The Dead Lands (8 page)

N
O ONE KNOWS
where the flu came from. Some say a long black car pulled up to a gas station and from it stepped a black-haired man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm. Others say that late one night—for a few minutes, all over the town of Ames, Iowa—the faucets ran yellow, as yellow and as thick as melted wax, polluted by a terrorist or maybe some parasite loosed from deep beneath the earth. And still others say a featherless crow the size of a child tumbled down a chimney and onto a fire that charred it into a black pile of bones and sent a diseased cloud into the air all over town, one that people breathed into the pink pit of their lungs, where a burning sensation gave rise to a cough.

That was how the sickness began, with a cough, a needling itch at the back of your throat that grew steadily worse until it felt like your chest was clogged with burrowing ants that you must—you simply must—expel, barking raggedly into your hands until they were spotted with blood. Accompanying this was a fever so powerful that a wet washcloth steamed when placed on your forehead. Your brain cooked. Your vision went red, with twirling black flies along its edges. And all this time you were coughing, coughing, until it felt as though your guts might uproot and push out your throat.

One day, it was simply there, among the people of Ames, the virus rooting in their lungs like red-tipped mushrooms. The USDA labs were located there, level-four security clearance and host to every animal-borne pathogen in the world, from anthrax to bird flu to Ebola, and many speculated that it came from there, from an unwashed hand or an open laboratory window or a pricked finger. The deadliest viruses must meet three criteria. They must spread swiftly, by a cough, a kiss, a sneeze, a hand testing a melon at the supermarket or gripping a pole in a subway car. They must be unfamiliar to humans, so that antibodies cannot defend against them. And they must kill the infected. This virus met all three.

On average it took people five days to die. During that time, their chests collapsed inward with every hitching cough. Their throats rasped. Their lips bruised like wilting lilies. The blood vessels in their eyes burst and they wept blood and because they were propped up on their pillows the blood raked down their cheeks.

This was October and the leaves turned a shimmering gold and came loose from their branches and revealed the patterns of the wind, twisting and swirling along the streets, lawns, ballparks, making a clattering music. And when the wind kicked up and the leaves rushed past and clung to the leg of someone's jeans, like a starfish, damp and splayed, they would hurriedly wipe it away, as if anything the air carried might cause harm.

When parents said, “You'll catch your death,” they meant it, grabbing their children as they raced out the door to hand them a jacket, yes, but also a surgical mask. “Stay in the yard,” they said.
Don't breathe
, they wanted to say.

It was unsettling, not trusting the air, lungs filling up like dark closets that might hide ghosts. Everyone bought masks. Not just surgical masks—because the stores emptied of them almost immediately—but carpenters' masks, gas masks, even Halloween masks. Anything, no matter how ineffective, to make them believe they were choking away the germs.

Doctors prescribed medicine, but medicine did not help. Scientists gave the virus a name, H3L1—also known as Hell. It wasn't long before the hospitals were full, before the schools closed, before the sidewalks in Ames crowded with reporters. Three people died. And then, in one night, three hundred. Everyone rushed to the grocery stores and pulled from the shelves cereals, pasta, granola bars, canned fruits and vegetables, bottled water, whatever would last even after the electricity snapped off. “The worst is happening,” they said. “The worst is here.”

In Ames, a Budweiser delivery truck pulled up to a Hy-Vee and an hour later pulled away. A Greyhound grumbled back and forth to Minneapolis, its tailpipe coughing along with its gray-faced passengers. A charter plane. A Japanese hatchback. A bicyclist stopping through on his way across the state. And all those letters licked closed. The sickness spread.

The infected rose from a hundred to a thousand to a million in a matter of days. There wasn't time for quarantine. There was barely enough time to utter the word
pandemic
.

For a few days, everyone blamed Ames, so that the town felt like the eye of a black whirlpool with sunken lungs and broken ribs swirling through it. But then the sickness fingered its way across Iowa and into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri—spreading outward from the heartland—the country, the continent, the world. There was no one to blame anymore. And there was no difference between good and bad, young and old, or at least not that the sickness recognized. Everyone was eligible for death.

