate traffic law.”
“Where are you?”
“Police academy.”
“Did you say, the ‘police academy?’ ”
“That’s right.”
John bounced from one senses-flooding memory to another. Backwards and forwards he traveled through time, reliving random events. It was the story of his life fed to a paper shredder.
Abruptly, his mind landed splat on the operating table from which he’d begun his travels. His left leg twitched mightily, as if determined to free itself of the restraints.
“My leg! I can’t make it stop!”
Moments later, the leg stilled, but John had already forgotten about it, his mind occupied by a new and overwhelming concern. “Thirsty,” he said. “I’m so thirsty.”
Indeed, he was even thirstier than he’d been inside the fiery oracle. As dried up as a dead wasp in a window sill. “Please may I have some water! Anybody! Water!”
Instantly, however, John’s thirst disappeared. Completely. Without a drop of drink. What magic was this?
Before he could ponder the mystery, all curiosity drained away, and a sense of peace and contentment swept in. His flesh tingled, in a special way, the way it always had when hearing the national anthem as a boy before a ballgame at Candlestick Park. He’d never felt happier in his whole life, he thought. He was in a state of grace. In heaven, perhaps. The bright, circular lights above him seemed to signify a divine presence.
After some unknown amount of time had passed, John heard a soft voice from the edge of heaven call his name. The voice grew louder. It was The Wizard again.
“John, what do you feel?”
“I feel peace,” John responded. “Wonderful peace . . . happiness . . . it’s been so long.”
“Anything else?”
“I think God is somewhere near here . . . Leave me be, please . . . please go away . . . Let me find God . . .”
But John’s perfect peace and happiness and his feeling of nearness to God all vanished—like everything else—abruptly. He turned anxious. He wasn’t sure why, and his mind rooted around for the cause. He settled on his current predicament.
“What’s happening to me? What’s going on? What are you people doing to me? Stop it! Stop it right now!”
John’s anxiety evolved rapidly into panic. “Help! Somebody help me! I-I-I I’m losing control of myself! Help! Somebody! Please! I’m losing control!”
The panic fled, replaced by yet another powerful emotion. With all his might, John thrashed his four limbs against their restraints, snorting violently at first, then releasing a low, deep, menacing, guttural sound, the prelude to a throat-ripping roar.
“Rrrraaaaaggghhhh!”
Nurse Karen stepped back smartly. Someone else, less intimidated, jammed a foam cylinder into John’s mouth, stifling his roar but not his blind rage . . .
Marilyn turned the page to the seventh sacred drill and shivered. It was called the End Time drill. Even before reading on, she knew exactly what the drill would require.
Like so many other cult leaders, The Wizard would demand that his followers be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Suicide. The End Time drill was undoubtedly a suicide rehearsal, both a test and a tool of obedience. She read on . . .
The End Time itself turned out to be the arrival of the worldwide environmental holocaust. If The Wizard deemed that the End Time had come, and that the resulting local destruction would be too awful for Earthbound members to endure, then he himself would use the public address system to order his followers to return to their dormitories and await a knock on the door from one of the members of the Leadership Council, who would provide a pouch of small white pills.
Each person will be given a single pill. Do not swallow it immediately. Instead, swallow it simultaneously with all other members of your dorm.
If the drill is a rehearsal, then the pill will be a harmless placebo. But if not, then the pill will look and taste exactly the same as the placebo, but contain a large dose of saxitoxin, a concentrated form of the toxin that causes shellfish poisoning, and it will kill within minutes
.
John awoke from a deep and dreamless sleep, his eyelids weightier than blanket wool. His head throbbed.
He lay in a twin-size bed, staring beyond his feet at its white cast iron frame, waiting for his mind to focus, to tell him exactly where he was . . .
“Good morning, Brother John.” The Wizard stood grinning at John’s bedside, flanked by Tom Mahorn and Nurse Karen. She held an empty hypodermic syringe in one hand.
“Where am I?”
“The infirmary, of course,” The Wizard said.
“Would you like to sit up?” Karen asked. When John nodded, she reached to the corner of the bed for a plastic control panel and pushed a button. Slowly, the top half of the bed and his upper body began to rise. He surveyed the room.
From the opposite wall, soft morning sunlight streamed in through the half-open slats of Venetian blinds. Behind the visitors to his right, he saw two empty beds with identical white frames. The three beds stood parallel to each other, spaced a few feet apart, headboards pressing the wall. To his left, beside the door, stood a tall cabinet. Its top surface held a silver tray filled with medicinal items—a roll of gauze, liquids in plastic bottles, a pair of steel scissors. The floor was hardwood. The room smelled mildly of pine-scented disinfectant.
“How’s that?” Karen said. The bed had taken the shape of a living room recliner.
“Good,” John said.
“Is there something I can get you?” she said. “Another pillow? Glass of water?”
Water. There had been something about water, he recalled. He’d been thirsty. Very, very thirsty.
“Brother John?” Karen said.
John’s rickety train of thought derailed. “What? What did you ask me?”
The Wizard dismissed Nurse Karen, asking not to be disturbed. John’s eyes traced her departure. She pulled the door closed behind her.
“I remember her,” John said, “in greens and a mask . . .”
“Sister Karen?” The Wizard said. “You must be remembering the operation. You were awake some of the time.”
“What operation?”
“You don’t recall what happened?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You were taking part in a rain dance, and you fell. Hit your head on a rock. Fractured your skull. Luckily, it was a small fracture. All Doctor Fosse had to do, really, was stitch you up. The X-rays show you’re doing fine.”
John vaguely remembered the rain dance. It seemed long ago now, after all his—he didn’t know what to call them. Nightmares? Hallucinations? Drug-induced deliriums?
Tom Mahorn sat down on the middle hospital bed. The Wizard moved to the foot of John’s bed and squared to face John. He wore a collarless dark blue jersey, a strand of bone-white puka shells around his neck. He took on a look of utmost seriousness.
“Brother John, you and I have important issues to discuss. First of all, I need to know, once and for all, whether I can count on you to support my work. Do you believe in me, or don’t you? Are you with me or against me? The End Time draws near, Brother John. Very near.”
“The End Time,” John repeated, his mind drifting back into the awful dark place, that pitch black purgatory . . .
“The End Time,” The Wizard said, “does not have to arrive, Brother John. We still have a chance to prevent it. We must prepare for the worst, but we must also do what we can to prevent the catastrophe.”
John recognized The Wizard’s words. He’d heard them before in the dark place. Planet Earth was in trouble. Everyone was in trouble. Every living thing . . .
“What are you thinking about, John?”
“What you said. What you said in the dark place.”
“That’s right, you were there. You were really there. Don’t think you imagined that part. I sent you to the dark place in your mind because I had to find a way to get through to you, John. You were having trouble believing in our cause, weren’t you?” John nodded. The Wizard gripped the bed frame with both hands. “So I put your mind in the dark place, where you could at last open up to the truth, and now you believe, don’t you?”
“Yes,” John said. He’d listened to all those speeches, couldn’t stop pushing that button, The Wizard making perfect sense. The End Time was on its way, it couldn’t be denied. But it had to be stopped.
“Brother John,” The Wizard said. “Is there something you wish to tell me? Perhaps about who you really are, and why you first came to this farm? Hmm? Speak up, Inspector.”
John’s eyebrows raced halfway up his forehead. The Wizard knew! The Wizard knew his true identity!