Ultimate
Supernatural Horror
Box Set
Featuring:
Virgin (by F. Paul Wilson)
Haunted House (by J.A. Konrath & Jack Kilborn)
Wolf Hunt (by Jeff Strand)
Eerie (by Blake Crouch and Jordan Crouch)
Speed Dating with the Dead (by Scott Nicholson)
TheFinal Winter (by Iain Rob Wright)
Copyright ©2013 by F. Paul Wilson, J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand, Blake Crouch, Jordan Crouch, Scott Nicholson, and Wright Ideas Ltd.
VIRGIN
a novel by
F. Paul Wilson
VIRGIN
Copyright © 1996 by F. Paul Wilson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-1880325759
First Edition (under the pseudonym Mary Elizabeth Murphy): Berkley Books - January 1996
VIRGIN
After they banished me from Jerusalem I wandered south, leaving my position and my inheritance behind. What need had I of money? I wished to be dead.
I tore my blue robe with the three-striped sleeve and cast it from me. I traded it to a beggar for the filthy, louse-infested rags on his back. But the lice have not bitten me. They deserted the rags as soon as I donned them.
Even the vermin will have nothing to do with me.
--from the Glass scroll
Rockefeller Museum translation
1991
Israel
The Judean Wilderness
“Don’t spare that switch, Achmed,” Nabil called back from the lead position where he played the flashlight along the slope rising ahead of them. “Getting there second is as good as not getting there at all.”
I know that, Achmed thought and swatted the donkey’s flanks with greater vigor.
He and his brother panted as they pulled and drove the reluctant beast up the incline into the craggy foothills below the high wilderness.
Behind him the parched land sloped away to the Dead Sea; ahead lay the mountains, forbidding during the day, terrifying at night. Countless stars twinkled madly in the ebon dome of the sky, and the near-full moon on high etched the sere landscape with bleached light and bottomless shadow. The beam from Nabil’s flashlight was barely distinguishable in the moonglow.
An empty sky now, but not long ago a dark object had screamed through the night, trailing fire and smoke. Achmed and Nabil had leapt from their camel-hair blankets and stumbled out of their tent into the cool night air in time to see the bright flare of its explosive collision with the nearby hills.
Achmed remembered his initial awe and terror. “It is the hand of Allah!”
He also remembered Nabil’s none-too-gentle shove against his shoulder.
“Goat! It’s a missile. You heard the talk around the fire last night. The hero Saddam is sending missiles against his enemies. Thousands of missiles. And he’s killing Jews and infidels by the millions. Already he has sent the Americans howling with their tails between their legs. Soon there will be no more Israel and our herds will graze among our enemies’ bones in the ruins of Tel Aviv. Let’s go!”
“Go where?” Achmed cried as his older brother began pushing through the huddled goats toward their tethered ass.
“Into the hills!”
“Why?” He wasn’t challenging his older brother—a good Bedouin boy did not question the eldest son of his father—he simply wanted to know.
Nabil turned and pointed toward the jagged sawblade of rock that cut the western sky. His face was shadowed but Achmed knew from the impatience in his voice that his brother was wearing his habitual you’re-so-stupid scowl.
“That was a missile that just passed, a giant bullet. And what are bullets made of?” Achmed opened his mouth to answer but Nabil wasn’t waiting. “Metal! And what do we do with any scrap metal we find?”
“We sell it,” Achmed said quickly, and suddenly he saw the reason for Nabil’s haste. “There will be lots of metal!” he said.
Nabil nodded. “Tons of it. So move those feet, camel face!”
Once again he realized why their father placed so much trust in Nabil, and why he was glad Nabil had been born first. Achmed doubted he could handle the responsibility of being the eldest son—the only thing he did better than Nabil was play the rababah, hardly a useful skill. He hoped he was as muscular as Nabil when he reached seventeen in three years, and prayed he’d be able to sport such a respectable start at a beard. At times he despaired of outgrowing this reedy, ungainly body.
And tonight was but further proof of his unsuitability for leadership. Never would he have thought of making profit for the family from the remnants of a spent and exploded missile. But he could lend his back to gathering the scrap so that his abu could be proud of both of his sons.
And now, as they clambered up a slope that seemed ever steeper, a thought struck him. The goats! Father had entrusted them with one of the family herds, to take it north in search of better grazing. That herd now stood untended and unguarded on the plain below, ready to be driven off unchallenged by any passer-by with a larcenous heart.
Achmed turned and gazed back down the slope. The Dead Sea gleamed in the moonlight like a strip of hammered silver, shadowed on the far side by the mountains of Jordan and outlined on the near by the black, shore-hugging ribbon of Highway 90. No lights moved on the highway. Their herd was safely huddled in a dry basin kilometers from the road. He realized his fears were groundless. Who would be wandering about the wilderness in the dead of night? The only thing moving here was Hamsin, the desert wind.
As he returned to the climb, a question popped into his mind.
“Nabil! Why has this missile landed here instead of in Tel Aviv?”
“Probably one of the Israelis hit it with a lucky shot and knocked it off course.”
Of course, Achmed thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Nabil always had an answer.
Achmed followed his brother up the steepening incline of the dry wadi, so steep at times that he had to heave his shoulder against the donkey’s smelly hindquarters to assist the beast up the slope. Eventually they came to a ribbed outcrop of stone that towered over them. In the daytime this rock would have looked sandy red and yellow. Now in the moonlight it glowed goats-milk white, streaked with the stark shadows of its crevices.
“What do we do now?”
Nabil looked around, then up, then ranged left and right along the face of the rock as if he expected to find a path into the cliffside.
“I don’t know. There must be away around this. The missile crashed atop it. We must find a way up.”
“Maybe it crashed on the other side. I couldn’t tell from where we stood. Could you?”
Achmed saw his brother shake his shadowed head. “I’m sure it crashed atop this cliff. Almost sure. Maybe if we travel around it we’ll find a way up.”
To the left looked no more promising than the right, but something in Achmed drew him leftward.
“That way,” he said, surprised by the certainty in his voice as he pointed south.
Nabil stared at him a moment, then shrugged and turned south.
“As good a way to start as any.”
The going got rougher. No path here, no sign that man or beast had ever traveled this route. Their sandals and the donkey’s hooves slipped on the loose shale that littered their way. The jagged edges angled up, cutting Achmed’s feet and ankles.