At a time when everyone should have stayed home—that's what the television said, before the channels gave way to static,
stay home
—people instead went to church. At St. Cecilia's in Grand Forks and at Trinity Lutheran in Chicago and at the United Methodist in Memphis, people wandered in and out throughout the day. The services and vigils were ongoing. The candles burned down to bubbling pools of wax. Everyone wore their masks, but the masks didn't always help. They breathed each other's breath and they tasted wafers and wine and they brought their hands together in prayer and they sang, how sweet the sound, until the coughing overwhelmed them and they hunched over and fell to their knees in awful genuflection.

The power went out. One minute refrigerators were humming, radios playing, lamps glowing, and the next, their mechanical brains went dark and silent. Those who were still alive brought matches to Sternos and sparked on their propane grills to cook. The police spray-painted black
X
s across doors, the hieroglyphs of the infected, most of whom were already dead. All the windows of all the stores were gaping mouths broken by the bricks of looters, and in the evening the glass caught the last of the dying sunlight so that the streets of the towns and cities seemed to sparkle.

Then the horizon flashed, the air trembled, as if beset by constant thunderstorms. These were nuclear warheads. China was the first to fire. Then Russia. The United States responded in turn. And soon Britain and India joined them. The missiles scorched the sky, made blackened craters out of cities. When New York and then Boston vanished in a fiery pulse, the Atlantic Ocean poured into their smoldering craters and the steam of millions of ghosts blurred the sky. The nukes were meant as a last-ditch inoculation, to cease the spread of the virus, but they only hurried along the death of the world.

Nuclear power plants, one by one, after losing their power and their employees, after emptying their emergency backup generators, descended into a state of meltdown. Their containment caps cracked and the cracks glowed as red as magma and from them seeped a heated, poisonous breath.

In the nineteenth century, the sun had bulged and erupted and lashed the earth with billions of tons of protons and electrons, a geomagnetic storm unlike any other. The sky had whirled with auroras of colored light. Telegrams had vanished midtransmission. Telegraphs had smoked and erupted in flame, along with anything else plugged into the now sizzling circuits. Many believed the gates of heaven or hell had opened.

The effect was much the same when thousands of missiles shocked the ground and mushroomed the sky, when hundreds of power plants cracked open and disgorged their core. Those electrical grids still functioning now sparked and fried. Satellite and GPS signals scrambled. The energy released by the flares and explosions, caught in the earth's magnetic field, splattered and raped the world. The wind rose and the clouds swirled in and took on a purplish red color and the air smelled like ozone. Radiation spiked. Rain blistered skin and yellowed grass.

For millions and millions of years, the biosphere was a contained environment. Nothing came from above, save for the occasional meteor, and nothing came from below, except for lava spewed from volcanoes. This changed when people began burning fuel, choking the seas and skies with CO
₂
, cranking up the temperature decade after decade. But there were more than four hundred nuclear power plants around the world, and the colossal radioactive energy released by them and by the missile strikes resulted in a supercharged global warming, the equivalent of a million volcanoes erupting at once.

The Gulf Stream, the northward current that followed the East Coast of North America and crossed to Europe and dropped to Africa, was one of the principal ways the world regulated its temperature. When the northern ice caps suddenly melted, the rush of frigid water shut down the circulatory cycle. At the same time, holes opened in the ozone layer, holes big enough for the moon to roll through. This created permanently unbalanced temperatures, unbalanced pressure systems, some sections of the globe hardening into permafrost, others furnacing so that anything green began to wither and crumble to dust.

Some people headed north; some people headed for the woods. Some hid in caves, where they gathered their rifles and sleeping bags and filled their backpacks with matches and food and clothes for all seasons. They chose the caves because they were isolated, easily defended, and maybe they chose them, too, because people felt already as though they were slipping back in history, to a simpler time dedicated to the gathering of food, the warding off of danger. They made fires and with the cinders drew upon the basalt walls pictures of bodies lying all about with
X
s for eyes, a cipher for future generations to behold and puzzle over.

