Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  Blaine was nodding. “To be introduced through a wastewater treatment facility in Boerne, which discharges its purified water into the aquifer that provides San Antonio with its drinking supply.”

  “Why San Antonio?”

  “Because the city’s one of the convention capitals of the country, Doctor. I’m surprised you were never invited to one for research and development types.”

  “I think I was, actually. I didn’t go.”

  “Plenty of other people do, from every state and plenty of countries. A hundred thousand in the next month. And instead of bringing home presents, they return with a time bomb stuck in their system.”

  “If Beaver Falls is an accurate indication, it will take six months for the contagion to begin its spread. After that, everyone the carriers come into contact with become carriers themselves.” She shook her head. “Frye’s followers included. It makes no sense.”

  “It does if a large number, even a majority, of those followers can be protected.”

  “But there’s no way they—” Karen felt herself grow strangely calm. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Lot 35 … That’s why Frye needed it … .”

  “Within six months he may well have figured out your formula, Dr. Raymond.”

  “Thereby salvaging the original intent of his plan. He’ll only need to produce enough of Lot 35 to supply the chosen followers of the Seven.” Karen’s mouth sank, her face going dreadfully pale. “My God, I’m a party to what he’s done. I helped him.”

  “Karen—”

  “Wait! There’s something else!” Her mind was working feverishly, churning information both new and old at a desperate clip. “There’s something else. Frank McBride, the man Wayne Denbo found by the roadside, was inside the isolation ward,” she explained. “That means Denbo might have become a carrier, along with everyone else he in turn came into contact with. You see what I’m saying.”

  “No.”

  “The disease may already be spreading. Frye’s divine function may be playing itself out without him doing another damn thing.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No. It would depend on when McBride actually contracted the disease. It could have been after he had been placed with the others. But if not …”

  “Go on, Doctor.”

  Karen swallowed hard. “We were around Denbo, too. All of us. We could be infected. We could be carriers. And there could be hundreds more, thousands by now. Ten times that many by tomorrow.”

  McCracken remained maddeningly composed, his voice flat and precise. “You’re saying Judgment Day might already be inevitable.”

  “No, there’s another way we can stop it,” Karen said, sounding sure, “a way we can reverse the process. Frye’s bogus vaccine works on the genetic level by teaching the body to recognize and effectively imprison HIV cells. But remember, his protein coating was programmed to erode over time. Change that genetic programming and the cells remain trapped.”

  “Are you saying you could change it?”

  “If not me, someone with more expertise in this specific field. But they’d need a sample.”

  “And there’s only one sample we know about for sure, and Frye’s got it.”

  Karen nodded. “A sample he plans to release into San Antonio’s water supply.” She recalled the test tube she had found within the Kingdom of the Seven’s lab. “Using a dissolvable test tube.”

  “Which means the Indian and I have to do more than just stop Frye from dropping his poison into the wastewater treatment center in Boerne: We’ve also got to come up with this test tube.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  McCracken’s expression wavered just a little as he gave the truck more gas. “I’m afraid, too.”

  “You assured us McCracken was dead!” Jessie Will ranted, speaking for all four of the men seated before the Reverend Harlan Frye.

  For reasons not yet explained to them, Frye was holding the meeting in his private theater. He addressed his audience standing directly before the screen that had been ripped and torn when McCracken plunged through it.

  “I erred and I admit that,” the Reverend conceded. “I saw the tapes of the explosions. I responded with my head instead of my heart because my heart told me that McCracken is somehow blessed. He couldn’t have survived in his world as long as he has if he wasn’t. Only one of equal purpose can defeat him.”

  “You mean kill?” Tommy Lee Curtisan elaborated.

  Frye looked dismayed by his use of the word. “His previous opponents have made the mistake of attempting to do just that. But in doing so, they place themselves in the world he has mastered. No, defeating him means accepting his presence but believing in the sanctity of our mission over that of his in God’s eyes.”

  “Well, God seems to have been about as unable to stop him as we’ve been,” Tommy Lee Curtisan said almost whimsically, behind the slightest of smiles. “We’re beat, Reverend. Now, I’m not laying the blame with you and I’m not saying you’re not worthy. But it’s plain as day that we got to wait a time before we put your plan into effect.”

  “And the rest of you,” Harlan Frye raised, “do you echo these words?” He looked at the other three members of the Seven. None of them could meet his gaze. “Your vision has been corrupted, my brothers. You stand to be defeated by something far more powerful than Blaine McCracken: your loss of faith. Don’t you see what’s going on here? The Lord would never trust the destiny of His world to anyone whose faith was not absolute. Let yours waver now and you risk losing His grace as well as your place in the kingdom.”

  “This isn’t about faith,” said Curtisan. “This is about reality.”

