As the last word came from my lips the phone rang. Marla, in a state of shock, answered.
“Hello?” she said. She listened for a moment and then, “He wants to talk to you,” she told me.
She handed me the phone. I delayed a few seconds before taking it and a few moments more before speaking.
“Mr. Mack.”
“Hogarth?”
“Yes, Justin. Bron says for you to call on the president. Tell him that we need to start sending antibiotics and antivirals to China. Tell him that the problem isn’t nuclear holocaust but diseases set free by the volley of attack. The jetliner that crashed in the secret Pentagon center disrupted the switching of target codes for our missile system. Don’t ask why the Pentagon would have American targets in their system just accept it. We’re lucky that some American cities were hit. That way our armed neighbors will be willing to understand and forgive.”
“Forgive? There’s at least twenty-five million dead,” Mack said. I could tell by his voice, and my fractured temporal vision, that he was about to break down.
“Over four billion will die before this is over, Justin,” I said, choosing my words to keep him in the realm of sanity. “Everyone will unless you call the president now.”
“What will I say to him?”
“Tell him that I called you,” I said. “Tell him that I told you the code words for targeting D.C. are ‘raging fool.’ Tell him that in seventeen hours messages will start coming in about a powerful infection eating its way down the Yellow River Valley. He won’t be able to contain it but he will retard it enough to keep it from completely wiping out humanity. That’s all, Justin. That’s your place in history.”
I pressed the off button on the phone and closed my eyes. Possibilities flooded through my mind. I was no longer seeing the world but intuiting it through a sense mechanism that Bron passed on to me before he died.
It was only then that I realized that Bron was dead. I tried to mourn him but he was so alive inside of me that I could not bring myself to feel the loss.
I heard Marla say something in the near future.
“No, honey,” I said. “We have to stay here.”
“I need to get down to either my mother in Atlanta or my daddy in Miami,” she said in the present, regarding me with growing fear.
“Florida will be taken over by Cuban troops before the day is over,” I said. “They’ll be worried that the U.S. will turn its army on them. And if you try to get down to Georgia you’ll be killed by one of the gangs forming along the highways between the cities. It won’t be safe for three months.”
“But they gonna blow up New York!” Marla clasped her hands pumping them up and down as if hammering at a stake.
I reached out to her down a dozen paths of possibility. But in each of these she left for her family. Finally I looked down on her journey. I saw her raped and sodomized, beaten and murdered. I searched and searched until I saw the one chance she had.
“Marla.”
“I got to go,” she said.
She tried to move but I grabbed her hands.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You have a pistol in the hatbox in your closet, right?”
“How you know that?”
“If you meet a man with a scar under a dead eye kill him with that gun. Kill him the moment you see him. If you do that you may live.”
I let her go and she waited a moment staring at me. It was the closest chance for her to stay in the comparative safety of New York. But I could see her leaving later and that road led only to death.
“Good-bye, Trent.”
“Hogarth,” I said, correcting her. “If you live call me Hogarth son of Rhineking.”
Watching her leave I could see the paths of my life changing with the departure. Our son Clyde who would not be born. Our Southern California house with the pomegranate tree in the front yard that would never be built.
Through the last living tendril of the Stelladron that connected Bron’s mind with mine I could see, with his temporal sight, a thousand thousand possibilities. I had to pull my sight back so that I could perceive waves of possibility, not focusing on individual time lines. In this way I could cull out the best possible influences that I could have on the world.
I could see possible pasts and their probable futures. I could see my part in the annihilation of at least half of the human race. I felt remorse but not guilt. I was only a player and yet without me humanity would have perished.
It was my destiny to be where I was and what I was. I would protect the Stelladren and save as much of humanity as possible. Marla would probably die as would my mother of a heart attack and Miguel and Liam in the Battle of Tampa. I couldn’t save my friends. I couldn’t save the billions around the globe who were destined to die. But I could save the millions that had a chance.
I was to be the savior of a world that I had ushered into ruin.
I would have preferred death but that was not to be. Everyone who was to know my secret would hate me and still give their lives to keep my power alive. I was evil. I was necessary, vital. My name would ultimately achieve sainthood across the universe and my soul would be damned among the people whose lives I both saved and destroyed.
ALSO BY WALTER MOSLEY
LEONID MCGILL MYSTERIES
All I Did Was Shoot My Man
When the Thrill Is Gone
Known to Evil
The Long Fall
EASY RAWLINS MYSTERIES
Blonde Faith
Cinnamon Kiss
Little Scarlet
Six Easy Pieces
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
A Little Yellow Dog
Black Betty
White Butterfly
A Red Death
Devil in a Blue Dress
OTHER FICTION
The Tempest Tales
Diablerie
Killing Johnny Fry
The Gift of Fire / On the Head of a Pin
The Man in My Basement
Fear of the Dark
Fortunate Son
The Wave
Fear Itself
Futureland
Fearless Jones
Walkin’ the Dog
Blue Light
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
RL’s Dream
47
The Right Mistake
The Last Days of Ptolemy the Grey
NONFICTION
Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation
This Year You Write Your Novel
What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
Life Out of Context
Workin’ on the Chain Gang
PLAYS
The Fall of Heaven
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than thrity-four critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young-adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.waltermosley.com.
DISCIPLE.Copyright © 2012 by Walter Mosley
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
e-ISBN 978-1-4668-1623-7
First Edition: October 2012