And some, like the citizens of St. Louis, made their last stand. They used bulldozers and cranes from construction sites to help fortify a perimeter, and then they killed any who approached it. Several National Guard units, outfitted in hazmat suits, disposed with a shot to the head any who exhibited the slightest symptoms. The bodies they hurled daily over the wall became part of their defense, a warning against any who might trespass. Some buildings, such as the hospital, they painstakingly drenched with alcohol and bleach. There were a million ways their plan could have gone wrong, but somehow it went right, and a year later, long after the observable world perished, they continued to thrive, and many believed the Sanctuary sterilized.

They were wrong.

This is why Danica descends the staircase with a lantern held before her. Her blond-white hair matches the cobwebs that cling to the walls and singe in her passing. Spiders scuttle from the light. She curls her lip but does not fear them. Even when they drop onto her arm or dash across her feet, she merely shakes them away. Maybe
like
isn't the right word, but she has always admired spiders, their deadly elegance. As a child she would sometimes pluck gently at their webs, as if they were a harp's strings, to draw their fat black bodies into the light. And she made a game out of hunting grasshoppers to tangle in their webs so that she could watch them feed.

This was once a basement, now a crypt. By law the dead are delivered to the morgue, where their remains are harvested. But the ruling class made an exception for itself, their bodies entombed beneath the Dome. The coffins are wood—it is dry enough that they will never rot—the name and likeness of the deceased carved elaborately into each lid. When they were married, Thomas took her down here and led her among the coffins and asked where she might like to be interred. He seemed taken by the place. She knows he comes down here often to lay his hands upon the coffins.

She is not here to commune with boxes of skeletons. She seeks something else. After Thomas toured her through the rows and rows of coffins, he said, “You'll like this,” and led her to a metal door with a combination dial. He spun it one way, then the other, and back again—as she spied over his shoulder and committed the numbers to memory—before dragging open the vault. She was not sure of its original purpose, whether for money or safety, but it had since become a place where the Dome's occupants store valuables, relics. There were stacked pyramids of red wine that long ago had turned to vinegar, canned food that no one had bothered or dared to open, velvet-lined jewelry boxes, stacks of crisp, worthless green paper money, a short-wave radio, a diamond-studded watch, satellite phones, memory drives, slick black tablets with fingerprints still streaked across them, all the useless valuables of another time. Among them she spotted some things that might still serve a purpose: city plans, the blueprints of buildings, vials of medicine with yellowed labels, vaccines that might have gone stale. Everything looked new. Nothing aboveground looked new. She marveled at it all, touching everything, until she came upon a polished black box in the far corner. Thomas grabbed her by the wrist when she reached for it. “No,” he said, and when she asked why, he told her.

She stands before it now. It is rectangular, like a miniature coffin, small enough to cup in one hand. She reaches for it, the first time without success, withdrawing her hand as if burned. She checks the doorway behind her. Her hand trembles when she reaches again, when she seizes it, and on the shelf leaves behind a dustless space.

There are many things that can kill a virus. Detergents can melt through their lipid envelopes. High temperatures can cook their proteins. Enzymes can damage their nucleic acids. And time. Most viruses, when exposed to air, will survive no more than forty-eight hours.

But there are ways to keep a virus, too. They are made of DNA or RNA, enclosed by proteins. So long as the proteins are maintained, the virus is preserved. Their small size, simple structure, and lack of water allow this. Scientists have discovered the DNA of Paleolithic men, even of velociraptors and megalodons, crushed into stone or ice. Chemicals can sustain them, as can low temperature, as can air-locked pressure, as can freeze-drying. This basement is full of coffins meant to preserve the remains of the elite—and she holds in her hand a miniature version of the same. The greatest of viruses.