Mind Plague Read online

  Mind Plague

  Vincent L. Scarsella

  Copyright © 2019 Vincent L. Scarsella

  Published May 2019 Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.

  All rights reserved. 1st Edition

  ISBN-13 (paperback): 978-1-989414-10-1

  ISBN-13 (e-book): 978-1-989414-11-8

  DEDICATION

  To my wife Rosanne

  Contents

  Part One The Cabin

  One Bikers

  Two Gone Blank

  Three Jack Flynn

  Four Bad Actors

  Five The New World Order

  Six The Supermax

  Seven The Day After the Plague

  Eight Slave Gangs

  Nine Ellie

  Ten Breakfast

  Eleven Salamanca

  Twelve The Chase

  Thirteen Gone

  Part Two The Monastery

  Fourteen Ghosts

  Fifteen On the Road

  Sixteen Brother Paul

  Seventeen The Kingdom of God

  Eighteen Brothers Jacob and Anthony

  Nineteen Holy War

  Twenty Captive

  Twenty-One Brother Franklin

  Twenty-Two The Prodigal Son

  Twenty-Three Simon Peter

  Twenty-Four The Note

  Twenty-Five Coup d’état

  Twenty-Six Betrayal

  Twenty-Seven Thunder

  Part Three The Supermax

  Twenty-Eight Claysburg

  Twenty-Nine 187 Albert Drive

  Thirty Trading Places

  Thirty-One The Commander of the Faithful

  Thirty-Two In the Supermax

  Thirty-Three Home Sweet Home

  Thirty-Four Salah

  Thirty-Five Bedtime

  Thirty-Six Zawjas

  Thirty-Seven Barbecue

  Thirty-Eight Beheadings

  Thirty-Nine The Ambush

  Forty Trust Me

  Forty-One Knocked Up

  Forty-Two Finding Flynn

  Forty-Three Escape

  Part Four Mount Weather

  Forty-Four Freedom

  Forty-Five The Patrol

  Forty-Six Courts

  Forty-Seven Freedom Lost

  Forty-Eight Twenty-Fifth Amendment

  Forty-Nine Land of the Free and Home of the Brave

  Fifty The Interrogation

  Fifty-One If Only

  Fifty-Two Tribunal

  Fifty-Three Trial and Judgment

  Fifty-Four Firing Squad

  Fifty-Five Madame President

  Fifty-Six Messages

  Fifty-Seven Mouseketeers

  Fifty-Eight Hit the Deck!

  Fifty-Nine Attack

  Sixty The Fall of America

  Sixty-One Where Dreams Come True

  Thank You!

  Also from Digital Fiction

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One

  The Cabin

  One

  Bikers

  It was late afternoon in mid-June when the growl of a motorcycle speeding westbound along New York State Route 417 woke Franklin Strock. He’d been napping on the worn, tan recliner on the front porch of the A-frame about a tenth of a mile up a low, wooded hill from the road. As Strock sat up and blinked down toward the approaching bike, the hardcover book he’d been reading before falling asleep, The Brain Fog Fix, fell from his lap onto the wooden floor.

  A woman in her early thirties with long, brown, unkempt hair, pushed open the screen door and walked out onto the porch with a frown. She apparently had heard the roar of the motorcycle engine as well. Turning to Strock, she pointed to the road and mumbled something. Strock stood, put a finger to his lips to quiet her and whispered, “Shh! It’s a motorcycle.”

  “Motor…cycle?” she whispered with wide, expectant eyes.

  “Yes,” he said and nodded. “Motorcycle.”

  Strock went over, put his arm around the woman and drew her to him. After peering down toward the road for a time, they heard a scraping sound at the slight curve directly in front of the cabin. Seconds later, there was the thump of something leaving the road and landing in the brush somewhere off the shoulder, and then, except for the squawking of birds high up in the trees, silence.

