Mind Plague Read online

  “During our trip across the Atlantic, we learned that an outpost of US authority had survived in a shelter known as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center under one of northern Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. Several hundred politicians and military officers and various government personnel, and even some ordinary civilians had been gathered up and were now living underground under martial law.

  “Upon landing at Dulles, we headed there. The place was stocked with supplies and provided a comfortable enough staging area in the attempt by our new leaders to try and establish some semblance of authority and civilization, and of course, to go out and find and save as many survivors and zombies as we could. Though, after a while, that became a hopeless cause. There were some doctors and other scientists who somehow made it into the Mount as well, and they went straight to work trying to figure out what the hell had caused the Event.”

  “The Mind Plague,” said Strock. “That’s what I call it.”

  After a nod, Flynn continued, “People kept trickling in for a few weeks, those who’d been immune to the plague, or whatever, and our numbers swelled to just over fifteen hundred, where it presently stands. Of that number, roughly a thousand—mostly men, but a few women and children, were unaffected by it. The others, five hundred or so, are zombies whose minds, like your Ellie’s, they’re trying to resurrect.”

  “Fifteen hundred?” Strock asked. “That’s it? Out of three hundred thirty million Americans?”

  “Well, it’s estimated that there are another fifty to a hundred-thousand out there across the country who either like you, didn’t hear our broadcasts out of Mount Weather, or couldn’t make the trip. Worldwide, the guess is maybe five million human souls survived.”

  Five million, thought Strock, out of seven billion!

  “Did President Krank survive?”

  “Yes, but he was among the mindless, a zombie,” Flynn said. “He was found in his bed, next to the First Lady, who had also gone zombie. They were taken to Mount Weather and are undergoing, like your wife, retraining. But like your wife, it’s been a slow process waking them up, and Krank’s in no condition to resume the presidency, if he ever will.

  “The military leaders down there,” Flynn went on, “led by General Radley, have declared martial law. I can tell you firsthand from seeing him in action, he’s one smart, tough son-of-a-bitch. The general sent out patrols to make sure that nuke power plants as far as St. Louis didn’t blow. Far as I know, we haven’t lost one yet.”

  Strock stared off, trying to fathom Flynn’s news. He was glad to learn that the United States of America lived and apparently still operated on the same principles as the Old America—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now, he was suddenly hopeful that things might turn out alright, that the clock might be turned back, though he realized that things would never be the same. As Flynn had put it, they were living in a new world order.

  “The same day after checking in at Mount Weather,” Flynn continued, “I left to find my wife and kids. They lived in Centerville, not far from DC, and also not far from the Mount.” He sighed and looked away, gathered himself, then turned to Strock. “What I found wasn’t good. Like millions, billions, of others, they’d died in bed, starved to death. They were goddamned bloated, ugly corpses by the time I got home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Strock said, and Flynn gave a nod, gulped down his sorrow, and turned away.

  Finally, Flynn looked back at Strock and said, “Anyway, what we think now is that the Event—when ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of humanity lost their minds and memories—happened simultaneously around the world, just before six in the morning eastern standard time. It happened everywhere else on the planet and affected not only humans but some animal species as well. The scientists studying the phenomenon are stumped as to what caused it, though there are theories. Cosmic rays, a virus, natural or manmade.”

  After a sigh, he finished, “No one knows for sure, and I think we may never know.”

  Six

  The Supermax

  “So, what brings you here, to this cabin, from Mount… what was it?”

  “Mount Weather,” Flynn said. “What brought me? Ever hear of ADX Cumberland?” After Strock gave a short shrug, indicating that he hadn’t, Flynn said, “It’s a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, about two hours south of here. It’s a Supermax—a special maximum-security prison for the most dangerous criminals – you know, terrorists, serial killers. The worst of the worst.” He winced in pain and wiggled a moment before continuing, “That’s where I’m coming from.”

  Strock shook his head, not getting it.

  “See, the military guys governing Mount Weather worried about who might have kept their minds and taken over some nearby prisons, especially one of the most notorious of all, the Cumberland Supermax,” Flynn explained. “There was a sizeable group of Muslim terrorists there, you know, the worst radicals advocating the murder of nonbelievers—infidels—us, and the establishment of a worldwide caliphate, that sort of thing. They’d been involved in some nasty terror plots over the last few years, earning them life prison sentences.

  “Anyway, the idea of some Iman who hadn’t been affected by the disease gaining control over an entire prison population, especially that one, was understandably worrisome to General Radley and his advisors. So, a patrol was sent out—it’s only a couple hours’ drive from the Mount to the prison—to scout out what was going on. And what they reported, General Radley and his advisors didn’t like. It appeared that the Muslim terrorists had indeed gained control of the Supermax.

  “So, Colonel Denton, who was in command of our intel section, ordered me to take one of our cars and travel up to Cumberland, see if I could plant myself inside the prison to find out exactly what was going on in there, stay ten days, a couple weeks, then slip out again and return back to the Mount and make my report.” He sighed and continued, “And what I found isn’t good. Only, I haven’t been able to make my report.”

  “How’d you get inside in the first place?” Strock said. “I mean, you couldn’t simply walk in the front door?”