  “And all reality is based on our obligation to the Lord. Leave here now if you wish to shirk yours, but do not expect me to cower before mine.” Frye paused and looked each one of them in the eye. “Think of the shape of the world as we evisioned it,” he continued. “Think of your role within it. Are you willing to forsake that now, to concede that you were never worthy to enter this kingdom?”

  “McCracken knows where the kingdom is,” Louis W. Kellog reminded. “He will return here or send others in his place. They will destroy everything we have built, everything that is so crucial to the fulfillment of our vision.”

  “Perhaps they will,” Frye conceded. “And if we dwell on the material, then we will lose sight of what is truly important: serving Him by fulfilling our destiny.”

  “McCracken will be waiting for us in San Antonio, Reverend,” Jessie Will said flatly. “We have entered his kingdom now. Do we dare believe ourselves capable of battling at this level, no matter how many guns and guards accompany us?”

  “Indeed we can believe it, brother,” Frye assured them, “but only if we believe our purpose to be more resolute and our resolve to be stronger than his. As soon as we delay or defer, we truly enter his realm where desperation fuels defeat and despair.” He paused and let them see the confidence brimming in his eyes. “But there is a way we can keep McCracken from interfering, while at the same time letting the whole country witness our blessed work, so those who are worthy might understand what they are to be a part of.”

  “Whole country?” raised Jessie Will.

  “Witness?” followed Tommy Lee Curtisan.

  “Let me show you,” Frye told them, and stepped away from the screen.

  “They didn’t make it,” McCracken said upon noting the distant look on Sister Barbara’s face that followed her realization that Jacob and Rachel had not returned to the Amarillo motel room with the others.

  She digested the recounting of all that had transpired and then demanded that McCracken tell her exactly how the twins had died. Blaine deferred to Johnny Wareagle here, who was typically brief in his tale.

  “I must go to their father,” Sister Barbara said when he was finished. “He must hear of this from me personally.”

  “Spoken like a person who feels responsible for their deaths,” Blaine responded.

  “I refus
ed Turgewell’s overtures. I wouldn’t help him destroy the Seven when I clearly should have. And now, because of that, his children are dead. Senselessly. Needlessly.”

  “I don’t think you knew them as well as I did, Sister.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it does, because they weren’t in your world anymore and hadn’t been for some time; they were in mine. That’s where they wanted to be.”

  “But they were merely children!”

  “Raised by Turgewell to be his soldiers, not his heirs. They grew up in an environment of hate and desperation.”

  “Your world,” Sister Barbara followed flatly, in what had started as a question.

  “It’s what I am, Sister. It’s what the twins were. You didn’t make them that way, and you can’t blame yourself for their deaths.”

  “What about the deaths of my followers at the Oasis? Am I to shrug off responsibility for them as well?”

  “You couldn’t have known Frye would go that far.”

  “Oh, but I did, and have for some time. I thought myself above it. I foolishly believed faith would be enough to hold him at bay, perhaps even defeat him. It never is, is it?”

  “Not in my world, Sister.”

  “Is there room for vengeance in your world, Mr. McCracken?”

  Blaine nodded. “Biblical and otherwise.”

  “Frye must be stopped.”

  “I think he may have provided us with the opportunity,” said Johnny Wareagle suddenly.

  “What do you mean, Indian?”

  “That.”

  Johnny’s single-word response was punctuated by a finger aiming at the muted television screen where a commercial featuring the Reverend Harlan Frye himself had just begun playing.

  “I’ll be damned,” muttered McCracken.

  The commercial had ended by the time Johnny turned up the volume, but they’d seen everything they needed to.

  “He’s one bold son of a bitch,” Blaine continued. “I’ll give him that much.”

  “And that may be what allows us to destroy him, Blainey,” Wareagle put forth. “We fear Frye because he can convince himself and others that anything he does, no matter how destructive, is God’s will. But that very arrogance leads him to believe he is invincible. He won’t care if we show up in Boerne or not. His plan is meant to take our presence into account.”

  “Why bother with this whole charade at the treatment plant, anyway?” Blaine wondered. “Why not just dump his poison into the water system in San Antonio itself?”

  Karen Raymond looked up from a guidebook she’d purchased in a store on the way here. “Because there isn’t one. San Antonio has no centralized water treatment facility per se. Instead it relies on dozens of individual wells to pull the water up from the Edwards Aquifer.”

  “Which is what the Reverend plans on contaminating.”

  She nodded. “Almost as simple as draining the contents of his test tube into the purified water at the Boerne treatment center before it’s discharged into Civolo Falls, which drains into the aquifer.”

  “You said ‘almost.’”

  “Because Frye needs a catalyst to saturate the entire system in a relatively rapid time frame.”

  “What do you mean by catalyst?”

  “Something his toxin can bond to in order to spread.” Karen sighed. “It could be anything, or some combination of things.”

  “But it would have to be connected somehow to water, something he knows is already present in the supply.”

  “The possibilities are endless.”