  Strock turned to the woman and said, “It crashed, Ellie.” She nodded but didn’t quite seem to understand. He broke away from her, jumped off the porch and started down the hill to where he thought the crashed motorcycle might have landed. But a moment later, the roar of several additional motorcycles approaching from the west along Route 417 stopped him in his tracks. Slipping behind a tree, he looked back at Ellie standing with a frown on the porch and waved both arms telling her to get down. Her eyes wide, she nodded and crouched down.

  The roar of the approaching motorcycles reached a crescendo as they sped one-by-one past the slight curve where the lone biker had lost control and careened off the road. To Strock’s relief, the sound of the engines faded as the bikes continued their westward trek down Route 417.

  Strock leaned against the tree and listened. Now, there was only the buzz of insects and caw of birds in the lush, shadowy woods around him. After a breath, he pushed off the tree and started down again toward the crashed motorcycle. There was no path leading through the brush and trees, so he had to slash through branches to get down there. Finally, he heard a groan, and after stopping and cocking his head to listen, he continued toward it.

  The motorcycle, a Harley, mangled and smoking a bit, lay sideways on a crushed bush. A few feet away, its rider was sprawled on his side, groaning as he clutched his left leg. He looked to be in his mid-thirties—Strock’s age—and was a tall, good-looking man with disheveled brown hair, a long, thick reddish beard, and tan, weathered features. He was dressed in a dull orange jumpsuit.

  After observing the man for a time, Strock drew a breath and emerged from the bushes. Seeing Strock, the fallen biker tensed and drew himself back on his elbows a foot or so. He was wincing in pain, and Strock immediately saw that the man’s left leg was bent at an unusual angle.

  “Stay back,” the biker growled. His brow tightened as he reached into a leather sheath tied around the calf of his right leg and pulled out a long knife with a thick black handle. He held up the knife to warn Strock away.

  Strock stopped and held up his hands. “No need for that, friend,” he said. “I came to help.”

  “From where?” The man scowled and tried looking past Strock up the low hill behind him.

  “Up the hill a ways,” Strock replied, nodding toward the hill. “My cabin.”

  The man squinted past Strock as another wave of pain surged through him. “Damn idiot.” After blowing out a breath, the man nodded down to his left leg and said, “Think it’s broke.”

  “Looks it.” Strock frowned. “You know those other bikers?” He nodded toward the road. “The ones that just drove past.”

  “Yeah, I know them,” the biker said. “They’re after me. A bad bunch.” He shut his eyes against the pain, then opened them. “I need to get out of here. They’ll eventually figure out they lost me somewhere around here and circle back. And you don’t want them to find you either.”

  “Who’s they?”

  The man sighed in thought. Finally, he looked at Strock and said, “Like I said, a bad bunch. Terrorists. Criminals.”

  Strock shook his head not knowing what the man was talking about and also wondering what he might have gotten himself into.

  “Look,” the biker said, “all you need to do right now is help me out of here before they come back. Up to your cabin. Then, I’ll explain everything.”

  After mulling it over, Strock nodded and decided to help the man. What else could he do?

  Two

  Gone Blank

  “Before moving me,” the biker told Strock, his eyes tight with pain, “you need to hide the bike.”

  Strock looked across at the big broken Harley on its side and nodded. He went over and inspected it, deciding that it likely needed significant repairs before being operable again. With a grunt, he tried to lift it, but the huge motorcycle didn’t budge. Instead, he covered the bike with branches and brush, then returned to the biker and said, “Alright, bike’s hidden. Now let me go down and check the road.”

  The man frowned and asked, “Check the road? What for?”

  “Evidence of your crash.”

  After a moment, the biker said, “Good idea. I almost hit a hunk of tree, rock or something. I braked and swerved onto the shoulder, then skidded along the grass into the woods and landed here.”