  “No, of course not. Once I got there, I hid in the woods around the prison for a couple days. I noticed that some of the prisoners—zombies no doubt—were being sent to work on farms in the hills outside Cumberland—you know, working in the fields around the prison, plowing, planting corn, rounding up livestock, cows and sheep and such.

  “After a couple days watching them, I came up with a plan. Take out one of the inmate zombies and take his place. Some of them were off on their own in secluded parts of the fields. One day about a week after I arrived, I jumped one who was off working alone from behind and used a choke hold to break his neck. Straight from the agent training manual. It was quick, painless.

  “After that, I put on his prison jumpsuit, then dug a shallow grave and buried him as quick as I could, considering the circumstances. After that, I tried to blend in with the rest of the crew, and somehow, I pulled it off. I blended in. Zombies are zombies, interchangeable, and with their blank stares and even temperaments, they tend to look alike and are fairly easy to imitate.” Flynn tugged at his thick, dark beard and smiled. “And, having grown this over the last few weeks since the Event struck didn’t hurt. Beards like this are standard issue for Muslims terrorists.”

  “So, you got inside the prison, the Supermax,” Strock said. “Then what? What brought you up here, chased by that biker gang.”

  “The gang is from there, the prison,” Flynn explained. “Five zombie inmates led by a terrorist by the name of Osama Omar. He isn’t a zombie. He’s a disciple of the Supermax’s leader, a Sunni Salafi jihadist, Sheik Abu al-Shahab. He was sent to ADX Cumberland for life in the mid-2000s for his role in 9/11 and some other terror plots in the US after that. And he’s vowed to convert, by violence if necessary, all of what’s left of humanity to his radical version of Islam.

  “When the Event struck,” Flynn went on, “he realized what had happened and went about taking over the prison. He saved as many of the zombie inmates as he could, among the vilest human beings on the planet, numbering around five hundred or so. There are ten or so inmates who didn’t go mindless, many of them Islamic terrorists like him, but a few who aren’t. They’ve become his disciples in there, and the zombie inmates have become their slaves. They’ve been brainwashed to accept Shahab’s violent version of Islam, an army dedicated to spreading that version to the rest of mankind. From what I observed while inside, I think Shahab’s in touch with other pockets of Islamists who’ve survived out in the Middle East, and elsewhere, and that he intends to join up with them at some point to force Islam on the remaining survivors and establish a worldwide theocracy.

  “Shahab’s a brilliant guy, with an IQ way up there. A warrior genius, you might say. He’s got these stark, sharp features, long black hair, a thick beard, of course, and these dark, narrow eyes that sear right through you. He sees himself as the reincarnation of Mohammed himself.”

  After a sigh, Flynn added, “And he engages in whispering.”

  “Whispering?”

  “Yes, whispering, a form of hypnotism, mind control, I guess, using sounds and words and melodies whispered into a person’s ear. It’s akin to what so-called horse whisperers do to calm horses that have suffered a traumatic injury or event. Shahab’s a people whisperer.

  “Anyway, through his force of will, and this whispering technique, his conversion of the zombie inmates has been most effective. With each passing day, these inmates gain more and more of their mental faculties, and they are guided in what they should believe and do and think, by him.

  “Now, Shahab appears ready to branch out from the prison and start his campaign of conquest and convert the rest of us to his brand of Islam,” Flynn continued. “And if he finds out about the Mount, he’ll take his army up there and attack. That’s what I was going to report to General Radley. Only, I never got the chance. One of the disciples of al-Shahab, Ibrahim al-Badri, suspected that there was something different about me. I guess it was harder than I thought to impersonate a zombie.

  “Anyway, Badri convinced Shahab to confront me. And yesterday morning, when he and Shahab did just that, I saw what was coming and bolted. I commandeered the Harley from a lot outside the prison and overpowered an inmate zombie at the front gate. Somehow, I made it to Interstate 99 with Osama Omar and his biker gang chasing after me. They were still hot on my heels when I exited onto Route 417 up around here. They were gaining on me, and I was almost out of gas, when I crashed. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Seven

  The Day After the Plague

  “And you?” Flynn asked after a time. “How’d you find yourself at the end of the world.”

  “Like everyone else who survived, I experienced a nightmare of biblical proportions,” Strock replied. “A nightmare from which I have yet to awaken.”

  For the next five minutes, Strock soberly narrated his experiences upon awakening the morning of the Mind Plague: his finding Ellie, going over to the Remsler’s place, wandering in the awful silence of his neighborhood.

  “I finally got Ellie into a car,” he went on, “and started driving, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. The radio was still nothing but static, and the car crashes and people standing like statues, in some kind of blind stupor. Unable to figure out what else to do, I drove to the nearest hospital, and after locking Ellie inside the car, I ventured inside.”

  After another short laugh, he continued, “What a scene the ER was. People slumped over in their chairs, just sitting there, with that same blank expression, a few others slumped on the floor. Alarms going off on instruments everywhere.