  “Narrow them down for us, Doctor.”

  “Well, that test tube I found in the kingdom’s lab was made of gelatin-plastic compound made to dissolve slowly in water.”

  “So?”

  “So that indicates Frye doesn’t want his toxin to actually be released until it’s inside the system. It means the toxin must be light- or even heat-sensitive, and that means he can’t risk releasing it into the treatment process before the final stage.”

  “Which is …”

  Karen Raymond’s eyes widened. “Chlorination! Of course! Of course!” Excited now, barely able to keep her words up with her racing thoughts. “Frye’s scientists were limited by time, as well as what was going to be available to them.”

  “Like chlorine,” Blaine realized.

  “They must have programmed his toxin to require exposure to it in order to become active. And once that exposure takes place, the toxin will expand a millionfold, easily enough to infest the entire system.”

  “But chlorine dissipates. Otherwise we’d taste it in every glass.”

  “Microscopic, virtually immeasurable levels remain present in every glass. Safe under ordinary circumstances.”

  “But under these circumstances, assuring that everyone who takes a drink will become infected.”

  Karen was still thinking. “If Frye is able to somehow introduce his toxin into the stage of the treatment process in which chlorine gets injected, he’d be able to saturate the system as soon as the poisoned discharge reaches the aquifer.”

  “What do you mean by ‘stage’?”

  “There are three basic stages in the treatment of wastewater. You start with sludge and extract the water, which is filtered and then treated. Chlorination is part of the last stage before the final product is released back into the system.”

  “But Frye needed this dissolvable test tube because exposure to heat or light would likely destroy the toxin if he simply poured it into the tank.”

  “Yes,” Karen acknowledged. “You’re learning. He has to make sure the toxin isn’t released until the treatment water has already begun its journey underground.”

  Blaine smiled faintly. “I think you just gave me an idea of how to stop him.”

  “Sal’s on his way,” Blaine reported. “Couldn’t sound happier. Guess he likes to be needed.” He looked at Karen. “Trouble is, we may need a lot more to pull this off. The Reverend Frye isn’t likely to be fooled for very long, maybe not even long enough for us to get out of the parking lot.”

  “Then we need more help,” Karen concluded.

  “Tough to come by these days.”

  Karen started for the phone. “Maybe not.”

  “What the hell?”

  David Martinez shined his flashlight at the huge clumps of asphalt resting atop the stone floor of the Alamo. When he had made his last pass through the shrine twenty minutes before, they hadn’t been there. His first thought was that the unusually wet spring had soaked into the ancient walls to the point where one had cracked. Martinez had seen the magic the Alamo maintenance staff could work. By noon tomorrow it would be as good as new.

  But a pass with his flashlight along the walls showed all in the vicinity to be intact. Martinez then followed a plopping sound with his flashlight to a puddle of water rippling with fresh droplets. But how—

  Martinez turned his beam upward.

  “Uh-oh.”

  David Martinez had been an Alamo ranger for only six months. Being low man on the totem poll, he pulled a great number of late night duty rotations. He much preferred the day shifts when a small measure of the three million tourists who visit the Alamo pass through. He liked to watch them as they strolled leisurely around the exhibits, hovering about the various memorabilia and lingering near the painting of Davy Crockett making his last stand.

  In the quiet, dark, air-conditioned cool of what had been built as a Spanish mission, history came to life in the minds of the tourists, and in Martinez’s. The chapel had been built in 1744 only to be abandoned in 1762 after its roof collapsed. The mission remained vacant until Spanish and then Mexican troops occupied it. Rebellious Texans seized it from Mexican hands in 1835 and a year later made their fateful stand against Santa Ana that ended in a fierce twenty-minute battle just after dawn on the thirteenth day.

  Few realized, Martinez reckoned, that this chapel shrine the rangers patrolled twenty-four hours a day was one of only two ori
ginal structures that remained from those years, the other being the long barrack. The bulk of the famed thirteen-day stand, in which 189 held back nearly 4,000, was fought behind long-vanished walls in a plaza now occupied by Pizza Hut and K-Mart, among others, stretching all the way to the Hyatt Hotel.

  The restored chapel, though, was more than enough to bring the feeling of those days back. Martinez never tired of listening to the standard recital of the famous tale, was still learning something new almost every day.

  Not when he was pulling the graveyard shift, of course. Nothing much happened. Ever.

  Until tonight.

  Martinez’s flashlight had illuminated a large, jagged chasm in the Alamo’s ceiling. The rain that had just started up again found easy passage through it, as more layers peeled away right before his eyes.

  “Jesus,” he muttered, feeling for the black walkie-talkie that linked him up to the maintenance office. “Jesus.”

  For the second time in its storied history, the roof of the Alamo was about to collapse.

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  “Morning,” greeted the proprietor, a balding man with a massive belly extending well over his belt.

  “Morning,” returned T.J.

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