  Strock nodded, then strode off toward Route 417. After thirty yards or so, he emerged from a stand of trees and brush into a bright, muggy afternoon with the sky above the treetops a hazy blue. At this point, the road curved slightly with the narrow, pale asphalt divided by fading double-yellow lines. Strock stood along the shoulder, examining a silent, deserted stretch of road in both directions. The only sounds were the rustling of leaves, buzzing of insects and an occasional caw of a crow. Looking down at the road, Strock spotted what the biker must have been talking about—a thick chunk of a branch a couple feet into the road near the bleached white stripe marking the road from the shoulder.

  Strock reached down and picked up the branch and thought about heaving it into the shallow ditch along the shoulder, but thought better of it. Instead, he lowered it back down on the road. If the other bikers returned, they might notice that the big, nasty hunk of tree along the edge of
the road that they’d avoided was now gone.

  After replacing the branch, Strock saw no skid marks on the road surface near the spot where the biker must have bucked and swerved. He then used his sneakers to rake out the gravel along the shoulder that had been gouged out as the biker’s Harley had skidded sideways before careening along the wet grass into the brush.

  Moments later, back where the biker lay, Strock said, “It’s clean. No evidence of anything. Whoever’s after you won’t know you went off the road and landed here. I left the chunk of branch you almost hit out there on the road, in case they noticed it.”

  The biker nodded and winced again. Then, he told Strock, “This leg is hurting bad, friend.” After another wince, he added, “I need to get out of here, lay down somewhere.”

  “Can you stand and hop along with me on your right leg?” Strock asked. “It’s a fairly long way up to the cabin. Will be tough for me to carry you up there all the way.”

  The biker looked up the incline of the hill leading to the cabin and sighed. He turned to Strock and said, “Yeah, sure. Let’s go.”

  As Strock helped him to his feet, the biker grimaced and let out a growl. Then, as he steadied himself on his right leg, Strock put the man’s left arm over his right shoulder.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” the biker mumbled and closed his eyes as he leaned on Strock and hopped slowly with him toward the cabin.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were shambling into the clearing in front of the cabin. Ellie came out on the porch and made some vague hand gestures and mumbled something that seemed her attempt to communicate her surprise and worry at the sight of Strock helping a hurt stranger toward the cabin.

  Seeing her concern, Strock called, “It’s alright, Ellie.” He glanced at the biker who was still grimacing in pain. He turned back to Ellie and told her, “Go inside.”

  Ellie nodded and retreated into the cabin, frowning.

  “She a zombie?” the biker asked. “Lost her mind?”

  Strock nodded and with a sigh, he replied, “Yep. Gone blank.”

  Three

  Jack Flynn

  That’s what Strock called what had happened to Ellie: she’d gone blank. Becoming a “zombie,” as the biker said, was another way of describing it, he supposed, but without the mindless, eating-flesh feature of creatures rising from the dead of horror movies.

  Actually, there was no good name for what had happened to Ellie and all the other blanks, millions of them, billions maybe. How many, Strock wasn’t sure. Like all the rest of them, going blank or becoming a zombie meant that Ellie had lost her mind, memory, and personality. Like countless others, she’d somehow forgotten who she’d been or how to do the simplest things, like getting out of bed, feeding herself, talking, walking, eating, washing or even relieving herself. Like the rest of them, she’d somehow contracted a form of retrograde amnesia or something like it. The Mind Plague was the name Strock had given to the sickness, or whatever had suddenly and inexplicably erased most everyone’s mind and soul.

  Why he and a few others in the great minority hadn’t come down with it, like the biker, was an equal mystery. In fact, before the biker’s arrival, in the nine months since the Plague had struck, Strock had seen only one other person who hadn’t gone blank.

  “She your wife?”

  “Yeah,” Strock said. “She was—is.”