  “Finally, I ran into somebody, an actual guy who, like me, hadn’t gone blank. Except, he was in serious panic mode. He was searching for a doctor, anyone who could help him. He grabbed me and asked if I knew how to deliver a baby. That his wife was in delivery right now. She’d been screaming and pushing out the baby one moment, and then, just stopped.

  “I went up there with him to the delivery room, and he was right. She was just lying there, staring forward. A nurse was standing next to her bed, with the same blank expression as the others. The guy kept asking me what to do, as if I knew. I didn’t, but he kept hounding me. Finally, I pushed away from him and ran out of there. The horror of it was, I thought I could hear the unborn child screaming from his blank mother’s belly. And I heard a couple other cries, maybe infants from the nursery whose minds hadn’t gone blank, desperate for a feeding or the touch of human hands that would never come.”

  Strock fell silent for a time, staring forward now, blanking out but not in the horrible, dead-brain way he’d witnessed from hundreds of people that first morning of the plague.

  “I’ll never get that out of my head,” he went on. “I’ll never forgive myself for not doing something to help that guy, the babies.” He swallowed, drew in a breath. “Driving away from the hospital, the idea popped into my head that I should get the hell away from there, run for the hills, hide out here, at my cousin Stevie’s hunting cabin. I used to go down there with him and his dad, my Uncle Paul, when we were kids, teenagers. My dad had died, and Uncle Paul had become like a father to me. We’d hunt, fish and as we got older, Uncle Paul would let Stevie and me drink a couple beers with him. And sometimes, Stevie and I would sneak off and smoke grass out in the woods. Eventually, I went off to college and law school, and Stevie and I grew apart. But that morning, I knew he still had the cabin.

  “I raced home from the hospital, packed some things, then drove sixty miles down here, and the rest, as you say, is history. We’ve been here ever since.

  “Along the way, I saw more of what I’d been seeing that morning, more of the craziness. Cars off the road, crashed into trees, smoldering wrecks, nothing working. Nothing on the radio except static. Smoke billowing up all over the place. Some houses and buildings on fire. And except for that poor guy at the hospital, I found no one else with a working brain who could think.

  “I couldn’t help myself, but I had to drive out to one of the places where smoke was really billowing up to the sky. It was about five miles off the New York State Thruway, somewhere near Fredonia, a college town. When I got there, I saw what was causing the smoke. A jetliner had crashed, and the debris was scattered across a farmer’s field. There was nothing but wreckage and smoke and the acrid smell of jet fuel. I couldn’t help but watch it for a time, and then, I pulled myself away.”

  “I saw a couple of those, too,” Flynn commented and shook his head. “Jets gone down. A horrible sight.”

  Strock nodded and after a sigh, continued. “Anyway, I finally made it down here. I knew the place was secluded, and better yet, it couldn’t be seen from the road. A safe place.” He sighed again and thought before adding, “Since we’ve come, I’ve been raiding supermarkets and hardware stores and houses in nearby towns every couple of weeks. The gas generators have given us at least a semblance of civilized life, lights and a way to watch old DVDs. I’ve collected four of them, the generators, and stored a bunch of gasoline cans after finally figuring out how to pump it out of the tanks at various gas stations.

  “And we eat pretty well. There’s plenty of food out there, in the supermarkets, houses. Canned stuff, crackers, cereal, crap like that. And we managed to keep warm this past winter. The pot belly stove in the main room works pretty well, and I bought a couple electric heaters to supplement it. It can get damned cold and snowy in these parts November through March, even into April and May, but thankfully, we had a pretty mild winter this last one. Not much snow but still damp and rainy.

  “Once we were settled down here,” Strock went on, “a lot of my time’s been spent trying to bring Ellie back.”

  “How long you two been married?”

  “Four years,” Strock replied. He looked at Ellie and sighed, then turned back to Flynn. “I married late, at thirty-two. She’d been divorced.” He laughed and said, “It was love at first sight, for me anyway. For her, it took a while, several dates, almost six months, to fall in love I guess, and agree to marry me. Anyway, I think I got the better of the deal. As you can see,” he said, nodding to Ellie, “she’s one pretty lady. Beyond anything I deserve. And smart, at least before her brain was washed out by the Plague. I was talking her into going to law school when that happened, then forming a partnership with me.”

  Strock looked at Ellie, smiled and patted her head and she smiled up at him. With a sigh, Strock looked back at Flynn and said, “But, as I said, and as you can see, it’s been a slow process bringing her back.”

  Even now, Strock knew, after all these months, Ellie hadn’t advanced very far. After nine months, she still had that bewildered, somewhat frightened look, like one of those white women who’d been rescued from the Comanche Indians in the wild west of the 1840s. But unlike such a white woman, who at least had memories from the time before she was captured, Ellie’s memories and thoughts from the time before the Plague seemed to have been erased. They were gone, so there was nothing to tap into and bring back.

  “After a couple weeks down here,” Strock went on, “I trekked back up home with Ellie to grab some things we’d left behind, some clothes and other stuff I thought we’d need. During the packing, I came across our photo albums, wedding pictures and so many others taken over the years. You know, happy times, our trips to Disney World and Aruba, family gatherings at Christmas and Thanksgiving, barbecues, picnics, that sort of thing. I even found a couple DVDs we’d made.