  What she was now was unclear. In the time before the Plague, Strock had no doubt who she was. She was Eleanor Strock. He and her family and friends had always called her Ellie. He was also confident that Ellie had loved him before the Plague. Now, he wasn’t sure. How do you teach someone whose mind and soul have been erased to love you again? It was hard enough to teach her how to eat and pee and shit and sleep and speak. But re-creating who she was, her personality, that was another matter. That was why he’d been reading so many books and medical texts on Alzheimer’s disease, retrograde amnesia and other mental deficiencies involving the loss or memory and dementia, that he’d taken from the Salamanca and Olean public libraries, and the bookstore in the Southern Tier Mall, like The Brain Fog Fix he’d been reading when the biker crashed in front of the cabin.

  Strock helped the biker across the narrow clearing to the staircase of the front porch and slowly lifted him up its three steps, careful not to let him slip out of his grasp and fall and hurt himself even worse. On the porch landing, Strock asked him, “You alright?”

  After a nod, the man let out a rush of breath and said, “Yes.”

  Strock nodded to the old, tan recliner a few feet across the porch and said, “Let’s sit you down there for now.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” the biker gasped.

  They hopped over to the recliner, and as Strock gently lowered him onto it, the biker winced and groaned. Strock turned and noticed Ellie peeking out of the front door.

  “Come out, Ellie,” Strock told her. When she hesitated, he urged, “Come on.”

  Instead, she backed again into the cabin. As the screen door snapped shut, Strock sighed and said, “She’s like a child most times.”

  “Yeah, it’s tough bringing them back.”

  That seemed an understatement to Strock. Bringing Ellie back had been going painfully slow. At first, it was like caring for an infant. Feeding her. Bathing her. Cleaning her piss and poop during the month it took to potty train her. Her slow progression to self-sufficiency was frustrating, and he often had to stop himself from being hard on her, from scolding her too much. She’d cry then like a child, not quite understanding what he wanted her to do or why he wanted her to do it.

  It took two months of constant attention before Ellie was able to feed herself, go to the bathroom on her own, and dress herself. Teaching her how to talk became the next priority. He got out books from the library for that. She learned the alphabet like a two-year-old, letter by letter, and the sounds that made up the English language. He’d spent endless hours teaching her how to pronounce things—her name, his name, a fork, spoon, plate, book, branch, and so on. Still, after nine months, she was far from capable of caring for herself, let alone becoming the woman, the loving wife, he’d known in the time before the Plague. Worst of all, she still seemed a stranger to him, and he to her.

  “What did she do?” the biker asked and winced again in pain.

  “What?”

  “Your wife,” he said, nodding back inside the cabin. “In her former life. What was she?”

  “What’d she do?” Strock frowned, wondering about this small talk, and why the biker wanted to know. “She was a legal assistant at a law firm. Glorified secretary, actually. I was a personal injury lawyer in my former life, at another firm. I met her at a bar where lawyers and secretaries used to hang out after work. You know, happy hour. We hit it off from the first moment. Fell in love, I guess. That was five years ago.”

  “Lucky guy,” he remarked. “She’s a pretty lady.”

  That she was. Her maiden name was Marino. She got her dark skin and her angular Latin cheekbones from her father. From her Irish mother, she had inherited brown eyes and reddish-brown hair, and the cute freckles on her brow and forehead.

  “At least you still have her,” the biker remarked. “I was away when it happened. My wife and two daughters didn’t make it.”

  “Sorry about that,” Strock said. He wanted to learn more, where he’d been, why he hadn’t been able to get to them, why he was running from a biker gang, and what was going on in the greater world beyond these secluded parts, outside the safety of the cabin, but he felt that attending to the Biker’s leg took priority over learning his story. The biker had turned quite pale by now and his grimaces more pronounced, making Strock worry that the man might go into shock and pass out.

  “I need to set that leg,” Strock said.

  “You know how? You said you were a lawyer, not a doctor.”

  “I’ve got some survival books that teach you how to do stuff like that. You know—how to survive off the grid. Like start a fire, skin a deer. Set a fracture.”

  The man frowned and said, “From books, you think you can set my leg.”

  “Yes, from books,” Strock said. He started for the cabin but stopped after a couple steps, turned and looked back at the man. “Hey, what’s your name?”